The Startup Life Is Not For Everyone

"One thing that is not spoken about in the early-stage tech world is how many startup founders come from money or stability. I’m by no means saying this applies to all founders or early-stage startup employees. But if you dig a little, you will see the “risk” that some of these people are taking is not as risky as they may seem."

This is really true. The business risk may be very real, but the personal risk for many is relatively limited. For some people, going without a steady income is to truly be without a safety net and risk having to sleep in a shelter. For me, when I started my company, I went in knowing that if we ran out of money, I could get a nice dev job within a few weeks and not only bounce back, but bounce forward (or at least sideways). If things went really sour, I might even have to move back to my hometown for a couple months. Gasp!

In this world, agency is a privilege that's hard to measure. I feel like sometimes people underrate their own and mythologize their self-madeness, but overrate that of others and pathologize them as lazy or cowardly.

As a 46 year old, white male with almost 20 years of IT experience, what I hear a lot of these startups saying is, "We don't really give a shit about you, your life or your time. We want to suck out a decades worth of input in 2-3 years and when you burn out, fuck you. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out."

Who wants to live like that? These expectations will continue to gradually get WORSE...if you can imagine that. Until (and if) they run out of new recruits who don't know any better.

The fact that a startup founder tweeted "disappointment" about a very personal choice that a developer made makes me inclined to believe that I would run very, very, very far away from working for this person.

The cool thing about starting your own business is that you can build it however you like.

You can work 80 hour weeks or 10 hour weeks. Your choice. You can neglect your friends, family and health, and work yourself into the ground. Or not. Again, entirely up to you.

Surprisingly, the end result will probably be roughly the same. If you're good at building software, and work in bursts like most of us do, then a few good deep sessions a week will get your thing built plenty fast. And since so much of the other 90% of building a successful business is measured in "calendar time", it really doesn't hurt much if you don't get in 60 good hours one week.

Naturally, if you take VC money, they might prefer you do things the "normal" way. Fortunately, that's another thing you get to decide whether you want to do.

Frankly, I'm surprised the attitude of many people seems to be: "I'm going to work at an established company for X years to get experience, then break off to start my own."

Then they write blog posts and postmortems about how they lost their friends and spouses, became horribly unhealthy and severely depressed. But it was worth it in the end, of course.

The article talks about startup founders having low risk because of money and stability, and that's absolutely true in my experience (especially of people who jump into startups immediately out of college).

What the article fails to mention, and I think is just as important, is that the RELATIVE risk of the startup lifestyle continues to decline as traditional, "stable" jobs slowly become a thing of the past. I'm part of a small (but growing) freelancer agency, and when I try to convince others to join my firm, relative risk is a large part of my pitch.

When the "safe" option is to work at a bank or consulting firm, is it really all that safe? Many students think so, but have to be reminded that some of these firms average less than two years of tenure per new employee. Large tech companies have been somewhat safe over the past 5-10 years, but still put you at the mercy of corporate-scale layoffs that may have more to do with your product and the company's finances than your skills.

In a startup or small company, the risks are much more upfront and come with corresponding compensation, usually in the form of equity with growth potential. Large companies typically do not reward their employees for the risk they assume, because there is a perpetuated assumption that they provide a high level of security. So if we're all forced to bear a high level of risk, at least we should be compensated for it.

This is an interesting perspective. However, I come for a different vantage point: I'm a terrible employee and I feel that the world worked hard to force a "corporate career path" on the wrong guy for years. Perhaps startup life should be always an anomaly because it isn't for everyone, but it's the only place I've ever felt like I was a meaningful part of meaningful work.

I do think it's still underrepresented as an option, though that appears to be improving. Also, access to investment and radically cheaper startup costs have made this very difficult path just a little less difficult. I think it's an amazing time to start something, an amazing time to be an indy developer. I also think these early-stage laboratories will help replenish some of the SMBs America has lost on the street corners. Maybe the days where you can make a living as a local grocer are gone. But the days to make a living as an innovative, startup grocery delivery service are just beginning.

EDIT: It's timely that the post immediately under this one on the front page is "Pushed to the limit as a banking intern". Maybe it's just my nature, but I didn't work less in a corporate environment. I was just more disconnected to my work and the results. I didn't feel the same impact.

