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Comment by birken | Hacker News Reader

This post really misunderstands what both success and failure are.

Getting into YC or raising money isn't success. And trying an idea out for a few months before giving up on it isn't failure.

Building a success startup takes a long long time. Years. Lots of years. Maybe the idea is bad, but giving up on it after a couple of months really proves nothing. All it has proven is that the founders are the type of people that are readily willing to bail out at any moment, and that is a quality that doesn't lead to startup success. The "nightmare" described in this post is a joke compared to the depths some highly successful startups have gone through. Techcrunch wrote a bad story about me? Really? Try having to decide whether to lay off people to make payroll or having spent years on an idea only to still be not sure if it is working on not.

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Having been in an accelerator before, I definitely related to their sense of dread that they might mess up this opportunity and never be successful again because of it. Watching peers strike it big must have been super hard.

I quickly realized after that most "success" is exaggerated in the media, etc. and true success takes a lot longer than we expect. Raising $1M isn't success. Hell, raising $5-30M in today's climate isn't success. "Success" is such a vague concept that it's best to just focus on being happy and building cool shit and growing it year after year. It takes time.

>>"Success" is such a vague concept

Actually its not in terms of business.

Success = Profit + Long term sustainability in doing so.

Success can also be short term growth and being bought by a larger company, in this industry.

Success is the most loosely defined, illogical concept in the startup world. When your friends are raising big rounds, you think they are successful, even though most of them won't survive beyond the runway that round gives them (esp. at that stage).

Yet the media and the community celebrates founders for all sorts of things and call it "success" when it's not. So yes, it's incredibly vague, and the existence of an accounting formula means nothing in the founder psyche.

Actually it's not that either.

Success in a business context means a positive rate of return on the resources invested. Or to refine one step further, a return that is positive and superior to the next best alternative for the deployment of said resources at a given level of risk.

So Profit.

Profitability and return on investment are related concepts but are not the same thing.

Instagram, among many others, most certainly generated ample return on its initial invested resources without ever generating profits.

ROI /= Profit.

See Amazon (or as noted below, Instagram).

However I also think that is a problem for many people who want to startup. They don't usually think about how they'll show a profit and manage to run their business within that profit. Investor money gets them started and an exit by selling an unprofitable yet growing business to a larger company is the goal.

I think it was Patrick Collison who also spoke about 'impostor syndrome' when joining YC. I imagine this is probably quite common. The whole question of what it means to succeed or fail is interesting; OP's perception of failure contradicts what I thought was the common view in SV - that to 'fail' (i.e. not get funding) is part of a greater process of learning and enhancement. I also can't understand how a 21-year-old Stanford graduate who already has experience in the market he's about to launch in could ever feel he "must have just been lucky".

>I also can't understand how a 21-year-old Stanford graduate who already has experience in the market he's about to launch in could ever feel he "must have just been lucky".

You don't seem to understand how competitive YC is. Guys like that are a dime a dozen when your acceptance rate is less than 3%[1].

[1]http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-portfolio-stats

I completely understand how competitive YC is, I just find it hard to believe that anyone could doubt themself when they've attended one of the most prestigious universities in the world and also been accepted into the most selective startup accelerator. There's no 'luck' involved. This all takes immense talent.

> The "nightmare" described in this post is a joke compared to the depths some highly successful startups have gone through. Techcrunch wrote a bad story about me? Really?

From the narrative, it sounds like there's a causal link between the TechCrunch article and the startup forcibly being summoned to office hours to ask what the hell is going on. Which says more about YC/PG's policies than it does about the startup founders.

I realize the actual nightmare is that after a few months of all-night coding the founders didn't launch the next facebook, but still:

> We had much bigger problems than the piece, to be sure, but launching with an article that roundly mocked us was one of the final nails in the coffin.

Hint to startup founders: It doesn't matter if Techcrunch writes about you or what they write about you. If you are letting that affect your perception of your company in a large way, you are doing it wrong. Though to Techcrunch's credit, in this case they really did a good job of reporting.

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