I.e., what chain or confluence of events brought them to the breaking point, and what processes/practices could have prevented them from reaching it? I imagine there's probably a great deal to learn from even the most "boring" failures.
I'd say about a quarter to a third of founders we fund have never-give-up morale. The rest are mostly in the middle group.
For the people in the middle group, I think the big danger is not knowing what to do next. That's why it's so important to launch early. Once you get something in front of users, they tell you what to do next. Not that you should do exactly what they tell you; you have to guess what they really need. But at least you start to have some data about that.
I have seen people learn this talent from two sources:
1) A deep, abiding conviction that they will get what they want because they always get what they want. 2) A cheerful disregard for other's predictions of failure (or well-founded empirical observation that the project is anything but a success) -- because "you've only failed once you quit".
Type #2 are much easier to have dinner with but I've certainly seen #1 work.
But what if you started optimistic, but after years of dealing with stupid people who can't even write decent emails, your morale has fallen so low you can't stay excited?
Is there any way to recover, short of wiping your memory of the past and starting out innocent and optimistic again?
Or is that part of what makes it an exclusive trait of the successful, because it is very hard to stay optimistic over the long haul, therefore only a handful actually succeed...
Maybe the pharma industry can make "stay optimistic" drugs just for startups...
This sounds like 16PF Second-Order Factor IV: Subduedness vs. Independence -- also known as "field independence".
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From Page 119-20 of the "Handbook for the 16PF":
Both the ratings and the primaries in Q-data support this pattern, describing a person who is independent, radical, autistic, projective, and a law to himself (hence the alternative designation of this dimension as "Promethian Will").
You could argue that 100% believing 'attitude => result' is the best way to think even if it is not so true. But it seems to me that each person involved in any endevour needs maintain their own cost/benefit analyses of the situation. If the costs mount and the chances of benefit shrink they are actually doing the right thing by changing path. I can see why this might not make for good coaching advice though.
What's the distribution of never-give-ups among YC startups? That is, do startups with a never-give-up tend to be composed entirely of never-give-ups? What are the dynamics for startups of mixed composition?
If the never-give-up is sufficiently convincing, that's almost as good as having all never-give-ups. He drags the rest along. The dangerous case is the startup that has all middle of the road founders. These have to get lucky fairly quickly or they give up.
That was the big reason for me. There were a bunch of contributing factors - rejected by YC 3 times, no luck with other outside investors, better opportunity came up, all other founders quit, scope of the project was much bigger than we envisioned, continuous problems simplifying the UI enough that I'd want to use it myself, and some doubt about whether current browser performance is even good enough to run the product - but I kept going through all of them until I really had no idea what to do next.
Joel's comment about it taking a long time before you can even know what knobs to tweak is right on. Early-stage products are almost completely wrong, and oftentimes they're so fractally wrong that nobody will bother telling you how to make them right. Launching helps, if you can get users. But many startups fail to get even one loyal user.
You'd probably benefit a lot more analyzing the reasons why you personally give up on projects than why someone else has.
I can tell you how we failed with our first product. Bad design choices (that people would accept a large client download, that Mac wasn't that important) and a bad UI meant a bad user experience. Plus a lack of up front planning about why would users want to use us. Therefore the users never returned - the lack of momentum had a big negative effect on morale. Every day in the office was miserable then because we knew people weren't using/enjoying our product and we weren't growing.
We made a tough choice to abandon that first product and our new site is starting to rock and is heading in right direction. The positive momentum has such a big impact on morale and every day hearing a user say "I'm so glad I found this site" is best motivation to keep going through all startup challenges. So it comes back to momentum from users, and that comes back to good design and understanding what people want and why they would use your product.
just my $0.02
Personally, I want to hear stories about failure more than stories about success. Stories about success are boring and repetitive, because they usually revolve around some combination of luck and persistence. But the truly hard decisions in life come when you're spinning your wheels, and you need to determine when it's time to cut your losses.
so i guess, actually failure was very valuable. i actually see 3-4 much larger / better funded startups in our field who now are repeating the mistakes we made in our first product, but somehow I guess they won't be able to make that decision to change course.. easy when you're smaller and flexible.