My thoughts about a startup
I’m at a crossroads and thinking about what comes next in my career.
My journey so far: I did a PhD in Maths, which I loved for the intellectual freedom but found the culture of “love maths, do it all the time” a bit unhealthy. After that, I wanted to do good (‘do good’ really means control it and shape it the way I think it should be) in the world and moved to the UK government, which I found technophobic - my skills felt like they would atrophy rather than flourish. Then I moved to a scale-up but found the leadership toxic, with a CEO who thought it was better for members of the leadership team to fight it out rather than build consensus. Currently I work at a hedge fund which has a fairly free tech culture but is very corporate finance focused.
I’ve gotten married and hope to move to New York in the next 6-9 months. I’ve also been doing a masters part-time for the past two years and struggling to balance that with full-time work. This transition presents an ideal opportunity to explore something I’ve been discussing with a friend for the past two years - starting something together.
When we spoke about this recently, I was confronted with 3 options:
- Find something we love doing, and try to get paid to do it (passion-driven business),
- Make some company that solves a niche problem that we can derive passive income from for low energy (the 4 hour working week solution),
- Roll the dice, go big and get VC funding looking for the big payout eventually (unicorn startup).
I should acknowledge there are other options I’m not considering here - freelancing/consulting using existing skills, joining an early-stage startup, or bootstrapped medium-growth businesses. But let’s limit the scope for now.
Options in depth
To compare these approaches, I’ll evaluate each on four dimensions: maximum revenue potential, personal hours required, whether personal interest in the work is necessary, and overall risk level. These criteria reflect what matters most to me based on my work philosophy - balancing financial needs with time commitment and personal satisfaction.
Passion-driven business
Max revenue: Likely small
Personal hours: Quite likely high
Personal interest: Required
Risk: Medium
Think of a board games cafe or a charity. This business is a passion project - it is taking your hobby and trying to make that a source of money. You are expecting to not make a huge profit but just enough to keep afloat. The main benefit of this option is working on it should feel fun!
Revenue considerations: Really depends on the hobby and the problem you are solving. However, as you are more interested in the community than making money, it is quite likely you will have lower revenue than a for-profit business. Most small businesses take at least 2 to 3 years to be profitable and become truly successful
Time commitment: As you love the idea you are more likely to put in the hours, and as the profitability is lower you’ll need to. This will be hours you like working - but still hours you are not spending doing something else.
Risk factors: Very much depends on the specific business, but only 39.4% of small businesses reach the 5-year mark.
4-hour work week solution
Max revenue: Likely small
Personal hours: As small as possible
Personal interest: Not required
Risk: Low
If you haven’t read the book - it is a bit dated but the concepts are there and is worth a read. The basic premise relates a lot to my How I think about work piece. It is a form of lifestyle design where you simply work out what you need to achieve the things you want to do - then make work fit into that plan.
The approach: Find a problem in a niche area - prototype and make viable a business in that area. Then automate your way out of a role using geographical arbitrage and empowering people under you to make decisions.
Financial model: There is an initial startup cost as you smooth out the business model, but the goal is always to drive down the hours to make this as ‘profitable’ as possible (i.e. low hours for high salary).
Key advantage: You don’t need to ‘like’ the business you make - it just needs to be financially viable. This means you can blast through different ideas - if one doesn’t work you can destroy it and move on to the next one.
Unicorn startup
Max revenue: High
Personal hours: Very high
Personal interest: Not required, but best of luck
Risk: Very high
Here we take a problem that is faced by a large group of people and think up a novel solution. This will likely have large profitability but intense competition. Think Uber (transport), Airbnb (accommodation), or Stripe (payments) - solving massive market problems with technology. These kind of ideas are ones where you need ‘stealth startups’ because ultimately the solution can and will be copied once people know it works.
Investment requirements: Quite likely to scale you will need high investment - which requires Venture Capitalists, which further adds to the pressure as you need to deliver for them.
You could love the idea
In some ways this and the passion-driven business aren’t mutually exclusive. The difference here is the intensity.
What I want from work
Read How I think about work for more on this.
Cost framework application
Whilst I may not be personally interested in the specific ideas in a 4-hour work week business, they are still my ideas rather than someone else’s. If working on someone else’s ideas has a weighted cost of 0.8 and working on my own ideas has a cost of 0.3, then more hours on my own projects could still result in lower total “cost” than fewer hours on someone else’s work.
