Hmmm, I guess all I have to say is that wasn't my father's experience in a lifetime of entrepreneurship, say early to mid-60s to semi-retirement bit by bit star

Hmmm, I guess all I have to say is that wasn't my father's experience in a lifetime of entrepreneurship, say early to mid-60s to semi-retirement bit by bit starting in the late '90s or so. The "Everybody will Treat you like you have a disease" definitely didn't happen, but I'm sure that's in part due to the culture you live in, in this case, SW Missouri, in the extreme SW part that's culturally southern. His father, whom I'm named after, died when he was 11, but he was entrepreneurial himself, pretty much had to be when you start your family in the early '30s AKA the Great Depression, and from a farming background, and his mother had enough of that sort of thing as well, plus a farming background. One aunt who didn't, to my knowledge, discourage him. Ditto my mother's side, she also grew up on a farm. Friends? The only problem he had there was as they started dying off, we've got relatively good genes. Somehow, he had the people skills to make it work, including going into business with some of this like minded friends. Can't remember if he hired any, though. Didn't as a rule have co-founders, aside from those combination efforts with like minded friends. Your wife will leave you for someone, anyone, she sees more often than you. That's where you a) have to use some skill in picking a wife (and I'm sure it helped to do so in 1959 instead of today), but most importantly, don't let it consume you, maintain that "life/work balance" everyone talks about. I don't recall work ever getting in the way of his hunting and fishing trips (his two major forms of recreation), or taking up so much time he didn't have any for his family. Attitude, in part, also, maybe not taking things so seriously, if a venture failed, well, he'd move on to the next one soon enough. Customers? They wouldn't get far in trying to physically assaulting him, that shit doesn't work well in Red State America where we're de facto and de jure allowed to defend ourselves with lethal force if called for. Thanks? Not sure he gave a damn about that, only if their checks cleared. And, again, one key is don't get in so deep that one client screwing up does more than force the closure of the business. Again, nobody will want to talk to you about it. Simply not his experience. Where do you live, what kind of culture is all this a norm as you perceive it??? But, yeah, humans are the "extremely hard work", and that's where he had a lot of talent. The technology, he's find people with it, who needed the sort of support he could provide, human in terms of hiring, managing and firing, legal, in setting up corporations, business models including taxes (many periods in his working lifetime when taxation was hostile), retirement money vehicles like IRAs, etc. I wouldn't say he "enjoy[ed] the full shitty panoply of human behaviour", but he was certainly capable of dealing with it, that was in fact one of the secrets of his success when partnering with the "technical" types of people (scare quotes because that also including for a period of time groups of doctors, work that allowed him to also run a venture on the side). If you don't have what it takes on the human side, as you obviously don't, then don't take this path, at least not without teaming with someone like my father who'll shield you from much of it.