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The Truth About Starting a Startup

170 points by allenleein 6y ago

bjarneh 6y ago
> So the only thing we could do to compete was to make ourselves into multiple people, 10x if we could. An easy way to 10x ourselves was by not having a personal life and not taking care of ourselves. Sounds great
alfonsodev 6y ago
I've seen similar situations from close, it makes you think twice about asking for money, the moment you get funds you also get a runway, and that can be a huge stress, for some more than others, it depends if you have all your shit together before starting, some people might have traumas and attach their self worth to the outcome, and everything becomes a big drama under the stress, others might avoid conflict and explode at a later stage, there are so many ways people break under pressure. > I’ve come to believe that a big part of our jobs as founders is to manage our own emotions through the emotional rollercoaster called building a startup. I totally agree with that, I'd go even further saying is not a big part, but it is THE big part. Necessary but of course not sufficient for a unicorn, but you need it to be able to persist .
pritovido 6y ago
Ohh, the hard work theater... Humans love human sacrifices, all the ancient cultures did it. Human's effort is not linear. Try this: Go outside, measure some distance by counting steps, like 500 meters, or measure it with google earth. Experiment A: Then take your clock and start running your distance multiple times, do for example 5 Kms, apply more and more effort until it is reasonable but not that exhausting and can sustain it. Run for 20 minutes. Write down your time and how do you feel. Experiment B: Now do the same thing another day but applying all the effort you can. Then you will be forced to stop in order to rest and not die. Then try again, stop when you can't do more and so on until you make the distance. Write down your time and how do you feel. Compare both times. Compare your feelings in both situations. You will be surprised at the results. You can do bigger distances if you are trained, like 20 kms, because it represents better work load. In places like Singapur, or China and now the US(it used to be different in the past because of religion) they are living their lives like in experiment B. In places like Germany or Israel they live their lives like in experiment A. In Germany people is not less productive than in America, or Singapur. Quite the contrary. In China people work all the time, they sleep on work, but the intensity of work is very low. Working all the time means you can't be excited for work. All work, no fun,your mind sabotages you. Jews invented the system that forced everyone to stop working at least one day a week. Christians inherited that and dominated the world. Now the US goes backwards, glorifying hard work until you die in your 30s because of cancer. I have known several guys die very young of cancer in the startup scene and it is not a coincidence. The immune system and organs are depressed by constant stress. Stress is good if you can rest. Tissues are not repaired. They eat badly and don't sleep. Do not do that. Do the above exercise with your work. Measure the real output of your work. Force yourself to rest and be with your family, go hiking or to the beach like in experiment A. Work as hard as you can,and do not take breaks, like in experiment B. Do that for a week and compare your output results. You will be surprised.
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  > Jews invented the system that forced everyone to stop working at least one day a week. Christians inherited that and dominated the world. Ostensibly, Christians dominated the world by pioneering monotheistic proselytization. The day of rest didn't necessarily preclude Abrahamic religion from continuing the human sacrifice culture carried over from the polytheistic Canaanite roots of early Judeo-Christian religion. To the contrary, human sacrifice was elevated to the foundational myth vis-a-vis prophetic martyrship and symbolic rebirth. On the whole, I agree with your broader point. Sacrifice cultures and result oriented cultures are intrinsically at odds with each other -- at some point, the culture must decide what is more important: appearances, or sustainable throughput? Cultures that decide to prioritize the latter almost all converge to your experiment A.
- bob33212 6y ago
  This is true 99.99% of the time. Someone like Elon Musk is an outlier. He can actually be productive 18/hours a day for a while. Most of the "Hustle" and pour 100% into the business types I know are including a lot of Coffee meetings, Logo Design Meetings, VC meetings in their 12/hour days.
- ido 6y ago
  This is absolutely not the case in Israel, which is as dog-eat-dog competitive as any. The German speaking countries are indeed better (Austria even more so than Germany).
kevsim 6y ago
As a startup founder in Europe, who works what I think of as a lot, but also finds time to make dinner for my kids and read to them at night, this type of article always gives me anxiety and/or guilt. Am I hustling enough? Is it wrong to watch Netflix on Saturday night instead of coding? What about that walk/workout - was there time for that? We have users for our service [0], they're happy and they're paying us but it always makes me wonder if the competition is doing more and out hustling us. I guess there's no way to know and at some point you need to draw your own line in the sand in terms of work/life balance. 0: https://kitemaker.co https://kitemaker.co, the super fast, hotkey-driven product management tool/issue tracker that has deep integrations to GitHub, Figma, Slack, etc.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  All this hustle porn is meaningless. Why are you doing it? Everyone is doing it to escape the system. Anyone that says different is lying to us or to themselves. You can't escape the system if it kills you first.
  - Taylor_OD 6y ago
    Pace is what is relevant here. You can probably get more done faster by putting in more hours. However for the vast majority of companies shipping something sooner rather than later really will not intact the company bottom line. Lot's of deadlines are meaningless and do little but add stress. If you can get comfortable, and build a culture around, a more relaxed or even livable pace you will be much happier and have happier engineers.
