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The target audience of these notes is someone like me: a nerd who one day had an idea and figured that in order to make that idea a reality, it would be best to work on it full-time. After examining the feasibility of this a bit and deciding to go ahead for now. But i knew that i didn't know anything about business; i knew that i had to learn about what kinds of things companies do and what kinds of people usually do them, what the steps are to get started with these things, how much money each of these things cost, and whatever else businesspeople are expected to know about that i didn't know yet. These notes (will) cover what i learned.
My idea was software-related, so at times i'll cover software-business-specific stuff. These sections will be clearly marked, so you can just skip those if you are not interested in that.
No, you should not start a startup.
work full-time on it, and eventually recruit some other people to help out, too. While working on this idea, i'd have to pay the rent, therefore i'd have to find some way to get paid. I thought of some ways to get people to pay for the idea, and decided that they had a high enough probability of working to justify continuing with the project for now.
The good news is that almost anyone could be successful in a startup. It's mostly just a matter of putting in the hours (I'm NOT saying that putting in the hours guarantees success, in fact even if you work hard, you'll still most likely fail; i'm just saying that putting in the hours is more important than having novel ideas, having a winning personality, etc).
you'll learn a lot by
failure rate
no, our culture does not encourage risk-taking (but maybe more than others)
survivorship bias
the Kelly criterion
life
note: before the idea of 'progress', that is, that as time goes on the human species can improve its condition, was the idea that history was more or less cyclical, like the seasons, with better and worse times. Spending your whole life working in hopes that later generations can have a better future only makes sense if they get to enjoy this future more than you would have enjoyed taking it easy -- but who knows if human history is destined to improve, or to rise and fall cyclically, or just to lurch from crisis to crisis or even to go from bad to worse?
bear in mind, however, that deciding whether to start a startup is not a single decision that precedes working on the startup. If you decide to go ahead now, you should still continue to re-evaluate this decision as you go, because you will be gaining more information. You aren't committed until you quit the day job (and even then, you aren't really committed until you hire someone, sign a contract or take money from a client, or take someone's money to invest).
