>> "In my experience, startup founders who want to get rich want it more in order to have the freedom to work on what they want than to impress people."
Isn't the whole point of doing a startup, to be able to work on what you want? Surely creating a profitable startup gives you that freedom to do what you like?
No, because there's billing, payroll, taxes, customer support, management, board meetings and a hundred other things that come with running a startup. We have to do what's best for the company, and that usually doesn't include taking a month off to try to build a robot spider.
Well that depends, and it is the difference between working for a company and "running" a company, IMHO.
The actual act of founding a company can result in you working for it or running it, sometimes one after the other. This transition is as key as the work itself. The traditional method is to sell, taking a lump sum buyout and outsourcing the entire operation to someone else forever. That gives you the base from which you can take a month or more to build robot spiders.
Other methods also exist, most popular being to outsource a lot of operation functions and automate others, but still retain control. This happens a lot in many organizations, not just tech startups.
This provides enough freedom to build robot spiders and work on your company at the same time; retaining the investment for the long term, presumably because it is something you actually enjoy doing. Tim Ferris is the extreme example here, 37Signals a more realistic one.
If you are slaving away "working" for your own company as a long term solution, you are doing it wrong. You may as well go find a corporate job and pile up the pension.
Yes, but if your margins are good and your growth is strong enough, you can remove yourself from the equation and hire people to takeover most of these tasks. You'll probably still have to attend the board meethings though.
Then again, it's probably not considered a startup anymore at that point.
Read "The E-Myth" by Michael Gerber. It points out how most businesses must be setup from the start to allow a systemizatiom/franchising that allows the founder to exit.
Isn't the whole point of doing a startup, to be able to work on what you want? Surely creating a profitable startup gives you that freedom to do what you like?