Why I Dropped Out Of YC
wikichen.is
wikichen.is
If you want to play the game, you better be mentally prepared for dealing with a lot of shit. Egos are going to clash. Friendships are going to be strained. Stress is going to occur. To use one of my favorite quotes my dad always said to me, "that is life in the big city". Startups are not romantic -- they are a slog.
But... if you are building something you want to build, it can be worth it. Just don't expect it to be easy.
At the end, when things suck (and they will totally suck), and you have to drive hard, you gotta know that the people who are with you, are those you can be with the next 8-10 years.
I feel the best way working with others on a startup is to stop focusing on being right, or trying to prove yourself to others, and just focus on product-market fit, revenue, growth, etc. If you're going to be made a fool, but the product succeeds, then so be it.
One day your on a huge blog/well known publication and your traffic is going nuts. The next day its all gone.
One day your celebrating your investment/funding win. The next your struggling to find more money and or accept it's not going to happen.
One day your invited to demo your latest tech to one of the big tech firms thinking it's your big win you've worked years for. The next you realize/wonder damn did they just steal our hard work - why did they treat us like garbage?
So many ups and downs. Sometimes you just want to give up, but you don't because this what you love to do and if you stop/give up on one tech idea you'll get restless and do another!
If you think it doesn't matter, you're wrong.
The functioning of ideology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology
Silicon Valley has its own ideology, and HN is the center of it. Any statement of "...is awesome" is a good candidate for finding the foundations of this ideology. Any good ideology has to encompass a diversity of views to survive. In this case, we see the public prostration of the spat out soul who voluntarily subjects their weakness to the crowd in the name of self-development. Addressing whether this is a good or bad thing would be to enter into the terms of which this particular ideology functions.
Most ideologies typically benefit a certain class of people: clergy, politicians, a bureaucracy, academia, venture capital.
When you see "community X is awesome" posted within community X, it's mostly a recent convert looking back and realizing that wherever they just came from was a comparatively bad fit for their personality and views.
I hear it a lot, here, from hackers switching from /r/programming to HN. I hear it on LessWrong from people who came from, for example, the atheist community, or the skeptic community, and didn't realize it was possible to talk about those subjects without constant dick-waving and chest-beating regarding their respective out-groups.
Either way, it's almost the opposite reaction to what you're accusing it of being: it's not like joining a cult; it's more like leaving high-school and realizing you can make friends with people because they talk about things you like, and behave in ways that don't annoy you, instead of just putting up with them because they're constantly forced to be around you for six hours a day.
Start-up life keep it coming. I've rode your high and lows and will continue to do so til the end!
your => you're * 2
rode => ridden
Again, why not get it right, since there's no doubt you can?
The same happened with the article: too well written to be enjoyable. You could feel the effort in finding clever ways to say simple things.
The fact that you didn't thank him for taking the time to help you, makes me think that for you self improvement is less important than looking smart. As he said, <I'm not knocking you down but trying to help you from making trivial mistakes that change people's perception and distract and detract from the important things> That explains it perfectly.
Drew Houston writes without capitalization. Would you say the same to him? Ideas are what matter, not apostrophes.
On your second point, I think there's a clear difference between consistent lack of capitalization that is obviously a stylistic quirk, and simply using a homophone because you don't know (or, I guess as it turns out, don't care) that you're doing so. This is a common mistake and not usually due to ESL/EAL.
But I won't do it again, as it evidently is not a net good in this medium. Sorry, folks.
Thank you for informing me. Now that I know this, I'll look more seriously at Dropbox alternatives. This degree of carelessness and disrespect for others is dangerous in the CEO of a company asking me to trust them with my data.
What I don't see is a lot of founders who are bad at written communication. Maybe it's self-selection (those who can't write are less likely to try to write online, so I won't see them as frequently, if ever), but it really seems like being good at written English is a requirement for being a successful tech entrepreneur now. "Good at written English" doesn't necessarily mean perfectly idiomatic and grammatical American College English, but clear and persuasive when the reader is fluent in (American, College, Middle/Upper class, Standard) English.
The nice thing is written English is much easier for "tech people" to learn; the best training is reading lots of well-written English, and you need to do that to participate in the technology and startup world anyway. The keys are: 1) having good source material (there's a tipping point, like some sizable non-US English communities -- which is why Singlish is a thing) 2) actually caring.
