I am (not) a failure: Lessons learned from six failed startup attempts
blog.rongarret.info
blog.rongarret.info
> First, it sets the stage for what was to come, and second, while it was unquestionably a success, it was not my success.
I used to think that success was being successful the way I wanted and I was often frustrated because things were working but not because of the way I wanted them to. Turns out, it's doubly difficult to make things not only work but also work the way I want.
I've since tried to be more open-minded and see wins that perhaps I didn't expect or want still as wins and it's made me feel a lot more successful. One might scoff and say I should hold myself to a higher standard, but at the end of the day, success is only an intrinsic feeling anyways. It's not a measurable metric so I might as well feel better about the progress I'm making.
In the context of the article, the author could see these all as failures, but it sounds like some of these were pretty successful. In fact, the author concludes as much, finding happiness in the "failures". It's all an arbitrary label anyways.
There’s a great old aphorism that sounds like sarcasm if you don’t understand this: “Take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves.” Any halfway sane team is dominated by people who are all too happy to jump on the Big Things. But for want of a nail, the kingdom can be lost. And if you cannot see his importance, and fire the farrier to hire more knights, then everybody loses.
With a good boss you don't have to look; they hold these people out and highlight their work, those people recursively do the same thing. In true success there's so much to go around.
Yet in our consumer world, people are continually thinking of their worth simply in terms of the money they have or the money they make. I’ve known many married working moms, who decided to leave the workforce and be homemakers, who constantly felt like their worth diminished because of the decrease in their wealth, not recognizing that the bond they had with their children, was growing stronger and greater, and didn’t recognize how incredibly valuable that truly was.
Note: I’m not saying working moms can’t have strong bonds with their children, I’m talking about specific situations where for them it was hindering their relationships, and their relationships improved but was at the cost of less money.
I think a lot of times those who don’t have great community around them, are often the ones who will really chase money over other things, because the impact of not having it is so much higher for them.
Tomorrow. What a banger.
Next lines are:
You think you can keep on goin’, livin’ like a king Ooh, babe, but I strongly doubt it
>> I dont believe in this rat race 60 hour a week thing.
The question is do you believe you were successful because of, or in spite of this?
Success is never determined by hard work. It's always a combination of many other factors and at best hard work may contribute a little. Otherwise the billions of very hard working people struggling to feed their families would be extremely successful.
But that's not a story that you put on a poster, so people prefer to believe the lie that killing themselves chasing "success" is a good thing.
The different between you two though is that they have millions and can still have your lifestyle within a couple of years.
Those are things you buy with your time, your life clock if you will. You have a limited budget of time and you don't get to spend it twice. And when you get to the point where you feel like you've probably spent half or more of it, you might look at what you spent your time acquiring and be disappointed.
Pretty much everyone I've talked to about 'success' uses the definition of 'the sense of pride in what they have achieved in their life so far.'
If the value of what is a 'good' thing to achieve came from inside of you, then in my experience, you'll be happy with what you've achieved. However, if you adopted someone else's definition of what is 'good' to achieve, you may find that having achieved it you don't feel happy. I expect it is different for everyone.
What this conversation did for me was to show me how one thought about 'success' affected the choices of where you spent your time, that they were different for everyone, and that people using someone else's idea of success could be disappointed or unhappy having achieved 'success'. And that realization helped me make decisions about how I spent my time based on what I valued in my life rather than by an arbitrary "score" like a bank balance.
Money isn't everything.
Comparison is the thief of joy.
It's a great example of the power laws in startups: it's much more lucrative to have a minor role in a major success than a major role in anything minor.
Seeing the outcome of the startups he listed, it would have been much better to work as an enterprise CRUD developer at a bank, insurance company, etc
Enterprise CRUD developers don't make that much. I'm confident OP made more over his career than them.
The average CRUD developer working in the US in most major cities can make $130K to $165K within 5 years with aggressive job hopping.
Throughout this thread, it's clear you have an ax to grind. Startups are obviously not for you, but many enjoy them and benefit.
I think he wrote that he didn't make anything from that. He held onto the equity because he (unfortunately) thought Virgin would turn it into a success.
There are so many people especially on HN who succumb to survivorship bias. Most failed startup founders never admit it. The original author is not one of them and he was willing to be open about it - that’s a compliment by the way.
“Many” may benefit from them. But statistically, most don’t
I will also repeat the obvious (but oft missed) observation: working in a revenue-generating industry, not a cost center. This doesn't need to be a startup, but very few banks or insurance companies generate their massive products within IT.
I said in another reply, that I made plenty of mistakes and had plenty of “failures” so I’m not faulting him for that. But where did he say that he learned from his failures and worked on his weaknesses that allowed him to succeed based on his goal of becoming a successful startup founder?
The power laws actually cut both ways. I think the optimal path is not entirely obvious without some particular understanding of whether or not you are a stronger player as a leader or a follower.
> I'm very grateful to have the luxury of not having to play the game
Real question: Comparing your social life before and after having money, what changed the most? Or do you hide it, so your friends have no idea?
Lots of tech employees, if they don’t let lifestyle inflation take over, hit a point where they could retire early but may not want to. At that point t walking away from a job is much easier.
When you combine that with wabi-sabi, and just a general appreciation for the present, I find I am able to cope with whatever life throws at me, no matter how bleak it sometimes gets.
I started a self-funded tech company around 1998. This was hard tech, hardware and software. And I was the sole engineer doing all the work. This meant 18 hour days, 7 days per week to get the plane off the runway. Two years later, after booking lots of sales, we finally moved out of the garage and I started to hire people. Yes, I ran this beast entirely on my own for two years. A few years later a large well-known company expressed interest in acquiring the technology. The number being floated was in excess of $30MM.
What happened?
Well, 2008 happened. The economic implosion caused this company to second-guess entry into the market we had pursued --which they intended to do by acquiring us. The deal went from being a couple of meetings away from an acquisition to evaporating in front of my very eyes.
The bad news was that the economic downturn truly hurt us over the next couple of years. I had to shut it down in 2010 and lick my wounds.
This thing went from pouring all of our savings and an incredible amount of very hard work into a crazy idea, executing well enough to get a $30MM+ offer to closing the doors and nearly losing it all in the process.
At the time this felt like an abject failure and a waste of ten years of my life. It took me months to get my head back on straight. Today, looking back, I see it as a success. I took an idea from nothing to close to a massive life-changing exit and did so mostly on my own through hard work, grit and determination. That's a success story nobody can take away from me. I learned a lot along the way and most of those lessons were part of success in future endeavors.
Life can be funny and cruel sometimes. You might think you are going through your darkest hours when, in reality, you are growing a solid backbone that will support the rest of your life.
