Peter Skirko

My personal website is www.pskirko.com.

I joined Indie Hackers to explore the idea of self-employment or running a small business, but my timeline is really 10-15 years from now, and the effort is exploratory: I may do it, I may not, TBD.

I'm not in a hurry per se, but also, everyone's life situation is different. Some people are looking for something right away, either because they have to (lost a job, profoundly unhappy with current job, etc.), they have flexibility (if it doesn't work out, their day-to-day living costs are minimal or they have a really comfortable financial cushion), or they just identify with being an entrepreneur and can't bear the idea of just being an employee somewhere else.

For me, things are not so simple. For example, while I am interested conceptually in self-employment, I haven't concluded it's the right choice for me. Being in a big company offers you significant leverage: the value of a single action is magnified by having a great systems infrastructure, talented coworkers, a lot of problems already solved, etc. Thus, the marginal return can often increase rather than diminish, if you pick the right problems to work on. I find myself getting quite good at this style of work, so it's possible that my value is in fact maximized in large companies. I know this thought process is counter-intuitive to many, but my goal is to think as carefully about these things as possible.

I also think a lot of the writing and discussion of entrepreneurship is not nearly as high a signal/noise ratio as people may perceive to be. A lot of it is rife with survivorship bias, and people are generally really bad at explaining how success came about, which is multivariate to say the least.

What I do like about those writings and discussion are:

• Surfacing of new ideas and trends (being on a leading edge, rather than lagging)
• The ability to be more experimental, and faster, at a very fundamental level
• And a bunch more. To be updated later.

I just write this to make clear that everyone's perspective and approach is different, but it won't be obvious just from reading what I say or write, so by stating my position clearly and carefully, it can actually help people both understand me, and also provide a point of reference for people who share some of the same ideas that I do.

Cheers!