“Tried the adventuring life. Didn’t care for it. Too much pain, not enough profit.”
— Vidar the Collector, merchant at Bastion’s Keep
Ever since a friend’s invitation late last September led me, half by accident, to start a new company and a new product, my time has been shattering into pieces between my family and two companies, with no putting it back together. I thought I’d already been through plenty of the extreme, project-packed kind of busy — but as it turns out, life is like a street: there’s always some brand-new experience waiting around the corner to ambush you.
At the new startup, my role covers not just backend development and server setup but also product planning, operations frameworks, marketing, and sales. One brain, switching and working across all these different roles — often the stress gets high enough that I can’t help questioning my life choices.
The other day at the dinner table, my wife asked me: “You’re this busy now — are you actually making any more money?” For a moment I had nothing to say.
A lot of people start companies burning with passion — to chase a dream or change the world, or at least to make a bit of extra money. But looking back at myself, I didn’t seem to have any special reason for setting out on this road. I just felt it was time to do this, so I did (excuse me, sir, where’s your brain?).
The co-founder of my first company, Protype, came out of a strange bit of fate. Not a close friend or an old classmate, but Ray, a web designer who’d briefly been stationed at BabyHome. A year or two after we met, we happened to quit our respective jobs one right after the other, so we just went ahead and started a company together. Why I wanted to start it with him, and how I talked him into it, I’ve long since forgotten (my memory isn’t great). But through all the ups and downs of these past few years, the two of us have somehow been incredibly good at working things out together. On luck and unspoken rapport, we’ve stepped into our sixth year.
Back then, with keeping the company alive as the goal, I set up a pay system that carved out 20% of each project’s income as a bonus. The result: for the first three years the two of us basically drew only the legal minimum wage. Things only started to turn around in the fourth year, and even so, my salary today is still half of what I’d earn working for someone else. Sometimes when I think about myself, I really am that famous line from Diablo III: “Too much pain, too little gain.”
Back to my wife’s arrow-sharp question at the dinner table — all I could do was answer quietly: “No, I’m not earning more. My salary’s the same as before.”
After all, the new company isn’t making money yet, so the founders can only draw minimum wage. And because the first company had funds committed to an outside investment, I voluntarily cut my own salary there in half to help cover it. Between the two, what I actually take home is just as low as before, aaargh… (so, like I said, where’s that brain of yours?).
Setting aside the little smirk at the corner of my wife’s mouth whenever salary comes up — if you asked me what the point of all this hard startup work really is, and whether I’d choose the same road again if I had to do it over, I think the answer is still yes.
For me, running a company is more like one part of life — my work and my life are tightly interwoven. This is the shape of life I want: it holds a small business of my own, it fills and satisfies my interests and my life, and it happens to earn just barely enough money to keep living on.
Everyone who wants to start a company has their own vision and imagination; everyone already on this road has their own reality and their own original intent. These are my startup ramblings and reflections. So — what are yours?