Replace Drew's intentional lack of capitalization with this "your/you're swap," and you've got the same situation.
It seems like people are just prejudiced, and are so prejudiced that they feel justified in calling people out on a forum under the guise of "helping" them.
Yes, grammar is powerful, but this isn't a situation where it matters. They were expressing empathy. They weren't writing a press release. And we can't seem to find it in ourselves to avoid bikeshedding this thread.
"how is babby formed" type stuff is what is incomprehensible.
"How is babby formed" is still generally a bad question, marginally worse than "Where do babies come from?", in that it's unclear if the focus is impregnation or gestation, and "babby" could be potentially misinterpreted as "babble".
IMO OP was borderline "bad at written communication" too, at least if the goal was to convey factual details of the situation. It was entertaining, but unclear. Sometimes obscuring key details is the goal, but generally not in technical or business writing.
The point you're trying to make is based on the mistaken assumption that they were being unclear. They weren't. Nothing was obscured. No one seriously believed that they meant to imply ownership instead of "you are."
They also weren't doing technical or business writing. It was empathy, which is sometimes helpful.
At the very least, not making an effort to use the correct word is extremely disrespectful of your audience and their time.
When you're in a situation when your message is competing with others, the clearer wording will out-compete muddled wording. That could be in advertising, recruiting, pitching, evangelizing, or any number of places where you want to influence the reader in some way. Every Joule they waste puzzling out your words is one they won't use being influenced (positively) by your message.
How often do you see you're/your confused in professional advertising or press releases? Very rarely.
When learning a language, I love gentle corrections to the many inevitable faults, and wish people would do it more often, because it helps you improve. Perhaps that varies with the person, but please don't interpret them as insults or bikeshedding to reinforce someone's ego, as they very rarely are. Communication is also about authority, tone and style, so just being able to guess what someone meant is not always good enough.
This was just a small note to this person about a repeated mistake which is undermining their credibility. If they take note, their communication will be improved for the rest of their life by not confusing these two homophones.
I doubt that "your" and "you're" are homophones in most other languages. As a native English speaker myself, I often slip up and write "your" when I mean "you're" because they both sound the same in my head and it's quicker to type "your".
I think that a non-native speaker would be less like to make this mistake, because it requires the writer to decide to contract the pronoun and the verb and then forget to use an apostrophe.
I think this is far more likely to happen if you're simply typing out a stream of consciousness than if you're translating your thoughts from a different language.
Another reason non-natives don't do this mistake might be that usually they are thought the written language first, so schools concentrate on grammatical issues more.
As the parent commenter said, I've also noticed in the past that this mix up occurs usually among native English speakers. I've noticed it with other languages too, that native speakers often mix up homophones, probably because as a native speaker you write as you would speak and either you don't care or don't even think about it.
I agree with the other comment that this thread is toxic. I didn't intend that. I guess I learned a lesson.
It may seem obvious, but I never before considered how the simple grammatical mistakes I frequently make disproportionately hinder the ability of non-native speakers to efficiently comprehend my posts.
Your comment has given me an extra incentive to carefully proofread my future HN comments before posting.
This:
> "it's the underlying thoughts however spelt that matter."
is not true. You didn't write your post in txtspk because that is not the locally acceptable way of communicating. It could be comprehensible, unambiguous and require less typing, but it just doesn't meet the tacitly agreed standards in this community and you would not expect your ideas to have the impact they deserve if you chose to write that way.
Daniel Kahneman refers to this as "cognitive ease" vs. "cognitive strain". Making your writing correct and easy to read increases cognitive ease, which makes your readers "like what [they] see, believe what [they] hear, trust [their] intuitions and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar." [2]
Grammar is important for making a good impression as well, but that's really not the key selling point, especially for anyone in business. The key point is that if you want to persuade anyone of anything, whether it's to invest in your startup, to buy your product, or to leave their cushy Google job to work for you, you will be more persuasive if you use proper grammar.
[1] "Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Affective Judgments" http://psy2.ucsd.edu/~pwinkiel/reber-winkielman-schwarz-Flue...
[2] Thinking Fast and Slow
In my experience, if you love technology and tinkering, you should absolutely not work at a startup.
In the first years, a startup's main objective is results, results, results. Now is not the time to play with the latest node.js module, it's about picking the technology that will allow you to reach your goal the fastest, period. Compromise on that and another startup built on PHP will beat you to the punch.
