Building a company is fucking hard | Hacker News Reader

Building a company is fucking hard

nvdk.co

255 pointsnavidkhn1170 comments

Not dissing the general message. Startups can be brutal, but still. Dude is 22 and claims having seen more hardship than others. Try dealing with raising kids, health issues, sick family members, dying friends, mid life (all of which will probably happen as you near the age 40) and a startup will look like a pleasant distraction from the actual hard stuff in life.

I,d say enjoy being 22, don’t take yourself to seriously and reflection will come with age.

I agree with everything you said, but it really feels like you're laying the groundwork for a smackdown by an 80 year old.

Everyone you love will die and you will be a stranger in your own country.

Not if I die first!

You could as well buy a lottery ticket!

By 80 you have already outlived a lot of your friends.

Luckily we all get a lifetime to make peace with this.

This is my favorite HN comment thread.

Yeah, but I still see some elderly people who were very well-adjusted throughout their lives (AFAIK), but still be generally sad due to loneliness.

I'm curious if elderly people with many, many kids tend to be happier due to much more frequent contact with loved ones.

Completely agree with you, and was going to comment the same.

Perhaps at 22 you don't have the full perspective of what life can be. I certainly didn't at that age (now I'm 41 and I guess I have a better perspective for sure).

I guess “struggle porn” is just a hip thing to write about. Books like “The hard thing about hard things” celebrates this. It’s startup canon by now.

Wow....hadn't heard the term "struggle porn" before, but I think it hits the nail on the head.

Probably because writing a blog post about how everything was really easy and straightforward and now you're earning millions with no meaningful competition would make people hate you and then try to copy your business model. Writing that everything was really hard discourages competitors.

It is. To each their own, but it sounds like when a bunch of Wall St interns brag to each other about how they worked until 3am, went home and showered, then were back at work by 8am the next day. It gives some people a sense of validation/importance that they are way more hardcore than the average person because they work so much more. It actually favors inefficiency in the sense that working smarter isn't as valuable as who could withstand grinding or "hustling" the longest.

> Perhaps at 22 you don't have the full perspective of what life can be.

It's hard to believe that one has the full perspective at any age.

I think this is highly dependent on the context you are in. An Italian friend of mine lived for a year in a tiny fisherman community isolated in an island in northern Brazil a decade ago. He told me that after a couple of months we got this full perspective of things as he knew 100% of people, their pains and joys, dreams and realities.

Looking at the other side of the spectrum, what are the chances of an immigrant to achieve the same level of perspective after living for a year in Manhattan?

I believe it is a more productive -- and joyful -- exercise to think about the role you want to have in the context you belong to.

This reminded me of a pretty neat but lighthearted video: How to Age Gracefully [1] (4m40s).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sycgL3Qg_Ak

I'd never seen that before. It's a nice video (and indeed apposite).

Technically true. But in reality, perspective alone is useless. What matters is (perspective * ability to make meaningful use of it). For most people, that function peaks somewhere no later than 60s (unless they have grandkids that actually listen to what they have to say).

perhaps? you can't even rent a car until you're 25. this isn't due to being overly cautious, this is actuarial science at work. you are not really an adult until you are 25 ... unless of course you've had an especially hard life. even then, before 25 you are quite more impulsive than after.

somewhere around midlife your perspectives will shift again. i imagine when you hit your later senior years (retirement age), yet again.

Perhaps? It goes without saying that until you hit retirement you don't have a full perspective of what life can be. Until say 10 years after life starts to degrade for you (age-related health), you will not have a full perspective.

22. lol.

Exactly. Stopped reading after the first sentence.

I wonder if the median age of HackerNews readers has shifted through the years? I started reading HN probably around my early 20s, if not sooner, and now I'm in my thirties with children. Life doesn't get easier or less complex as time goes on, that's for sure.

HN readership is definitely skewing mid 30s at this point.

do you have any data to back this up?

I am 37 and judging by the comments here, I feel like average user age is above around 40.

I’m 21 but don’t comment a lot as it’s a bit intimidating. As far as I perceive top commenters are older than me as they usually have a lot of experience in the topic they’re discussing. I bet many people my age feel the same

I could believe it. It was definitely a product of its time, riding a wave of people that simply don't exist in the same amounts anymore. Outside the bubble, a lot of society has moved on to other obsessions and talking points.

Hasn't HN grown quite a bit in recent years? I would assume that would pull the average age down.