Entrepreneurship is hard. Very hard.
It’s like anecdotes you hear from religious people during a disaster. “I lost five of my kids. But I’m so thankful that God looked out for me and saved one”
I don’t think any of these people are saying “I’m so glad my kids are dead” they are saying they are able to see these unfortunate events in a bigger picture.
What you may be looking for is “sour grapes” - something that was previously desired is now not viewed as highly after failing to obtain it.
Of course I’m not saying in my original anecdote that people getting killed from a natural disaster was preventable.
In the appropriate threads, I have posted right here what I learned from my many mistakes - marrying the wrong person (since remarried), staying at my second job too long and becoming an “expert beginner” (I’ve done decently for myself since then), failed in real estate around 2008 (since recovered), etc.
You can look at some of my “favorited comments”.
This isn’t bitterness. At 50, I am where I want to be. But if you had asked the 35 year old me - divorced, negative net worth, shitty job with out of date skillset, etc. I wouldn’t have put on a happy face and say I’m not a failure.
The GP didn't say they thought it was a success at the time; quite the opposite. Aren't you basically saying the same thing, only with a different timeline?
> I grew a lot. And I think my current happiness stems mainly from the fact that I like the person I've become, someone who can fail again and again and again and again and still find a way, for the most part, to be happy.
He didn’t say that his current happiness and success comes from the lessons he learned. It’s more like the lady who lost five kids and kept her faith because it was that God was good to save one not thinking if that were the case was he good for letting the other five die? (see also the biblical story of Job)
Without going into details (again look at my favorited comments if interested, I’m not trying to hide the details), what I learned from my failures is why I think I’m not a failure now - ie I achieved the goals I wanted to achieve - was a direct result of learning from my previous marriage and divorce, doing what is needed to not be an expert beginner - I got my first only and hopefully last job at BigTech at 46 (no longer there) - and was much smarter about my finances.
The GP would probably do well to see the endeavor as a success in terms of how they should behave in future. Any necessary adjustment would seem to come from the margins.
If retrospect exists to inform future decisions: getting to the GP's point in his business is a useful success signal.
Whatever it is that you're tracking seems less useful toward any question that isn't "am I rich from this right now?". The answer to which is "no". As-in "no shit". It's not useful.
How is he not a failure based on his own mission?
I am glad you edited your comment slightly because it was worse than what remained (which is still terrible and insensitive).
That said, one of my favorite quotes, by Mark Twain is:
"A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way".
Which is to say that it is impossible for most to align with the mind of someone who loses a business, or much worse, a child, without having held that cat by the tail. And so, your comment, while misplaced, is understandable because you don't have a good frame of reference.
Additionally, in my particular case, well, the 2008 economic implosion caught most everyone by surprise. It was like a nuclear bomb dropped. Few saw it coming. Millions of businesses went down. Millions of people lost their homes and jobs. And, while I not, by any means, perfect and without mistake in my life, I find it hard to interpret such a catastrophic exogenous factor as a personal failure. Sure, it would have been nice to have had $10MM in the bank to survive it. Most non-VC companies do not have this luxury. We had five million dollar sale contracts evaporate overnight when our customers, in turn, had their banks materially reduce or cancel lines of credit. We had customers send truckloads of our products back to help us because they were filing for bankruptcy and the courts would have grabbed hold of our (unpaid) products and they would have been stuck in the hands of a trustee for months, even more than a year. Etc.
Like I said, sometimes you have to hold the cat by the tail to really understand.
> I find it hard to interpret such a catastrophic exogenous factor as a personal failure
I mentioned in another reply that the 2008 crash hurt me too. It was definitely a personal failure that I had five mortgages where I owed a half million dollars, put 0% down on four of them and only 10% down on the fifth and I was only making $70K from my primary job at the time and didn’t know what the hell I was doing.
Your original comment, which I saw before the edit, characterized my comment as copium. Someone else responded to that before your edit.
Anyhow, your 2008 failure was, sorry to say, 100% your fault. Perhaps you were younger and inexperienced. We've all made stupid mistakes due to inexperience. Buying five homes with 0% down payment was an extreme gamble. We live and die by the consequences of such actions.
In my case, we were conducting business as usual and then, out of nowhere, the music just stopped...and there were not chairs. Very few people saw that coming. Those who did were focused on the financial world rather than engaged in running a business. This is why so many businesses got caught unprepared for such an event.
I am sorry you lost it all. That's terrible. I lost a home before due to employment difficulties. My mistake in that case --funny enough, young and stupid-- was to buy it with an adjustable rate loan. When interest rates went from roughly 6% to over 12% my world got turned upside-down in a hurry. Like you, I wasn't making enough money at the time to survive that. I lost the house a couple of years later.
Interestingly enough, that's what pushed me towards entrepreneurship. I had to earn more money. The only way at the time was to start an small electronics manufacturing business while keeping my day job.
So, yes, in that case, really fucking dumb decision on my part. Yet, at the end, it launched my entrepreneurial journey, something I am very happy about today.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42773763
> Honestly, that feels like copium. It’s like anecdotes you hear from religious people during a disaster. “I lost five of my kids. But I’m so thankful that God looked out for me and saved one”
It still says “copium”
> Anyhow, your 2008 failure was, sorry to say, 100% your fault.
Isn’t that what I just said that they were my mistakes?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42774270
> And not being willing to admit your mistakes and assess your weaknesses means that you continuously make the same mistakes.
And then I went on to admit my mistakes.
In the very comment that you replied to I said It was definitely a personal failure
> Interestingly enough, that's what pushed me towards entrepreneurship. I had to earn more money
And I decided to upskill and I knew when I signed the offer letter at each job, how much I was going to make without any risk.
> Like you, I wasn't making enough money at the time to survive that. I lost the house a couple of years later.
I didn’t say I couldn’t keep my house. I made more than enough to keep my primary home. It was very much a strategic default. I had another house built and got an FHA loan three years to the day after my last foreclosure. Money is never personal to me
Overtime, I’ve come to appreciate that statement more and more. I think it is an incredibly profound insight about life.
Investors know the long odds of success, so they invest in twenty to thirty companies and wait for one to get big.
Founders and employees can't diversify like that, because you only have so many working years. To mitigate this we have decided to award successful founders with huge paydays as a lure to others to throw their hats in the ring. This has some malign effects, namely unsuccessful founders and employees get bupkis. It also attracts the wrong sort of personality to be a founder, selecting for too much risk appetite. (At least what I consider the wrong sort for building a sustainably profitable business.)
I have an idea for how to solve this and I wonder if it's already been tried or if there are holes in it. The idea is to spread the risk of starting a company across something like an accelerator class. If one company in that class gets big, it would be contractually obligated to hire and grant shares from some pool to other members of that class. This would be at the cost of the winning founders' stakes.