One of the things we talk about a lot is how overtime and working more than 40-50 hours a week is always a management failure. We didn't raise enough money, or plan well enough, or get enough people, or understand what we were doing, etc. We work really really hard, but we make sure it's within those parameters, except in some really rare emergency scenarios.

During interviews, people always look at me like I have two heads when I try to actively talk them out of doing startup. It's not romantic, it's not horrible, it's just different. At different times people will be amenable to that lifestyle, but not always.

I get so tired of everyone talking about "startup life" and I think a lot of it is just tagalong marketing. We can't figure out ways of pumping up our businesses or what we're doing so we just tag onto this shiny intangible lifestyle that's already marketed by movies or other blogs.

Startup life has always been bullshit. Making cool things with great people has always been cool. No matter what stage you're doing that in.

A 'startup' need not be something in Silicon Valley, based on information technology, venture funded, and intended for an exit at $1+ billion.

Working at GM, GE, IBM, Cisco, or any of a long list of other famous, big companies tends to be a long walk on a short pier and not a 'career' with which one can get hired, buy a house, support a family, grow in prosperity, pay for college for the kids, and retire comfortably.

Why? Such a career needs to last about 45 years, and in all of the history of the US since the Industrial Revolution there has been only a tiny fraction of jobs in large corporations that could be the basis of such a career.

E.g., might have joined IBM in 1950 and then, 44 years later, lost the job when the company lost $16 billion and went from 407,000 employees down to 209,000 and cleared out rush hour traffic jams in a large chunk of Upstate NY. That was about the best shot at a 45 year career in IBM: Join before 1950? IBM was not much of a company then. Join IBM after 1950? Likely the job would last less than the 44 years of my example.

GM? Shipped most of its jobs out of the US, helped Detroit and much of Michigan and much of the Midwest Rust Belt look like a war zone, and went bankrupt.

GE? Discovered that good products made in Japan sold quantity 1 retail in the US for less than the direct, marginal manufacturing cost at GE, and GE closed down big chunks of their business.

So, what's keeping people in the US employed? Mostly small businesses, especially ones with a geographical barrier to entry. Such businesses do need to be started and, thus, are startups. The US has millions of such businesses all across the US in big cities down to towns that are just crossroads. Net, startups are most of what is keeping the US economy running.

So, the broad idea that startups are rare and strange with a lot of obscure aspects is a bit silly. E.g., long lists of points of tricky advice on just how to do a startup are a big silly for nearly all US startups. E.g., in my neighborhood, the guys mowing grass show up with a relatively new truck worth, say, $30,000, towing a trailer with at least one lawnmower worth maybe $15,000 -- could plug together quite a server farm for that much cash.

I think that while it's certainly not for everyone I think there's a powerful reason to overly emphasize and encourage it.

Not to promote needless suffering, but rather simply because, at the end of the day, they are one of the principle sparks that makes the other jobs possible. My relatively stable corporate existence, even if plagued by all the hallmarks of big dumb corporatism(s), is a blessing (and I do consider it a blessing, especially for where I'm at in my life) that was made possible by a key core of individuals who were the ignition points for the seeming stability I have access to now.

I believe that the very reason to push, even to some excess, even to the point of some idealizing, of start-up life is among a few vital needs that must be fulfilled in a society if that society has hopes to insure longer term availability of stable options among all possible economic paths.

Like industrialized agriculture, for all of it's ills, evils and problems, the shear population, as it exists and continues, demands some version, some manifestation, of a system that shares at least some of the key attributes.

Start-up culture is both the seeding and blood letting that makes stable private and public professions possible. In many ways it's the agriculture of our day. Subject to whims of forces akin to climate and nature, but who's volatility makes all the growth and upward movement possible.

What's all this gunk about "startups aren't for everyone, they're HARD WORK"?? A big-company job is hard work too, if you're a driven person.

Studies have shown that people are much happier when they're doing self-directed work.

I also think that lamenting losing talent to a bank might have more to do with the perceived negative value that modern banks bring to humanity.