Well, it depends. I started reading HN around 21, when I was doing my first startup, which quickly failed because of problems with my personality — lack of self-awareness, bad work ethic, but most importantly, unsolved emotional problems. I'd never say that I've worked all these issues out, but age experience and hard labour I've put into therapy certainly help with self-improvement. Not to mention that my CV is more impressive, which puts me into a completely different position in the labour market.

So, if you don't go to harder goals and projects, like having children, life can get easier. But it's always your conscious decision to move on to a harder difficulty level.

Anecdata re: readership age: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17636856

Eyeballing: average age seems to be mid 30's.

EDIT: 35.4, you can run in your console on that thread:

    function averageAge(){
        const ages = Array.prototype.slice.call(document.querySelectorAll('.commtext'))
                    .map(span => span.innerText)
                    .map(text => text.slice(0,2))
                    .map(firstTwo => Number(firstTwo))
                    .filter(n => !isNaN(n))
        return ages.reduce((x,y) => x + y, 0) / ages.length
    }

    averageAge()

Played a bit of code golf with your snippet, but can't figure out how to combine the .map(Number).filter(Number):

    let avgAge = [...document.querySelectorAll('.commtext')]
                  .map(span => parseInt(span.innerText))
                  .map(Number)
                  .filter(Number)
                  .reduce((i,d,c, ages) => ages.reduce((x, y) => x+y) / ages.length)

After having kids, you go to work to get some rest.

While you state it in a more rational way, many of the responses dismiss what OP has to say just because he is 22. As somebody who is 22 as well—everybody is facing a struggle here. The market does not care that we are 22, it is equally brutal to both of us.

Also, I agree that raising kids may be something that is more difficult that you additionally have to do (all the other things have no correlation with age), but some of the replies here come off to me like that one jacked dude in the gym giving the newbies stick for being weak. At their current musculature, they are doing the best they can. Difficulty levels are relative.

Health issues, dying friends, sick family, and mid life have no correlation with age?

Being 22 is harder if you pass on opportunities to get perspective...

22 year olds can also have health issues, dying friends, sick family. Not sure how "mid life" is an "issue", per se?

All I'm saying is, all things considered, building a business is hard regardless of what age you are.

Absolutely heartbreaking challenges can occur at any age. But all of those things get more probable as you, your friends, and family get older.

That means that more people will face more challenges at the same time as they age. And, more importantly, any individual facing real hardship while young is unfortunately still likely to face greater hardships as they get older. That is why the OP's advice to build perspective earlier in life is useful for everyone, and does not discount the reality of hardship for the article writer or other young people.

> Also, I agree that raising kids may be something that is more difficult that you additionally have to do (all the other things have no correlation with age), but some of the replies here come off to me like that one jacked dude in the gym giving the newbies stick for being weak. At their current musculature, they are doing the best they can. Difficulty levels are relative.

The author picked the fight. People are dismissing what he's saying because writing that makes him come across as self-aggrandising. As a result, people are making a judgement call that the guy probably doesn't have much to offer.

To continue with your gym analogy, it's like some weedy guy walking into a gym and telling all the jacked guys that they're exercising wrong and he can teach them better form. That may in fact be true - being able to teach form doesn't require you to be jacked, and vice versa. But more than likely this person is talking out their ass.

I'm 23 and when I read that sentence it totally turned me off the article, the author seemed like a tool, and I completely agree with all the 30-40 yr olds in this thread saying the same thing.

He did say professional hardship, it's not wildly unreasonable.

I think you're playing the averages here, assuming he's a typical 22 year one. Which is reasonable. Just be careful about assuming too much - he may have had periods of his life that were more difficult than you and I will ever experience, you just don't know.

Sometimes it comes all at once! A friend of mine was building a startup, having kids, dealing with a sick mother and being middle-aged all at the same time.

> and being middle-aged

The rest I could take, but middle-aged? Truly hell.

I totally agree. I was 35 when I worked for a start-up, by that time I didn't have kids, health issues, sick family members nor midlife crisis. Work side of life was tough but rewarding at the same time. Lots of pressure, but I could smile in the end of the day.

Now I am a managing partner in 3 companies and have all the issues above. Work is ok, manageable, but the personal issues are REALLY hard to cope with, specially the irreversible ones related to aging and health.

It the past, resilience was a key attitude to me. Nowadays I see acceptance as being more important.

> It the past, resilience was a key attitude to me. Nowadays I see acceptance as being more important.

I am starting to understand this, too. Very well said.

> Dude is 22

Ah, that explains the unnecessary and distracting showing off by swearing in the title.

