It’s very common for graduates of our local MBA school who often form teams of 3-6 co-founders who want to split the equity among themselves, take C-level titles, and then hope they can find some technical people to get the work done. I try to have some honest discussions with those who will listen to advice, but many don’t want to hear anything that doesn’t make their journey sound easy
In fact, after I left, I came to the realization that the leadership team had first licensed the initial product, then basically contracted out all the changes they could do to patent it separately, essentially doing none of the actual developmental work themselves.
Unsurprisingly, it was a shitshow.
Before my startup, I read a lot about startup. I knew that it would be hard. But knowing is so different from experiencing.
On hindsight, all the stories have successful ending, or the author of the book are successful. Among all the hardship described in the book, the overall tone is optimism.
We should read more about failure, than success.
Now I am on my second startup journey, fulling understand what is awaiting me.
I'd be genuinely curious if your response to the same impending hardship makes a difference in the outcome.
Like, does KNOWING about suffering make it easier to go through it?
Also, being able to anticipate the hardship in concrete terms also allows you to get in front of it and mitigate the adverse effects. You make fewer mistakes, so less of the hardship is self-inflicted.
Entrepreneurship is very difficult even in the best of circumstances, but it is also a skill and experience makes the job significantly easier.
It took 5 years to ski, especially the first 3 years were a painful process.
(on avg. 1 week per year)
Not sure how much this resembles entrepreneurship.
Some setbacks may hurt my confidence in my first startup journey. Now I would just drink a cup of coffee and keep working.
Many are too young to realize the financial and relation hardships that can result from chasing a dream and failing to deliver a fraction of hoped for results.
It doesn’t help to have stories like the Airbnb founders with binders of maxed out credit cards.
I'm running a small startup (5 months old tomorrow) and everything is "fine" - I have funding (part of it signed, other parts seems very likely to be signed in the immediate future), a team, development is going well - but there are constant obstacles and setbacks and it's a lot harder to keep my cool/spirits than as an employee.
Rationally I know whatever happens I'll be ok (at worst I'll have to get a well paying job as a developer somewhere else) but emotionally it's different, especially when you have employees depending on a salary you're paying.
One thing I found helps a lot is to talk to other entrepreneurs who have been where you are now & I'm very fortunate to have several people like that in my professional network.
There are just not enough such writings to balance out the (mega) success stories which are obvious result of survivorship bias.
I mean, the Olympics are on, and I love it when they interview a gold medalist or their family and they say "this makes all the sacrifice worth it." I always then think of the literally multiple thousands of non-gold medalists who tried just as hard and sacrificed just as much and think "well, that must suck."
Same thing goes for Hollywood actors, you only hear about the stars who were barely making a living before their big break, not the other thousands who were barely making a living and never got a big break so they ended up doing porn on drugs.
As a recent case in point, it was a fluke that Anna Kiesenhofer won for women's cycling. If she hadn't, few of us would likely have heard about her, which would have been a shame because her background is quite interesting. I imagine there are many other competitors like her. (Well, maybe not exactly like her.)
It's not that the success stories have any convincing ideas for any aspiring founders anyway.