The upside for winners would be much lower, but the downside would be lower too. This would attract a different sort of person to this accelerator, and be a differentiator for selecting talent.
Greedy optimization can also get you stuck in local minima. Why does any investor participate in VC? As an asset class it underperforms. There's something more that motivates people than return. Cool factor, bragging rights, and also I think a concern for growth and the macro outlook.
In my model the reserved pool of shares for failed founders would come out of the winning founders' pool. It's spreading risk across founders, not diminishing the stake of investors.
In the main, VC LPs put money into VC firms because they have portfolio allocation constraints for decorrelated investments, is how I understand it. It's definitely not out of charity.
I'm not saying it can't work, what do I know, but a challenge you'll have to address here is:
* By the time you're at the first big-money investment, the priced A round, you're dealing with investors who make just a couple investments a year.
* Despite that, the most promising startups are chased by VCs, not the other way around.
* If you're one of those promising startups, what would motivate you to take money from the investor structured the way you propose?
Most returns in startup investment come from a small fraction of breakout successes. Even if you got, like, 25% of startups to join this kind of funding compact --- which would be a huge, a momentous achievement on the same scale as the creation of YC --- the math here might not work out to where the shared-fate component of the deal was meaningful for any of the failed startups.
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23907342
Maybe if the terms were really good, like 20% of the company for $10,000 or something.
2. You’re not creating the correct incentive system. It creates the opposite incentive you want - it rewards those people who do nothing and let others do all the work. You could easily get in a situation where all people in this co-op do nothing, under hopes someone else hits it big.
2. Wouldn't the incentive be to abandon your failing startup and go work for one of the more promising ones in your class?
No, it is not. Socialism supposing involuntary participation. As long as participation is voluntary for all agents, it is capitalism.
I think your idea would only work if there were rigorous selection process, but also some mechanism to "fire" founders who aren't contributing or insist to make terrible decisions.
Obviously it doesn't always end badly. But we get a massively skewed view from survivor bias.
My life turned out pretty damn well once I got a plain ordinary job working for someone else. But I don't kid myself: when it comes to starting a startup, I did fail. The main lesson I learned was that I was always going to.
I hear this a lot and I think it is good advice because the only person who should actually start a startup is the one who sees this but still does it.
Worse than failing is not trying.
You will live your life always wondering “what if”.
When you fail, you will have an answer to the above question and can live in peace.
Otherwise you're not missing much. Work for something that pays well, solve interesting problems, spend time at home with your family and friends. The problem is when you're wanting to start something because someone else did it and don't have the implementation or execution perseverance (or just don't believe in it strongly).
When you fail, it can be due to many things. Not everything in the world is controllable. This is one of the reasons why expecting zero ”What ifs” at the end of your post-mortem is unreasonable.
I guess being aware of what you need and can afford is key.
There's no proof that this personal feeling should be listened to or given behavioral authority, especially when it suspiciously conforms to the aesthetic that is widely shared by many who end up having only achieved a mundane life, despite “noble” projects launched because of arrogant egos. This social phenomenon which sponsors the freedom and agency of people fit only to be busy drones is wasting global resources on bourgeois affairs. Elon Musk and his eventual epic failure at super-industrialism is a great example of this harmful sinful pride.
The “what if” has only served to help overvalue ordinary potential, when that capability should have been limited to simple tasks, industries, and affairs. It's a mind virus riding on the waves of language and the beastly body of rationality, a false reality having been successfully disguised as a legitimate object to perceive within the cognitive sphere of humanity. It is deviation that surely has contributed to the collapse of the great liberal humanism project, the real goal of democracy and its encompassing civilization having been the quiet and stable enslavement of a massive surplus of dull brains and basic bodies. A mass of uninteresting genetic carriers who would do well to never worry about what is outside the scope of their common destinies.
The dialectic that there can be morbid peace if you would just test out the hypothesis that you can become a great man is an incomprehensibly devised thinking trap that can filter out men who don't know what the fuck is going on in the grand universe.
But God (or simply nature) works in mysterious ways and I'm glad that hubris was created to serve as an instrument for learning what not to ever do. And to materially benefit from, salvaging from the failures of future past technologies being a huge possibility to leverage. Your supposed tragedy is my informed opportunity, to paraphrase Jeff Bezos.
EDIT: If you ever invent warp drive or faster than light travel or functional nuclear fusion, I'll be looking forward to the blueprints of such treasures and strategic advantages ;)
But if you're young, got the time ... I think it's worth a shot, or two, or more.
I worked for a startup whose founder was a super young guy who had never had a job before being CEO. He was missing experiences like "what do I hate when my boss does" and so needed to repeat all the same mistakes. This resulted in things like... postmortem reviews with action items like "we should dock people's pay if installs are done incorrectly" instead of "we should ensure that the install crews have the tools they need to do the install correctly". (That action item was one of the few battles there that I won. We gave every installer a toolbox containing the tools to do the job. This improved the success of installs greatly. But who needs a meeting to come up with an "idea" like this?)
But I hear you starting at zero life experience, that is bad. I would find it pretty painful to work at a start up and have to talk to the founder "bro let's talk about the basics of picking your battles" and do it ... well.
“The time value of money (TVM) is a financial principle that states that money in the present is worth more than the same amount in the future.”
Money is worth more NOW so you can spend it to acquire skills, resources, and goods. If you wait then you are living life without those things. And delaying early strategic wins.
Passive investing is renting out that optionality to other people, like starting a 401k early.
This is circular. Why would money magically get more valuable in the future?
Money is valuable for its uses, not intrinsically.
The reason why you can get interest on money is because people and businesses need it NOW to do productive things, more badly than in the future.
This is the entire principle behind discounting cash flows.
Yes, I need some of my money now to pay my expenses. But if you had 200K extra to invest in 2010 and chose to invest it and instead chose to work somewhere paying $200K less than you could have thinking I can make $200K more in 14 years. You would have lost out on 605% returns.
> Money is valuable for its uses, not intrinsically.
Investing in it’s truest form is consuming money to make entirely new goods and services.
To put it one more way. If the treasury was paying zero percent forever. Would there still be time value of money? Absolutely.
What do you think you are doing when you “invest” in the stock market?
Yes I know when you buy stocks aside from the IPO or secondary offering you’re buying from other people and the company doesn’t get the money directly.
They spend it to accomplish a goal. The ability to accomplish that goal now is more valuable than the cash.
The value of the money to you or the business is worth more now than 10 years from now. Meaning just like I said, it makes more sense for you as an individual to have made $300K and live off $100K and invest it in 2010 than to wallow in obscurity at failing startups and then start saving at 35.