Definitely agree

Guy lost me a couple sentences in, right about here: "I’ve only been up and around for about 4 years, a happy ignorant high school teenager before that. I have yet experienced more professional hardship in these four years than most people do in all of their lives."

I realize the guy is young and hope he is just using hyperbole and does not honestly believe what he is saying.

I'm willing to bet the guys that queue outside of places like Lowes and Home Depot hoping to just get some day labor to feed their families experience quite a bit of hardship. Probably same for the guys that sneak over the border to get jobs working on farms to send money back to their families, or the person that works for a company for 20 years and is laid off. The author willingly dropped out of college to start a business.

I never really understood professional stress until I got to the point where I realized my kids eating depended on me bringing home an income. Whenever I get stressed about work it helps to realize that the problem is probably solvable and that I have it no where near as bad as these guys doing back breaking physical labor to do the same thing I am trying to do, feed people they care about.

I wish the author nothing but success but he is being a tad dramatic.

He's from India. Statistically speaking, he might be right, although judging by the fact he dropped out of school he's probably in the upper echelons of society.

I would say being from India hurts his argument. He has started at least one, perhaps two successful businesses that took off in the first few months. The median income in India is $616. I think professionally he is doing ok.

or the billion-ish people around the world living with food insecurity, many in india. privilege tends to be blind, but yes, he seems to be just talking to his peers and not the whole world.

i applaud the guy for his entrepreneurship, especially from his roots in small-town india.

The author should have chosen a more relevant title to the post. At this age I had just started working and was playing counter strike for 10 hrs a day. Kudos to him for going through this so early in life. Having said that this is a click bate title.

It's amazing how entrepreneurship is so textbook nowdays. Quit job ->. start company->. be minimalist ->. Get funding ->. post tech blog ->. blog on founder struggle. ->. Blog on failure ->. Travel ->. Become a one-bagger. All of this in few months

Dude should read Candid.

Excellent comment; couldn't have written the same as well.

I don't think we should necessarily be gatekeeping here. What makes life challenging is subjective to the individual. There are young people out there subject themselves to a lot of stress because they want to be successful.

Working really hard can take a serious toll on you. Not quite in the same way that common midlife stressors can pull you in 20 different directions (kids, aging parents, etc). But in the moment, the stressors are very real to the individual.

The things the author mentions are very similar to the things a friend of mine said when he started his first business. He was 23 then and now 25. I showed him this blog post and he told me that was a very inexperienced age for him then and that was the phase when he used to have a lot of beliefs that are now changed.

He's from India too.

Some very good points, though the tone slightly reminds me of the the Mark Twain quote: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

It's certainly very difficult to start a business from scratch, and to grow it.

A trick is if you can spin off a job into a contract, into a larger contract, etc, with the same customer(s), ideally people who may move to larger companies, and carry the relationship with them.

> A trick is if you can spin off a job into a contract, into a larger contract, etc, with the same customer(s), ideally people who may move to larger companies, and carry the relationship with them.

Similar story for me. I had what I thought of as a temp job Client #1. The CTO of Client #1 liked the work I was doing & introduced me to the CEO of Client #2. I was like, "hey, am I allowed to work for 2 companies at once", and they were like "sure!". And that's how my brain flipped from temping to consulting.

As a sidenote: I looked it up because I was curious and apparently that quote is a misattribute: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/10/10/twain-father/

lol. famously, most Mark Twain quotes are misattributed.

> I have yet experienced more in these four years than most people do in all of their lives.

Lol, hearing that from a 22 year old.

I think anybody that would say this is very likely completely right about it, despite their age.

I'd make the opposite claim.

What does it even mean, to have experienced “more” than anyone else? How do you compare raising a child to starting a company to performing as a top level athlete to losing a parent to ...

Mathematically minded nerds tend to forget that not everything in life can be turned into set theory :)

As a mathematically minded something, I agree with your first sentence, mostly disagree with your last one. There are a lot of nerds who think they are good at math when they are not.

There's a lot of potential life experience out there, not all of it good. And a lot of people go through extraordinary hardships that they didn't choose. A great example of someone who's experienced both the difficulties of running a business and the difficulties of running for your life is Intel chairman Andy Grove:

" He was born András Gróf into a not religious Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, which was ruled by a military dictator whose government persecuted Jews. That Gróf was not a Jewish surname may have helped his family avoid some of the worst of the persecution. As a small child, Grove had scarlet fever, which not only nearly killed him but also rendered him partly deaf. With the advent of World War II and Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, Hungary abandoned its official neutrality and joined the Germans. In 1944, when the war went badly for Germany, the Nazis overthrew the Hungarian government, fearing that the Hungarians were about to make peace with the Soviets. The rounding up of Jews for death camps and slave labor soon began. Grove's father was forced to serve in the German army at the Eastern Front, where he endured appalling tortures for the amusement of German soldiers. Grove and his mother hid under false names with a Christian family; almost every day was a close call, as soldiers snatched Jews off the streets and out of their homes. Then the Soviets fought their way into Budapest, bringing with them more persecution (and the rape of Grove's mother).

