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You don't need much people management skill to do consulting. You are managing yourself, not running a company. You do need to deal with clients. Product management skill would help tremendously. Basically clients rarely have any clue on what they want. You need to take their vague ideas, map to equivalent feature/functionality, extract the detail from them, and translate those into development functionality. Then fit the change into existing architecture, do the design, and implement them.

On the technical side, try to understand various architecture and how things work together. Do the full stack. Ideally when talking to the clients about a feature, you should be able to figure out what need to be done along the whole pipeline of work.

If you are a software developer and want to go further, I would say get involved in:

- Product management.

- Architecture.

- Go to meetings to talk to clients.

No, just by myself. I do "join" another company which takes care of billing and taxes. For health insurance I just use my wife's company's health plan.

Full stack web app for some companies with special needs. I have to do everything: biz dev, product management, project management, architect/design, development, DBA, QA, support, dev ops.

Also consulting for legal technical due diligence.

Develop yourself. Never stop learning. Have an optimistic outlook. Have a pleasant personality. Work well with others. Don't afraid to do more than necessary.

Avoid excessive startup if possible. I was young and naive. After doing 5 or 6 startups, I realized it's a lossy deal. VC spread their risk by investing in 10 companies and assuming 9 would fail. Founders go in with 90% chance of failing but with enough equity to offset the risk. Early employees are screwed, with 90% chance of failing but with meager equity, while doing huge amount of work.

Join startup for the learning. Join big company for the cash. If you really want startup, join late stage startup that are making money, which drastically cuts down the risk of failure while still give you upside.

Go into consulting is you want the cash. You have to be good and deliver.

Yes, USD. Experience count. After some more years of work, you could make as much.

63K taxes for 370K reported income.

Edit: forgot the AMT.

After 30,

- 125K, startup.

- 110K, cut salary for an early stage startup.

- 150K, with upto 25% bonus, plus options, startup that made boatload of money.

- 210K, consultant

- 280K, consultant

- 300K, consultant