"It's not their money anymore. Don't you dare give up."
He didn't, he persevered, and the company had a fine outcome years later. I would not blindly follow OP's advice.
If your formula is sufficiently wrong, which is the rule not the exception, you can’t make up for it with perseverance.
There’s a selection bias in these stories you hear. Stories about people who gave it their all and failed aren’t popular.
These moments make you more powerful than ever to be able to articulate why those precious (auto corrected but worked) times were not the myths you heard.
"What would you do differently" is easily answered with "anything but the thing that just failed."
One would hope so, that's the definition of long odds!
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.
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.
Joint pain 20 miles into a 26 mile race? Keep going. Joint pain 10 miles into a 15 mile training run? Quit. Feeling like you’re blowing out your ACL during a race that isn’t at the olympics? Quit. Muscle pain during any type of run? Keep going, that’s growth.
Depending on the startup or project you’re evaluating, there are models you can run to decide if what you’re doing is ever going to be worth the pain. SaaS for example has a growth ceiling you can calculate based on a few key metrics. Would be a shame to keep pushing on something that even theoretically doesn’t have the potential to achieve the goal you’re after.
I guess the moral of the story is really be sure that you are holding a losing hand, and that you can't play go fish instead of poker.
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.
You can make up for it by examining your formula and experimenting with changes to it though, even when something is hugely wrong. Persevering with the same thing when it doesn't work is stupid; understanding that and trying to fix it is not. It's what startups call pivoting.
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.
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".
It's not a simple decision, at least based on my personal experience. If you have a good team, a good market, and economics that let you exist in the market until you get the product right, it's worth hanging in there for a really long time. The reason there's "selection bias" on persevering is that it's how a lot of companies actually succeeded.
It's not just tech, either. There's a reason why people like Eddie Cantor said "It takes 20 years to make an overnight success."
Those who persevere and fail may tell how not quitting early enough continued the agony, but also can tell how just a bit more help could have led them to success, but odds were just all stacked against them.
Those who saw a failure coming and quit are likely not to tell much about it, there's no glory at it.
This all produces a kind of evolutionary / social pressure to persist and maybe win even when the chances are slim. The winner takes all. The losers persist at their (and, in a sense, everyone's) expense of "malinvestment", but they, and the price they pay, is handwaved away and forgotten. Evolution is about advancement of a species, not of a particular organism; progress is about advancement of an industry, not a particular company.
I'm with the "wind it down properly if it's not working" crowd though. One reason is that you have to fire people, and it's nicer to still be able to give them some severance pay.
It's often investors who push the "never give up" thinking because those 11 years just come out of their LP's bank accounts, not out of bedtime stories with their kids.
Most startups stay in it way longer than they should.
I'm happy that things worked out in your example, but they generally don't. Mostly because founders reason with their feelings instead of applying logic, statistics and probabilities of success.
Might make sense to wait and see what kind of rocks you find.
The article is talking about pivots not a lack perseverance ...