Entrepreneurshit? Please.
blog.davidkatz.me
blog.davidkatz.me
And many small startups have a much worse cash situation than those fueled by VC but your post fails to consider that. Many of them have loans, sibling / parent money and the like. It's actually much harder on them.
Or how about physical or retail businesses? I know many non-tech entrepreneurs who have gone through personal bankruptcy due to this. Including my own parents. Which led them to get divorced.
Bitch, you don't know me. Don't assume you do.
I agree that VC funding is not the only path to stressful business, although it certainly helps a lot. In this sense, VC is a part of a larger problem - people's tendency to take on more risk than they should. I dare say that if more people lived and did business within their means, we'd all be calmer, have less bankruptcies, and maybe even less divorces.
It is very easy to read your post and come away with the feeling that being an entrepreneur is necessarily stressful, and that just isn't the case. It starts being stressful when you can't meet your obligations, and that mostly happens when your ability to meet your obligations is heavily dependent on circumstances you can't control - circumstances like relying on outside money.
Is VC better than loans from family? Most definitely, because by taking money from someone who fully appreciates their potential losses, everyone gets to be less emotional about the whole thing.
Still, I believe that by not taking any outside money, or extracting a heavy price from yourself, you get a shot at a significantly calmer variant of Entrepreneurship, and that's something people should know.
Mark, the method David says, purely bootstrapped, keep your day job until its profitable, no outside investors even family.... is the safer road and avoids many of the pitfalls you outline. Of course, you still have to worry about the market changing, losing a client, your cost structure vs your competitors, and the like. All the things that your current boss worries about, you get to inherit.
But also the VC, angel, or other investor method gives you cash up front to put off some worries on day 1, but as Mark says, when you hire someone, you have to look them in the face knowing you only have 6 months cash in the bank.
With the bootstrap method, you only have 1 week cash in the bank.
Both can be stressful. I guess having other people depending on you besides yourself is less stressful in some ways, but also less (0) chance of a home run exit.
Knowing that progress on your startup is slowed because of having to keep a day job creates its own unique type of stress.
You're a well known and well respected entrepreneur turned VC (as opposed to VCs that have never seen the pain of being an entrepreneur themselves) so I doubt that anyone is going to take the "bitch please" part too seriously.
Ofcourse not being at the receiving end of that post maybe my perspective is different and I'd react similarly.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=bitch+please+meme&hl=en&...
"we have closed $150 million in our 4th fund...now you know why I’ve had many nights away, many airports and much time on the road."
"Raise money. Need money. More money. Yes, please give me money. "
"I mean you never know if your investors are REALLY going to keep backing you. "
"If I told my VCs would they then lose interest in our next round? "
Your slides are from Seedcon which is all about VC.
Almost nothing about making money from paying customers. Almost no worry about if customers are really going to keep backing you, or keep interested. Almost entirely about keeping VCs happy.
Please don't justify things on your blog for what other people think about the title or your article, we live in a free world and we are free to speak out our minds without justifying or being bullied by anyone else.
Really, it's a great article. Thank you very much for writing.
I did too, as in Suster's post this is responding too, he links to a concept he calls 'conference ho'. Its interesting that both that post and this one have a misogynistic language element.
To me, the original post came across as encouragement to all the founders who feel like they are the only ones busting their butts and still feel stuck.
I felt this particular excerpt from your blog post though was a bit unfair to Suster:
> Suster (who’s a VC now) won’t take his own advice though, because:
> > Of course I do [want to be a founder again]! How could you not want to go back to it. It’s addicting. It’s an adrenaline rush like no other.
because in his post, he also says:
> Yet one day you wake up and you realize you can’t run as fast as the young guys. You can’t quite hit the 3-pointers as often. Yes, you have maturity that makes you a wiser player. But you realize that you can be more helpful as a coach.
And yes, I sleep better at night as a coach. And I’m happy as a VC.
"His advice" isn't for everyone to be a founder. I think it was just a pep talk, like: "If you feel like you're spinning your wheels going nowhere and everyone else is a rock star, don't worry, you're not alone. That's how everyone does it."
I don't know Mark or anyone he has invested in, nor am I particularly tied to him. However, it felt a little strong when you issued this warning:
> be careful around VCs like Suster, who’d love to give you heaps of money so you can get up at 4:50am and get a heart attack every time your money starts to run out.
Keep writing. I like your style and I think its great when people write. Just leaving my honest feedback as well because I felt some of the aggression was unwarranted.
When I said 'be careful around VCs like Suster', I didn't actually mean anything about Suster in particular. I'm sure Suster is a great guy, and that he does his best to help entrepreneurs succeed.
You need to be careful with VCs like you need to be careful with casinos. Both enable you to take higher risks than you usually would. Sometimes you'll want high risk, and that's fine, but don't get blinded into thinking that it's the only way.
Starting a high-growth startup is a risky, stressful endeavor. If you want to start a business that is not high-growth that is bootstrapped and grows slow but steady, great! That can result in an awesome financial outcome for you personally. Some people enjoy chasing hyper-growth and the risks that go with it, that doesn't make the OPs post wrong, it just means it applies to a different type of business and a different type of entrepreneur.
Why exactly does building enabling IT platforms (let alone other technological advancements) require multiple rounds of funding from outside investors and a pathological focus on growth with no regard for sustainable structures and profitability?
http://www.crunchbase.com/funding-rounds?page=1
Mobile-PC syncing of videos. Mobile-PC syncing of contacts. A way to save your child's artwork. Yet another payment solution. Yet another e-signature solution. Fine businesses, I'm sure, but nothing that's worth dying for.
