Comment by partisan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by partisan | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for being so open and honest. A lot of people look up to you and I think it is a good thing for them to understand that one does not spontaneously become a patio11 and that the struggles continue on even after success (however that is measured).

I have some questions below, though I understand if you prefer not to address the topics therein.

> The components to this include an emulated AVR microcontroller, an emulated hardware device built out of three of those microcontrollers, a scratch-built C compiler, a scratch-built fully-functional debugger, and an in-browser UI to tie everything together.

I'd say you guys jumped into the deep end of the pool and your goals from a technology standpoint were ambitious, to put it politely. Do you think that you would have taken a different approach if you could do it over again? Did you have to invent these wheels or where there other options you could have leveraged to accomplish the same goal? Is the technology you are building part of your competitive advantage? Having seen in-browser consoles and programming environments, I just have to wonder what the advantage is of coming at the recruiting problem from a hard computing perspective. As a programmer, that is the way I would approach it as well, since that is where I would feel I am making the most impact, but that would simply be to make me feel useful and not to move the company along, necessarily.

Also, I detected a hint of discord in yours and tptacek's posts during and after your release. Would you say that the process has put a strain on relationships, even if temporarily?

Do you think that you would have taken a different approach if you could do it over again?

Oh goodness yes. If I had a do-over, I'd run a straight-up recruiting company with ~0 lines of code written for 2~3 months on the strength of our personal networks, figure out how that works, launch a single tech tree far closer in scope to e.g. Stripe CTF 3 than what we launched, fold candidates developed from that into the recruiting stream, then scale engineering and recruiting in parallel. Instead we went into hard-core dev mode for ~10 months to do something which derisked the business a lot less than being recruiters for a month would have.

Co-founder relationships are co-founder relationships. It's been a stressful year getting a totally new thing off the ground. I think thats a comes-with-the-territory sort of thing based on the reports of literally every founder I know; it is new territory to me. Maybe someday I'll write more about that, but for the moment, still have to figure out recruiting first.

Totally agreed with your post-mortem. Classic mistake of a founding team: write version 2 of microcorruption, instead of first de-risking the business side (the headhunting business).

Aside: post-mortem is such a funny word choice for our projects, isn't it?

I've heard of people using postpartum instead. Lessons learned is probably the most popular alternative though.

First off, this is perfect.

  Do you think that you would have taken a different approach if you could do it over again?
  Oh goodness yes.

To founders, if you don't answer the question this way, you're not pushing yourself/your team enough. If everything is going perfectly right, be scared or get another job.

@patio11 [Unsolicited advice from a fellow founder]

> All three of us were working as recruiters for it, but Thomas and Erin were also full-time on development for Jailbreak.

Have one person own recruiting, which I'm guessing is you. That is priority number 1, 2, and 3 for you no matter how little you know/like it. It sounds like you learned this really well (we fucked it up initially as well — the dangers of all-technical co-founders.)

For other founders:

As an early startup, you have two goals:

1) Acquire users.

2) Build something users need.

You should always be doing something towards one of those two things. If you have more than one person in the company, there should be one clear owner for each. Set metrics that are just out of your reach. As J. Cole said, "If you don't aim too high, then you aim too low."

Do not stop doing either of those two things until either your sleep schedule is on fire (for goal 1) or your servers are on fire (for goal 2.)

Do not hire, talk to press, design a new logo, talk to investors, join a softball league, speak at conferences, or bring on a social media manager until shit is on fire. That's what product-market fit feels like.

Unless you are building a lifestyle business, you do not have a successful company until your small team is on fire. Then fire yourself from positions (via hiring) to put out the fires.

> you do not have a successful company until your small team is on fire...

One of the things I loved - positively loved - about the Starfighter team, is that when the servers were crashing over the Christmas holidays, there were times when the team said (paraphrasing, from memory) "We've implemented some fixes & done what we've can, but now we're going home to enjoy Christmas with our families and children".

I love that. It's not worth impacting your kid's Christmas just to keep your servers slightly more efficient. I certainly wouldn't want recruiters placing me with companies that would throw me into death marches. I feel the Starfighter team have quality of life in their DNA, and I trust that the clients they work with are handpicked to also be great places to work. Flip that too much & I think Starfighters would lose their value proposition, may as well try another recruiter.

See my reply to @birken above. I don't have a problem with them specifically prioritizing Christmas vacation. It was more a comment on finding product-market fit.

And to your point, quality-of-life is super important in the long term. When you're small and don't have money (not sure about their funding situation), you are default dead until you hit that product-market fit.

Ooh, I love that last sentence! You're right, vacation is one thing, but being profitable and never having to worry about money is also important to quality-of-life.

> Unless you are building a lifestyle business, you do not have a successful company until your small team is on fire.

I was a "founding employee" of a very successful company and I don't think I would have ever classified anything as being "on fire". I also slept 8+ hours a night because I like sleeping and never worked on the weekends because I like enjoying weekends. The company did well because when everybody came to work they were ready to come up with great ideas and execute them quickly.

I don't think your comment is complete off-base, I've met a lot of people who "play startup" and spend time doing things that aren't actually helpful to their company but feel like they are (going to conferences, perpetually talking to investors, etc). These people probably aren't going to be successful. However, it also isn't true that the only way to succeed is to ignore everything else in your life and devote yourself fully to your startup.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't work 80-100 hours at your startup if you want to. If that is bringing you personal satisfaction and you are efficient at it than more power to you. But that lifestyle is not a requirement for startup success.

I (personally) think there is a significant difference between a founder of an early-stage startup and employees.

The best equivalent is parents of a newborn. Do you get to not feed your baby to preserve work/life balance? No, because its survival depends on you. You do whatever it takes. That doesn't always mean working 80+ hours per week. Sometimes it means a vacation to preserve sanity, but there is a certain bar (and a high one, at that) for being a good parent.

Once things stable out, you can start to diversify your life. But until then, there are so many things constantly going wrong or unknown.

That may be an unnecessary pressure I put on myself, but my bar for starting a company is "all in." It's just too hard, with too small of a likelihood of success, to waste time half/90%-assing.

That's great if that belief motivates you to work hard on your company. Whatever makes you happy. Your advice just isn't as broadly applicable as you think it is. Companies never really "stable out." In my experience the bigger and more successful the company got, the harder it was. More people to manage, more people depending on the company's success, endless recruiting, etc.

The goalposts are always going to move too. You are going to think "oh, once we just get to this milestone everything will be great". Then you'll reach that milestone and you won't even care because there will be something new you want to achieve. Over and over again.

Companies are good at sucking you in and taking over your whole life. That is why the advice that the company must take over your life is so wrong. You should try to be in a softball league and force yourself to take vacations, because you are going to be more efficient and happier that way.

I wouldn't be surprised if the two biggest causes of startup failure are burn out and/or stress-related founder break ups. In retrospect, I think the biggest challenge in the early years of what ended up being a very successful company was staying motivated and positive through the 2.5-3 years it took to get any sort of serious traction. It's really hard to work at something for so long and have very little tangible success to show for it. Things that distract you from the sad reality and help you push through are your friends, not your enemies.

Thanks for the response.

I'm with you. Sometimes, as techies, we get caught up in the "how we do it" to the detriment of "what we do".

Whenever one of my team members comes to me with a question, I always start with "what are we trying to do here?", in spite of knowing what they are working on. It helps me with the context switch from my own work, assures me that they understand the task, and it helps me to make sure we have a good reason for doing what we do. I always look for a non-technical answer first. Few (lucky?) people get to work on technology for the sake of technology.

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