Impatience Kills Startups | Hacker News Reader

Impatience Kills Startups

chrisyeh.blogspot.com

69 pointschrisyeh30 comments

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Good post but i think a lot of this i caused by HN.

"Get out there and sell something now!"

"Look what wicked awesome thing I made in a weekend (weekend wink wink nudge nudge)!"

"Make sure you know when to pivot/give up!"

"With adwords yo can validate a market/channel/idea in just a couple days!"

Ha, you're very observant.

I love HN; it's one of my main sources of information. But there is an incredible sense of impatience created by all these stories of rapid success.

Overnight success is the exception, not the rule.

It's also caused by more traditional media outlets too.

"Top X entrepreneurs under 20"

"Website X was making $50k/mo in 6 months"

"I just tinkered on the iPhone a bit and now I'm making $2k a day on this little app"

I love the NY Times, but they're chock full of this crap. I guess nobody wants to read a story about "I worked 2 years for nothing, now I'm making slightly more than nothing. Maybe in another 5 years I'll be making enough to equal a decent entry level programming job at MegaCorp."

I find the impatience of many entrepreneurs to be disturbing and confusing. Many seem to expect to build something and cash out within a few years. But creating something so quickly worthy of sale is extremely hard work. How could you work so hard on something unless you loved it? If you loved it so much, why would you want to sell it?

I think there is currently a unique opportunities for entrepreneurs to create businesses that utilize their most prized passions, experiences, and relationships; and that keep them busy and fed for their entire lives.

Life is long. What's wrong with something great taking 10 years to build? Or 20. Look at long it has taken Apple to hit their stride! But, the only way to achieve such endurance is to follow what you love.

At the same time, life is short. Why waste one moment doing something you don't love?

> At the same time, life is short. Why waste one moment doing something you don't love?

Bills/debt (student loan payments, in my case). Fear.

Neither is a good reason. But they are both excuses many of us use.

That's nice, but at the same time, while an investor can wait 20 years for a startup they've invested in to succeed, is it reasonable to expect a human being to invest 20 years into a startup that doesn't look like it's succeeding?

The trick lies in being able to tell when something will never work. Sometimes the light at the end of a tunnel is an oncoming train. And no amount of patience will help a buggy-whip company when Henry Ford comes knocking.

"Startup" itself is an impatient word compared to "business". I prefer the term's inherent ambition over "small business", but I think there's an implied assumption that "startups" either win big or flame out, so you have to get traction in your market quickly.

Again one of these posts where the author doesn't have/write about own experience to back up his claims. (Example: "Most successful startups had a long gestation period" - proof? citation? something?) He doesn't even write his full name in his profile. But on the other hand his About-page says he's a Marketer. So the point of this article might not necessarily be the contents.

I should probably put my CrunchBase profile as a link on my blog. As you can tell, I haven't redesigned it since 2001.

http://www.crunchbase.com/person/chris-yeh

I have personal experience with the PBworks story as both their first investor and their VP Marketing!

Ah yes. :) Yes, put the CrunchBase Profile up! Thanks for clarifying.

Chris, would you mind sharing the name of the friend's blogging network?

I'll check with him. He likes to keep a low profile. Otherwise I'm sure he could get a front page post by writing, "How I Built A $1 Million/Year Blog Network With $0 Funding."

Thanks. I'd love to hear more about this.

I wouldn't complain if this was reposted once every six months.

Thanks for the reminder :)

The point is well-illustrated, but not at all new. Jim Collins's book Good to Great dedicates an entire chapter to what he calls the flywheel effect. Consistent effort applied over a long period of time with a consistent vision can generate massive results. But, I doubt the concept was new with him, either.

By the way, if you haven't read Good to Great, I highly recommend it. Although based on large, slow-moving businesses, the general points Collins and his team extract are easily applicable to just about any significant project.

Long, long ago, when I was a Stanford undergrad, Jim Collins spoke in one of my classes. At the time, no one had ever heard of him. But he had a huge impact on me. As soon as I got back to my dorm room, I printed up a big sign reading "BHAG" and taped it above my desk!

We live in a different world now, a world that moves VERY fast. In a world like this, IMpatience is a virtue. It's the only way your gonna keep up!

This may be a terrible illustration of my point but let's have a look:

Entrepreneurs time to a $1bn net worth.

Steve Jobs - 20 years?

Mark Zuckerberg - 3 years.

Andrew Mason - 1 year! (maybe 1 and a half)

Apple was undoubtedly a huge success long before then. Every school in the country had Apple IIes in the 1980s.

I think you need to accounting for inflation and the growth of the electronics market in general.

Yes, it is a bit of a vague example. But i think it still shows my point.

Apple was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak on April 1, 1976. Apple went public in December of 1980, roughly 3.5 years later, in the most successful IPO since the Ford Motor Company.

Is this really due to impatience though? You've picked the cream of the crop to make your point, but arguably I'd say these guys were visionaries that stuck to their guns (skated to where the puck was going) more than they were impatient. If anything, they were very patient to let the world catch up to their ideas.

I would agree that with Zuckerberg, that is probably the case. Andrew Mason however, had only been doing ThePoint for a year before he decided to pivot to groupon.

I am pretty sure it took Steve Jobs a lot less than 20 years to become a billionaire (pre-NeXT era).

That said, impatience also prevents feature creep.

patience or impatience? Seems to me that being patient would lead to less change, less creep.

Impatience to launch leads to less feature creep.

Seems like he's talking more about patience to stick with your business through "the dip" even if it's not an overnight success rather than patience to first launch. Launch away and iterate, but be patient if it's not an overnight success when you first launch it. It's a good message. Along these lines, I always like to remember that most overnight success stories were 3+ years in the making before the "overnight" success.

Never forget the old adage: Overnight success takes years.

impatience kills just about everything...

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