The Post-YC Slump
blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
I'm curious about why there's no consideration of the possibility that perhaps such a high-intensity pace is simply not sustainable on a personal level for most people.
There's no reason why Y Combinator can't simultaneously be great for the businesses of those capable of working sixteen-hour days indefinitely, and toxic for the businesses of everyone else.
That said, I'm not surprised. YC is a rare opportunity, and people will absolutely punish themselves for the duration of their stay in YC to get the most out of it. Few people can maintain that kind of pressure longer term. I don't think that's a weakness, I think it's just being human.
I don't think the measure of working hard is counting how many hours you're at the office. I think the signal of working hard is how often you let yourself get into your comfort zone and coast.
I think working hard means pushing yourself out of your comfort zone - continuously. It means forcing yourself to ask the hard questions about your business you're scared to ask. It means figuring out how to do things you're not good at, like hiring or selling. It means identifying the most important problem for your company today, and tackling it, even if it's not what you want to be doing.
I'd guess that during YC, the partners and the community act as a force to keep people asking the hard, honest questions about their business. And I'd guess that after YC, without those outside forces, people revert to their default comfort zones, with things that feel nice. Getting press feels nice. Going to conferences feels nice. But what's true early is true later too: it's the work that doesn't feel nice that usually matters most.
You could spend 40 hours a week in the office doing the right things, or 100 hours doing the wrong ones. One of those will lead to growth, the other one won't. And it doesn't have to do with the hours.
Which is why people talk about it the way they do. The doing it right is assumed.
Simply working hard does not guarantee any path to success, at least in the world of startups. You can work extremely hard, do no "fake work", and have really great product and the vast majority of startups will still fail. You need a great deal of luck as well, ie. #rightplacerighttime, and that's something that isn't admitted by VCs whatsoever.
Yeah, you can hire "experts", but it's expensive. Having some basic knowledge of how things work can postpone hiring experts until the company can actually afford it. Want an expert HR person or an expert shipping/receiving guy? That's $150k each per year.
I mentioned this in a post just yesterday. The way YC (and VC in general) encourage companies to scale quickly at all costs increases dependence on VC money because it encourages companies to spend extra money getting things done/ready quickly, when they may not really need to.
HR, billing, marketing, sales, etc. are just as much a part of a company as the product, and "Hire experts to do it" may not be the best advice when starting out.
I just don't get why these "insightful advice" posts ever gain traction.
Pure hubris.
> The main problem is that companies stop doing what they were doing during YC—instead of relentlessly focusing on building a great product and growing, they focus on everything else. They also work less hard and less effectively—the peer pressure during YC is a powerful force.
No, the problem is that it's difficult to build a large company. High growth is easy in the beginning when you're going from 0 to $100,000, but try going from $100,000 to $100,000,000. "Fake work" isn't what prevents the vast majority of companies from doing this.
During YC, you're in a very controlled environment - everyone around you is working hard, you have a deadline, you don't have money, and you just focus on building, etc. Once you leave YC, suddenly, a few things happen (I've seen this with exactly 2 start-ups so apologies for extrapolating):
1. You suddenly have a lot more money, and simultaneously lose the very guided structure you had at YC
2. A lot of YC founders are young, haven't worked in teams with different personality types, etc before and they have to learn how to manage people and each other
3. Because growth is the only thing they've been taught to look for at YC, at the first sign of any slowdown in growth (which could be natural and acceptable, or due to some other reason), they start freaking out and churning. This further exacerbates point 2 and they start stressing out their team and each other
4. There's a bit of a personality cult around YC founders right now - I recently attended a YC party in an apartment in a fancy high-rise in SF and it's amazing how many hanger-ons that were there fawning over the founders. It was a very SF start-up version of a celebrity night-club in LA/NYC. This unfortunately builds on the narrative of infallible YC founders who are building great billion dollar companies, etc
I guess where I'm going with this is that in addition to just growth, folks need to be taught how to work in teams, how to gear up to build a longer term, sustainable company, and to appreciate that they can and will make mistakes, but they need to handle that with grace and maturity.
Lol... I think your YMMV on what you encounter here, maybe I just know the boring founders that could care less about social status. In fact I think the ones who care about social status are by and large the ones who don't actually get accepted.
It provides really interesting opportunities for them to be proactive about giving help at the right time. For instance, they'll be able to setup rules for notifications e.g. when you're having a slowing rate of growth, or to send congratulations when you've had a strong month etc.
