In his personal, excellent talk (as the 1st commenter on Damien Katz's blog post wisely notes), Damien Katz shares and talks about quitting to do a startup when you are not young and single but older and responsible but still have that startup urge on simmer/low.<p>Laura (his wife) and Damien's share their differing responses/perspectives on what the personal/family risks were in the comments on his blog post below:<p><a href="http://damienkatz.net/2009/02/couchdb_and_me.html#comments" rel="nofollow">http://damienkatz.net/2009/02/couchdb_and_me.html#comments</a><p>In the beginning...<p>"Sell our house, live off the savings and build cool stuff... There were a lot of reasons not just money...<p>The first was just educational - I had interests in a lot of areas. The first was, distributed systems. I wanted to know more about them. I wanted to know how to build them... It seems crazy but if you're going to go off and pursue a Master's degree - you're going to quit your job, you're going to have to pay your tuition - and there's no income - and the end of it you have a degree. An Education...<p>It was about more family time. I had a beautiful one-year old and I didn't want to spend all my time at the office, working on somebody else's crap...<p>I wanted to see what I could do...<p>And this is the reason why my wife was interested. It would be an interesting story...<p>No wants to be wrapped up in this consumerist lifestyle, where if you have money you spend it...It was a good thing it forced us to downsize...<p>I wish I had sort of a vision... It wasn't like that - it was just day after day and letting it bubble into my consciousness...<p>The development process...It was really stressful once I decided I wanted to build it because I didn't know <i>how to build it</i>...I couldn't see past all the complexity...It just took a long time grinding at the problem, thinking about it...<p>I really just went into a panic mode. I was thinking I was a total fraud, I don't know what I'm building, I've got my family wrapped up into this - I don't know how to build it - so I got on Amazon and ordered <i>Code Complete</i>"