You pay to build the bus terminal, and in return get a certain amount from the tickets sold on those buses. Then you care how good your bus terminal is, and care if the buses will earn you money.
Yeah, but, to continue the analogy, I’ve never heard of a construction company paying for the privilege of building the terminal on the agreement of a percentage of future earnings.
Investing like this is always risky, but i was thinking cheap like 50 - $200 to build the website.
Yeah, but for most companies that is pocket change.
Maybe instead you pay to build, and return you get stock? percentage of the company?
That’s what I was talking about for equity. This is an example of a posting on Angel:
Staff Backend Software Engineer $0K – $1K · 0.01% – 1.0%
Full Time · San Francisco · Software Engineer · Python · Java · Ruby · Programming: 3P APIs & Libraries · Backend Development · API
They are offering $0-$1k and .01%-1% of the company. Presumably if you took the $0k salary, you would own 1% of the company. If that company turns into Facebook, you are a billionaire. But the vast majority of companies won’t do that. Maybe it will turn into a nice stream of income. Maybe the company will be bought out and you’ll get 1% of the $100M buyout. There’s also a real chance that you’ll get nothing when the company folds.
If I was young, and I had confidence in the company, I might take that risk. But know that it is a gamble.
The other problem is that most of those companies are looking for really rock-solid people with a lot of experience because tiny mistakes and inefficiencies made now will cost them dearly in the future. Personally, I’d be a little suspicious of a company willing to take an untested bootcamp grad with no real world experience and make them their CTO or lead (possibly only) developer. Any developer position worth equity as a company founder is going to involve some hard core coding and knowledge. Anything that doesn’t isn’t going to be worth giving up equity for. That’s just the reality of the market.
jad·ed
Or other definitions, like MW:
made dull, apathetic, or cynical by experience or by having or seeing too much of something jaded network viewers jaded voters
As a musician, I’ve become “cynical by experience” of people (not necessarily you) trying to convince me to work for free. I’m sure it is a common experience of all freelancers. Maybe you haven’t experienced it yet. A lot of people are going to explain to you why it is in your best interest to work for free, usually as “exposure”. That and $2.05 will get you a cup of coffee.
Were you a musician before being a programmer?
I was a musician for a 5 years before being a semi-pro programmer for 6 years before being a musician/music teacher for 20 years before (now) trying to become a programmer again. Only boring lives follow a straight line. You can’t even imagine the twists and turns of my life. I’ve been homeless. I’ve eaten waffles on the beach with Charo. I’ve toured the world playing music. It’s been fun.