If you love tinkering, join a big company. Spend a few months there to prove yourself to your colleagues and superiors and once you have that, you will have no problems carving out a comfortable 20% time that only you know about that you can use to tinker with the latest hotness.
Just don't do that at a startup, or be prepared to be the reason why the startup failed.
However, to me love of technology is not playing with the latest node.js modules. While node.js is not my cup of tea, I can see how that be fun (I enjoy playing with the latest OCaml libraries, C++11 features, golang, etc..), but ultimately that alone isn't about technology. To me building technology is about reading a paper, extracting the core ideas, and applying them knowledge to implement a feature customers and no competitors offer is.
If we take this definition of technology, then there's plenty of place in startups for people who love technology. It depends on what the startup is building: if innovative technology (as opposed to an innovative business model) is at the core of the company's product, it's a great place for technologists. (There is of course nothing wrong with innovative business models -- nor are innovative business models mutually exclusive with innovative technologies; indeed, some of the greatest companies have combined the two!)
Now with big companies it is absolutely true that even if technology is not the core, challenges around availability, scalability, performance, etc... necessitate more than a trivial investment in technology.
"Startup" and "big company" are also not binary. I've joined LinkedIn when it was may be 200-300 people and even then we were solving some rather tough technical problems (you can read about some of the problems we solved in this paper that was accepted to USENIX FAST -- http://static.usenix.org/events/fast/tech/full_papers/Sumbal...). Although, the focus would have been more immediate had I joined LinkedIn when it was a 10 person startup -- but even at fairly early stages, the team was solving problems related to search and graph traversal, etc...)
There are people writing line of business code in 5000 person companies and there are people implementing query optimizers in FPGA in 10 person startups. It's very hard to make any generalizations and make categerical statements such as "if you love technology and tinkering, you should absolutely not work at a startup" or "to enjoy startups you have to love technology" (there are plenty of great startups founded by people who loved something more than they loved technology -- and these startups have made my life much more enjoyable as well!) I've done work that I am proud of in companies ranging in size from 15 to 14,000 people and learned tons in all of these environments (with various trade offs for companies of different sizes).
(Shameless plug: I hack on distributed systems in C++ at Cloudera -- and we do plenty of other cool things, despite not being a big company. Like distributed systems, databases/data stores, file systems, query processing, and more? Drop me a line.)
There are some exceptions for startups whose real pitch is precisely the R&D, and who are able to pull large amounts of up-front funding from investors who are willing to bet on the technological development. Tesla is one example, in part because Musk's large amount of self-funding meant it could afford to take a full 5 years between founding and product-to-market. Very few startups have 5-year R&D runways, though; if you want to do R&D on that timescale you're usually better off at a place like Google or MSR, in parts of academia, or even a big engineering company (BBN, Lockheed, Intel, etc.).
Startups are the best hope for R&D to make it out of the lab. You have been brainwashed by the Lean Startup movement. It's a good strategy but it is not the only way to skin the cat, and if you are looking to change the world it's probably a bad way to do it.
Look at the greatest companies that have come out of Silicon Valley over the last several decades, and you will see companies which started out with products that took a lot of time, capital, and R&D to launch. The two largest market cap companies in the world, Google and Apple, were not created through the Lean Startup approach of throwing together existing technology and pivoting around trying to find a local optimum, but came about from the hope that if you spend your time up front, get investment, do the R&D and hard work, and build something with an eye towards the future, you will be rewarded. Intel. HP. Microsoft. Should I keep listing companies that did big R&D up front?
Who do you think is more likely to change the world, the latest startup that throws together some B2B app on AWS with no vision and just is trying to find product market fit, get their Google acquisition, and live happily ever after, or companies like Oculus, Meta, MakerBot, hell even Soylent, who have put in serious big-bet, R&D, and say lets shoot for the moon or lose everything trying? I'm not saying that the lean startup approach shouldn't be done ever, but to get up and claim that startups are not the place for R&D basically goes against everything that makes Silicon Valley an amazing place. If this is the mentality that comes out of the pop-culture-ization of startup life I don't want to be a part of it.
I think startups can indeed be a good way to take existing R&D and productize it, i.e. "make it out of the lab", but I don't think they develop a lot of it.
For Microsoft the reference there was not their (extremely lucky) deal with MS-DOS but all of the other work they did: from the early BASIC days to the days of Windows where they did extensive R&D in order to leapfrog their competitors.
