What Startups Are Really Like
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
Now, step back: who here wants to say any variant of "That isn't the same thing!", "That isn't possible!", or "You are insufficiently dedicated and will never be truly successful!" You see, that is why startups take over your life: because you expect them to take over your life, everyone you know and talk to and model your behavior on expects them to take over your life, and if they're not taking over your life you are told you are doing something wrong.
I suspect from your description that your business is already successful and is a low risk of failure.
Many are happy to have a lifestyle business in addition to their full-time job, and feeling respected by posting on Joel on Software and these discussions. Others have opportunities, either because they are young and have college friends, or are older with money saved up and a list of industry contacts, to jump in on a new idea together. This dilutes ownership but allows one to iterate faster, and avoid being the only one outside of their customers who actually know and care about their product.
I suppose I could have worked slower and things might have turned out the same anyway. But probably not that much slower. And I certainly had no idea at the time how much margin for error I had.
Depending on your market segment, customers can be very demanding. If your web site goes down at midnight on Friday, you can't very well let it wait until Monday at 9:00 to put right, can you?
Investors have fronted you money on the expectation of explosive growth. If you don't deliver that growth, they might not be around the next time that you need cash.
In web-based businesses, speed is a major asset to keep you ahead of the competition. Hopefully, you've got a head start on the copy-cats, but there are more of them, and some of them might even be as smart as you.
Finally, there's personal drive -- as I think you've identified, start-ups do attract a certain personality type who aren't the kind to leave a job half-done and call it a day.
In closing, I would ask you a question -- you run a small business, but is it a start-up? PG has been pretty clear in many of his other essays that these two are not interchangeable. After all, the start-ups that are being discussed here are hoping not to be small businesses for long!
1. If your startup is succeeding wildly. If you were seeing amazing returns from your time(i.e. maybe you work 80 hours in a week but made $10,000 and growing or signed up 20,000 new users), it's hard to think about anything else. You realize that you have stumbled upon a rare opportunity and it's worth it to sacrifice other things for a short time.
OR
2. You don't know any better. The first time you do a startup it's hard to know if it's succeeding or not, and everything takes longer because you don't know what you're doing and you make more mistakes. But likely you've read tons of stories about startups that fit #1, and because you don't know any better you confuse cause and effect and think that working 100 hours is going to make your startup succeed.
These are the two good excuses that I can think of for dedicating a disproportionate amount of your time to your startup. My general advice is to not take it too seriously unless you've stumbled upon a number 1. Life is too short. And it's not too hard to do a startup and enjoy life at the same time if you don't make big mistakes.
I will. Your second and third obections are straw men, but the first sounds reasonable to me. I don't see a modestly demanding side-project from a day job (to use your terms) as quite the same thing as what the quotes in the OP are about.
You make a good point about some patterns being socially constructed. That could be a factor here, and an interesting one. But I think you spoil it by excessively extrapolating from your own situation. This is a more subtle question than that.
The startup I'm working on occupies the bulk of my life right now (I'm not sure I'd say "taken over", since it's a far from hostile occupation). I can't imagine doing what I'm doing in an arm's-length or part-time way, or even a full-time way in the 8-hours-a-day sense. It requires more creative energy and focus than anything I've worked on in the past. I can't turn that on and off. To try to fit it into a conventional rhythm would kill it. Certainly this has its downsides. But the conventional definitions of "balance" have their downsides too. The vast majority of people I observe whose lives are "balanced" by those definitions are simply not doing anything very ambitious or creative. Of course I'm not advocating imbalance as an alternative as such, but I do say that any real discussion of this question needs to take this fact into account. Most don't. (Find me one!) Most utter platitudes about "work-life balance" and stop there.
As an aside, listening to Tony Hsieh yesterday made a lightbulb go on about why I find the phrase "work-life balance" so... debasing. It's because it assumes that work is not life.
But I think your advice is specific to the model you've built and the output you are yielding. I don't remember the numbers but I think you are somewhere around 100k (or less) in yearly revenue? Startups, whether logical/warranted or not, seem to be aiming orders of magnitude more than this, yes?
This is equally true for what pg is saying, of course.
However I think that most good business ideas require enough work, and are in landscapes that change quickly enough, that they really do require a larger time dedication from someone.
your definition of small business seems to be the logical/literal one, which includes all businesses that start small, including lifestyle businesses (nothing wrong with that; it's just a different definition of the word, and a different kind of business).
/me rides off into sunset
I would say that the valley culture is an effect of hosting many startups, not the cause.
I´m a business wannabe from Brazil and i just laugh when i read that one. Here we dont have ANY chances of getting money from VCs so when we start something new, specially with technology, we never expect to get money. Ramen profit system is not an option at poor countries, it´s the law.