I imagine one of the problems in investing in so many companies is that you aren't always aware of problems before it's too late. By using software to collect metrics about their portfolio companies, they can systematize how to become aware of and help out companies where they can make a difference.
I'm working on an alpha for a product called Growth Report that does just that. It's not "gem install yc" but it's pretty close. Interested to try it out with FieldDay?
Raising money is not fake work if you don't know how you are going to pay your team in 6 months, or 3 months, or next month. Twice I have taken out a second mortgage on my house to pay my team, its not a good idea. Press seems to be a necessary evil, again I have made the best product on the market, only to go unnoticed because of lack of press coverage. Its not like 99.9% of the press are out looking for a great product, they are being lead by the PR agents.
I agree raising money and getting press are "non productive work" as far as product advance goes. But so are things like washing the dishes in your house, they don't help you get more work done that day, but it is a needed part of the system.
So maybe y-combinator should take those two VERY important survival aspects over for the 25% of companies that they feel are the unicorns. For another 10% they will make sure they have enough money for the next year, and that they will get the press they need. Seems like a natural extension....
What the author is talking about is how there are a lot of fun things one can work on that could be useful at some point in the future. But probably not within the next week or month. Instead, the author is saying to focus on the things that will without a doubt be useful within the near future (<month).
I recall reading somewhere that YC batches are now split into clusters because there are so many companies in each batch. Maybe these dinners can be cluster specific as well.
As the companies grow in size, they can democratically decide to reduce frequency to monthly - I can see how changes would be slower as the companies become larger.
Edit: To clarify, this is purely a peer group - no YC presence needed. Have to do it this way to scale.
"You have to keep up a high level of intensity for many, many years."
Don't take this the wrong way /u/sama, but could it be that perhaps business models are the problem and not founders not grinding away for years on "real work"? 90% of startups fail [1] [2]. I am highly suspect of the idea that this is caused by teams not being committed or working on "fake work". More likely, markets shift, business models aren't viable, and so forth. This is not a case of people "not giving it their all".
[1] http://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-startups-fail?share=...
[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/01/16/90-of-start...
EDIT: Its been proven scientifically that people encounter diminising returns past 40-50 hour work weeks. [3] Don't encourage grinding harder. Encourage finding where to exert the most leverage, and hiring best people you can hire today. Quality people + automation leverage (your software) + quality marketing is a solid formula (but not a guarantee) for success. Luck, while no one wants to admit it, is a non-insignificant component of success ("right place at the right time").
[3] http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres...
Strong early growth is a very positive sign. But growth is a funny thing and can be hard to sustain. The true market test may come later... from when you are trying to grow a $50 million dollar business into a $500 million dollar business.
The key word in that sentence is "could", not "will". I'm pretty sure after all these years YC have enough experience and data to identify the "could"'s. But they're still just "could"'s. Doesn't seem "wildly" optimistic to me, just optimistic, based on previous track records.
But a lot can, and poor execution is why they don't.
Let's put it another way. When you say:
>It would be interesting to put together a list of these "good idea, but poor execution" ideas.
I read:
>It would be interesting to put together a list of these "execution plans but poor execution" ideas.
There is absolutely no way to separate out the "good idea" from the "good idea but poor execution" because business is the art of execution.
But maybe I'm crazy.
You can patent entire industries and fundamental advances. The hard part is just choosing what to focus on, that you can actually do in 1860 starting with $1,000,000 and maybe the patent system (though it's probably unfair that you're using a time machine - this is likely quite immoral as you're not the true inventor of anything.)
And then doing it.
In other words: the outcome of the game is about execution. But what you're executing is idea. The two go hand in hand. You have a real chance to become worth 2015$ 1 trillion within the 20 years - or generate a one-million fold return on the million. You can be worth as much as entire continents. But you have to do it right.
For starters, you have to be someone whose brain can ship those technical ideas back to 1860 in one piece. This is quite similar to someone with an idea today. Not everyone qualifies.
Put another way, you could probably make exactly the same amount of money, if not more, with a "back to the future 2" scenario where you had zero ideas, but had a chart of various events that you could wager on or invest based on.
When we look at it from that perspective, it's only execution - can you correctly execute about the information you already have.
Soooo - yeah, it's not a great analogy. In general, having a perfect knowledge of what happens makes for bad analogies.