You ignored my other examples but the fact is that the Lean Startup approach to startups is a relatively new thing, only really fits for web-oriented startups where up front development costs are low thanks to SAAS and open source, and even then the companies you might be able to point to as definitive success stories are YC companies and maybe companies that are the latest round of tech IPOs taking a Lean slant on how they found their product market fit. Eric Reis's startup failed! Find me a biotech startup, find me an energy startup, find me a robotics or hardware startup that doesn't do R&D on day zero. The YC model of developing a web application using open source software and launching on Heroku to get revenue for a B2B need is a very narrow slice both in time and space of the way innovation happens. Hell, look at any legendarily successful software companies that aren't in the web sphere of the last 10 years, like iD Software, Adobe, Pixar, Wolfram, and so on and you see R&D focused companies from their beginning.
The approach of doing a university spinoff using your own tech is a model I do like, and I agree it's a way to develop new tech and also bring it out of the lab. But I think the academic part there is key: you get some R&D runway up front before you start the startup and need to make money, rather than doing a startup up-front. You can then "afford" to start the startup once at least some of the high-risk work has been done and you're reasonably close to a product. Since you mention Wolfram, that's probably an even better example of that than Google, given Wolfram's rather lengthy prologue to his startup: he spent 8 years at Caltech (1979-1987, first as PhD student, then as professor) developing the Symbolic Manipulation Program, a precursor to Mathematica. Then he spun off a company in 1987 and launched Mathematica in 1988. I don't think he would've been able to do the same kind of initial R&D in a startup as he was able to do at Caltech.
I'd think you'd want most or all of the experimenting to be out of the way.
Facebook started on PHP and Google on C++.
The software innovations that these companies brought to the world didn't happen in the start up phase but years later, once they had grown sufficiently big that they had resources to devote to R&D in an effort to streamline and optimize their existing infrastructure.
I talk to a lot of startups on a daily basis, most of them are either built on Java or Ruby on Rails. I don't see any of them building their v1 with Clojure, Kotlin, Ceylon, Idris or Ermine or any technology created in the past five years.
tldr; hipsters will grossly overestimate their ability to "change the world" with that "brilliant idea" they had this morning in the shower, so starting a new company is pretty much the worst path to take, if you want to "tinker with technology".
You've listed people whose stories bear little resemblance to the vast majority of little tech startups that subsist on ramen and go through accelerators.
- Google: C++
- Microsoft: assembly
- Apple: assembly
- eBay/PayPal: Java/C++
Like I said, there is simply no room in the early years of a start up to experiment with recent technology. I'd go further and claim that it's actually critical to use older, established technology to get your startup off the ground so you can focus on your idea without being hampered by technological glitches.
Viaweb: lisp. ITA software: lisp.
It does mean that you need to be pragmatic and prepared to pick the sub-optimal choices and check your ego at the door for things to work well. You can love technology for what it lets you achieve without getting hung up in not having the ability to always do things perfectly.
If you can deal with that, chances are that if you pick a startup that is technically challenging you will also get to tinker. The constraints are just different.
I've certainly had people come into dev teams in startups and get annoyed at technology choices and constantly argue for changing them (one even tried to get me fired, and almost ended up getting fired himself as a result because the way he went about it backfired spectacularly) because they disagreed with choices that laid firm not because they necessarily were ideal any more - startups change quickly - but because they were good enough and taking the time or resources for a change would have been totally unacceptable.
If you're that guy who needs things to be perfect and who will put in lots of time and energy trying to change things that aren't perfect, then a startup is not right for you - you might get lucky and agree with everything, but more likely you'll find yourself endlessly frustrated because people refuse to listen to your suggestions to rewrite stuff unless they are necessary right now.
But even though I insist on the pragmatic choices in a startup, I've also had plenty of opportunities to tinker at startups. The issue is that you need to constantly think about what gets the job done most efficiently and fast, without too much technical debt, not what is ideal.
You also need to be an earlier employee to get that freedom at most startups - if you get in as one of the first few tech hires you have lots of freedom to make architectural decisions and tinker (as long as you're focused on the company goals. But then there certainly is a long period of slogging through things that might not be very exciting before the company (hopefully) gets large enough to be able to afford more unfocused/unstructured tinkering on the side as exploration again.