Personal circumstances shaping my next move:
- I need time to finish my masters programme off - balancing full-time work with study has been challenging.
- I’m moving to New York in the next 6-9 months and want to be open for social opportunities in a new city.
- I have a tendency to overload myself and then burn out - I need to be fully conscious to not repeat this pattern.
Work philosophy priorities:
- I’m tired of working on someone else’s ideas - I want to work on my own, maybe it fails but it’ll be fun to try
- I want autonomy to make decisions that affect what I work on day to day
- I want to work with people I like and respect their life choices
If I were to work for a company again, I would want a company culture that is open, transparent, and meets people where they are. But given my current circumstances and philosophy, starting something of my own feels like the right path to explore.
So startups?
Given my personal circumstances and work philosophy, I’m evaluating these options based on:
- Time commitment - I need flexibility to finish my masters and explore NYC.
- Burnout risk - I’m conscious of my tendency to overload myself.
- Delayed gratification - I prefer present satisfaction over uncertain future rewards.
- Flexibility - I need to adapt to major life changes ahead.
- People/culture fit - I want to work with people who share my values.
When thinking about the options above, I rank them as follows:
1. 4-hour work week solution - Best fits my current needs: low time commitment allows focus on masters and NYC transition, low burnout risk through automation, flexible approach that I can adapt as circumstances change.
2. Passion-driven business - While I’d enjoy the work, the high time commitment risks burning out during my masters completion. I want time and space to really live the American experience, and a demanding passion project might prevent that. Maybe if there was a way to bring the time commitment down whilst still doing this it could work?
3. Unicorn startup - Violates almost all my criteria: very high hours when I need flexibility, high delayed gratification when I want present satisfaction, inflexible culture when I value adaptability, and brings me closer to people who are “just in it for the money” rather than sharing my work philosophy.
Summary
Working through these startup options systematically helped me understand what I actually need right now. I started this thinking expecting the passion-driven business to win - after all, I want to work on my own ideas and enjoy what I do. But mapping out my specific circumstances (masters completion, NYC move, burnout tendencies) against each option revealed that the 4-hour work week solution best fits my current life stage.
This surprised me, because it means choosing efficiency over passion in the short term. But it aligns with my broader work philosophy from How I think about work - optimizing for present satisfaction rather than delayed gratification. The 4-hour work week approach lets me scratch the entrepreneurial itch while maintaining the flexibility I need for this transitional period.
I also caught myself engaging in fear-driven thinking - initially justifying this timing because “doing my masters covers any gap in my CV.” This kind of conventional career anxiety contradicts everything I believe about present-focused decision making. I need to acknowledge that while I’ve intellectually convinced myself of this approach, part of me is still driven by worries about future employability rather than what actually makes sense for my life right now.
The analysis clarified that this is a decision for my current circumstances, not a permanent philosophy. If my situation changes - masters finished, settled in NYC, different financial needs - I might well choose differently. That’s the point of thinking systematically rather than just going with gut instinct.
Appendix: Deep tech vs. Solution assembly
I want to comment on the focus of the startup. I’ve been discussing business models without considering what the company actually builds.
Deep tech businesses focus on creating genuinely novel technology - solving problems that require significant R&D and technical breakthroughs. Think SpaceX developing reusable rockets, or OpenAI building large language models. These companies need to invent new solutions because existing tools simply can’t solve the problem they’re tackling.
Solution assembly businesses take existing tools, APIs, and services and combine them intelligently to solve market problems. Think Zapier connecting different software platforms, or many SaaS companies that build user-friendly interfaces on top of existing cloud services. The innovation is in the combination, user experience, and go-to-market strategy rather than the underlying technology.
My personal developer preference is a first principles approach, so my inclination is toward technical companies. I think this is somewhat influenced by being dyslexic - I struggle understanding what others have done and would rather know fully how something works than stand on technology that I don’t properly understand. This means I’m drawn to building novel solutions rather than orchestrating existing ones, even when the latter might be more commercially sensible.
I should acknowledge that I hold these preferences lightly - both approaches create genuine value and successful businesses. But personally, I find deep tech companies much more compelling. Having done a Maths PhD, I love getting into really complex solutions to problems - I find it deeply rewarding and I like really knowing from the ground up how something works. As a developer, I absolutely hate a poor developer experience when working with other projects, so I recognize that solution assembly businesses add tremendous value through better interfaces and user experiences.