That attitude has served me well, I mean, I've had groups back out on us after they signed an agreement. What are we going to do? Lawyers cost to much and who wants to work with someone who doesn't want to work with us? Our customers are our partners and we love them--but if the feeling's not mutual I'd rather cut it off.
It's funny, I'm so optimistic about our success--I'm an entrepreneur after all--but I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop when closing a new customer.
BTW: I should mention that our customers are newspapers, who are notorious for taking a long time to make bad decisions . . . so when we close someone, it's time to break out the scotch.
You seem to recognize that you always have a position of your own: you don't merely have to take just about anything that happens to come in as you know you have better things to do as long as there isn't anything in it for you.
As a side note, does anyone have a transcript of Jason Fried's talk? His was another favorite of mine from yesterday.
I usually take the opposite approach: I should persist because PG says that single-founder startups don't work, and I'm going to prove him wrong, damnit.
You might get some good insight by observing a potential co-founder's behavior toward their romantic partner, or toward potential romantic partners if they're single.
I'm willing to bet that the majority of founders are single males who do not understand what marriage is all about. I have not had the experience of being part of a start-up, but I do have 6 years of marriage under my belt. I cannot imagine any circumstance where being someone's co-fonder is in any way like being married to them.
I'm a kind of bloke-ish girl, but even so I think I worry about feelings and opinions and perceptions a bit more - I bring that aspect of looking at situations to the startup. 'Course, my "job" is to code, whereas my cofounder is meant to be thinking about other people; it gets interesting.
There's also an entirely different dynamic: minority programmes. I took part in Astia, a women-in-business networking and training group. All the contacts from that equate the startup with me (the woman) and my cofounder's not being treated very well by them at all. (There are a few other reasons beyond gender there but it is something I doubt two-guy startups have to face!)
- My co-founder very intimate knowledge about me. My credit score. My favorite things. My political positions.
- My co-founder knows me well enough to manipulate me, if he wanted to.
- My co-founder is really aware of what a rotten person I can be.
- I can talk absolutely candidly with my co-founder. About anything. Even medical stuff.
- My co-founder almost certainly knows exactly what I'm doing right now, even though he's 1000 miles away from me.
It seems like trust and communication are fundamental to both romantic and cofounder relationships. Maybe you can't judge a founder after watching them try to drunkenly pick women up at a bar, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't a correlation between someone's ability to maintain successful relationships in both categories.
I suspect, however, that you refer to sucessful marriage, which could easily span several successful startups.
For example, if your co-founder only has 3 months of living expenses saved up, well you've got a deadline to get more money.
Plus in the YC-model startup, you're usually living in very close proximity with your co-founders, so you need to get along with them as roommates as well as partners.
One nitpicky little thing:
"If you are persistent, even problems that seem out of your control (i.e. immigration) seem to work themselves out."
Should be e.g., not i.e. I know its a quote and pg shouldn't fix it, but it drives me nuts when people get this wrong. i.e. is roughly equivalent to "in other words", and e.g. means "for example."
I was fraternity president for a while. I distinctly remember being surprised by this "feature" of my job. Especially when I am awoken at 3AM with news that a (fully sober) member had driven his truck into the lake across the street.
This job was the best experience I had prior to running a startup, and I'd never do it again.
If you live in Ohio, however, "I own a software company" goes a lot further. If only I were single...
It's not that we're too optimistic, it's that the process is so subtle that the English language is too coarse to describe it. For example, what exactly does it mean when someone says 95% of the VCs are incompetent? How exactly are they incompetent? To what degree and in what ways? What exactly do they do that makes them appear incompetent? If you've never talked to VCs before, reading that they're "incompetent" probably won't give you a good idea of what an average interaction with them is like.
It's sort of like describing what making love is like for the first time. Very eloquent people have written volumes on this, but it's far too subtle for a written or spoken language. Until you actually do it, you'll only have a very poor approximation in your mind of what it might be like, no matter how much you read. Startups are like that.
There was one surprise founders mentioned that I'd forgotten about: that outside the startup world, startup founders get no respect.
In social settings, I found that I got a lot more respect when I said, "I worked on Microsoft Office" instead of "I work at a small startup you've never heard of called x."
Partly this is because the rest of the world just doesn't get startups, and partly it's yet another consequence of the fact that most good startup ideas seem bad:
If you pitch your idea to a random person, 95% of the time you'll find the person instinctively thinks the idea will be a flop and you're wasting your time (although they probably won't say this directly).
Unfortunately this extends even to dating:
It surprised me that being a startup founder does not get you more admiration from women.
I did know about that, but I'd forgotten.
-- I totally agree with that. My previous job was in a startup, and when I told them "i worked on real-time location based mobile communication", and tried to explain what it was, it will usually go over the head.
