On that note, I don't recommend any plan that involves your parents, but that's just my undying need for self-reliance.

If you really want to know what I do to survive, nothing special really. I cut back my costs but don't eat only ramen and live in a box. I pick up some consulting and freelance jobs and help out people with other stuff when I'm in need (menial labor can be a good thing). The key is flexibility. I think about my company 24/7, but there is no way I can work on it that much. There is more than enough time in the day to make a living wage and work on your startup full-time, just make it happen.

Being a founder is about getting things done, busting walls down and doing, often, the unthinkable in terms of effort and brainpower to prove your thesis correct.

Based on your question, you probably aren't ready.

YCers, of course, are given a theoretical 3 months of living expenses and then usually get other investment at the end of the YC program -- so there's no mystery there (at least for those people for whom $5k == 3 months of living expenses).

On a side note, I've also found it increasingly difficult to keep in touch with old friends post-grad. The majority of my time is now devoted to my projects rather than hanging out or attempting to reconnect.

You're probably just being facetious, but you're not jobless; you just don't have a job that involves working under contract for someone else. ;-)

I took a slightly different path: I moved back in with the 'rents, but I also took a job for a couple years and saved up money. Then I went full-time on my startup, funding it mostly out of savings (I was paying rent to my parents). It's funny - now that I've moved out, my expenses are only about $200/month more than they were when I was living at home, but the difference is that now I'm paying a complete stranger's mortgage instead of my parents.

Alternatively, by "top private" do you mean very expensive, so most of the students were independently wealthy and were getting degrees in things not intended/needed to provide jobs after graduation? I just can't fathom going to / sending my child to a school where that was normal.

"Top private" as in #1 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. It's academically selective (slightly under 20% acceptance rate), and yes, very pricey for those not on financial aid. The demographics did skew toward children of upper-middle-class parents who wanted degrees in useless subjects. Liberal arts, after all.

BTW, this is not saying that 50% of graduates could not find jobs. There were a couple in that situation (mostly English, history, and language majors), but most people living back with their parents had jobs - in some cases, very good ones. I worked at a financial software startup. I had a classmate at the State Dept. Another friend was doing strategic analysis at MITRE (MIT Research and Engineering). All of us chose to live with our parents, even though we were making more than the median household incomes for our respective areas. Then there are more conventional live-with-parents stories, like the schoolteachers and librarians and baristas and unemployed.

It's more that if a large enough critical mass (say, all the English majors) chooses to live with their parents, it then becomes socially acceptable. And then their friends do it (while banking the rest of their salary), partially so as not to feel "different" from their less-successful classmates and partially just because they can.

After college I worked full time for one year. I kept living with college roomies and saved up about $10,000. I used that to work full time on open source for 10 months, and move to Europe (where I stayed).

When I started Directed Edge 6 years later, I did something similar, but had more saved. I got my living costs back down to college student levels to ensure that we had a long runway.

It's easy to stretch money out if you get used to it and easy to save enough money to live on for a year if you've got an IT job. The freedom of knowing that you can survive for a year on $10k while living well, mind you, is pretty awesome and it certainly gives you the flexibility to do something you think is worthwhile.

EDIT: I assumed you are/were a citizen of the US and shouldn't have.

I had a job with a startup lined up, which fell through, and then ended up getting hired by the SAP LinuxLab who sponsored my visa (roughly equivalent to a H1-B), so I went back to the US for a couple weeks, packed up my stuff, shipped it over and well, stayed. 6 years (and one job) later I got permanent residence, which meant I was no longer bound to having a company sponsor my visa, and a couple months later quit my job to found Directed Edge.

The convenient upshot of that is that now, at 28, I'm permitted to live and work anywhere in the US or EU.

a) dead and gone,

b) sick and dying,

c) impoverished,

or

d) stingy?

(I ask as a parent of would-be start-up founders, trying my best not to fit into those categories, but never knowing for sure when I might fit into category a).

1) I am on H1b-Visa [More Important than #2, so didn't even think about applying for YC this summer, though I would love to]

2) I need $$$ :-)

I typically try to wake up early(6am), hit the gym, put in my 8/9 hrs at work so I am free by 5-6 pm. Now I have potentially 6 more hours till 12:00 am during which I try to get some work done on my personal projects OR go to silicon valley meetups etc Or just laze/party out completely some days. [Potentially 30 hrs in 5 days]

So, time is not really a problem, it's more of a Time management and Motivation that will carry you forward. I am still tweaking both :-)

PS: On another note, I will be up in the SF city for StartupWeekend. Still looking for people to partner up ? Anyone Interested ??

It's very easy to go down the road of, oh no there are so many obstacles, but if you're relentlessly resourceful, you can make it work :)

BTW what/who are the "IIRC , The buxfers" ?

Buxfers = http://www.buxfer.com/about.php (I think)

I'm going to Startup Weekend but I'm also a backend developer. There should only be 1 backend developer per team right?

