| You could contact YC and ask if you can put in $100k. Or sit down by yourself or with a friend, and draw up some rules: max commitment to any one venture X, min equity requirement Y, time horizon Z. Say you decide to start by investing $50k in $5k chunks. Then read HN and similar as you already do, waiting for things that set your spider-sense a-tingle. Interview them, see which ones excite you, throw some bucks at the ones which won't let you sleep at night. Then your job is to check in with each of these 10 for half a day each week - not too onerous for them, not too consuming for you. Assume that 7 of them will fail, 2 will survive but not thrive, and one will still keep you awake at night in 3 months. Investing $50k in your gut instincts with the knowledge that you'll likely lose 80% of it will probably teach you more than 20 books or seminars. Edit: the failures will of course result in a variety of emotions, but as long as they fail in an interesting way they could yield great new friendships and contacts. Your second round of (say) $100k will be better invested, and the result of that process will guide your third round of $250k, by which time you'll either have found your feet or lost your shirt in the process of looking for them. Edit II: it may sound stupid, but you could also purchase/establish a small coffee shop with fast internet and a good tech library: give solo programmers a place to hang out and hack and later marry them with a business advisor of your own choosing. |
The coffee shop idea is also not an easy one to pull off and next to impossible if you are not doing it full time. See "I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life." http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/