Grove wanted to be a journalist, but he discovered that journalistic success depended on the whims of political correctness, and he decided to enter a field where subjectivity would not affect judgments about his work; he chose to study chemistry. In 1956 Hungarians tried to replace their Communist government with a democracy, and the Soviet Union in vaded their nation. There was fighting in Budapest's streets as young people tried to repel soldiers and tanks with small weapons and bottles filled with gasoline. Soviet troops began snatching young men and imprisoning, torturing, or killing them. Grove and his best friend, Janos Lanyi, fled to Austria, dodging Soviet troops, crawling in mud, afraid all the way. He had lived 20 years under murderous oppression, surviving by always remaining alert to the possibility that even a simple attempt to purchase a loaf of bread could cause him to disappear along with many other young Hungarians."

-- https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/biography/F-L/Grove-And...

I've never heard this story, thank you for sharing. As hard as I (and many others in the West may try), I wonder if it's possible to bring as much determination to my field as someone from such harsh circumstance can. What an interesting person.

That would only be true if starting a business was the only thing that mattered in life. However, we know that's not true.

It is difficult to take someone seriously when they introduce themselves by saying something like that. Experiencing life is not a competition, nor is it a valid bragging point. I guess it is good to know that there are some painfully obvious lessons that are not learned by building a company.

Indeed, whenever I hear something along those lines, its obvious that I talk to young immature person, who experienced quite a bit in a very narrow part of life, and not much more. Arrogance never helped anybody, did it.

Truly experienced people who properly seen-it-all get a proper dose of humility about themselves, the world and the others. You can really feel it from them. Unlike this kiddo.

I can relate to him. I used to think that adulthood was a permanent state, that I would feel the same age at 30 as I did at 20. That is not the case, I feel exactly the age that I am and I learned just as much in my last ten years as I did in the ten years prior.

It's difficult to take someone seriously when they emphasize everything with the word fuck.

How else will we know how cool and hip they are?

People with the mindset of "I'm in my 20s, I know all about the struggles of life" are usually primed for a big kick in the pants by life. I'm saying this as someone in their mid-20s. When I was 22, I used to think I knew what adulthood was like after having to work a 9-5 job and pay rent and buy groceries. Hah, was I wrong. There's such a level of naivete based on using a 2-3 year sample size of living independently to project what the next 40+ years (who actually knows how long) of life will be like. Life always finds a way to throw something new at you, and as people age the accumulation of life experience also expands. There really is no replacement for experience, and it's impossible to say "I know what everything will be like ahead of me" without actually having lived it.

A lot of old people have been comfortable their entire adult lives.

Then it follows that even more young people than that have been comfortable their whole lives.

I'm going to take a wild guess and say that you are young.

Just on of the points would be how different the world looked like 60 years ago.

Have you asked them? You might be surprised.

Everyone's got problems.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'comfortable'. But let's assume you mean 'figured out life'. I used to think that people knew what they were doing as they were getting older.

I'm still 'young', my wife and I are late 20s, early 30s. And I have given up the idea on 'figuring it out'.

This. Right here. Currently in my late 20's. I have nothing figured out, and I stopped trying to figure things out a while ago.

If you're inclined to be generous, that could be read as an implicit "experienced more [small business related events] in these four years..."

In fact, the post seems to have been edited to this effect by now.

That doesn't make the statement not nonsense, just nonsense for different reasons.

That put a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the article.

This is exactly the resulting effect of VCs + tech media's influence on young and impressionable tech entrepreneurs.

In fairness, I feel like I had more formative experiences between 16-20 than I have since (35). Young adulthood tends to be eventful and formative in a way people's 30s usually aren't. Throw in entrepreneurship... It's not that far fetched.

Can’t agree more. I experience and changed a lot when I was in my early 20s. Now life moves slowly.