This is the textbook definition of the time value of money - as quoted from Investopedia.
- money is more valuable now because you can start earning interest - but why are others willing to pay interest? - because the money is more valuable to them now
The culture of HN is certainly still alive
Also a note, it seems wikipedia agrees with investopedia here —- and the equations of TVM include interest rates and compounding.
You have a point on the WHY, but I think TVM may just take that as an assumption.
The time value of money (TVM) surmises that money is worth more now than at a future date based on its earning potential. Because money can grow when invested, any delay is a lost opportunity for growth. The time value of money is a core financial principle known as the present discounted value.
I think this is a good description which represents my view. Notice that these are true regardless of the existence of central banking:
Opportunity Costs of Waiting: Money available now can be used to address immediate needs or desires—buying goods, accessing services, or achieving goals. If that money is delayed, those opportunities may be lost, diminished, or deferred, reducing its practical utility.
Uncertainty Over Time: The future is uncertain, and there is a risk that the purchasing power or usefulness of money might change due to factors like inflation, changes in circumstances, or unforeseen events. Money available now provides a guarantee of utility that might not exist in the future.
Personal Preference for Timing: People often value immediate access to money because it aligns with their current priorities. For example, having money now could allow someone to travel, invest in education, or address urgent health needs—opportunities that may not hold the same relevance or availability later.
https://chatgpt.com/share/678ee649-6e30-8010-b16b-d152ac228d...
You’re talking about prioritizing a different lifestyle.
On that note: Warren Buffett made a 1 million dollar bet with some hedge fund managers that he could beat their returns just by putting money in an index fund over 10 years - he won the bet.
Steve Jobs is sort of an exception here, not only was he adopted , but he was adopted by a very middle-class family .
I find myself really good at developing small apps, but very bad when it comes to the business side. I would love to find someone to work with who's good with business. But so far I've just been time scammed a few times by morons who come up with insanely impractical ideas .
And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want to give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're able to build the entire thing out from scratch. If you discuss modest technical limitations they'll berate you for corrupting their vision.
In my local startup community there are a lot of entrepreneurs and small startups founded by MBA students and recent college grads who clearly come from wealthy backgrounds. Nearly all of them either fail quickly or continue for years without getting any traction beyond their parents’ connections’ businesses.
The other side of being wealthy and well connected is that it’s really tempting to fall back on a job with your family connections or to play startup for a few years while burning through “seed” money from the family without the real pressure of needing your startup to succeed.
> And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want to give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're able to build the entire thing out from scratch.
There are a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs who need a cofounder but don’t want to give cofounder equity.
The majority of successful founders and founding engineers I know had past working experience together. There are exceptions, but most of the time when someone goes searching for a cofounder or founding engineers because they don’t have anyone in their network, it doesn’t work out. It can work and does sometimes, but it’s so rare that I’m very surprised to hear success stories.
There are just too many people in the startup community looking to “hustle” their way into an MVP without giving anything up in the process. Also a lot of people who want to be “cofounders” and get 50% of your company in exchange for doing as little work as they can.
I was in a startup Slack for a while. Every other week someone would come in asking for advice about how to evict a deadbeat “cofounder” from their company who had secured 1/2 or 1/3 of the equity but wasn’t contributing anywhere near the other cofounders.
If my normal billable rate is 70$ an hour I might offer a discount if your project is really neat.
But I've never seen that, I've seen people wanting to me to sign contracts would say I will donate time, and these are never people who are realistic about what their chances are. You get all this hype where they claim someone offered them 100K just for the idea, but when you ask for $100 a month to host the server they don't have it .
Then the network would take a small percentage of equity in the companies of all the members.
As for business, many successful tech entrepreneurs “learn” it either as they go or by bringing on business experts, but not giving them full control. For larger examples of the latter, see Eric Schmidt as the “adult in the room” for Google, Sheryl Sandberg for Facebook.
Connected is when your Mom knows the chairman of IBM. Like with Gates.
I find it easier to just consider Steve Jobs to be exceptional here. He's the definition of not letting the circumstances of your birth dictate anything.
Jobs has said himself on multiple occasions that he was lucky with timing and proximity to the industry and people, not that it lessens the immense grit that was still needed.
I haven't created any billion dollar companies yet, have you?
I also don’t claim to make such effort. I just want to clarify that networking is a conscious skill and not always a result of family connections.
Nothing you can do today with a typical HN skill set will come even close to that. There are thousands (at least) of people with those skills. They can build it too, whatever it is. You’re not Woz and you don’t know a Woz. Likely there is no Woz today; everything computing is so much more specialized and complicated and layered and just plain big. You may be able to find success in this world, but it won’t be replicating the Jobs story.
It's as if no one taught them -- or they just don't have the sense for it? -- that a startup is just a vehicle to make money. There's nothing special about it. You can make lots of money without a "startup." You can make lots of money doing many different things even without a business entity. It's just an abstraction for linguistic convenience.
My biggest wakeup was finding people much less educated and much less intellectually gifted and much less socioeconmically privileged making a lot more money than what could be considered their betters in more prestigious and, on the surface, well remunerated professions.
If you don't want to make money, don't go into business. Stay at your job and grind a career out. If you have the desire to make money, your senses will naturally sharpen as you use them more to achieve that end. Otherwise, if you go and "build a startup" for any other reason than making money you will fail barring extraneous circumstances.
Baffling that this isn't common sense, really. But my fault. I keep forgetting a professional forum is just a proverbial water cooler, where you get to see a wide mix of people in your profession -- and all the different backgrounds, values, ideas, and ways of seeing the world -- most of which are continuous works in progress that culminate only at death.
That is what's taught in many start up schools, for good reason. A startup can't ignore money without great luck.
However, it's not actually true. Lots of people start companies to make things better in some way, rather than to make bank. Some of them make bank regardless. Many businesses just tick along, but don't care about 'success' as determined by yacht size/botox per square inch/'status'.
> if you go and "build a startup" for any other reason than making money you will fail barring extraneous circumstances.
The idea that motivating people by money is the only or even best option is a major propaganda point in the class war (and quite silly if you think about it).
> Always baffled me how little commercial sense HNers had when I was growing up and reading this forum.
How long have you been reading HN? How have you felt the "HNers" w.r.t. nose-for-commerciality (and along whatever other dimension you think is relevant) change over time?
