I strongly agree. I'd like to see more honest conversation about the problems people face when building a business. I'd like to see more honesty about failure.

I strongly agree. I'd like to see more honest conversation about the problems people face when building a business. I'd like to see more honesty about failure. I'd also like to see more transparency about the amount of personal conflict that tends to come up when building a business. This sums up my views: ---------------------------- Recently, I exchanged some email with my friend Colin Steele, currently CTO of TypeZero and formerly CTO of RoomKey.com. We discussed another startup that had failed, and he wrote: It’s sad and disheartening. I think few people understand how amazingly difficult it is to start a new business, and run it successfully. Drama, people, and personalities, seem to have an outsized role in how these things crash and burn. There needs to be some codification of best internal practices for creating startups, like Steve Blank’s book “4 Steps To The Epiphany,” but for the culture; a co-routine that runs alongside “customer development” — call it “culture development” or something. I agree wholeheartedly, and would also add that more public discussion of the difficulties would help startup culture. I would make an analogy to the history of divorce in the United States. The divorce rate rose for much of the twentieth century, and it peaked in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then there has been more public discussion about what makes marriages strong. You can see the trend reflected on television shows: neither Leave It To Beaver nor the Brady Bunch mentioned the difficulties of marriage, and that was the era when the divorce rate was rising the most. Modern sitcoms talk endlessly about the difficulties of marriage. Couples still face drama and conflict and personality, but the public discussion seems to have granted people the vocabulary they need to address their problems, and the divorce rate has come down. Popular awareness helps. At the very least, books and movies can help explore the important reality that startups are not easy. https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/0998997617/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...