I can't make assumptions as to whether you or the gp have kids, but I didn't have my first until 37 and the second last year at 41. For me personally, having kids was the single most trans formative experience of my life with regards to how I have to examine my life and the world around me. Nothing before that came anywhere close, perhaps if I had lost a parent/sibling when I was younger or had enlisted after 9/11 I could say something else was in the same league, but as it stands, kids in my late 30s is it for me :)

No kids, but not planning to have any. I think I’ll lead a better life if I have time and money on my hands.

Had kids yet? :-)

yep, one and a half ;)

Look... I you can't take this stuff entirely literally. Life experience isn't quantifiable. We're talking about impressions.

2 months of summer when I was 17 was packed. Romances. Feuds. New ideas, disillusionment, entirely new ways of thinking.

Even if so, that's not what the OP claimed. The OP claimed that his 18-22 was more eventful than most peoples 22-35 AND ALSO 16-20 combined

..artistic licence. People speak figuratively.

It would be funny if it weren't so sad.

Somebody needs to give this guy a fridge magnet about humility to add to his collection

Indeed :-) I just wrote up some reflections of hitting 21 years in my career, feel free to take a read -> https://mcconnellsoftware.github.io/success-criteria-21-year...

It calls to mind Bo Burnhan, poet laureate of this YouTube generation:

"We all deserve love,

it's the very best part of being alive

And I would know

I just turned 25"

https://genius.com/Bo-burnham-lower-your-expectations-if-you...

Moreover:

"The rational part of a teen’s brain isn’t fully developed and won’t be until age 25 or so"

https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con...

There's an old adage that successful people surround themselves with success. It's all about cohort - if you don't have other friends who are pushing themselves the way you are, it will be very, very, hard. It doesn't matter if you're in tech and your friend is in gardening, what matters is the shared struggle, and dreams. It helps knowing you're in a boat others have been in before.

Spouses/partners can understand and support - but (most) haven't been through it, and there's just a different conversation that can be had with others who have. That's not a negative, it's a reminder that it really does take all types.

100% agree.

I don't have any friends that pushed themselves to start an IT company and being successful. I only know people who claimed to do the best but failed miserably within the first year of their start-up.

I made also failures in my startup as well, but we closed because we were approaching the zero budget and without having real customers.

Partners who are not in IT cannot fully understand the struggle of running an IT company.

It's interesting to me that you categorize your failures differently than the "people you know".

This is what I have been going through for a long time. Everyone around me goes to their 9-5, so I barely even talk about my work anymore with them (even though I love it). You get used to it. I have tried finding people that are doing the same thing as me but with no luck.

Well, you found one just now.

If you have a little bit of freedom (money and job-wise) and your country (passport) allows you to travel - try to join a digital nomad trip. NOT one of those "life coach, ebook selling things".

You'll be part of a group of like-minded people from around the world. I joined Hacker Paradise some years ago and it not only gave me valuable directions but tons of people that would understand what a Trello is and you can share struggles and stories.

This is why it's important to grow up in the right zip code, do well in school, score high enough on standardized tests, get into the best universities. If you want to maximize your chances of getting to the top, the best way to do that is to know the right people.

That’s one approach of many, and ultimately depends on the individual.

That's why I wrote "maximizing chances". Life offers no guarantees, all we can do is try to optimize our choices so the probability of success (however one defines it) is maximized. The data I've seen suggest that knowing the right (well heeled, hard working, smart, etc) people plays a huge role in building a business.

Great advice! That's like saying that it's super easy to become rich. It just takes 2 easy steps: Step 1. Be born into a rich family. Step 2: Get inheritance cash.

Don't be so morbid. If you have a rich family, you can get plenty of capital without anyone dying.

They're not saying it's easy. They're saying some people have a huge head start in the race.

Pick your parents well.

There are many, many people who do these things and fail or become mediocre at best. In fact I'd say the ultra rule following path you laid out is contra to what makes a great entrepreneur in most cases.

That being said, having rich parents is the #1 way to raise capital. VCs fund people they know socially first.

I have the opposite experience. And still managed to surround myself with like-minded people. What did I do? I did what the op wrote:

> I find goals that excite me, and I dedicate every molecule in my body towards achieving this goal.

I did this for many things. And I finally connected the dots.

Why do we focus on zip code, schools and the like? The help, but they're way less valuable than human relationships. Entrepreneurs put way too little value on non-business friendships, but the reality is that they're what sustain you. Sometimes I really just need to discuss things with my best friend and get her perspective - she has nothing to do with tech, doesn't live on my continent, and at the same time, has so many of the similar problems. That's the real magic.

Your spouse may not be able to understand everything but if they don't support you, your life is going to be hell. Sadly, it's rare to see a founders spouse happily take the roller coaster ride with them for the long haul.

