coderunner

Curious to get an idea of the scale of side projects that people managed to turn into a full-time job. If you either bootstrapped the entire thing or only took VC money late please mention that if you don't mind!

There's a couple companies in the business of using a 3d simulation for training autonomous cars like Waymo, Cruise, Nvidia, and Applied Intuition. I don't quite understand their product though.

1. Are the trained object detectors in the simulation applied to real world data also or is only the part that makes decisions transferred to the real vehicle (e.g. it's safe to turn left here) while detectors trained on real world images of cars, people, etc. used?

2. Tangentially, I thought that in general detectors trained on computer generated images was not very applicable to real world images. eg training on a bunch of images of 3d modeled humans won't work well with testing on pictures of real humans. Is this not true?

Has anyone here transitioned a side hustle to a full time job after the side hustle was already making close to their full time job? If so do you have any tips on what helped you manage your time? And did you have to worry about competitors seeing success of the product and overtake you if they decided to devote full time to it from the beginning?

I am working on software / internet side hustles outside my day job as a software engineer in the hopes that one will eventually hit. I have some family and financial responsibilities that make me very averse to quitting a stable paycheck with no significant traction on the side project.

Were you able to do this without taking investor/vc money? I imagine a VC would want me to work full time from the beginning which would be understandable if they're putting in money. From what I've read, it seems like a lot of people that do take VC money are able to take a minimal paycheck since they are usually younger and have minimal outside responsibilities.

Thanks for any help.