    - rorykoehler 6y ago
      Working longer hours, like hiring more engineers to a team, has diminishing returns. You can maybe sprint for a few months (I’ve certainly done it) but it takes years to see a startup through.
  - pietrovismara 6y ago
    > Everyone is doing it to escape the system. This really resonates a lot with me. Yet it's really rare to hear people talk about it in the startup world.
k__ 6y ago
I think, in many industries speed isn't that important. Sure, a new feature shouldn't take a year, but also new stuff every week isn't the key. If you don't do what your competitors do and you communicate it well, this can already be enough to differenciate. It's not always a sprint, where everyone runs the same race. If all your competitors run in the same direction, but you choose a different one, you can very well walk for some time.
aogaili 6y ago
The truth about starting startup in the Silicon Valley bubble, there are many ways to start a business and pursuing what you believe without slaving once self at work and ignoring their teeth for a decade.
- laurent92 6y ago
  The thing is, an immense market has opened because of Internet in general, and it is up for grabs. In 20, 30 years, we may meet economic shrink and we’ll be in a replacement market instead of an investment market. By then, Tracy will own a territory in this market, others won’t. She’s digging a place for her and her descendents. It’s extremely tempting to grab the land that is available, as it has real consequences on the future.
  - achairapart 6y ago
    This reminds me of that story about the gold rush and people selling shovels...
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    This. My risk profile and my fomo are in constant conflict
  - fisf 6y ago
    Predicting the economic future 20-30 years down the line is very ambitious, even more so because markets are changing faster then ever. I don't think that trying to dig a place over this timescale, given this uncertainty, should be a justification to sacrificing a big chunk of your life -- very few companies can expect to survive so long. So, basically, if you are not seriously rich by that time, the additional effort might not make a difference. There are reasons to invest one's life into a business (loving what you do, belief in doing the right thing, adding to the world, etc.), but market forces should not be on this list.
  - toyg 6y ago
    Looking back 20 years, occasionally I have the same view: “if only I had stuck to X, I’d be a millionaire now”. But the truth is that I just wasn’t built for X, I would have been just another one of those 90% of businesses that fail, and cutting my losses by getting a regular “salaryman” job gave me the peace of mind to focus on what I actually like - which often happens to be coding for the pleasure of it. 20 years ago we thought Internet Explorer would be the last browser we’d ever use, and... it just wasn’t. The network effects enabled by the internet, when triggered in the right way at the right time, can sweep through established markets faster than in most other sectors, and it will probably continue to be like that for a very long time.
wegi 6y ago
While reading the text I was asking myself, whether it is an American or a SV thing, to tilt towards 100% work in the work-life-balance. There was recently an article about successful startups from Utah that worked 9-to-5 and still had a good and scalable business running. I see similar things in Germany. We do not have unicorns, but there are thousands of businesses supporting hundreds of workers. And rarely do they have to sacrifice everything to run those.
- romanovcode 6y ago
  I was thinking the same thing, she romanticizes work so much it's kind of.. ..weird. Work is work. Especially if you work for someone else - they pay for your time, that is all. Nothing more.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Interesting that this is hard to understand. For generations, craftsmen who have dedicated themselves to the art of their craft have existed. Almost all have "worked for someone else". I saw a monk once, on his hands and knees, maintaining the grass at a temple. This is the craft he has dedicated himself to. Others have chosen other things. It is not hard to see why many see their life's work as important to them. That isn't romanticism. That's just a different preference vector. Personally, having read The Remains of The Day, there are certain end results I would consider failure. But clearly men such as Newton did not consider them that.
    - romanovcode 6y ago
      I don't know man. I don't see the connection between Newton and building CRUD SaaS apps. In fact I see it funny how one can compare himself to those great scientists like that because he/she built an app.
      - yowlingcat 6y ago
        > In fact I see it funny how one can compare himself to those great scientists like that because he/she built an app. I think I see both sides. On one hand, as someone else said, it's not the building a SaaS app that entrepreneurs are proud of -- it's building the business and building the company. That in and of itself is a lot more impressive to me than building just an app. Is it as impressive and historically significant as the great scientific discoveries of Newton? Maybe, but probably not. Or maybe they are apples and oranges. Suppose Newton had a collaborator who built a giant manufacturing empire with his discoveries. Would those two be comparable in terms of "who was more important", or would comparison simply cease to be meaningful at this point? To your point, maybe that's what makes the Newton comparison somewhat of a non-sequitor -- it's at best a reach.
ignoramous 6y ago
Tracy comes off as what Paul Graham defines as "formidable" [0] and so it is no surprise that the essay underlines just how difficult it was on both personal and professional level to startup but PlanGrid overcame it all anyway. But... > I remember on so many occasions; I would turn the corner in our house to find one of my co-founders, who are all tall, strong men, sobbing in a corner, mourning our best friend. I can't help but find this line ironic given the talk is from Future Founders Conference for Women. [0] http://paulgraham.com/convince.html http://paulgraham.com/convince.html
- sokoloff 6y ago
  It’s in the context of remembering all the people stories most vividly and so fits for me. If you’re arguing to edit out the clause “who are all tall, strong men”, I can sort of see your point, but I think it does paint a useful picture for me and I don’t think we should hold talk authors to sub-sentence standards of perfection.
