What I think most folks here are overlooking is the concept of “Founder Market Fit”

Anybody can come up with an idea and start a company, but why are YOU the right person to build it? What’s your secret sauce? What do you know that the rest of us don’t?

The answer is never about the money.

Startups are incredibly hard. They take up all of your time and energy.

Paul Graham has famously said that you should only focus on eating healthy, working out and building your company.

If you’ve given up on your company during Tech Stars besides the potential to make a lot of money, the company is already dead.

Startups aren’t a job. Most people here have jobs they don’t like and can get away with doing it just for the money. You can’t.

I would strongly suggest you bring this up to your advisor and/or investors and find a way to cycle yourself out before you waste any more time, energy and people’s money on it.

You can’t turn 20k into 500k/yr if you can’t even raise 20k

Here’s your hard truth:

It’s not the money that’s holding you back, it’s your own mindset.

1. you should search everywhere and ask everyone. Start with a friends and family round and try to raise 50k or something like that so you can quit

I have to fly to SF and sleep on couches when raising money. It took about 4-6 weeks to raise 3.5M

2. if you’re feeling burnout working a 9-5, you should consider what it will be like when you raise money.

You will not raise money if you’re still working your current job.

Startups are hard & lonely. The thing that keeps you going is your belief in what you’re working on

Find a support system of other founders that you can trust and talk to about the dark parts

3. the best groups live in small text message formats. Slack / discord communities (and even this subreddit!) are typically worthless outside of some superficial advice

Refer to #2

My advice to every young founder is to move to SF. Your chances of finding like-minded people are much higher. Your chances of success increase by hanging around those people.

Then your worst case scenario is taking a job at some other startup where you could learn and do well at

Good luck! I’ve done it for 7 years, one acquisition and recently started working for one of the best early stage companies & teams I could imagine

It is not easy, it will only get harder 🥹

No you shouldn’t. This is 5-10 years of your life, minimum.

You don’t need a better idea You don’t need to work on something you don’t want to You don’t need to start a company

You can speculate and make stuff up all you want.

Will we really know what happened? Probably not.

What we do know is that in less than 24 hours, the board played their move, it completely backfired in their faces in the worst way possible (the employees got pissed) and now they’re fucked

The OpenAI board may consist of some great researchers, but they’re inexperienced business people, board members and humans

This will set a precedent.

It sounds like you’re making assumptions on whether the company will be able to fundraise.

Are you sure it can’t or are you just worried it can’t? Has the CEO been eluding to it? Do you know that they’re struggling to fundraise right now?

Startups are always in limbo. It’s very easy to conclude a startup is doing poorly: no money coming in, no users & employees working 9-5 pre Series A.

It is very hard to figure out if a startup is doing well: it’s making money, but not enough to cover its investment, etc.

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Now that we have that out of the way, if you know the company is failing and will not be able to recover, as an employee, why are you willing to go down with the ship?

I would strongly consider leaving for the sake of your career. I’m not sure how old you are and what your career path has been, but making less at a company that’s doing better will be better for your career long term than making a ton at a failing enterprise.

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If the market is offering you 70-100k, then it sounds like you got lucky you were able to find a job making double (I don’t know where you’re from).

For example, I too would like to make double my salary but it’s just not possible because nobody is willing to pay that rate.

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When it comes to your SO, HCOL and your savings, it sounds like it would be smart to start having conversations on what a future of making 1/2 or even 0 is going to look like for you.

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I wish you the best of luck!

Are you quitting your job? Is he? Has he built anything yet? Mock-ups? Prototypes? Real product?

Do you know this person? Do you trust them?

Do you see yourself quitting your cushy Fortune 500 job to make half of what you’re making now to support the business? That could be 6 months or a year from now.

Do you see yourself working on this for 5-7 years with this person?

Best of both worlds in my book. Great work!

This is Reddit, not reality. There are more folks working on non-AI startups than AI ones.

ChatGPT came out a year ago which started this gold rush, so only in this past year has starting an AI company made sense / become cool to do.

It might seem that way, but the ppl working on real money makers arent wasting their time on reddit lol