Either you devote your entire being to the invasive alien job that is learning how to extract value from civilization's economically receptive citizens or you pack up your bags and head back home on the plane that can depart from the place where great men are selected and trained. Being a startup founder is much, much more intense than some special forces soldier life. You learn better values and habits than some punk that will have peaked at the earning of the title of U.S. Marine, to use a stark contrasting example. Or a black ops Delta Force guy who just has to navigate a huge forest in the dark on the dangerous way back to friendly territory, while the compared startup founder needs to develop an entire science for the navigation of profitable markets that no human has ever seen before, let alone taken advantage of before. A nerd like Richard Feynman can be much more tougher than someone that can do a thousand pushups without stopping and shoot an M4 carbine at a target 900 meters away.
Is Elon Musk even a good example of a successful startup founder or businessman, despite his billionaire status? Logical skepticism says no. And the brainwashing that popular ideology does says yes.
After all, didn't Elon Musk fuck and impregnate some bitches during his rise to a big bank account? He could have been using that time and energy to colonize Mars before this twenty-first century ends. He's not serious about what he says he wants. A terrible role model to look up to.
It might not be representative, but the people I’ve known that wanted to start tech businesses in the past 15/20 years approached it the way people start restaurants. You can’t slowly ramp up most restaurant concepts with a DIY budget— you need to invest a lot upfront, and you need a lot of existing expertise for even pretty trivial concepts. (And before people say food trucks and catering and private chef and the like— catering and private cheffing are totally different businesses with very different processes and institutional knowledge, and in most places, food trucks aren’t dramatically cheaper than opening a small restaurant.) Folks seem eager to start acting like a CEO and delegating things to people paid with investor money rather than making something themselves and getting it off the ground. Maybe that’s what the business requires? Maybe in software markets, customers aren’t interested in scrappy small players anymore, perhaps worried about lack of support, shitty UX, them going out of business or whatever.
Just speculation. Not even going to pretend I’ve got broad non-anecdotal knowledge on this.
Junior engineers didn't cost more than any other recent graduate, and as you could get away with a few rough edges in production for quite a while, you could put together an adequately balanced team for not much money.
The tooling was much worse, but the compliance burden was much less.
Did your friends in the .com era talk about "doing a startup" or "starting a business"? I feel like that's changed a bit, people are more calculated and cynical about how the game is to be played with respect to rounds, exit strategies and so on. The "startup" model specifically means something a bit different to "starting a business", around ambition, scale, investment model etc. All businesses need to be started, but not all businesses are startups.
Total scalability & strong network effect points toward a "get the monopoly, now" business model. Which, IDK, might suit some things but definitely isn't the right fit for all things tech.
I think this is the biggest factor that actually affects the fundamentals of selling tech. To my eye, every other aspect is some form of Gordon Gecko business insanity and/or VC people looking to stoke egos by making people with good ideas feel like big shot executives while figuring out how soon they can throw it all in a juicer and extract a bunch of cash.
This, but also it's a bit like gambling, this is the high risk / high reward way to do startups. The slower way is more stable, but you don't get to have fun with other people's money while you're building the business.
they eat ramen for 10 years, often even believing in someone else's dream without substantional equity to match the risk/reward profile. meanwhile, the plumber next door who started his own plumbing business is driving a ferrari on weekends.
Rare, wise words. (in a world, where 'follow thy dreams' philosophy is venerated).
There are many opportunities online available. Start with acquisition and build from there.
I did it myself a few times, and have friends who made way more. The biggest secret, sticking to it.
It's not for everyone though. Bar is super high, risk is high, long work weeks with little balance are the entry ticket.
I briefly worked for Grab the company, which was another SE Asia "Uber". Among other things, at one point they procured drivers in Saigon by giving the wives/families free chicken meat. This way, they could prepare the drivers meals to take while they were out on the road all day long.
Kind of a local spin on tech workers free meals.
You've got battle scars, and stories that are worth their weight in gold. Your experience is probably extremely useful for the right startup.
My conclusion is that most interesting stories remain burried and we're lucky to see anythign real (as in true stories) surfacing, because people that are crazy enough to enjoy these pains, hardly have any time to write about them.
Meanwhile we're presented with a somewhat skewed reality that's both less interesting, less real and overly biased towards glamor. The title of a somewhat :) unrelated book keeps popping in my head "Reality is not what it seems".
the thing is perhaps this is in fact the best way to motivate (or demotivate) the startup craft - you end up learning by drinking from the firehose daily. I believe there are few other types of activities that have such a forcing factor to learn and most are generally some sort of crisis (war, etc.) and so entrepreneurship is likely the least damaging one (at least for everyone else than the team haha)
Many may not have actually happened, but it’s still worth considering even decades later.
Many major religions prohibit making a show of good deeds. You're supposed to do it secretly, so that your intentions are pure.
But other people only see when a good deed is reported, so we're getting a distorted version of reality.
Some of these are reported for good reasons. But the worst form would be what social media kids are bombarded with: things like the clinically oblivious "influencers" who make videos of themselves exploiting a homeless person with a "charity" stunt.
One way to do good, while also letting people be inspired, is to do it anonymously. For example, the donation in a large crowd of them, or the anonymous rich-person's donation to a good cause (not a vanity university department named after yourself!), or any of the countless ways that one person quietly helps someone else.
You'll never know most of the times someone else helped you out, and most of the times you helped out someone else will also never be known. That's OK.
If you ever have the occasion to jump into an icy lake, to save a busload of photogenic schoolchildren and puppies, then you must try to get out of there right after, before anyone's phone dries out. Then the story will be about people simply doing the right thing, even an amazing thing, and fading back into the crowd. It'll be one of the best stories ever.
(Title text is about some engineer solving P=NP locked up in an eggbeater calibration routine)
I always find it funny when some FP programmer ridicules others for not understanding monads, when in fact, those riduculed may have more extensive experience using them without knowing they are called monads.
After spending a little more time on both history and philosophy of science, I realized this is generally the rule rather than the exception, across all fields and functions
Having to explain yourself helps clarify what you’re doing. The time “lost” keeping said person updated might even pay for itself.
Also reading Scott Belsky's "The messy middle" let me match a lot of my experience.
I tried to read "Eating Glass: The Inner Journey Through Failure and Renewal" but didn't have the energy/stomach.
Re a16z - "The hard thing about hard things" is not bad either.
However I think a frequent series short stories over a large period of time, would make for much better content.
Is anybody around with enough insight in that business to make an educated guess as to what happened?
- Bank operators responding to queries have no idea why a decision was made
- Banks rely on algorithms to determine credit worthiness, these are run centrally so a bank manager at a branch may say positive things but the system generates a report independently.
- The algorithms also can raise flags for other risks, such as anti money laundering. The bank will not disclose anything if a flag has been raised as a regulatory requirement.
Most banks are seeing this happening and acting as conservatively as they can. They are avoiding change because they don't want to be the next victim of the financial industry crisis. It's not a shadowy cabal; it's really just the fear of going out of business.