Now I tell I write the software of Kindle, and girls just dig it. I also heard apple people that work on iphone/ipod get a lot of attention in parties. My dating life has improved a lot.
I was thinking why is this, but it might have to do with "everyone has a dream". As children we dream to be rich/famous artist/rockstar/soccer players, etc., but actually few people achieve this status. And girls, the good looking ones, during their lifes will get bombarded with "guys with dreams", and will see them more often to just fail, than go anywhere. So the dream/vision is just that, but normally doesn't pay the bills.
Plus, the "dream of a startup", it is a very selfish one.
While saying I "work for big corp/famous product", it makes you competent in their eyes, and as you achieved something tangible, and not just dreaming.
Maybe I am overanalyizing it, but girls just like a provider, than somebody with a 'dream', but nothing to show for it yet, unless your startup made it, and you have something famous to show.
when i tell people i work for my own company they're really impressed fwiw (in the uk) - I think tons of people can correlate with how terrible boring jobs are.
I am the opposite of your last sentence. A guy I like _has_ to have a dream/extreme passion. In fact, I prefer a-dream-and-broke, to no-dream-and-sweet-day-job. Either way I just like people who are focused and excited about stuff. That comes way before their job. (you hear that dudes in bands who sling coffee coz it lets you tour? i keed, i keed...)
On the other side of the equation, when i talk about my own entrepreneurial stuff, reaction is all over the place.
I think the main thing is that most people, guys and girls, have "a type" (i don't just mean looks, i mean style, subculture, humor, etc) And when when you approach people "cold," without knowing them through some other context (where you volunteer/go to school/hang out and drink coffee/see shows at), talking about your job is kind of this thing you're hoping will get them to change their type, or recontextualize you or something. But the thing is, before we utter the first words about our jobs, the chances that we'd click with that person are mostly determined by other stuff. So while it's very true that talking about our startups doesn't impress most people, it's really the low success rate of the "cold call" to blame :D
On the jobs front, there are some jobs that (I suspect) have a much higher "cold intro-ing" success rate. "CEO", "Senator", even "Board of Directors" are all probably going to get people interested in you, regardless of who they are. Except these people generally aren't hanging out in bars trying to met people.
Secondly, any time you can get some sort of name recognition in there, I think you will greatly increase your rate of success. A tangential example is that my friends don't give a <expletive of choice> about what "Steve Jobs" has to say, but they're all very interested if I say "CEO of Apple" instead.
Go pick up virtually any book by and for pickup artists. (Or start with a website like http://www.seductiontuition.com/.) You will find it full of incredibly crass generalizations about women that are guaranteed to offend. But it works! Pickup artists aren't worried about being politically correct, they are interested in getting attractive women in bed. And they have found strategies with a high success rate.
For the converse go pick up dating advice aimed at women like The Rules. (You can find much of it summarized at http://www.topdatingtips.com/dating-rules-for-women.htm.) It is full of nasty stereotypes about how to treat men that I find horrible and awful. But it works! The advice is popular because it has helped many women land relationships they are happy with. No matter how much I wouldn't like being treated that way, it clearly works on a lot of guys.
Now let me be clear. I don't like either of those sets of advice any better than you appear to. Nor is either relevant to my life - I was lucky enough to fall in love young, and have now been married close to 20 years. However I accept that there is empirical evidence supporting those theories. And the lesson I take from that is that many people don't work like I'd like them to.
A short sentence, but there's confidence, power, wealth, passion (and a fair bit of pretentious bs) in there.
I don't think it's necessarily a matter of competence/achievement but simply being able to relate. If they've heard of our product then they don't need to spend fifteen minutes having technical buzzwords thrown at them, nor do I need to spend hours unravelling the misconceptions they form. It's just 'oh yeah, you did that? great' and onwards we go away from the fantastically boring topic of 'where do you work'. In circles where people don't find that topic boring (i.e. startup guys) the 'being impressed by working on $foo' doesn't hold anyway.
#1 is aptly chosen. I've always heard that picking the wrong business partner is worse than picking the wrong spouse and I have to agree. Some days I spend more time talking with my co-founder than I do my wife, and right now he is currently six states away.
But I wanted to add that #5 also plays a role here. I vividly remember the first time my co-founder and I had a disagreement: we were both pissed and thought the other was pretty stupid. Some things were said and I got offended but we were both able to take a step back and remove our emotion. I told myself, "this is how start-ups die." Once we both removed our emotion from the situation we were able to address the problem and ultimately make the product better. We needed to be persistent not only in our work, but also in our relationship.
Ever since that time we've decided that while we may at times offend each other (it is a natural reaction), we just need to get over it, and quickly. Now we can say things like, "you're doing this wrong" or "that looks ugly" or "we need to completely rethink this" and no one wants to take their toys and go home. By removing emotion we can more direct, more efficient. And our product is better and we have more clients because of it.