This need not be essentially true. Although delivering results is of highest priority, delivering "right" results is even more important, results that create your USP, results that set you way ahead of your competitors. And that requires right amount tinkering, if you want to call it that. And that tinkering is a lot of fun - to deliver world class results in the least amount of time possible.
If you want ownership (and by that I mean an equal say), you want to do a lifestyle business, not a startup. Once you start accepting other people's money, you get trapped into their expectations of an exit strategy.
That exit strategy ends in one of three ways:
1. Your startup is sold and either you have a regular job or you no longer have any say. Either way you hopefully have some money.
2. Your startup goes public, makes you very wealthy, and now you are beholden to the SEC, tax lawyers, accounting lawyers, etc.
3. Your startup fails and ends.
That's it. You may have a great idea, with scalable revenue, etc. But if you want control you have to fund it yourself. That's one reason why I doubt Efficito will ever take investment money (my co-founder and I are on the same page there) from outside parties.
Where startups are better is where you want help to achieve greater rewards and don't mind being beholden to investors. That's the decision that has to be made before even looking at incubators.
I think that there might be roughly three types of companies: those financially backed through equity, small passive-ish businesses that allow the owner to go off and live their "lifestyle", and boot-strapped (equity intact) active corporations.
Personally, I want to retain all equity/control and would choose to dominate the market rather than milk the profit margin.
Anyway, maybe I've missed the mark. I'd love to further flesh this out.
The difference is that you are interested in long-term earnings on your revenue, not in making it big by selling shares (either via the stock market or by selling the business). The real difference, I think, is that a lifestyle business is not for sale. And that's a deal breaker if by an investor you want to make money by selling your interest.
Investors won't touch a company with a 10 foot pole if they get a whiff of lifestyle corporation because they'll never get their investment back. But this doesn't make it a bad company, despite what you read around here on HN. In reality a lifestyle company can be just about the greatest, most satisfying and financially rewarding job that you can have. You just won't get any investor telling you that because there's nothing there for them.
It's not actually that they won't get their investment back. It's that they won't get it back in a form that really works for them. If I were to offer a VC an investment plan that would mean reliable payments of 30% of what they invested every year starting in five years and continuing forever, that would not be an attractive deal. Would they get their investment back many times over? Sure. But the thing is, it wouldn't happen all at once as a large payoff.
I just started taking an entrepreneurship class this week, and it has helped me understand that what I have been doing the last 15 years is entrepreneurship/life style business (I live in a low cost of living remote area, and just write and work remotely helping customers as I want to - I work relatively few hours per week and almost all of my work is pleasurable).
I compare my business with two friends who were at our house last night. One owns the best Mexican restaurant in town (for 30 years) and the other once owned a bunch of clothing stores. They are also entrepreneurs who have made decisions to work harder and earn more money than I will ever make. My point is that the fun is in making our own decisions about what we want out of life and our careers.
Here in Indonesia for example 70% of the nation is self-employed and the per capita GDP is <10% what it is in the US. However, the poorest Indonesians in Jakarta generally have more secure access to food and housing than a significant chunk of Americans.
Apparently, the company was stalling, and there were lots of disputes. It's a startup. I guess the author walked earlier than usual - that's either smart or dumb .... it's hard to know which without knowing more.
But there's not enough meat in the article to have a sane discussion on, other than making wild allegations about the author or YC or starups or Moleskin journals.
"…an irreconcilable working relationship rooted in fundamental differences in personalities and misaligned expectations of roles and responsibilities…"
"…the startup would never be something I could call my own, not just in stake but in equal say… …in this case the lack [of a sense of ownership] tore [the startup] apart…"
"…it just wasn’t fun anymore…"
More specifics about the irreconcilable clashes over roles and sense of ownership would have been great, but there's enough to see that there were unpleasant disagreements between friends that got worse rather than better over time, and it made more sense for the author to leave than others. Happens all the time among people with strong opinions and unclear areas-of-mutual-deference...
Yes and now get back into your comfort zone.
Sorry, to be harsh but I just couldn't figure out why you left whom--YC, your startup, your cofounders? And what's all about this Moleskine? Happy about any clue or tl;dr
People are brandwashed.
That's what I got from it anyway.
Of course I'm afraid I will fail, but I also don't think working at an office is fun, unless you get to work on a cool project and there's no politics (yeah right..) or something like that. But then if building a product yourself, on your own terms, with your own hands, etc, is not fun, then what is? And I don'mean to be rhetorical or sarcastic. I'm asking seriously.