A few key banks, OTOH, are embracing change and innovating. Having strong relationships with them is key to making progress. It takes a very long time; 6 years sounds too short. I'm not sure the startup timeline could ever stomach the length of time it takes to build those relationships.
So my guess is that the author didn't have as strong a relationship as what he actually needed. My company has also worked with enthusiastic executives who turned out not to have as much weight in the company decisions as they hoped.
[1] https://usafacts.org/articles/whats-behind-the-decline-in-us...
Thanks for the insight, I was wondering about this point.
I generally tend to try and attribute what _feels_ like coordinated cabal behaviour to general incompetence or lack of control. This feels like one of those situations.
I've worked around banks and this erratic behaviour is pretty common, and mostly due to short term personal motivations, and lack of coordination rather than an excess of coordination (i.e. collusion - which is not to say that banks aren't guilty on this point, but I think mostly not the case)
There was a large-ish scandal in the late 2010s when some core banking providers were delaying Zelle integrations for smaller FIs, and they started complaining as customers were demanding it and leaving the larger competitors with it.
Another option can be as simple as this - they fear tech as most don't understand it. When I was working on a corporate charge card startup, my co-founder and I faced this issue many times. The craziest experience was when the bank was ok to be issuing bank for us but requested our clients to go to their branches to sign paperwork (the bank literally has maybe 5 branches in the whole USA).
1. Don't use some clever or hard to remember name with a weird spelling. While easier to Trademark, the users and customers won't differentiate your site from the sea of attention grabbing garbage.
2. If people have zero paying customers, and zero revenue... than the hard fact is they were never in business, and should have founded a nonprofit instead (common for opensource support service entities.)
3. Often copyright and patents are infeasible for small business, and people simply can't build or defend things like a large firm. Thus, initially design products/services to last maybe a year or simply be disposable... When 270 desperate cloners show up to dilute the market sector... people quickly understand why they can't rely on Android, Steam, or Apple ecosystems to protect their bottom line.
4. There is zero loyalty without treasure. The only people that care if your firm goes into the red is you, and maybe the small-time shareholders. Most people can't take the constant adversarial posture with problematic staff, opinionated shareholders, and high-demand customers. Everyone thinks a CEO is lame till you become a CEO for a year or two... Every conversation from that point on is about money or marketing, and most people keen on building things tend to burn out of the role eventually due to social isolation.
5. No company lasts forever, if the operation is a projected liability it is your job to respond accordingly. Even if that means executing an exit strategy, and firing the entire problematic division.
6. Ask business people about their memorable experiences, and not about their money source. The superficial apparent function of a business is usually very different from the actual revenue model.
Best of luck, =3
Desire to know more intensifies
[1] https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/debanking-pat...
That's actually the start of a multi-part series:
https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-cre...
https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-cre...
https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-cre...
https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/cutting-to-chase-repeal-...
https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/a-simple-solution-to-cre...
Keep in mind all that was written twelve years ago and the world has changed a lot since then.
The answer is simpler: it's not that big of a problem to the people that would need to solve it (visa, banks)
Yes, it' billions of dollars per year, but that's on a denominator of trillions.
> In 2022, global payment card transaction volume surpassed $40 trillion, with the U.S. accounting for over $9.5 trillion 1 . If we consider the $5 billion in unauthorized purchases reported by Security.org 2 , the percentage of fraudulent transactions in the U.S. would be approximately 0.05%.
1 - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tudQcmL8lNH49iZZ8wRB88KW...
That's not wrong, but it misses the point. It's not worth the bank's time to solve it, but for me it would produce a pretty damn good ROI. All I needed was one entry point into the system, but I couldn't find it.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
The interchange rate on credit cards is high, but "diabolical" is a stretch.
Also, fraud is a very small line item in a credit card P&L. Generally 25bps to 50bps vs credit charge offs which are closer to 3% to 6%.
Source: Ran risk for Bank of America and a credit card fintech.
I'm always struck by the sheer serendipity of these stories. It appears that everything after Google was possible because of the safety net created by Google's IPO, and the author's time at Google itself ultimately came about because he and Urs hit it off over Lisp and Smalltalk. What would hace happened if the author had been allergic to dogs and had ended up at JPL because of their Fortran skills?
iCab: Uber obviously was very successful with this ~same premise
Smart Charter: I assume you can easily book a private jet online now?
Founder's Forge: linking record-keeping and payment is what makes Ramp great; 10 years of fintech innovations made executing this much easier
Spark Innovations: this is basically the premise of Airtable
I quit my job a year ago to pursue my own ideas. Like the author, I had made some money from a IPO. The post-IPO environment with heavy bureaucracy killed the vibe and I quit. Note that it wasn’t a Google tier company, but I made enough money that I could take a risk for some years without income.
For me it has only been a year. But I feel like a huge loser at times. In no scenario will I give up until I’m utterly defeated or captured the castle - I’m not a quitter. But this feeling gnaws at my soul.
I have failed to find a co-founder. Most of my friends are not interested in startups. So, I have had to look elsewhere. Between people who screwed me over equity, people who didn’t want to do the work, and my own imposter syndrome (I’m from a low ranked state college, and people I meet in SF are elites), I feel horrible and alone. I tried and even successfully built some projects over the past year, but ultimately nothing worked out.
Now, I’ve decided screw it. All the advice about sell first and get a co-founder - sounds great on paper. And I have some doubts around that whole belief but that’s not important.
I know actual pain points I’ve faced in my decade long career. I’ve done both highly technical and highly functional work. I’ve talked to enough people and validated my idea. I wish this thing existed and that I’d worked on it sooner instead of trying something different with randoms.
So, I’m just going to go and build it. I like building things, and I’ve gotten enough recommendations and performance reviews that point out that I’m good at delivering value for the customer and making sure my team succeeds.
So I’m building a product. I am able to dogfood my own product as I build it which is great. It’s a somewhat complex, b2b AI enterprise product, and having built multi-billion dollar enterprise software and delivered multiple multi-million dollar implementation projects, I feel that there is really no rush. Most enterprise software and organization processes are awful and not well engineered nor well thought out.
If this fails, whatever. I tried. If it works, amazing. I like building good things and have a track record of doing so, albeit for others.
But I fear I will keep feeling like a failure until it is successful. On the other hand, it would be very cool to build a solo founded enterprise product and deliver actual success.
Anyway, thought I’d share my thoughts it feels good to type it out. Thanks to the author of the article for sharing.
I did hundreds of cold calls for someone else. Honestly the most intimidating thing I've done but ended up learning to enjoy it.
I also enjoyed meeting our customers at our conference at previous job and it was a fun experience talking to people and showing off what we'd been working on or understanding what we could improve.
