Ask HN: What happens to the founders of startups that fail? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What happens to the founders of startups that fail?

9 pointscgoodmac18 comments

What kinds of things do they do after? Real examples would be helpful.

After my first startup, I got a job at Google. After my second startup, I just founded another startup.

Part of becoming an entrepreneur - probably the most important part of becoming an entrepreneur - is realizing that the rules are just guidelines. People will give you all sorts of career advice - "never leave a job without another one lined up", "make sure you get a good raise every time you switch jobs", "don't call yourself a programmer" - but they're just telling you what worked for them, and in some cases it didn't even work for them. The guiding principle you should follow is "I'll deliver things of value to other people, and in return, I'll ask for things of value to myself."

Cheers !

1. you advise others not to follow the advice of others (blindly) 2. you give advice to others

My advice would rather be: Think.

There's no contradiction between saying "Consider other people's advice carefully before acting upon it" and "That said...here's my advice."

"Think" is probably a pretty good way of summing it up.

They go to a farm upstate. They're real happy there, with lots of room to run around.

They write melodramatic postmortems on Medium which fail to identify why exactly their startup failed.

Afterward, they either a) do another startup or b) join an established company, depending on how jaded they are from the experience.

That first part isn't fair to the startup founders. I know a couple of founders of failed startups who wrote post-mortems on Medium, and then when it surfaced on HN the comments were stating that the founders were glossing over the important issues. In both circumstances the post-mortems outlined clearly why the company failed, it was just that readers saw a side to the story which the founder didn't expand upon (either as they didn't feel it was important, or out of respect to those they worked with) and assumed there were secrets hidden there that explain the failure.

I knew the full story of these startups, it was as told in the postmortem (one of which explicitly stated "we failed because of X"). Judging by some of the comments I read, some people don't want to believe the truth that's told to them. They assume they know more about the situation than the founder that lived it.

It's often hard to know why a startup failed. For example, if you released something but got few sales, it's hard to know if the product wasn't executed well enough, or your sales & marketing were weak, or there's simply no market. Would a couple more iterations have brought success? You can never be sure.

That's the exact reason why I'm not a fan of them. Most of the posts on Medium are made less forewarning and more a last ditch publicity event.

I doubt the part about last ditch publicity event. Would writing a postmortem on why you've failed really help to bring in customers? Most likely not.

Last ditch publicity for either their own personal branding or a product pivot.

The top of the silicon valley hierarchy of needs (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CHnRlpfUEAA9b6R.jpg)

I think it is not healthy to be critical of postmortems written by founders, in general.

* It is usually hard to talk about failures and especially if one has contributed to the failure significantly.

* It gives a counter perspective to the rosy pictures painted about startups by the media and tries to right the balance of views presented to the aspiring entrepreneurs. It helps to provide a reality check of what can really be expected and if startup is really the reader's cup of tea.

* On a personal level, it is an attempt by the founder to lay it all out and move on. So obviously there is some melodrama in it. Considering that, there are so many people in tech who suffer from depression and never talk about it, and we really have to coax some to take help, now that someone really tries to share their turmoil with the broader community, we should rather be welcoming than critical.

After all, no one is going to fail their startup, just to write a melodramatic post on Medium. ;)

I went and worked full time at a company. Spent time with my family and enjoyed the fact that every two weeks a paycheck would be in my bank account.

After that, I started another company.

They try to justify their next startup by claiming to have identified the reasons why their previous startup failed. (irony)

Actually if they learnt something, they did not fail. Their startup just ceased to exist.

Ever wonder where the homeless people in SF come from?

After running out of money, I did the homeless thing in San Francisco for a while. That was hard. The easiest way out of it was starting a new business, as I had a hard time getting taken seriously when applying to jobs. Being a failed, desperate entrepreneur type did not help me project a confident aura of "you'd be lucky to hire me". It was more like "good luck, we wish you the best (and please get out of our office)".

This is what happens to them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpXY6LBNUNk

;-)

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