>here's an old adage that successful people surround themselves with success. It's all about cohort - if you don't have other friends who are pushing themselves the way you are, it will be very, very, hard.

Or, you know, riches come to riches, which amount to the same thing.

People born in slums don't have as many changes to "surround themselves with success". For one, they wouldn't be welcome by most successful people.

Two important points in that essay:

You will need friends

You will need mentors

This is 100% true, so I have a question. How do you find those when you're already spending all of your time on your startup and new to town without a support network in place?

Meetups are a good place to start imo. Signal vs. noise is sometimes bad, but good groups of people who are building cool things exist almost everywhere.

A co-working space helps in my experience. Although it's still really hard (at least for me, as an introvert) to build such network. It's scary, but it's the only way.

Some of the best advice I’ve ever received was to only enact one big change at a time.

Moving to a new city and leaving your support networks behind is a big change.

Quitting your job and starting a company is a big change.

Doing them together is perhaps not the wisest course of action.

Facebook/Twitter.

Its definitely hard to make friends as an adult, so why not reach back into the past and pull an old friend out of the hat?

I moved to NYC at 27 with no friends, no family, only a job offer. It took me 6 months to get settled and in an apartment that I felt comfortable with my wife moving up to. But in that 6 months, I had co-workers that turned into friends, strangers from the neighborhood that turned into friends, and old friends that I reconnected with now that I was 2000 miles away from running into them randomly at a party, funeral, or starbucks.

So if you have a job, start hanging out with those people after work. You can easily find friends and mentors in that group.

I moved to a new city in Jan where I know one person, am starting a new company, and have a young family (e.g. limited time). In the last month I've:

1. Spoken to a group of CEOs about how to solve their product management issues

2. Organized a group of 6 product managers for drinks (I had met two of them once)

3. Demonstrated credibility and a willingness to help enough that I've gotten a bunch of inbound intros to help people with their Product problems

Here's what I did:

1. Connected with people at the local startup hub. There's only one here as it's a small city (< 500k people). I've been working in tech since 2001 and have cultivated a fairly broad network. I was thus able to get an intro to the CEO of the hub here which helped immensely.

2. Share my knowledge. I've been doing Product Management for 16+ years. That's a skill that's needed here. So doing talks through the hub has enabled me to meet people and establish credibility. I put the word out that I'll meet with anybody in the local community to see if I can help with their product issues, and now people are sending me intros to others.

3. Organize people. It takes so little to organize a small group of like-minded folks. Last night I got 6 other Product Managers together here at a bar to talk shop. It was a matter of putting the word out amongst people I'd met via steps 1 and 2 with a time, date, and location.

If you lather, rinse, and repeat steps 2 and 3 you'll establish a good community because you're helping others level up.

Think about this time as an investment in your long term success. Work doesn't always look like writing code or talking to customers - having a peer group and mentors you can learn from will help with strategy, tactics, accountability, and - most importantly - your mental health.

This is very solid, actionable advice that I can follow. Great point about "work doesn't always look like work." Thank you!

These aren't really true in my experience.

I never had someone I'd consider a 'mentor'. And I've had friends but I don't spend a lot of time with them and they don't relate to my business at all.

At the same time, I managed to build a business earning mid-6-digits per month. Not spending time futzing about with other people allowed me to focus on the actual craft and make the product really good. Not having "friends" to distort my thinking and pull every discussion towards common thought patterns and easy-to-understand platitudes allowed me to take my business in new directions that I understood but that others were unable to see or accept.

If you really want to do something different, and seriously intense, very very few people will understand or have what it takes to participate. Put simply, 1-in-1000 people only appear once per thousand people. If you're trying to do a 1-in-1000 challenge, it's almost guaranteed that everyone around you is not up to it. (Of course it's highly likely you aren't up to it either, but you can't walk away from yourself. On the chance that you are up to it, you don't want to screw that up by averaging your results out with people who are far less capable and driven than you).

Extroverts need people to talk to, they have no choice in the matter and some people might need help with knowing where to start with basic stuff like registering a company etc. And some people need some emotional support, it does not need to be logical support just: "you worked hard have a hug" type support.

But I totally agree with the don't talk with people about difficult work stuff you are trying to do to, like it takes years and rare talent to understand something in such a way that you can do "something different, and seriously intense" and make money off it, so there might be nobody in the world that you can have a proper discussion with about your thing.

