If it isn't going to work, just shut it down

I think a lot more people persevere past the point of salvation than persevere against long odds and succeed. There's no clear cut answer to determining 100% of the time, in the moment, if failure is a foregone conclusion, but that doesn't mean you should stick it out until the bitter end. Since most startups fail anyway, if you're already near failure mode then the bias should be in needing an extremely compelling reason-- beyond blind perserverence-- to keep going. Otherwise just salvage anything that might be salvaged and try something else with the new benefit of experience.

"What would you do differently" is easily answered with "anything but the thing that just failed."

Guess: when you validation of the problem, validation that there is money to fix the problem, but don't yet have validation that your particular solution or business mode has product-market fit.

Though I've worked at a few startups, I don't have enough experience to know to know the above generally applies. But if there isn't a market for your product, no amount of effort is going to fix it. I don't mean existing market, sometimes good products make their own category ... but you need to have evidence that is true.

> How do you know now that you were wasting your time?

For me, this is very hard advice to give, and I usually equate it to running.

When you run, it often hurts after a while. There is a kind of hurt that you just need to push through, and then there is the kind of hurt that will cause bad or long term damage.

It’s sometime hard to know the difference. You can sometimes quit when you shouldn’t have, and you’ll probably cause an injury or two figuring out the other kind.

Over time you learn what “fake pain” and “real pain” are - in my experience - only after the fact and learning from the past.

This is bad advise so don’t follow it, but I’ve found quitting first, and then feeling horrible about yourself when you find out you shouldn’t have allows you to collect more data than pushing on something that will never work for X years.

“All the time” is quite a vague non-quantitive phrase though.

How many startups successfully pivot? How many fail? What is that as a percentage? Personally I think that’s a more useful indicator of risk when deciding.

This is good life advice also, the key is self-examination and having the open mindedness to see and act on errors.

> You might still fail if you pivot but you'll definitely fail if you stop.

I think this is a skewed way to look at it, because it doesn't take into account what happens once you failed.

Fail your startup after a year, get hired as an employee and grow your career for a few years, and you have immensely more chances to be in a good place to succeed than if you choose to push and spend years before failing your startup.

Failing is the rule for startups, by far not the exception. Persevering at some point becomes sunk time fallacy, not something to be proud of.

Someone once said "Startups don't die, they commit suicide".

I was working on a small bootstrapped product for some 3 years. I had great opportunity at the time, because I was still young and living with my parents and I didn't have to work for money at the time. I got some pushback after launch, but I was tired of the sacrifice and started freelancing and moved out to live on my own. I never formally declared that I quit, I just thought that I would do it in my off time. I had little imagination that this would practically meant that I'm quitting because I was not getting anything done with that approach. 2 years later, I decided to get back to it again. I started laying low, go back to living with my parents (this time I did earn money though), but I unlocked some 40h/week for my product experiments. After some 6 months of experimenting with the old idea and realizing of how horrible the code was, deciding to rewrite it from scratch, I came upon a related, but different idea that I have found actually to be useful myself and I saw just how superior it was to the previous idea and how it solved pretty much every problem with the old product. I also made many mistakes with the old product launch, that was just due to being too inexperienced (being too greedy with the price, not marketing to enough people - and of course, giving up way too quick).

I'm still working on the new product. Not sure if it will succeed in any way but I do not want to lose momentum. I'm learning tons. While working on the current idea, I have 2 new ideas for bigger products. I guess if it fails I will try the VC route with something new. BUT do I wish I could go back in time to the time when I stopped, I would be 2 years ahead and likely launching the new product now.

My story is of someone who did not succeed yet. If I persist and not die too soon (like literally die), my story will fall under "survivorship bias".

OP here. I think i mixed the message too much by putting pivots in the same category as founder transitions and down-rounds.

Pivots are fine. But when you're basically just starting over on a completely new business with less money and a demoralized team, your likelihood of success is significantly impaired. Successful pivots need to carry ~something~ over of value

That just amounts to never cutting your losses & throwing good money (or time) after bad.

The fact that it's a difficult decision with risks of being wrong either way is not a good reason to avoid making it. If you're going to choose perseverance it should be a reasoned choice, not the result of inaction due to uncertainty in the face of a difficult choice.

Before "move fast & break things" became the slightly misguided mantra for SV the message was often wisdom, much more tempered by decades of startup culture, was "fail fast and move on".

Most will fail. If the only thing you have left is vague hope and a willingness to work hard and very little else then it's best to put that optimism and work ethic into a course of action where the preponderance of evidence doesn't already point towards failure.

Of course it's a balance, but don't be afraid of making a decision just because it isn't an easy one to make.

Consider another point of view then: how many people struck it big on their second, third, fourth startup?

Off the top of my head Uber was Travis' third startup. Does that make him a quitter or a perseverer?

At my age I known plenty of tech entrepreneurs who've been at it for 10 years with no big hits. Statistically some of them will eventually make it. I doubt I'll be able to say sincerely they were the ones with more grit. But I'm sure they themselves will say it for me :)

Agree that this was not in line with selling books and other things, but that's more of an expansion and not a pivot.

He’s of the wrong tribe now it seems

He challenged the narrative and now he's a sworn enemy of the establishment.

It is not weird. He is the world's biggest grifter. Precisely, a great deal more of what he says is a lie than is true, and he has profited more from his grift than anybody except (maybe!) Putin.

Pedo Guy. Hyperloop. Full Self-driving. Electric truck-tractor. Cybertruck. Sub-orbital passenger service. Sub-orbital freight. One-day turnaround. Mars Colonization.

(To be clear: Starship, even 1000 of them, is totally inadequate to colonize Mars, and barely enough, maybe, to maintain an outpost. And it takes 9, not 6 months to get there. And one ship could take 17, at most, not 100 people.)

> like thousands or tens of thousands of the motor/generator devices. I can't imagine the cost.

? The number of motor/generator pairs is proportional to the charge/discharge rate of the system. I'm not saying that because I'm an insider or have any special knowledge, I'm saying that because nothing else makes sense. So the question is whether it's cheaper to maintain a bunch of cranes and miles of steel cable and pulleys or a water generator and pipes. And then things like how each responds to earthquakes and thunderstorms (water probably wins in the latter, but the former is a little more complicated).