With a lot of comments along the same lines as how hard it is because in the end it's business, what does it mean to build a product for fun, but where the business part is either not the most important part, or even present at all?
Would that be like building a product and giving it away, so it's actually only for fun?
If you could get into YC in 2008, you could almost certainly get one of any number of great jobs in the Bay Area, and could easily found a startup again (even with YC; depending on how exactly you left, it might be a positive).
On the bright side, he may have saved his former company's life by parting ways with it when he did. Early stage ventures past the incubator/accelerator stage don't seem to weather cofounder disputes without taking significant damage.
The strongest pressure is probably from cofounders, or from employees/customers (once you have those; you can also fire either), or from yourself.
But it isn't just that. They are locked into an exit strategy and they have to protect that interest. This is even true of the investors with the most honesty and integrity.
In other words, one would hope that an investor would not micromanage, but the investor is ultimately in it to make money and has a few small acceptable options to do that, so they are going to protect that interest. Money == power.
You can literally ignore the investors for at least the duration of the note (and probably longer) with no real repercussions. If you sell the company, they'll be able to get in line for money (and generally get paid first), but until Series A, investors have essentially no control to do anything.
In practice, being a dick to your investors (intentionally or unintentionally) is a bad idea (sorry! was busy!), as they usually will help you a lot more if they know how they can help you, but otherwise, it's pretty much at the bottom of concerns.
I don't think founding a startup is ever "easy", but it's incredibly fun for a lot of people.
> Maybe in the wake of a failed startup I deluded myself into thinking great teams are predicated on great friendships, a truism that no longer holds absolute truth.
> It was also the acceptance that the startup would never be something I could call my own, not just in stake but in equal say, that cemented my decision to walk away.
> and when you’re grinding away on an early stage venture with no pay, the enjoyment you derive from working with your partners is all you have.
(I'm also a YC dropout.)
Taking the new Moleskine from the shelf and removing it from its plastic wrap, I turned to the first blank page and picked up my pen.
Good luck on the next steps. One small suggestion, however: consider a Rhodia Webnotebook next time (I wrote about it here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/product-review-rhod...). It's more durable than Moleskines and the paper is consistently better. I use a pocket-size notebook but there are A4 versions too.
He could enjoy the ride just for fun.
Is YC fun? Not the dinners. The work you're there to do.
It seems like doing a successful startup is closer to this than to fun: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7222850
Maybe in the wake of a failed startup I deluded myself into thinking great teams are predicated on great friendships, a truism that no longer holds absolute truth.
Perhaps there's a misunderstanding of what a friendship is in a business context. The cofounders have to have been friends for quite awhile, otherwise the stress will tear them apart. But they probably don't have to be dear friends, or the kind of friend you hug. It's just business.
to those like me who held the institution on a pedestal
This seems the central issue. YC is ultimately about business. It's awesome, it's changed the world and my life, but having expectations that it's going to be fun and that you're there with dear friends seems off the mark. But I've never done YC, so this is just speculation on my part.
If you haven't done YC, how has it changed your life?
Dropbox has made my life a lot less stressful.
HN gives us all so many opportunities. For example, the monthly "who is hiring?" threads. If anyone is suddenly stricken with a run of bad luck, then they can make a post about it and the community will come together to at least offer them work. People here like talent, and can find ways to use it. Most other places aren't like that. And imagine a world with only Reddit.
Also, imagine a world with no HN and no Reddit.
YC has made seed funding more accessible, and given founders more power. The VC's had the upper hand before YC. Now the VCs seem to be closer to servants than masters. If I decide to do a startup, that will impact me.
Probably some other things I haven't thought of off hand.
Nothing important in life is easy. That being said, this is also figure of speech. I don't think it's overly enlightening to be literal in reading this. Things don't become fun when they are or become chores; like dirty laundry. {etc}. But who knows.
I've actually been in a similar position with an incubator startup-thing where my cofounders couldn't carry on working on what we (perhaps mostly I) initially set out to do. Working on anything else certainly feels like hot pants to me. But alas, I'm taking the other route and seeing what happens when I swallow my pride and decide to try learning about something that I think is otherwise bullshit. Just this one time though... can't let the rest of the world tell you to work on shit you don't want to work on forever ;)
Anyone else relate to this for an incubator-type thing? How did staying a path you didn't initially like vs. quitting work out for y'all?