But on a personal level time spent making friends can be truly rewarding. I mean we humans are herd animals, there is no escaping it. I personally get along truly well with very few people, but I can get along with some people for a short amount of time, so visiting different groups of people from time to time gives me a lot of joy, even if I would never truly get along with those people for more than a few hours each week/month.

I agree that human connections are important and valuable. I just find that they can't have anything to do with work, and they certainly don't help you with your work (which is what the post above said).

The people I interact with socially/romantically can't understand my work at all and are totally separate from it.

> This is 100% true, so I have a question. How do you find those when you're already spending all of your time on your startup and new to town without a support network in place?

One option is to join a network like: https://nugget.one

(Disclosure: I'm founder of Nugget)

If I set out to tell you the story of my life, there isn’t much – and yet, a whole lot! I’ve only been up and around for about 4 years, a happy ignorant high school teenager before that. I have yet experienced more in these four years than most people do in all of their lives.

Ah, the folly of youth. Of course you are more special than everyone else. Of course you are smarter than everyone else. Of course you have experienced more than everyone else.

I certainly was as well at 22.

”When I was seventeen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-five, I was astonished at how much he had learned in eight years.”

> I have yet experienced more in these four years than most people do in all of their lives.

oh please. how embarrassing

I've already ranted against blog posts titled 'X is Hard'. Yet another hits the top post on HN. Yes, most things are hard, especially when you can describe it in detail as an 'expert'. To a layman, anything can be hard.

These always come off as ego pieces to me justifying why they're worth money or why they should be hired. How about you just let your work represent you?

I agree the title is a poor one, but I think there is some useful advice in the article, e.g. taking it easy when the week is hard.

"Most start ups will die because of mistakes made from the one bucket of common errors – about 90% of them. These include bad financial management, hiring errors, product errors, marketing errors, etc. I believe they can be easily avoided, but can also be easily forgotten about when you’re busy hustling."

As far as I remember the reason most companies were dying (from a YC survey, I believe?) was product-market fit. This is not something that can be "easily avoided", and certainly not by simply having a mentor.

I think Mark Cuban on Shark Tank used to tell founders this. Don't start a company because you have a world-altering idea. Start a company because you love starting companies.

The handful of successful entrepreneurs I know fit in this mold: they are addicted to starting companies. Once it's showing stable growth and beginning to mature these people get restless and starting wondering what they can start next.

What would he have you do if you have a world-altering idea? A company is still the best vehicle for seeing it actually change the world.

Find someone who has experience starting a company and try to start a company together.

Open sourcing it.

...you're not super familiar with Mark Cuban, are ya?

Recognize that you most probably don't.

Well, that's just no fun at all.

That's not to say an idea isn't worth pursuing and building a company around. But if you set out to change the world, you're not going to. The people who have built world changing things didn't assume their work would lead there (exceptions will prove the rule).

If you have a world-altering idea, and you want to alter the world, but you don't actually like to do the work (which is what Cuban was warning about), then don't build a company -- tell people your idea (try to sell it if you want, but if you don't like doing the work of selling, just give it away) and let someone who wants to the work do the work.

This is how academics and think-tanks and pundits operate.

Of course, what you'll find is that ideas are a dime a dozen and yours likely aren't novel. Execution is the best vehicle does changing the world, and it doesn't matter whose ideas you execute on; what matters is that you like executing.

The quote was that you should only start a company if you "love starting companies." It's not about being willing to do the work or not. I can do work I don't love. In fact, that's most of the work I do.

And what to do when you want to do the work, and not the surrounding nonsense? I.e. you want to develop your world-altering idea, instead of dealing with VCs, markets, customers, HR, hiring, firing, and all the countless other things a founder ends up doing instead of working on the actual product?

I think that's just a smart aphorism. What if I love starting companies, but nothing is working out? It has to be a mix of both?

I mean, if you're experienced, plan ahead (mentally and economically), and have a good idea and product market fit, it doesn't have to be torture, or even that hard. It's like trying to prove a really hard theorem. For Goedel proving the incompleteness theorem was probably incredibly hard, but he did achieve it in the end (thanks to previous experience and training and because he tackled a good problem with respect to his skills), but for most mathematicians that'd be impossible or torture. I know what I'm saying sounds mean or cruel, but I mean it's the truth.

Business is hard when you get emotionally invested. Otherwise it’s just work. As I’ve gotten older I feel like the latter perspective has helped me handle the challenges better and make better decisions.

The more I look at my business as “just work” and not some egotistical search for meaning the better I am at it.

