<story><title>A startup founder&apos;s hourly rate</title><url>http://ninjasandrobots.com/a-startup-founder-s-hourly-rate</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bermanoid</author><text>Yikes, this is painfully misguided.&lt;p&gt;The fact that on the 10% chance that a startup is successful the founder&apos;s time will need to ultimately have been worth $1000/hour in order to make the gamble worthwhile does not by any stretch of the imagination justify your making decisions as if your time was actually worth that much.  Because nine out of ten times, your time is actually worth nothing. [Not to mention that the market doesn&apos;t care one bit what your time &lt;i&gt;would need to&lt;/i&gt; have been worth to make the gamble worth it for you, nor the fact that increasing your burn rate actually decreases the chance that you&apos;ll succeed at all]&lt;p&gt;Your time is only worth whatever you can reasonably expect it to be worth, and that &lt;i&gt;has to&lt;/i&gt; include the chance that it&apos;s worth $0. If you start only considering the upside, then you can start justifying all manner of stupid purchases: why walk when you can save six minutes ($100) per trip by keeping a limo service on-call? Why bother cooking for yourself when you can hire a private chef? Hell, why bother coding when you can &quot;only&quot; pay $500/hour and get a best-in-the-business programmer to do it for you? You&apos;re still &quot;saving money&quot;.&lt;p&gt;Please don&apos;t think like this. It&apos;s a recipe for failure.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>idleworx</author><text>I agree. I had written a post on my blog similar to your line of tought a while back. More along the lines of people are overestimating what their time is actually worth. 
&lt;a href=&quot;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3376081&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3376081&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>A startup founder&apos;s hourly rate</title><url>http://ninjasandrobots.com/a-startup-founder-s-hourly-rate</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bermanoid</author><text>Yikes, this is painfully misguided.&lt;p&gt;The fact that on the 10% chance that a startup is successful the founder&apos;s time will need to ultimately have been worth $1000/hour in order to make the gamble worthwhile does not by any stretch of the imagination justify your making decisions as if your time was actually worth that much.  Because nine out of ten times, your time is actually worth nothing. [Not to mention that the market doesn&apos;t care one bit what your time &lt;i&gt;would need to&lt;/i&gt; have been worth to make the gamble worth it for you, nor the fact that increasing your burn rate actually decreases the chance that you&apos;ll succeed at all]&lt;p&gt;Your time is only worth whatever you can reasonably expect it to be worth, and that &lt;i&gt;has to&lt;/i&gt; include the chance that it&apos;s worth $0. If you start only considering the upside, then you can start justifying all manner of stupid purchases: why walk when you can save six minutes ($100) per trip by keeping a limo service on-call? Why bother cooking for yourself when you can hire a private chef? Hell, why bother coding when you can &quot;only&quot; pay $500/hour and get a best-in-the-business programmer to do it for you? You&apos;re still &quot;saving money&quot;.&lt;p&gt;Please don&apos;t think like this. It&apos;s a recipe for failure.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jiggy2011</author><text>Agreed , they seem to be considering the mean startup founder per-hour value (which may well be $1000 or whatever) rather than the modal per-hour value (which is probably shockingly close to $0)</text></comment>