<story><title>Side Projects</title><url>http://avc.com/2016/03/side-projects/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>There is a thriving community &amp;#x2F; ecosystem of people doing side projects.  It is big enough to support conferences.  I&amp;#x27;m making my annual pilgrimmage tomorrow to Vegas to attend Microconf, where ~600 people selling software over the Internet are going to be shooting the breeze and talking conversion rates, email marketing, and Slack integrations.&lt;p&gt;As far as I&amp;#x27;m aware, only one attendee has been acquired by Yahoo.  HN is aware of &lt;i&gt;maybe&lt;/i&gt; 10 of them.  The next 200?  You don&amp;#x27;t know about them for the same reason you don&amp;#x27;t know about Petersen Underwriters or Shiodome Accounting.  (&lt;i&gt;Who?&lt;/i&gt; The most recent two businesses which have had their yearly revenue chart moved not-at-all when I cut them a $1k+ check.)&lt;p&gt;It has not gotten harder to do side projects.  Back in 2006, over 25% of my launch budget was to send a fax internationally to send a paper contract to eSellerate (remember them?) for payment processing.  These days Stripe exists, and it is better all around.&lt;p&gt;It has not gotten harder to do web development since 2004.  Remember when your only options were shared hosting for $4 a month on servers which had two nines of uptime or buying a Dell and learning what colocation meant?  These days you can get a reliably hosted VPS for ~$20.&lt;p&gt;Remember when your only option for interactive scripts on the Internet was teaching yourself perl and &amp;#x2F;cgi-bin&amp;#x2F;?  Rails exists now.  Rails is a much, much more productive environment.&lt;p&gt;Remember when shareware marketing consisted of paying $200 to magazines so you could get a little ad in the back of them and pray that 20+ people bought your think, such that 20 * $25 &amp;gt; $200?  These days you do scalable online marketing approaches and sell products which have the same technical complexity as $25 shareware but, crucially, have LTVs in the mid-thousands or higher.  (SaaS billing!)</text></comment>
<story><title>Side Projects</title><url>http://avc.com/2016/03/side-projects/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>infodroid</author><text>Contrary to what this VC believes, it is NOT okay to expect someone to &amp;quot;work 60 hours a week at Facebook and then another 40 hours a week on your side project&amp;quot;. Because starting a business should not be founded on giving up your personal life. Quitting your job to focus on your idea full-time is a perfectly reasonable expectation. Investors need to start doing their homework instead of pushing founders to the burnout limit.</text></comment>