Why this is a workable analogy is because this really is similar to the position that founders with technical ideas are in. They have this vision that something can more or less work - but even if it does they still have to execute on it. That's my point.
Everything you dictate in this revised game is 100% guaranteed to work, because you're reading it straight out of technical manuals for the scientists who build these things today. But that still doesn't make a company that manufacture these things pop out of thin air. You can transfer a very large part of a $1 trillion in R&D back in time -- the ideas; but you won't suddenly have a company as a result. Someone still has to make it all and sell it all.
As an example, even if Babbage had invented modern transistors, he didn't "almost" create Intel and IBM. These companies as such are quite separate from the idea.
What do you define as "a lot"? What do you define as a "vast majority"?
Luck and timing no doubt play a very important role in addition to simply poor execution. Also even excellent execution doesn't take into account how the market will respond to what you are making or trying to sell which can't always be determined prior to actually going through the motions.
The vast majority will not achieve that goal (you don't need them to, either -- for sustainability, all you need is a few winners), and in the process, I can't help but feel that they're stunting their career, technical, and personal growth by approaching critical period of their lives with the belief that your economic model of the universe applies equally to them.
We try to be up front that they have a high chance of failure. But I truly believe that there is nothing better for their career, technical, and personal growth than doing a startup they're passionate about (we try to filter out the people that want to do a startup for a resume item).
Also, one of the advantage of YC is that if the startup doesn't work out, founders have made a lot of connections in the network and can usually find something interesting to do next.
As I've said before, I think the actual risky path is not pursuing what you really want to do and then spending the rest of your life regretting it.
We added a few people (part-time) raised a little money, but ultimately we couldn't get the product market fit we needed to feel comfortable that we could grow and keep our integrity (we were a financial product). A few weeks ago I shut down the business and I'm about to find something new.
The fact that I lost a year of income is completely irrelevant vs the regret I would have faced had I never made the leap. Even without YC my network has strengthened considerably and I learned more in a year than I thought possible.
I have read a ton, watched all the startup school videos, talked to a lot of founders and tried to understand how to do this well. The fake work problem is real and even while paying extreme attention to it, often times I would waste a few hours doing something that would not increase the probability of success.
Code and talk to customers. It's so, so crucial.
Starting a fast growth company is not for everyone, but for those that want to do it, YC's information is gold. Thanks for everything you guys have put out.
I'm a lot happier having spent 10 years building a sustainable company doing what I really want to do, than I ever was at exciting startups during the v1 .com bubble.
Getting to that point, however, required putting in a lot more than 3 months -- or 3 years -- of backbreaking effort.
Peer pressure once there is no longer there and you can't replicate that easily.
Further, I think nearly every founder who has gone through YC would report that, succeed or fail, they are net-benefited by the experience. Rather than stunting an individual, the exercise of founding a startup is probably one of the best ways to rapidly increase your skill-set over a short time frame.
I would disagree that you should grind away for it on years. If YC is confident that hustle/effort is the problem, they should be hiring engineers directly, pay them market rate, and keep all of the equity in their projects to themselves instead of having founders shoulder the risk.
If it were reasonable, I don't think the value created would be so great.
While I don't disagree with your points on a macro, startups are very specific entities, and their success is contingent upon founders (and team members) who are willing to do unreasonable things. And also be extremely lucky.
Sure, you worked harder than someone who has a boring 9-5, but you're not turning yourself an indentured servant until the end of time. Your only risk is the additional time/effort.
Your chances of success, however, are much higher with more experience and resources at your disposal.
This suggests that creating a business with the intent of not exiting, but retaining and growing it gives better odds. While a more typical small business has its own stressors and certainly can have long hours, in my experience the level of intensity is much more sustainable.
The down side - you're much less likely to walk away with large sums of money. On the up side, you're much more likely to create a sustainable venture that has a lot more success paths than the binary 'get acquired or go public' routes available to vc-funded startups.
[1] pdf - https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/FAQ_Sept_2012.pdf
It's no surprise that someone who starts a landscaping or property management company, where the prime thing being sold is hours of labor, would have a higher 5/10 year survival rate than a company selling bits, ads, or other types of digital engagement.
A quick search turned this up:
http://smallbiztrends.com/2012/09/failure-rates-by-sector-th...
This shows all business types following roughly the same trend. 'services' [which would include software and property management] have the lowest 5 yr survival rate at 36% and mining the highest at > 50%.
