Career (by alaric)
But should I have gone down the investment-funded startup route? Quite probably. It'd be a faster route to being at the programming language design stage of life than the current path.
And so now I'm facing a dilemma: I have an offer to join a startup, get paid a salary that will cover our living expenses with some room for fun things, and end up with equity. The site's already mainly written, and just needs tidying up and launching and maintaining.
But if I do so, I'll throw away the building momentum of the freelancing (which can pay a whole lot more in the medium term, but the income varies unpredictably, and it won't give me equity in a company that could be worth tens of millions of pounds in a few years). And I don't even know if I can do it - Sarah can't look after Jean on her own, when I'm away from the house for just a single day things are already in a state when I return. Me going and working in an office all day would be a bit disastrous. Some way around that problem needs to be found first... But it'd do me a whole lot of good to find a way to be out of the office. Or, alternatively, to have other people working in my home office with me. I've no objection to being at home (in fact, I rather like it; I have a glorious location, and I like to be near my wife and child), it's just the lack of other technical people around me that saps my morale.
But still, whatever happens, one day, when Jean's older and Sarah's better (since she'll be coping with the next child by then, or the one after...) and we have no debts and instead have savings, I want to start investing time and money into my own projects and start launching them to fend for themselves... I've no shortage of ideas.
But most of them are stopgaps for what I really want to do: implement ARGON. There's no money to be made in writing a programming language, and I think that ARGON would succeed far better as an open source project (so that people using it extend it and contribute their extensions back; it's a platform, and so it needs to grow organically, and having many hands on deck helps with that kind of thing, in the same way that the standard set of UNIX tools has grown organically... just hopefully a bit less messily than that! A bit more like the suite of NetBSD ports and drivers, maybe). So how can I make money from it? The traditional way of doing that is to either use it as a tool to do something that does make you money (eg, I write apps using ARGON quickly so take less time to complete a job), or to sell a boxed packaged supported version with a manual to give pointy-haired bosses the benefits of open source along with the warm comforting glow of buying a box full of books and CDs from a real company, or to get your creation popular then make money consulting on it (like JBoss).
But none of these offer the get-rich-quick appeal of building up a company then selling it off. And I wouldn't want to sell ARGON off, it's too much my baby. So I think ARGON will have to remain an expensive hobby to begin with, then perhaps later on used to bootstrap a business selling ARGON server appliances or something, which I could IPO or allow to be acquired.
Mon 16th Apr 2007 10:45 am 
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By @ndy Macolleague, Tue 17th Apr 2007 @ 11:22 pm
Since your previous post re Paul Graham I've been rediscovering his site. I first ran into it when he published his essay on Why Nerds are Unpopular about 3 years ago. Since then he's written a whole load more stuff and I've probably sunk quite a few hours into reading him over the past couple of days. Suffice to say, it reminded me of a few things that I'd learnt at college and filled in a couple of the gaps.
PS: did you get my eMails (over a month ago now) re NS wotsits? I'm not sure if my eMail to you disappeared into a black hole or whether you've just been busy; either way, there's no rush.
By sarah, Wed 18th Apr 2007 @ 4:42 pm
I told you not to worry about me and the house when making this decission - I want to keep the company going but then that doesn't have to be full time.
You need to be happy and we need to pay the bills.