HN is often filled with success stories, which can give a false representation of the overall success that people are having. Instead of your biggest success, what is your biggest failure? How much did you lose? How did you rebound (if applicable)?
I bought a pizza shop. Invested 100k from credit cards in it to prove I was committed. I work full time as a developer so, I needed someone to run it. Got sales to over 40k a month in sales and still couldn't turn any kind of profit. Bought a second shop pretty sure I was robbed blind. Sold both never got paid for either shop. Not sure how to proceed now. Getting garnished so huge chunk of my pay is lost to paying back debt. Learned many valuable lessons. I consider it my ivy league of the real world education. I flipped a house paid 85k with a loan fixed it up sold it for 128k, still broke even took to long to fix up. Bought a rental property tenants destroyed couldn't get it re-rented. Owned a mortgage company market collapsed.
Left my job to do (current) startup. Spent 14 months w/o salary before we got funding. The total sounds like a lot but if I had to do it again I would.<p>I'm a big proponent of being open about finances and the financial struggle of doing startups - especially when you have kids and one stay at home parent in my case.<p><pre><code> Loss of salary for 1 year, 2 months
Does not include loss of 401k match or ESPP
-$140,000
Successful Kickstarter @ $25k
+$20,000
8 week contracting project @ 20hrs / week
+$16,000
Living expenses for 14 months (savings/stocks)
-$70,000
Post funding difference in salary from market rate
-$50,000 (year 1)
-$40,000 (year 2)
</code></pre>
Total ≈ -$264,000<p>My wife randomly reminds me what started off as a 3 month experiment has turned into a 3 year "adventure". She's not adventurous though :).
Not me, but a friend of mine works at Google and she has poured some £ 64,000k into building a live tv streaming service that didn't come to anything. The developer responsible eventually just went off radar and didn't even give SSH keys to the server, or and copies of the source code. I feel really sorry for her, and have been helping in any way I can...<p>When I heard the 64k figure I nearly had a heart attack! Jiminy Jillikers thats a lot of money.
I lost most money on stock trading actually. But it was back 2009-2011. I could have bought a new Lexus paid in cash with it. It has been haunting me for years since.<p>Then I started a cheap jewelry retail website. I did small and invested only $800 for inventory. The site ran on Magento and cheap PHP hosting like $7/mo. I got literally zero sales after 8 months. I went down San Fran Piers and saw they were selling same thing for cheap. Doh! I gave up the business and put away all inventory, which wasn't much. However, the time spent on taking photos and upload hundreds of $2 products was all wasted. It's plain stupid.
$40k in '09 on a food focused web app - split with my brother. $2k last year on an education web app my wife worked on (that was our share, there were 3 other participants).<p>The real killer is the time, not the $s out of pocket. My estimated hourly rate varies a lot based on what I'm doing - but it would lead to a significant increase if included.