This is data is from the 2010 census, examining businesses started in 2005 - likely a different methodology than the SBA used. This which probably accounts for the discrepancy from my SBA stats in the original post.
The number of businesses that can be supported in the physical world is dramatically higher than for Internet services. Why? Geographic restriction and franchising.
There are going to be two dozen major cloud hosting companies, and maybe 50-100 smaller players. There are 7,000 frozen yogurt shops.
It would be great to have data on this. How many SMB owners make a few hundreds $K a year, for many years, ending up making a lot more than a very successful/lucky early employee making a couple of $M in one shot after many years. Especially in the software field.
2nd article just links to other articles on fortune which don't have anything to back them up.
So I'd be dubious of those figures.
"Y-Combinator’s success is undeniable: the program has produced 37 start-ups worth over $40 million each in the past five years. In its first six years, 72 percent of Y.C.’s 249 start-ups raised money after Demo Day, and today, the average value of a Y.C.-financed start-up is $22.4 million. However, these statistics also reveal a grimmer reality: 93 percent of the 511 companies accepted by Y-Combinator have failed. Even more alarming, only 3 to 5 percent of the companies that apply to Y-Combinator are even accepted, meaning that only one in every 200 companies that applies to Y.C. eventually succeeds."
Emphasis mine.
[+] http://koltai.co/notebook/the-risky-business-of-entrepreneur...
EDIT: Please disregard this post. Left for historical purposes. sama notes that the stats are inaccurate.
EDIT 2: The citations in that link I mention above are from nytimes and business insider. They might be accurate, if a bit old, but require verification. Treat them appropriately.
Also, he average valuation of all YC startups through w2014 (i.e. with enough time to have raised a first round) is now over $100MM.
- cofounder disputes - market timing - not continuing to find growth
are top 3
Dropbox - Not public, probably not profitable
Airbnb - Not public, might be profitable, lots of legal questions.
Coinbase - Not public, raised $100m+, no idea if it's profitable
Stripe - Not public, raised almost $200m, almost certainly not profitable
Reddit - Acquired by Conde Nast (private), might be profitable.
Zenefits - Not public, probably not profitable, raised ~$500m
Instacart - Not public, not profitable, raised ~$300m
Weebly - Not public, might be profitable
So I'd say their track record isn't great on that front. I don't know of any meaningful ($1bn+) IPOs of YC companies (not to say that they don't exist). The fact that I had no idea what Weebly was until a moment ago probably means it's not one of their success stories. I suspect DropBox will IPO at some point, but after Box's IPO, they have an uphill battle to prove that they won't be the same dud. Coinbase I had forgotten existed, so I'm really curious what their deal is (especially considering their valuation is so high, I wonder if they can support it anymore).
Box is trading at about 6x their forward revenue in valuation, versus cloud industry's 10-12x average, and during the last Dropbox round it was rumored it was valued at 40X its forward revenue.
Meanwhile Box is winning major partnerships and customers left and right and the market still hates it, I really wonder how Dropbox is gonna tell their story considering their vast consumer user base is a liability instead of asset when it comes to profitability.
But how many were successful, in the sense of paying back their investors? The most likely outcome of most VC investments is a "zombie", a company which can pay its own operating systems but is a net loss to investors. The usual VC stats are that about 10% are wins, 20% go bankrupt, and the rest drag on for years in zombie mode.
Sure, but I don't think there have been any studies that find negative returns after 40-50 hours.
If we are optimizing for maximum returns, rather than maximal efficiency, you would advocate for increasing hours worked until the result of one hour of work was zero.
Many activities have diminishing returns after a certain amount of work (oil drilling, distance running, mining bitcoin, etc.), but it doesn't mean that the rational decision is to stop when the point of diminishing returns is reached.
http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres...
The cited research claims total overall productivity of working 60 hours a week starts showing a deficit to working 40 hour weeks, after about 4 weeks.
That one grind where you kept pushing could keep affecting the productivity of the whole engineering team for the next 2 or 3 years. I've seen it happen. A lot.
I would assume doing strategizing or negotiating when tired could equally have devastating long-term effects on the business side.
Work as long as you want, just don't work tired. It isn't worth it.
In the average case.
People who build billion-dollar businesses are not the average case.
That isn't to say everyone should grind super hard. People should, however, have the self-awareness to recognize whether or not they are capable of high levels of achievement. Few people are.
