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by Michael Cote.
Original Post: Informal Stock Markets
Feed Title: Cote's Weblog: Coding, Austin, etc.
Feed URL: https://cote.io/feed/
Feed Description: Using Java to get to the ideal state.
Reading articles like this always makes me think, "Christ, why don't I work for myself (yet)?" The problem, of course, is Coté's First Law of The Coding Life:
Bills must be paid, fool!
Which is to say, unlike some debt-free folks (lucky fuck!), I can't just drop my day job and start working on my own thing...without having that thing pretty well flesh- and PowerPoint-ed out.
(I've never gotten around to having had a super-rich room-mate in college that I became really good friends with who would later hire me as VP-of-Friendship. So that option it o-u-t, out as well.)
Money the Hard Way
Which always brings up the idea of raising cash to start something. Ugh. Raising cash. To me, that brings up visions of Word docs, PowerPoints, lawyers accountants, teeth-whitening, and dark rooms with bad coffee.
Old Man Market, of course, has a system for doing this: going public, an IPO. Unfortunately, that's something you do after you're already successful. I mean, it costs millions to do that right? And then there's all that paper-work you have to fill out every quarter. Jesus! I'd need Intuit's QuickSarfuckOx. So, that won't work for me.
Long Tail It!
It'd be nice if there was some sort of informal stock market that allowed super small-timers like myself to Harvest The Long Tail. Something like micro-loans, but for investing. People could invest in me by buying stock. Here at CotéIndustries, we'd pay out dividends or some such thing: whatever, one of those MBA types chomping at the same bit I am could figure it out.
More than likely, it'd just result in the same problem: I'd have to spend all of time bank-rolling myself and dealing with the subsequent maintenance of the bank-rollers that I wouldn't have time to code and take care of the code-customers.
So how bout it? Anyone want a cut of my profit for some up-front funding? Come on, you know you want a murky, high-risk investment run by a cranky, overly-hirsute man.
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