"Over-engineering is poison. It's not like doing extra work for extra credit. It's more like telling a lie that you then have to remember so you don't contradict it."
the zappos talk given yesterday at startup school seems like a much longer-term solution to growth and repeat customers.
Would love help fleshing this out but in my mind, the framework consists of Messages, Channels, and Users. Your job is to test different combinations of those in order to most effectively communicate product/market fit.
When crafting a message, it's important to remember that there's only one question the customer cares about: "How does this help me reach my goals in the quickest and safest possible way?" The more of the thinking you do around this for them, the better your sales will be.
You will find better combinations of message/channel/target over time by developing relationships with your customer; listen to them and watch what they do, you will get important data that you can use to refine your product and to refine your pitch.
This helps explain #18 as well as #4 :)
I think this is false with startups, but the chances of succeeding are still low.
"This is the same phenomenon you see with defense contractors or fashion brands. The dumber the customers, the more effort you expend on the process of selling things to them rather than making the things you sell."
At first I thought this was funny and smart... but now I think it's rather glib. "Fashion brands" is almost by definition entirely a marketing exercise... tautology is a pretty boring type of argument. Now... the industry in wearable items is huge and not entirely oriented around marketing at the expense of value...
Defence contracting... I think it's a lot more complicated than dumb customers. For one, there are only a few customers... typically governments. So in a market with a low ratio of buyers to sellers, clearly you have to invest a lot in getting attention. And given the nature of contracts, once you have their attention (and their contract), the profit motive is then to satisfy the contract as close to the line as possible... that is... to skimp and make your product as crap as you can get away with.
Witty insights should really have some grounding in reality, and point the way to other interesting thoughts. This just seems to be a collective geek snigger at the aggressive and the fashionable.
This quote and the other comments about overestimating your competition really stood out to me. It's true that as a Founder, your own ability to execute and find what customers want is what matters.
Meaning that you have to keep justifying that extra bit of complexity, by thinking in terms of it - and therefore making it "true", even if it's not appropriate? Like a theory you have committed to ahead of the facts?
Reminds me of YAGNI and "do the simplest thing that could possibly work" - except applied to solving a real-world problem, instead of a pre-specified technical problem. I would like to add that doing this also increases iteration speed - that is, the speed of learning and adaptation.
http://c2.com/xp/YouArentGonnaNeedIt.html - http://c2.com/xp/DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork.htm...
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico">
I just emailed you a vanity favicon :)
1) Put editor in advanced mode by clicking on red arrow on top right (you have to be in advanced mode to override a variable)
2) Click 'Variables' link (now it is possible to 'override' the missing Head-tags variable).
3) Override the 'Head-tags' variable by clicking the "Define New Variable" button (even though we want to override)
4) Now you can paste in a tag like this: <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://enter-url-here-to-your-store/favicon.ico type="image/x-icon" />
I love yahoo store, but it has some serious usability issues right now ;)
Incidentally, you don't have to override head-tags. You can just change the global value on the Variables page.
Sorry about the usability issues. It was pretty good for 1997.
But like craigslist, it's a very ironic cool and minimalist design that I hope you don't change.
Looking at it with firebug, the whole nav is one tall .gif and all the links are mapped via rectangular coordinates. The title for each essay is also a .gif, though they have alt description tags.
I know its your baby, but if you managed this with wordpress or another CMS, it would be really easy and you could be much more flexible to add new things. With wordpress, you could make a theme just like your current, but with CSS styled text links and you would just make static pages for all your new essays and whatnot. I could recreate your whole site in about an hour if you'd like.
I find that this happens to me quite often in FreeBSD. Usually the way it works is that someone asks me to add a feature which I had never considered before; I do so; and then I completely forget that I added said feature and revert back to thinking of my code as I originally wrote it.
I don't know if this is the situation here, but I think it's much easier to change code than it is to change one's mind.
The Super-Pattern, 2nd para needs "If 'I' wrote a new essay".
Rather, it's that so much pretense has been acceptable for so long. If technology knowledge isn't necessary to make successful technology investments, why do the asset managers put up with the charade?
Is it all just an effect of VC rewards being too loosely coupled with results?
(#15 seems to me to follow as a matter of course, and is, arguably, the other side to the same coin)
You can already use "Code Mode"
to quote exactly, get things in
a different font, and formatted
exactly as you wish.
It's a very nice analogy: the startup is moving fast in one direction and the VC or whatever is moving slowly in another one.
Personally I prefer the phrase "impedance mismatch".
The last paragraph of 7 has an extra 'your' (but otherwise you're not repeating yourself ;-)