Being "superhuman" doesn't make you terribly more likely to succeed.
He'll be long gone before Uber fails. They're probably going to dump all of the liability onto the public markets, he'll probably resign to focus on other projects or some such, and leave some MBA schmuck to deal with the mess.
Is it a characteristic of most successful founders that they can make good decisions in high stress situations while sleep deprived?
Sure, but they're killing a lot more people than the docs getting sleep.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1705824/
"Interns working five or more extended-duration shifts per month reported more attentional failures during lectures, rounds, and clinical activities, including surgery and reported 300% more fatigue-related preventable adverse events resulting in a fatality."
Did you read beyond the first two paragraphs?
Revenue = Value x Sales Activity x Conversion Rate x Retention
The specific approach will differ depending on your size, your vision, funding or bootstrapped etc, but the fundamentals are the same.
Value: Covers getting your business model right. Volume x Margin, Product-Market fit kind of thing. It's essentially a hypothesis you're taking into Sales activity and refining.
Sales Activity: Includes lead generation, but I don't like to put 'Marketing' as a separate heading because blogging and chatting to bloggers is the easiest way to feel busy and achieve nothing. Are you getting in front of clients?
Conversion Rate: And how many of your clients are actually buying? Track this! Segment it when you can! [channels the power of Danielle Morrill] "Know your numbers!"
Retention: Obviously depends on the business model, but ongoing or repeat clients are lovely. In a recurring revenue business, churning a client for every new one you bring on board wastes all the previous steps.
There doesn't seem to be an obvious causation here. I could totally see either causing the other, or there being a common cause of both. Seems weird to just assume burnout is a result of doing poorly.
This is like most things in life, taken in moderation = good for you, but the extreme might kill you (or in this case, your startup).
I, too, won't pay your therapy bills after you burn out from working 16/7 work weeks for months/years on end.
The article is about the difference between real work (that moves a startup forward) and fake work (that does not). People often work very hard at the wrong things, so Sam's advice has nothing to do with "work harder". "Work smarter" might have been closer, if we're going to pick a half of that cliché. To take a post that is clearly trying to help save founders from a lot of unnecessary work, and twist it into something sick, is pretty uncharitable.
I keep thinking about adding the Principle of Charity to the HN guidelines. What good comments would be ruled out if we did this? It would certainly rule out many bad ones.
A venture capitalist isn't generally going to be satisfied with one of their investments discovering they prefer running as a lifestyle business instead of a potential multi-billion dollar company.
The VC has an interest in the aggregate success of their portfolio more than particular startups within it. Advice is going to be oriented towards that goal - they'd rather have 99 failures and 1 Facebook over 100 $1M sustainable lifestyle businesses.
"Work as hard as you did in YC" is great and all, but I really don't think it's possible for most folks long-term.
I'm not saying you can't be cynical or feel what you feel. I'm saying that cynicism also should have a bar to clear. Painting everything black leaves everything black for everyone. That's intellectual vandalism. It wrecks the discussion in its vicinity, and ultimately wrecks the community, because people who don't like wet black paint all over everything will just leave.
What is the minimal bar that cynicism should clear? Addressing a strong version of what it's critiquing, rather than lazily picking a weak version in order to get straight to sniping. That's the Principle of Charity, and it's basic to intellectual honesty. Why should cynicism get a free pass just because of how it feels? If you had considered that bar before commenting, you couldn't have posted what you did.
I don't at all mean to pick on you personally and I hope I'm not coming across that way. This is a systemic question and I care about its systemic effects on HN. What you posted was no worse than what many people post, and that's the problem.
"Work smarter" is a vague, cliche platitude.
Sam's article is far from trivial and far from condescending. What he wrote about is real and huge. Part of the difficulty of talking about it is that, when you put it into words, it sounds like a truism. Who would choose "fake work"? You'd think no one. Yet in practice, lots do. Not doing it is much, much harder than it sounds.
It's fine for someone not to know the problem well enough to appreciate this distinction. What's not fine is to rush for an excuse to call things "trivial and condescending". The difference for HN is important—basically the difference between a drinkable well and a poisoned one.
He says "I tell founders to consider how directly a task relates to growing. Obviously, building and selling are the best."
Well, many of the complaint list he has are arguably orientated towards building and selling. So I could be charitable and say he's trying to say that they're doing much of what they need to be doing but doing it wrong.