I just did three startups, all back to back, in NYC. I needed a break and less risk in my life. I got a sudden mid-life urge to settle down so I moved to the suburbs and I now have an easy, well paying, enterprise job. No teams to manage, no insane schedules, no Sunday morning phone calls, no 80 hour weeks, no more high blood pressure or anxiety attacks. No equity either, but I'll sacrifice that now for my non-startup job. Just a 40 hour work week and great salary/benefits. I won't get rich. But I'm okay with that at this moment. I do want to start a business in the future, but it will be a lifestyle business where I can set my own hours and pick my projects.

In terms of what you said about risk, I think most of the time when people talk about a startup being a risk what they mean is that the business itself is risky, that it's most likely going to fail. While sometimes it might be the case most of the time I don't think people are talking about any personal or financial risk to the founders, though that's just my perception and what I've always understood it to be meant when people talked about risk in a startup. Of course, a founder can definitely take on some personal or financial risk in a startup but I've rarely seen or heard of cases like that, when we talk about startups most of the time we talk about some sortof VC funded entity. Although plenty of small businesses are funded by the business owner, but most small businesses aren't really "startups" either.

Finally, there is the risk of failure to the founders, which can be quite demoralizing and possibly personally devastating, especially if it's the first time. I think how much a failure would impact someone just depends on their personality and how easily they can mentally move on, even if it didn't have any major financial impact. I mean, it is quite a bit of time and effort that could be wasted on something that ultimately fails; unless you view it as a learning experience and draw the right lessons and are able to move on to the next thing, whether it's another startup or more stable employment at a company that already went through the risky phase and won.

Many aspects of this post somehow resonated with me. I spent many years in corporate employment because I don't have any backup options. I also feel like I've wasted some time where others learn more about business the hard way. I'm now part of a startup, after my last jobs were with banks, and I believe the route from startup to corporate or the other way around can lead to a similar destination. The only difference is what experience you bring to the table, and a wider range of it is better for everyone.

This is a straw man argument (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man).

No one is saying that startups are for everyone. People just say that they're undervalued. The upside is ignored (probably because of scope insensitivity [http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Scope_insensitivity]), and the risks are misunderstood.

Most folks work hard at any job, in this economy. Why not a startup, where you share equity?

There's a lot of FUD about startup life, but really its just work, except with ambitious peers and cool projects. Sure it might fail at any time, but so can any job (speaking as a guy laid off from Dell when Dell never laid people off).

I like this fable: we're surfing, swimming, diving off the coast. A big boat comes by, and the people lean over the rail and say "Hey! Get out of the water! There are sharks and fish and pointy coral in there! And you're getting all wet and hot! You will probably drown!"

You can laugh, and try to explain that is pretty easy to swim, and you're all looking out for each other, and sharks don't really attack people very often, but you will never ever convince those dry people on the boat that its ok, really, and actually pretty fun out there.

There are many paths other than "work as a corporate drone" or "go all in on a risky startup". There are a good number of resources out there which can help you figure out how to set up a small SaaS business online or become a consultant. For example, check out Patrick (patio11) McKenzie's blog, or the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast.

The thing is, if you read Hacker News, Tech Crunch, and the like, they give the impression that you need venture capital to be a success. This is due to editorial bias on the part of the site owners. Start looking farther afield and trying things on your own and you'll notice that the promotion of venture capital is quite self serving.

I honestly think that these days if you're young and are not an engineer or something similar that's got jobs chasing you, being an entrepreneur (not necessarily a startup) is the only option.

Also, people in general believe their choices are the best choices and will go to great lengths to tell everyone that their own choices were better. Just one of those gorgeous biases we've got.

I object to the whole context of an article that misuses the language to make its point.

No one is "forcing" anyone to pursue a startup life.

But no one is judging anyone, right?

The author also doesnt mention that "open desk" and round the cloack hackathons doesnt necessarily devlop the most creative or stable software. I've seen good stuff written at a more measured pace.

Stop writing about Stop something, only to get some visitors to your page.

If anybody stop doing something, because somebody said to stop, then nobody will do anything.

"IT IS NOT FOR EVERYONE."

whenever i hear "it's not for everyone" i always hear that little bit of condescension.

This is oversensitivity. No one has ever tried to force the startup life on me and if someone tried to shame me into it I would laugh in their face.

Now, if this were an article about established companies treating their employees like they were in a startup, you'd have something there.