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Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

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2101 points jamesjyu | 1 comments | 07 Feb 19 15:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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bdcravens ◴[07 Feb 19 17:03 UTC] No.19106515[source]▶
> The next year was not fun: I shrunk the company from twenty employees to five. We struggled to find a new tenant for our $25,000/month office and focused all of our remaining resources on launching a premium service.

Ouch. Even at 20 employees, $25k a month is insane when you have no profit. I'm sure it was a pretty office, the kind that attracts good developers in a competitive market.

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eeeeeeeeeeeee ◴[07 Feb 19 22:47 UTC] No.19109434[source]▶
I thought the same thing. There are tons of people all over the world, or even spread out in America, that want to work on an interesting idea with interesting people. The office really does not matter.

It feels like so much of the VC funding goes to creating buzz and cool-factor (cool office, free lunch, potential lucrative exit), which can obviously be great marketing, but it really limits your runway and obviously the control you have over your idea.

Still insane to me that more companies do not embrace remote work.

replies(1): >>19111351 #
1. johnvanatta ◴[08 Feb 19 03:47 UTC] No.19111351[source]▶
Ehh. It doesn't matter up until the point it does. I quit my last job partly because we moved from a nice area in a dumpy building to an awful space (no natural light) for ~10 months. My health suffered, I felt depleted, and the entire team was on edge. How easy to commute to ($$) and how nice it is are definitely things I consider. Free food gets an outsized return too, if we're talking >100k salaries--I'd bet $4000 in free food gets more goodwill than a 5% pay bump.

Agree that remote should be more widely used, especially in software.