I’ve had four conversations in the past year where someone said to me, “I have young kids / I have an existing life I’m happy with / I have existing obligations that I enjoy. I don’t know if starting a company is compatible with that.”
(The joke that I had in my head whilst writing this was “this is You Have a Choice except for business” cc @eric)
Indeed. And the corollary to You Have A Choice is “if you are willing to accept the consequences of your choice”, as you describe:
I don’t want you to think that there are no tradeoffs to these forms. Of course there are tradeoffs. If you choose to live on a boat and sail from country to country, you’re going to have some difficulty ordering stuff from Amazon. (You’re also going to have difficulty interacting with any bureaucracy that assumes you have a permanent residential address). You’ll have to develop workarounds for this facet of your life, in order to get what you desire.
What are you willing to tradeoff to get the business or life you want?
And, more importantly, what are you trading off if you accept the normative path? “I could never accept the uncertainty of running my own business” is less convincing these days when layoffs are commonplace. “I have to raise venture capital to fund my idea” comes with losing control and being forced into making low-probability high-return bets so that the VCs can make their desired returns on the timelines required by their LPs.
People often don’t even notice the pain and friction of the normative path because they just accept it as “that’s just the way it is”. But when you pay attention to the whole picture, you start to see the options available to you if you’re willing to make different tradeoffs.
The ‘of course there are tradeoffs’ bit of this essay briefly got my FOMO and self doubt juices flowing, so, a footnote:
If you’re reading this, you definitely don’t fully adhere to the dominant narratives of your local culture. Which is to say: the ability to make choices that fit you and your life, regardless of narratives, is a skill you already possess
Maybe you don’t notice it, but it’s there: consider a time when you said, “eh, no thanks” to something that fit a dominant narrative because you had a better idea: “Want to go out tonight?” “Nah, I’m on the verge of a breakthrough in this vibecoding project I’m working on; have fun, and let me know what happens.” Or, “Sorry, I’ve got a sick kid; let me know,” etc.
There are the tradeoffs we’re aware of when we choose, but that wasn’t what my ‘ugh, tradeoffs’ sentiment was responding to; I was instead reacting to a feeling about the unknown effects of choosing: the tradeoffs that come as a consequence of a choice that I can’t yet see. The uncertainty that comes along for the ride
Rereading through the quoted excerpts here I was reminded: both choosing and the uncertainty that follows is a normal, inevitable human experience. Chouinard faced it; Buffett faced it; and at key points both of them likely experienced a level of struggle with their choices that isn’t recorded publicly, though it’s hinted at here
The conceit of time travel stories that involve going into the past is: If you go into the past you will change the present. Well, we’re all traveling through time, at a rate of one minute per minute (with some time dilation variance for astronauts). We’re going to change the future, whatever we choose, and tradeoffs and uncertainty will follow. So we may as well change the future in ways that suit us
I’m late to this party - but this essay home for me. I’ve been planning for many years to retire into running my own small family business, though much of that planning has been just making sure I create options for my future self. My goal has been to have something where I could scale up and down on my hours, work remotely (or work while traveling), build my schedule around creating quality time with my family, and to take advantage of some niche tax benefits. In winter 2021, I penciled in “partial retirement” for June 2026, though I figured I’d push that back for as long as I continued to work somewhere else in a role I loved.
Four weeks ago I was laid off from that role. It’s been an abrupt shift - but it’s also been remarkably freeing to be able to describe this as “retiring into running my own business”, and I’m really enjoying the flexibility to approach building this business from a mindset of exploring opportunities to create value rather than having to sign up for someone else’s vision or bet everything on a million dollar idea.
Thanks @peter. I’ve been meaning to reply to this comment but I keep forgetting (I’m sorry!) I thought it would be a good time to revisit given that the full Patagonia case is out. The key thing to remember is that finding these alternative configurations only really becomes possible if you have business expertise. Without skill, the odds of stumbling onto arrangements (moats) that let you do business on your own terms are pretty slim.
(Not to say that it can’t happen! It happens all the time!)
Because the secret message underneath all of this is that you need a moat. No moat = no way to run a business in a way that is relaxing — the kind where you can take three months off and go explore some random mountain.
Originally moved from the ‘Mental Models for Continued and Deliberate Loss Making’ thread.
For what it’s worth, both Ghost (the blogging engine that powers the main Commoncog site) and Rolex (the watch brand) are owned and operated under non-profit entities.
IKEA is held in two foundations, incorporated into two polities, so that Kamprad heirs can’t screw up the company and divide it up into parts.
And Hershey’s is majority owned by an orphanage.
So there are weird non-profit structures out there! I only realised this was relevant because of what @mozhu said!
(But this is probably not very useful information, @Gumbe and I apologise).
Similarly, Bosch is 94% owned by the non-profit Robert Bosch Stiftung. There’s a recurring pattern amongst where someone founds a business and then hands over control to a charitable foundation which harvests the cashflows for philanthropic ends.
Interestingly, there is one scenario I can think of which goes in the opposite direction (a non-profit spins up businesses), and that’s when research organisations like CSIRO license their IP to commercial businesses/startups, then reinvest the cashflows into research. Not useful for a performing arts organisation context though I’m afraid.
@cedric would this be worth moving into another discussion about alternative/unusual business configurations, ala There are Many Configurations of Business That Work?
Some foundations though change configurations, eg Wellcome used to own the Wellcome pharma business but eventually the foundation sold it and now just has a huge more diverse endowment.
I met the Ghost founders, very nice people. The non profit model is relatively common for European open source companies, in a variety of forms, also there are a number of coops, eg Igalia.
A post was split to a new topic: How is Commoncog and the forums set up?