[jamielee]

Sounds like you have a great life. I would not take it for granted.

I think that you have to be careful about the start-up dream stories. They are like chocolate cake. Eating it makes you feel good, and you want to eat a lot of it, but it is not good for your long-term health or happiness. Time spent reading a start-up book or story is time you will never get back.

If you are serious about starting a start-up, you have to be working tirelessly on the product. This is what I have gathered from watching start-up school videos. It seems that people who are successful focus on building the product (and catering to their user base) for much of their waking hours.

I am being sort of a hypocrite though, because I peruse Hacker News almost daily! Haha, but I do spend a good amount of time trying to build a product, too. I feel less guilty about reading so much by taking action to try and counteract the lost time. At least, it works that way in my mind.

[kuasha]

Thanks for your thoughts. Its not the glorious part that is interesting- but to create something that helps people. Right now I am working on a hardware device that will make communication easy specially for older and challenged people. But if it works it should crate more than a few jobs (one of which can be mine).

[jamielee]

That sounds heart-warming! Do you have a blog or something that you track your progress with? I understand that hardware is difficult because you have to keep a lot of things secret. I am pretty curious now. Do you live in the states? There are lots of accelerators other than YCombinator (if you have not applied there yet).

[kuasha]

I have not shared anything on blog yet. The idea is actually very simple - not much thing to hide - but it is not easy to implement without at least basic knowledge in telecom and electronics. Here are the ideas- A video phone system attached to a TV + webcam that can be operated with only a remote control. As a side effect we have Netflix, Hulu-Plus, youtube etc. on it for free. I use arduino for remote control part using a infra-red sensor and it is connected to a beagle bone black. BBB controls the communication. I use SIP for signaling. It will to be sub 40$ I guess when custom built and manufactured as a single device. A media capable home phone - nothing new or special but hopefully easier to use than existing ones. Still need to answer why someone use it instead of Skype. I am mostly depending on its design rather than cutting edge technology.

All the parts work separately but need to make a solid device that does not fail. I have talked to my friends in here, Europe, Australia and Asia- it works (https://www.facebook.com/w3voice has some video call photo) - they don't have the device yet- but my system works from browser with webrtc as well (no plugin required for firefox and chrome). The ssl certificate has expired (was using a 3 month trial) so can not share the site now. But prototype to product seems harder than I thought while doing weekends only. I even needed to buy a wooden box for this. This is frustrating because I am sure I will need to change things before people finds it interesting. So, need to build one as soon as possible. As it is now it may be actually a bad idea.

And yes, I live in Seattle area in Washington (west one). I did not think YC or anyone would be interested to find a solo guy working from living room with probably a bad idea in the first place (I have not applied to any yet- including YC). I was planning to complete it in a few months and go for them. I got few people interested to buy, so will have some customers as well.