I wonder if there's often a mismatch between what one thinks a business is going to be like, and what a business is actually like.
One of the things that keeps me away from doing stuff like this is that I _hate_ every part that isn't the engineering part, and the engineering part is a minority share of what it takes to run a business.
We know the answer to this even before modern tech businesses existed: running a business is a very different experience from what people expect. This is exacerbated with certain experiences that create worldviews which are closer to the opposite of running a business.
This is why startup people straight out of school are often unencumbered with ideas that impact their mission. If you go into a large organization, you are exposed to a reality that can distort your perspective. It's a myth that people can't move between large and small organizations, but the differentiator is their awareness of and desire to embrace the current circumstances. Many end up preferring the luxury and ease of large organizations and fail because they don't make the switch. Many startup people don't make the move in the other direction (even if they are exceedingly successful and it might be practical move.)
Similarly, a desire to only focus on engineering is something you feel will inhibit your ability to run a business. Over time you might be able to discover ways to reduce your hate for the other work. People here love to prescribe advice for situations like this, but it's really hard to give good advice without knowing a lot more about you.
My solution largely came out of recognizing this reality. So I just don't do side gigs. I channel that energy into little tech projects that do not seek to be a salable product. So I make my living 40 hours per week, and then do the rest on my terms.
It was practically dogma ten years ago that the CEO that built the business was not the CEO that took you public. In the late '00s and a big chunk of the '10s they swapped board members in order to go big.
But if you kill the culture before the IPO, then you have nothing and nothing.
I don't think that 'everyone an entrepreneur' would increase economic output and productivity, and the fact is that some people just want a paycheck because they don't really care about making more money than the paycheck gives them, and the work is fine.
Indeed. I love that my career is a minor sideshow of my life. I love the stability of working about 40 hours a week and then doing what I really want to be doing with life.
It’s a bonus that those 40 hours don’t feel like work.
I imagine that the creative class was revered and feared. Potters had very low status making a commodity product that everyone needed. Hard to say what was going on.
True. If you want to spend all day programming, be a contract programmer. Don't start a software business - you'll spend a lot of your timing doing admin, documentation, websites, newsletters, accounts, support etc.
And if you get a partner, they will insist that the part that is engineering is even smaller than it objectively should be and end up leaving you with a minority position in the product you invented.
One of the things that keeps me away from doing stuff like this is that I _hate_ every part that isn't the engineering part, and the engineering part is a minority share of what it takes to run a business.