I am not an extroverted person, so it definitely does not come naturally to me - I'm suppressing butterflies if I'm being completely honest.
In the sense that infinite monkeys will eventually put out Shakespeare. In reality, money and time are both limited ;-)
(Sounds like I’m kidding but I’m not really. Many of the richest people were very poor at some point. For example, Andrew Carnegie or Levi Strauss. Also Arnold Schwarzenegger started from nothing in the US.)
Also, there are a lot more poor people than startup founders.
Hm, there must be more to it.
The best analogy I've seen is that starting a business is like playing a game at a carnival. The more tickets you buy, the more attempts you have to win the prize. Meanwhile most folks are the carnival workers, never being able to get a chance to play the game in the first place.
Most people don’t start a business because they tell themselves that it won’t work. It’s the hard truth that most people don’t want to hear.
If you read about most founders they don’t become rich due to luck or background or whatever. No most of the time they set themselves a goal and then do EVERYTHING to get there. They don’t care whether their parents had money or not. Or whether the market timing is right. They just do whatever they need to do.
To give credit to your position, over in Europe they've a generous welfare state yet very few successful startups so there's definitely a huge grindset factor but you're still cashing in on incredible luck or a comfortable economic position to be able to try enough times to score.
This is why the standard issue techbro advice from semi-wealthy "hustlers" who failed upwards on the backs of a few H1B 'founding' engineers is not actionable, I can at least respect the ones who don't bother with the facade.
....because there isn't enough wealth where they're from to absorb a lot of failures.
Hence they come to the land of opportunity where there are gamblers with money to gamble.
“If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.” ― W.C. Fields
Quitters never win. Winners never quit. People who never win and never quit are stupid.
Thanks!
> I hope you'll try again!
Thanks for the encouragement, but I just turned 60. Running a company is too demanding for me to try it again. My ambition now is to be a writer and find an audience that wants learn the easy way things that I had to learn the hard way.
Yes it's a lot of risk, yes most startups fail, and yes you could make more money at FANG. However, this is one of the most exciting times to build a startup, thanks to AI.
The big winners of the all the AI advancements (especially OS) are devs and AI startups:
- No more vendor lock-in
- Instead of just wrapping proprietary API endpoints, developers can now integrate AI deeply into their products in a very cost-effective and performant way
- Price race to the bottom with near-instant LLM responses at very low prices are on the horizon
It's as if your product automatically becomes better, cheaper, and more scalable with every major AI advancement. This leads to a powerful flywheel effect: AI improves product -> better product attracts more users -> users generate more data
Besides the product perspective, AI also allows you to operate your startup a lot more efficiently.
Will we see a single-person unicorn soon? Very likely not.
Will we see very successful small and bootstrapped startups? Yes, already the case.
Thanks for sharing
Especially in my college years (2009-2013, ish), the world seemed smaller, and to me, a lot of what you wrote was like looking through a keyhole into the real world. Grown-ups can apparently write lisp at JPL[2]! Google was chaotic[3][4][5][6] to work in 2000, especially if you commuted from Burbank. A name change[7]. And, variously, surveillance, more lisp stuff, etc. Now I'm an adult and I still haven't professionally written lisp, but I'm glad to have read about it anyway.
Anyway, it might surprise you to learn that when I think of your writing, though, I think of your HN comments first. There is a kind of influence that you can only get with a steady, unthanked build-up of seemingly-small contributions over a long period of time. In the right place they compound. I probably cite you to other engineers once a month or so.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6199857#6200414 [2]: https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080212170839/https://xooglers.... [4]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090408003924/http://xooglers.b... [5]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090408013612/http://xooglers.b... [6]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090408003913/http://xooglers.b... [7]: https://flownet.com/ron/eg-rg-faq.html
mad respect to you for being open. thanks for sharing.
Ironically, today I have a part-time consulting gig at a company designing network switches, and I see them wrestling with the exact same problems we were tackling 30 years ago. So FlowNet would be a very close second.
Link?
I'm less convinced. Although to be fair, I'm really not the target market.
I think the root fail of this kind of business is that it's a Venn diagram of two circles, with very tiny overlap.
Firstly, flying commercial is "simple". You want to go from A to B at some point in the future. You want to buy a ticket, show up, and fly.
Sure, I get the TSA crap and so on, but it's fundamentally reliable. Not to mention cheap.
Private travel bypasses TSA, and sure there's glamor, and a bigger seat. But unreliable is built in also.
Or put another way, the jet owner goes wherever and whenever they like. The pay a lot for perfect convenience. But it makes that "empty return leg" unreliable. And of course, the further ahead you plan, the less reliable it is.
So there's one circle of people who can afford their own (whole or partial) jet. There's one circle who just want reliable A to B.
What you're left with is people who have enough to make it a business, but not enough to charter a plane themselves.
So your market are price insensitive enough to be preparedto pay more, but also don't really plan their travel, or don't need to travel reliably. Which just seems like a vanishingly small group.
In other words, what you are selling is worse than commercial (planing and reliability) coupled with worse than private (no control over where or when).
Which leaves such a tiny sliver of a market, where brokers practically outnumber customers.
You'd think that, but it turns out not to be true. There are a lot of constraints even on the owner: weather, mechanical failure, crew members getting sick. And it's even worse for them because when something goes wrong it can be a lot harder to recover. When you're flying commercial, or even chartering, the worst-case scenario is a delay.
The only real benefit to owning a plane is that you can keep some of your stuff on board.
> a tiny sliver of a market, where brokers practically outnumber customers.
It depends. If you measure the market size in terms of customers that's probably true. If you measure it in terms of dollars, it's not. It's a question of: all else being equal, would you rather pay less than more? Most people say yes no matter how fundamentally price-insensitive they are.
Not sure whether you're asking whether that sentiment exists or if it's correct. But either way, there's no easy answer to that. If you don't believe that's not helpful, but on the other hand, if your beliefs don't align with reality that's not helpful either. It's possible to succeed without strong convictions, and it's possible to succeed with convictions that don't align with reality, but if you have to choose one or the other, believing in yourself is a better than believing in reality if your goal is material success. (Look at Donald Trump.)
This is not to say you can't make money at it. People make money on scams all the time. One might argue that it's a foundational element of the American economy. But when it comes to bitcoin, I understand the technology and its attendant risks too well for me to want to play that game.
I agree completely that BTC is basically a scam at this point, as are most of the top coins by market cap.
However, there are a few interesting cryptocurrency projects out there which are quietly getting better and better (ie, Nano). Do you have any interest in the potential of the field, or has BTC soured you on the whole thing?
That's a very hard question to answer because it depends on what you consider "that bathwater." I think using digital signatures is a win. But mining is a BIG lose IMHO. It is vastly better in every possible respect to rely on trusted third-parties. Even with bitcoin most people rely on TTPs because managing your own keys is fraught with all manner of peril.
