The Fine Line Between Fear and Courage | Hacker News Reader

The Fine Line Between Fear and Courage

bhorowitz.com

67 pointsjen_mcfadden8 comments

The first part of this post deserves its own discussion. Deciding who is going to lead the company is the most important conversation that founders can have in the first week (or even before starting the company). I made this mistake and my employees (and mental stability) paid dearly for the next five years.

In my case, we had an early discussion that led to an argument, and it just never resolved itself. As a result, employees never really knew who their boss was and the marketplace/customers never knew who actually led the company. No one ever had the "authority" to make the call since the founders were equals in every regard, and every decision took twice as long. Even our acquirers couldn't really figure out who did what.

I would love to see Ben (or someone here on HN) share a separate post just around this topic...

If you managed to get as far as an acquisition, then it can't have been all bad.

Devil's advocate: Every decision may have taken twice as long but perhaps they were better decisions as a result?

Very true... At times there was an advantage to having a counter point to every decision, so I admit that it wasn't all bad.

"Over the past 10 years, technological advances dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been."

Not quite, because technology has chipped away at least a little bit at the number of fork-in-the-road decisions that can't be undone. If a choice is easily undone it's not really a choice anymore. You can just try both options, in series or in parallel.

Trying multiple options in series or in parallel is often not the best business decision. What type of choices are easily undone by new technology?

The technological choices are the obvious ones. Should we build on this platform or that one? They're probably not the highest priority in the grand scheme, but their effects are also most systematically underestimated, I think.

As technologies add leverage the same number of people can do more. So you can get away with hiring less, and run less risk of needing to close down divisions. Or you can raise less money and run less risk of too-many-cooks syndrome in the boardroom.

I'm sure these considerations are more obvious in small internet startups that are struggling to get off the ground. My point was just that you don't need quite the same amount of courage as before because at least a few life-or-death decisions have been taken off the table.

When I started my first company I was more naive than courageous. I quickly learned that being an entrepreneur takes a huge toll on all aspects of your life. Elon Musk describes it best:

Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death

But even after all the challenges, I still can't help being excited to take on the next challenge.

I enjoy Ben's posts a lot but they do sometimes have a ring of feel-good entrepreneurial astrology about them.

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