Well, that's the nature of all work and isn't greatly helpful or insightful. In detail, exactly, how is one supposed to scale if your technical debt and demo is a mess? How do I do PR correctly? How do I hire and build a team capable of rapid expansion? How do I know how much money is enough or wasting my time (my part-time accountant says we have enough money for 4 weeks...)? What do I do when a certified letter comes in from another company claiming patent infringement and I'd catagorized hiring a lawyer an obviously low requirement? Why is cult-of-personality always a bad thing (let's see a study on startup success between milquetoast founders and media savvy personalities)? Personalities make all the difference in the business world.
Which is why this opinion piece is given the gravitas that it is. But I'd honestly be more charitable to the founder in the trench and consider that YC is doing a poor job of preparing founders for... reality.
Your comment isn't flippant (well, at least not until the wild non sequitur at the very end). That puts it on the right side of the most important line. I still don't think it counts as charitable, though, because your criticisms don't engage the meat of the post. I was hoping to write a detailed reply about that, but alas there's no time.
I would honestly really love to see a full list of tasks and activities that could be classified as 'fake work'.
We were in a place like that towards the end of last year. We got invited (finally, after several applications) to the CED Tech Venture Conference, which was an important chance to raise our visibility, meet investors, etc., and I had speaking engagements lined up at All Things Open, Tri-JUG and an NCTA event. In the span of 2 months we had 4 big chances to be "out there" getting our name out, and we had some really cool new stuff ready to demo... life was good.
And then two weeks after All Things Open, I find myself on the back of an ambulance, being rushed to the hospital with a heart attack. Talk about your momentum killers. :-(
After that, things went into something of a tailspin. Obviously there was a period of time when I couldn't have cared less about startups, business, or even technology. I was just happy to be alive, and was focused on bike riding, diet, and cardiac rehab. But all through that, I figured it would be easy enough - eventually - to step back into working on Fogbeam and get things moving again. As it happens, it hasn't been quite so easy.
I mean, don't get me wrong... I'm back. Definitely, absolutely, 100%, back. But I can only say that as of maybe sometime in the past month. But there was a 9 month gap in there where I really just wasn't in the right place mentally to focus on this. It's hard to explain, as I was back to normal physically within a couple of months, but the mental recovery was actually the harder part, and getting back to where I am excited about technology and excited about building a company took a LOT longer than I expected.
I had a little false start back in Feb., when I wrote some code, did some stuff, and thought I was back on the horse, but it didn't last. It's been discouraging to deal with all this, and even more so very exactly because all of this happened when we did have some momentum going. Now I find myself wondering what it's going to take to get that back.
I guess there are a lot of things that can kill your momentum: the "fake work" that sama talks about, dealing with fundraising, dealing with acquisition talks, whatever. But from my personal experience I'll just throw in "health issues".
I'm sure you guys get (or will get) tired of hearing about this from me, and I am generally not the preachy type but I'll reiterate this again: pay attention to your health. No, really, do it. It's super easy to assume you're indestructible and immortal, and to push aside concerns about health. I know, I lived that. And the younger you are, the easier it is.
But trust me, it's not a good idea to blow that stuff off, no matter how young you are. Don't say "I'll wait to get back in shape once we have our exit". I mean, there probably won't be an exit if you're dead; and if there is, you won't exactly benefit from it. And remember, on things like heart disease, the artery damage that leads to heart attacks and the like, can begin really young. Even as young as your teenage years. So no matter how busy you are, or how old you are, NOW is the time to start eating right, lose weight, quit smoking, whatever it is you need to do.
Sorry, I'll step off the soapbox now.
I was 41.
1. stop smoking if you smoke.
2. lose weight
3. eat a healthier diet.
4. improve your lipid profile if it's off (talk to your doctor about this)
5. lower your blood pressure if it's high (again, talk to your doctor. Also, see: lose weight, and exercise more)
6. If you're diabetic, manage that. (Talk to doctor, lose weight, exercise more)
7. Exercise more.
8. (possibly) take a fish-oil supplement. There is at least some research showing that fish-oil can actually reverse existing atherosclerosis. And while it's not definitive on that point, almost everybody agrees that fish-oil is good for you. Even my cardiologist recommended it, while he was neutral / ambivalent on all of the other dietary supplements I asked him about.