* As a parent, it is likely you have more and varied business connections than your son/daughter. Do you know anyone you could introduce them to who might be able to help them along both monetarily, as a seed or angel investor, and/or as an advisor if (a-d) were to happen to you? This doesn't even have to be a direct contact, perhaps a contact of a contact, or however many levels of indirection you are comfortable with. Just a thought; the help you can provide is not entirely in what you know.

That's the primary reason I am here on HN. (Well, actually the primary reason I signed up for a user account is that I lurked into some very interesting discussions here over several months, repeatedly following the link here from Paul Graham's essays, but what I claim I'm learning is entrepreneurial skills I can use for myself and impart to the next generation of my family.)

Agreed that sometimes parental connections are WAY more valuable than parental money. I know some spectacular examples from my own generation, as I know (as a professional school classmate) the child of a Vice President of the United States. Most of my personal connections are not closely related to the career interests of my oldest son, but it only takes one person who knows one other person and so on if all the relationships are friendly and pro-active.

If I weren't in school, and didn't have student debt, I could live quite well on the same amount of income, yet bootstrap a startup at the same time.

Mind you, this requires a well-paying and flexible part-time job, but it's definitely possible.

There's also the Royal Society Enterprise Fellowships, also in Scotland, which is an even cushier deal - you graduate straight from PhD to startup with a year's salary from the university and some small seed investment.

For the most part universities want to commercialise your work, so if you're a graduate with no money but a ton of great work you want to turn into a business, there is support there - you just have to know where to look.

This applies more to postgraduate students, mind; some of the things that supported me fresh out of my BA and looking to start some projects included a part time job that paid well enough to cover my basic expenses, leaving me free to tinker in the rest of the time, and doing a lot of freelance work which pretty much came to the same end. Having money saved up from internships and graduate stipends also helped, but I believe the system is a little different in the US ;)

I'm in Iowa right now; it's a dead zone, but I have resources available to me here (family, time, friends) that I wouldn't have if I just upped and moved to SF right now. Not that the prospect isn't intriguing of course.

So, in short, I’m lucky. The startup has been able to fund me from the start.

I ask because there seems to be some division amongst the comments and essays I've read about how severe of a risk this is, and whether it is a greater risk than jumping in without building up a sufficiently comfortable cushion beforehand. The other half of this, that either hasn't be discussed as much, or maybe I just haven't noticed discussions of, is what happens when a risk of competition appears while the people involved are working at mitigating the risk of inadequate savings/funding.

It seems that some would argue that going the route of the part-time job to fund the project is reasonable path to follow and that things will work out; others that would claim that it puts the startup at an acute risk of failing or just never getting off the ground, and that never having enough money goes with the territory.

As concrete examples of both viewpoints, the 37Signals guys would argue that splitting one's time at first is fine, and is in a lot of ways more desirable than diving straight in. On the other hand, pg has argued in his essays that moonlighting is incredibly risky to a startup's success, due to both the time commitment required by other obligation(s) and the placating effect of an near-assured soft landing should things go bad.

It seems like this situation is precisely where discussions of risk trade-offs come in. Hearing the thoughts behind how these trade-offs are balanced is interesting and useful, both for the sake of curiosity and helping me and others develop an intuition for where our own balance should lie.

The only other thresholds to overcome is that you or your competition solve enough of the customer's problem for them to be interested at all, and that the price is something the customer would be willing to pay. Odds are, if you are tooth-and-nail with one or more competitors, you'll pass both those thresholds just trying to keep ahead of them.

There might be very niche markets were you won't have the threat of competition to keep you honest about product quality, but I can't imagine of any. I'd worry about any market where no one cares enough to make a competing product.

My advice, find a brainy girl/boy who believes in you (and can add value in their own way) and talk it over :)

I worked for a year and saved enough ($3000). This amount of money will go long way (8 to 10 months) if I spend frugally. I am already 4 months into developing the startup.

Another thing is, develop a knack for getting things cheaply. If you search around, you can get same things far cheaper, than say from a Mall or Big shop.

I've learned what I need to do to not burn myself. I've fine tuned it to the point where it's become sustainable, at least for a while. I try to exercise four times a week, eat healthy, get at least 7+ hours of sleep and to, once in a while, change things up dramatically to break routine, such as going to a different city to work.

My job pays the bills, I don't have very many responsibilities and my goal is to start a company which will provide a steady source of income and open up other doors of opportunity.

Bottom line: You can have a full-time job and start a company.

We live in Cambridge, MA, so you can get by without a car. Food is cheap, and rent is in the range of $700 a month with roommates. So one should be able to live in Cambridge comfortable on about $1600 a month.

Once we get funding, we will both do it full-time.

It's amazing what the response to

"I just recently graduated. Instead of going to Europe to get drunk for a year, I'd like to go home for a year and write software for my startup."

can be.

I am planning to live on the provision from my parents to startup after June. That is when my current job finishes. :-)

Well, of course, I have got my ideas and plans ready before starting. :-)