There Is No One Right Way to Start a Startup

The current debate on Hacker News seems a little too black and white to me.  In my opinion, there is no right way to start a startup (or a business).  How you should start your startup depends on your definition of startup success.  In particular, I believe you should:

1. Define what startup success means to you right now.
2. Make decisions that have the highest probability of achieving that success.
3. Every so often, GOTO 1.

Different people will have different definitions of startup success depending on a number of highly personal attributes, including current monetary wealth, desired monetary wealth, desired lifestyle, what one wants to work on, how much one wants to manage people, how much one wants to impact the world, etc, etc.

Consider the following (knowingly grossly simplified) personal situations:

• An independently wealthy person doing what they love with an indefinite (5Y+) time horizon.
• Someone at a high salaried consulting job who wants to quit to start a startup, but not change his/her lifestyle.
  
• Someone living in a developing country who just wants enough money to not work.
• Someone who wants to quit their job to do a startup, but has a family and so needs $x/month relatively soon to do so.

I posit that these people will (probably) have vastly different definitions of startup success, and thus should be starting their startups in different manners. 

A poll I created the other day I believe exemplifies this point.  I was surprised how many people would sell their startup for under $100K (the highest answer).  Clearly this poll has issues--for one, it would be better statistically if it were worded slightly differently and then given to startup founders right when they are starting out.  But I think the core exemplification still shines through.  If your monetary end goal is $5M vs. $100K, you should probably be doing things a bit differently.

Btw, this comment inspired me to write this post...so thanks for that hugh.