I applaud the kid for taking the jump into entrepreneurship at a young age. The one thing I think young entrepreneurs like him make is never working in industry/corporate/working for multiple startups before they start their own. You need to walk before you run. Its like apprenticeship, you go to a company/companies and learn how processes work, learn what efficiency means, learn how decisions get made, learn different ways of management or how different CEO's run a company, etc. I wish the OP best of luck, dont get to down in the dumps, you are only 22 and have already had an acquisition, and employed 15 people!

Yes it is. Finding a community has helped me greatly. Two years ago it was literally just me.

Now I have a therapist, a coach, a private freelancer community, three mastermind groups, an in-person entrepreneur meetup, three Slack groups, and a mailing list I write to and get feedback from.

The difference between now and two years ago is massive.

Something else that helps is not having a runway. After taking a year off and spending all of my money without much to show for it, I'm all in on the strategy of spending 50% of my time on freelance and 50% on building a business. Infinite runway and way less stress. YMMV.

I don’t find the problem of creating a company to be an interesting benchmark of discussion.

Why aren’t we talking about creating ethical companies and how to make it easier for companies to not seek to be corrupt, or set up barriers to corruption that are more verifiably not manipulable by those already with wealth or power?

I can’t see how any other angle of discussion about creating companies can be worth anyone’s time until that is better sorted.

> I can’t see how any other angle of discussion about creating companies can be worth anyone’s time until that is better sorted.

People differ regarding their personal ethics, ambitions, interests, and abilities.

If you make a compelling argument that your concerns are objectively the highest priority for discussion, even then only a fraction of the community will care to engage on the topic.

I think that standard sort of reasoning is inadequate given the degree of corruption that is deeply evident in corporate behavior and the impact it has on basic lives.

For your explanation to be adequate, there would have to be such extreme indiosyncratic variation in the most common of human ethical standards relating to murder, sexual assault, gross scale bribery, child exploitation and many other issues that, from a cultural anthropology point of view, seem to yield a very highly correlated set of ethical norms across almost all of the developed world.

It just seems implausible compared with alternative explanations, like intentional large scale paychological manipulation.

I can remember feeling similarly at his age and expressing myself similarly. I think others here shouldn’t fault him for behaving in a manner commensurate with his age and experience level. This guy will mature over time. He will some day be 40 and if he keeps learning like this he might be pretty successful. You could use this opportunity to get to know him.

Building is hard in general. I don't like if people say I need to hustle - I like to build in peace in my mind.

I like the fact that quotes keep you going for long period of time. I am exactly the same, different quotes have kept me going at different point of my life. This is such a simple trick that many would be quick to dismiss it or to forget about it.

One reason to subscribre to /r/getmotivated I guess :)

To complicate matters, you really have to decide ahead of time whether the licensing route a la Stephen Key isn't a better or more efficient option if what you are looking to do is just get a product out there and help people. Not a company, yet potentially more impact.

This article would have been way more interesting if you filled it with actual business lessons and examples. Instead, it's filled with vague self help messages...

Yes, yes it is.

Source: started a company and learned many things the hard way.

If running a company as a young white male from the west is hard then i dont know what is easy. Smh

I would pay to see a video of this person reading this again when he's 44.

Building a company is not hard. (Look around, we are surrounded by businesses).

Building financially and ethically sustainable business that employs people that are truly happy to work there IS hard.

Ethics is a really hard continuum to manage when financial factors are at play.

Building Ethically sustainable business model requires A LOT MORE effort and the positive results usually dont come overnight and tend to have long term outlook with focus on individuals/society as a whole. In todays world of "instant gratification" this is not a desired approach to running business.

Most businesses "don't even go there" - hence we are surrounded by the world we live in.

I don't understand why you are downvoted, because you are right.

Conducting a successful career is also very hard. Let alone a successful marriage! Or getting fit, loosing weight.

You want to build a company? Just do it. It's not harder than other things in life.

Edit: some words.

Building a successful startup is infinitely harder than having a successful career as an employee.

Because building a successful company = building many successful careers. The point that many companies still do not get!!!

You absolutely have to invest in your people in a best possible way if you are interested at all in building a GREAT company.

Can we alter the title somehow? I know for a fact that kids age 13 and 15 are reading HN daily...

Same for me. The language adds approximately nothing to the discussion.

I would argue that complaining about the language adds nothing to the discussion. Whether it's in the title or in the comments, you can't reasonably expect to censor bad language across the entire site, let alone the entire Internet. Far more offensive content gets posted here than a single swear word in the title of an article.

Welcome to the internet?

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