9. It's even less certain, but consider supplementing COQ10, Aged Garlic Extract, and/or Resveratrol. There are varying levels of evidence to support using each of these. Don't take my word for it though, look up what's out there and judge for yourself. IANAD (Doctor)
10. Read two books: "Cholesterol Clarity" and "Keto Clarity" both by Jimmy Moore and Eric C. Westman. Consider their advice.
I have one question: What to do if your growth flatlines even if you work super hard? How to approach that problem? (I know that there is no simple solution for this - but what would general approach to solve lose of momentum).
More seriously, if you're taking a company through the investment/VC pseudo-Ponzi pipeline, you have to grow. Otherwise, early investors don't get an exit.
I understand completely why this is a problem for YC. I just don't see it as being such a problem for the founders.
1) raised their money in a priced round. It's therefore unlikely they have unilateral control of the board.
or
2) didn't do a priced round but went with convertible notes. Those initial investments are now interest-accruing debt on their balance sheet.
In either of those scenarios there's going to be immense pressure to not let the business get comfortable.
As for other scenarios, I can't really speak to that - I personally have never been with a company that accepted any deal that included loss of control. I'm sure it happens, it just doesn't match my experience.
ouch. :) And yet what you're saying is true, even for those who are avoiding said pipeline as long as possible! @sama is right... growth and momentum are inextricably linked, and I've found @ userify that days with good numbers (and there are more of those these days!) keep us plugging through the harder days.
With momentum and growth, all things are possible. Without either, nothing is possible, and it messes with your mind. These are the days that you start messing with side projects and taking your eye off the ball.
It's all about building a growth machine on some meaningful axis (users, server, revenue, whatever) and figuring out what makes it grow fastest. Cashflow is derived from that. That's really all it is. Funding, hiring, even the technology itself: all just sideshows. Growth first.
The corollary: build something that helps you track your numbers. My thing literally just emails me a CSV with a new line appended every day. If it ever gets too unwieldy, I'll do something more sophisticated but for now it's a few hundred lines of python that helps me track trends etc in a spreadsheet. (I'd love to see a startup that can do API POST'ed metrics for $10/mo!)
Userify is growing at 50% monthly, but it's still not fast enough. Growth is everything, and the measurement of that growth is critically important. It doesn't need bells and whistles.. just get it done.
How can you grow without a product users love? Say your retention rate is nowhere where it needs to be yet, isn't it counterproductive to work on getting more users when you those users won't stick around?
A member of a YC batch seems to have only a few obligations. There was occasional office hours which help to keep the batch on track with objectives to reach product or growth excellence. They have social events, which are good for learning and more general. They have a few demo type activities which are, again, around product and grown excellence. The rest of the time they work on... product and growth excellence. Do they have to work on things more than 40 hours a week? No. Is there a time clock where they share their hours? No.
Granted they are often out of their normal environment and very excited so they do work more than 40 hours. But that is a choice not a requirement. There are many examples of founders who bring spouses and children and find time during their batch for having great family experiences and good work/life balance.
The issue seems to be when they get home. They no longer spend 40 hours working on growth and product excellence. They work on marketing themselves. They work on raising more money. They work on PR. They lose the product and grown momentum.
We need to stop turning this into a conversation about how "start up founders must give up work/life balance to succeed". No one is suggesting that. What is being suggested is that you take what you learn in a 3 month period and use it after that three month period. Don't work longer, work smarter.
Edit: If the down voters would care to discuss why they object to this opinion, do feel free.
I don't think he's doing that at all. He merely observed a negative pattern that many startups tend to fall into by default, and warned people about that pattern. The tone of the post is clearly "it's easy to make this mistake, don't make it", not "if you make this mistake you're an idiot." The latter interpretation is perhaps the least charitable you could have picked.
I do think there is a kernel of truth in your comment. YC tests a lot of assumptions and tries a lot of things. Many of the tests work out, some don't. This means that at some point they've necessarily given founders bad advice that people then went on to execute on. I think that's something worth acknowledging explicitly (e.g. "hey, we thought this was right but it turned out to be wrong; sorry"). But there is a huge gap between that, and what you referred to as "crapping on alumni".
Even Sam says IN THIS ARTICLE that "Also, very small startups can grow by sheer force of will, even with a bad product." Looking at the TechCrunch reviews, I think probably half of these companies will turn out to be pretty bad products in hindsight that could never have gone anywhere.
"instead of relentlessly focusing on building a great product..."
But I think it's probably very difficult to tell a great/bad product from reading a paragraph on TechCrunch.