The Silicon Valley hype cycle creates a lot of unnecessary drama. I can agree with you a little, in that people doing big things will sometimes experience big drama. But too many people, VCs included, work that equation backwards: big drama is a great indicator of doing big things!
As far as I can tell, most of the drama is just macho idiocy.
"Bitch Please" is a response to when someone says something stupid. A man or a woman can say this stupid thing. The phrase works just fine either way. The fact this was one guy responding to a blog post made by another guy further reenforces this.
It's tiring hearing this stuff so often. Its like the Ruby Conference news yesterday.. turns out the best speakers available for this event were white guys. Well, they are either misogynists or racists.. probably both!
Today.. people feel we need to protect and/or distance ourselves from a call of sexism before it is even made. Its a sad state of affairs.
Kind of annoyed this needs to be pointed out, even though I know exactly why you did it.
(Just like it would be inappropriate to see n-----. It's unnecessary and easy to edit out.)
"You're a b." You read it aloud in your head right?
So I do it. Good to assimilate improvements to the way you do things. Better than people who stubbornly keep doing things the old way. I see this all the time in programming, in business... I'm used to people who fight self-improvement, and try to form friendships with those who don't. Why is it better to argue about it and keep screwing up, rather than simply take a sec to edit a bit of text?
Sure, it's an ugly word but the sun hasn't exploded yet from anyone calling anyone by that word, not in 200 years. So why do we still demonize it?
I go to tech conferences and usually the only females are wives, waitstaff and salespeople. In Ruby talks, I've seen pictures of objectified, near-naked (even fully naked) females. You can support this, but I'm not.
We don't live in some egalitarian utopia. If we did, those words might be quaint. As it is, there's loads of gender violence and injustice. If you don't agree, fine; that's why there's activism. (That recent Ruby conference maybe shouldn't have been cancelled, unless there's something I haven't heard about. But certainly it does show that it's possible to strike back against stubborn misogynists.)
The word "bitch" can mean a female dog, it can refer to the act of complaining (i.e. "stop bitching, Ron"), an annoying person-male or female ("Man, Ron sure is acting like a complaining bitch" or "Wow, that Cheryl sure knows who to be a bitch"), a frowned upon act ("Ron that sure was a bitch move to sell out your coworkers like that"). The word bitch in its versatility doesn't serve to single out one group of people; it's used to describe a lot of things.
Now tell me how has the word 'nigger' been used and how people react to "Stop being a little nigger" versus "Stop being a little bitch"? Saying the two are one in the same is trying to force PC into an affair just so you can say you waved the PC flag by comparing one word to another when it doesn't work. Grow up and stop acting like someone's word choice somehow inhibits your ability to live a normal life.
Or the entrepreneur you can relate to doesn't have any customers?
There is nothing wrong with this, of course. Plenty of companies and entrepreneurs work this way. I am just not familiar with it.
My company did not seek venture funding, but I don't feel that changes the dynamic of Mark's post as it relates to me. There's something in there for everybody.
If you're going to do high risk/high gain, it's warranted and good advice. But to imply that this is what entrepreneurship is like is unfortunate.
In reality, most entrepreneur experiences are frankly boring. It's just a lot of hard, sensible work mostly in a job that isn't terribly exciting to describe to strangers with growing financial stability along the way with maybe a few scary bumps in the road. Most software startups are more comparable to a food cart or the local nail salon than they are to nascent world-changing mega-corporations.
If Suster had written a post about the stress of VC funded startups, I'd have no beef at all.
When you want to build the next big thing, to change the World, etc., not simply to gain some income, building a high growth / high stress startup may be necessary.
"Bitch, please" has been a thing much longer than saying anything "is a meme" was itself a meme. This whole thing is drifting dangerously close to 'yo dawg' territory.
Sadly, my subjective brain still likes the ring of the phrases. "Science: it works, earthlings!" sounds just a little too geeky, and "humans!" doesn't seems to ring true either. And "Children, please..." irritates me from an age-discrimination perspective (I'm a firm believer that if we patronised our children less, I'm sure there'd be less extremism and fundamentalism in the world.)
curse my sexist, subjective brain! :/
Most Americans despise "politicians". They like their representatives, but have a negative view of elected officials, because the amount of bullshit (fundraising, campaigning) one has to put up with in exchange for the returns is so immense that the assumption is that no one would do it without an ego the size of Texas. The assumption is that politicians are either monstrously egotistical, or taking something out of society (speaking fees, "consulting" options for their kids) on the side that would justify the absurdity.
"Entrepreneurshit" reminds us that VC-istan startup founding isn't much different. There are some good Founders out there, but they're basically private-sector politicians. To be frank, I agree with this assessment. One caveat: if you're rich enough to own your own time and career (instead of having to rent them from a boss) then I think the entrepreneurial path is superior in long-term expectancy, and you can afford the variance. But in that scenario, I'd probably boot-strap. Multiple liquidation preferences and participating preferred are for strivers and poors, yo.
I don't know that client-powered, "bootstrapped" companies can claim moral superiority, either. Mad Men is a good depiction of the sociology of that world. The industries have changed; people, much less. Most of those firms are had by the balls by clients (losing a big client triggers an avalanche of pull-outs) and that's no better than being beholden to investors.
The contemporary "startup" ethos is admirable in many ways but it's also chock full of ridiculous and embarrassing contradictions-- meritocracy vs. the extreme importance of connections; "this will be big" vs. taking an acq-hire welfare check, "changing the world" vs. the patent absurdity of many "social media" companies-- and if we want it to be more than a self-devouring fad, we need to have a real conversation about what kind of leadership we need, as a society, whether we are getting what we want in terms of leaders (I honestly don't know) and, if not, what we should do to change that.