> However, there are a few interesting cryptocurrency projects out there which are quietly getting better and better (ie, Nano). Do you have any interest in the potential of the field, or has BTC soured you on the whole thing?
I don't know anything about Nano. But the fact of the matter is that BTC is pretty much synonymous with crypto nowadays, and everything else (AFAICT) is riding on its coattails. No one would be taking any of it seriously if not for the fact that 1 BTC fetches USD100k or whatever it is nowadays.
About that:
https://blog.rongarret.info/2023/04/bitcoins-value-propositi...
(I'm the author, BTW.)
> and the fact that you can't easily reduce the amount of energy needed to mine is a feature, not a bug
We'll have to agree to disagree about that. Most people consider gross inefficiency a bug, especially when that inefficiency is a necessary part of the design.
This is an incredibly common pitfall that people fall into time and again. Hell, even I am getting these vibes with all that recent hype about deep learning - despite I am no stranger to academia (in another area and some years back).
> recent hype about deep learning
Does anyone really look at contemporary AI as a Platonic quest for objective truth? It seems to me that there is pretty widespread clarity about the fact that this is mostly a commercial endeavor. If you want to talk about Platonic quests for objective truth we should talk about, say, mathematics or fundamental physics.
I realize I have a tendency to romanticize some of the papers I read even if I fully understand intellectually it is a wrong thing to do. Probably I should try concsiously train myself not to do it or something along these lines.
My experience tells me if I have a question or an issue it's very unlikely to be unique to myself. And (re-)reading an honest or even cynical account about something typically helps e.g. ribbonfarm on corporate hierarchies/politics.
https://blog.rongarret.info/2025/01/an-open-letter-to-democr...
> And I think my current happiness stems mainly from the fact that I like the person I've become, someone who can fail again and again and again and again and still find a way, for the most part, to be happy.
Curious if you have any other learnings that are less specific to a particular endeavour but hold tru/derive from your experiences across all of them
Startups changing their plan is normal and expected. The investors have board seats and leverage if they don't like the pivot.
And of course that 1990s recession ended in March 1991, in roughly the middle of Mr. Bush’s term (he left office in late January 1993): one might just as well refer to ‘the first Bush recovery.’ Neither moniker is really accurate: ‘early 1990s recession’ is best.
Such a painful thing to realize, this is also the reason why I never attempted to do a PhD.
Americans are weird :)
Brilliant ideas are not enough. You also need a brilliant mindset, vision and execution. And the help of a sensible co-founder if needed along the way.
As I understand it, the competitor in this space is Anaplan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability_company
> The owners of the LLC, called members, are protected from some or all liability for acts and debts of the LLC, depending on state shield laws.
But to start a company you need some cash injection, that can come from your personal finances. Now you could get a personal loan to then inject into your company, which would make you personally liable for said loan. Personal loans are easier to get than company loans (because you can't default on them as easily), but I never heard anyone do that.
Usually you are only personally liable if you commit some sort of crime like fraud.
Having a fallback scenario doesn’t allow for the complete focus and ruthlessness to succeed at company building.
Weirdly I know the SVP Eng at that Virgin charter company.
The great thing about this article is that they talk about startups dying before they even really start …
I think this is the common case that’s never talked about.
They usually dont want to tell founders this, they want them to struggle through in the off chance it works
It's noteworthy that he's portraying selling before launch as a failure, and while ultimately the acquirer didn't follow his vision and the business didn't pan out (and perhaps the author never even got to liquidate his shares), it's still arguably more of a success than Loopt (raised $39M, sold for $43.4M), which Sam Altman and his backers had no reservations about portraying as a huge success that springboarded him to YC president and later to AI kingmaker.
I assume the purpose of the startup is to make money and hopefully make more than the alternative of just getting a job.
If my priority stack is “be a successful founder” over all else and I fail at doing so, how am I not a failure based on my own criteria?
In this thread are numerous nuanced disagreements with people sharing pros and cons of difficult life choices they made. I would suggest reading and reconciling these comments with your own life experience and values, in the best possible faith.
If you have zero interest in startups. These threads and this forum might not be of interest to you.
Looking at the 30 submissions on the front page of HN right now, only 2 are related to startups. This one and a submissions by YC itself…
why the hell those two?
I eventually - into my thirties- worked out that i wanted to be a good computer programmer, and a good photographer. managed the first, but not the tatter - two bored.
What I mean, is why did you have those ambitions growing up. I don't think most normal young people really can't think what they want to do until later in their lives.
I would guess to be free to pursue interesting ideas, and then make money off them.
just my opinion, and not to badmouth, but this sounds like a somewhat insecure person.
Tenured (metric) + professor (activity).
He defined his, same as you did:
Good (metric) + programmer (activity)
The activity is just what people find interesting and the metric is what you strive toward. Imposing the idea that the only reason you pursue originality is so that they can't get sacked is a very wild take.
Good question. I could probably write an entire essay about that but the TL;DR is that I thought that tenure and financial independence were the roads to freedom, which is what I really wanted. I also really liked (and still do) the college vibe, being surrounded by interesting people thinking and talking about interesting and weird stuff.
Guess my question is did you have any plans what to do with that freedom? Or did the vision just stop with freedom?
Must be I was less ambitious than you. I too started out with goal of tenure and financial independence. 3 years in on tenure track I figured it was easier just to get financial independence and give myself tenure than to play someone's game.
One I reached financial independence (probably a much lower threshold than your), I didn't have any trouble find trouble finding things to fill my days with fulfilling activities that I had long put off. Always fun stuff to learn.
So interested to learn if it was that you still had something you felt you had to prove? Just plan inertia?
Can really put my finger on it, but what if in "I am (not) a failure" essay in addition "Lesson Learned" for each attempt, you had a "Joy Experienced" (perhaps too corny) section as well.
Yes. I was going to solve really hard problems without any pointy-haired bosses standing in my way. I was specifically going to solve AI.
> So interested to learn if it was that you still had something you felt you had to prove?
It started out that way, but now I've ended up feeling like I gave it my best shot, and so I failed because I discovered my own limitations rather than any external circumstances (with the notable exception of Smart Charter). And I'm OK with that.
> what if ... you had a "Joy Experienced" (perhaps too corny) section as well.
What I find has given me the biggest dopamine rush over the years is getting something to work, especially after beating on it for a long time. And that includes small wins like fixing a bug in personal code that no one is ever going to see, or fixing something around the house, or getting something I've written on the front page of HN and seeing it well-received. The best way I can think of to characterize it is that I like to feel useful. I don't think I'm alone in that.