- lovetocode 6y ago
  I am not sure what point you are making. I think Tracy is just demonstrating that there is some humility to the process that she may have not expected but she wanted women to know that it is equally as stressful for men as it is for women. My words, not hers.
xivzgrev 6y ago
One of her favorite quotes is, in part, "Life is short. Take care of the ones you love." It seems to contradict one of her main points, which is that work always ended up coming first (otherwise, they'd run out of money, a competitor would beat them, insert $reason). I admire the vulnerability, but she might consider examining what she is professing to value vs what she is actually valuing, and why that might be for her.
blodkorv 6y ago
Think about all those people who always worked more than everybody else and sacrificed everything just to fail. There are very few blog posts about those guys. Its the same with people who study 100% more than everybody else to pass a class but still fail. You hear about those who made it thru, but never the ones who did not have the capacity for their goal. Its up to you to know where you stand in this and what you want to sacrifice. But always remember, romanticizing hard work only does good for society but very rarely for the individual.
- hamilyon2 6y ago
  Well, does it do good to sosiety? With all the broken families and mental health disabilities?
  - xwdv 6y ago
    Society creates new individuals and families, but an individual only has one chance at a good life.
- zeroxfe 6y ago
  > But always remember, romanticizing hard work only does good for society but very rarely for the individual. As someone who ran two failed startups, it's all about perspective. I gave up a ton to build and run my companies, and failed, but in no way do I regret it, or consider it a sacrifice. The amount that I learned, the people that I met, the skills that I developed, I'd never get from working a regular job. (I wrote a mini-postmortem[1] for my last startup.) There is huge personal value in taking big risks and doing difficult things even when you fail. [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/quid-sudo-shutdown-h-now-mohit-muthanna-cheppudira https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/quid-sudo-shutdown-h-now-mohi...
  - blodkorv 6y ago
    There are definitely sometimes you can make it into a learning experience. It depends on what kind of risk you are taking and when you decide its time to throw in the towel, and many other factors.
samdamsamma 6y ago
I am always confused what point is made when people talk about fleeing communism only to work tirelessly to barely keep from becoming homeless under capitalism. I mean, the one undeniable positive about communism is that nobody had to worry about becoming homeless.
- throwaway2245 6y ago
  Agree - Describing yourself as a "refugee of Communism" is an explicitly political stance which initially put me off reading this article. Was it relevant? Considering that she then describes working beyond the point that it damages her health, I'm not sure that this is such a great advertisement for capitalism. Nobody is a refugee of 'communism' at least as far as nobody is a citizen of communism - communism isn't a nation-state. (In general, people claiming asylum from communist states have been aristocrats with the power to choose to leave, and choose to do so rather than lose their status: so this shouldn't in itself be seen as a claim to poverty or disadvantage)
redis_mlc 6y ago
> My dentist found six cracked teeth, all from grinding at night. For people in their 20s and 30s - if you ever notice teeth grinding, or your dentist warns you about it, try wearing a nightguard or your teeth will shatter in your 40s. Your dentist will then try to replace each with a crown, but eventually the next step is extraction (dental surgery) and implants, which is very elaborate, and expensive (only partially covered by insurance in the US.) Also, as the article mentions, it's a sign of stress that you should look into.
jamesmehaffey 6y ago
You will always naturally prioritize the things that you love, so you should not feel guilty if you also love spending time with your friends or family or walking your dog to the pub on a sunny day. That’s why it’s called work-life balance. I read somewhere that Pink Floyd would stop everything in the studio to watch Monty Python, and I think decompression is a normal and healthy part of work. I often find that elusive solutions present themselves when I have changed gears for a while, but I suppose the real chore is finding the time for the things that you do not love but cannot avoid.
deleted 6y ago
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czep 6y ago
The proper title should be "The Truth about being a YC product". The startup mystique that YC perpetuates is designed to convince very smart people to work extremely hard on a small chance of becoming rich. They become a product in YC's portfolio, which captures just enough unicorns to allow hundreds of others to fail. This example is one of the lucky ones. There are order of magnitude of others who worked as hard but got nothing. The only consistent winners in this game are PG and his investors. You are the product. They're buying your surplus labor at a very cheap rate.
- baloney1 6y ago
  Is it really a very cheap rate? It seems like it is the market rate to me for newbie founders. If it were "very cheap", every VC and their mom would be rushing to buy in on these types of startups -- and believe me, there are many VCs and a lot of VC money in SV.
- headcanon 6y ago
  Thats a really cynical interpretation of YC - There's a ton of risk with starting any business, tech especially. You could say the same about any angel or early stage investor or accelerator program. PG and Sam Altman have always been upfront about the risk and expected returns from one of these - in the Startup Class, Altman even says that if your goal is highest expected returns you should go work at a FAANG [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI&feature=emb_logo&ab_channel=HowtoStartaStartup https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI&feature=emb_logo...
- fairity 6y ago
  > They're buying your surplus labor at a very cheap rate. Have you done the math here? Take the cumulative market cap of YC companies (use a conservative measure). Divide that by the hours worked by founders. Multiply that by founder ownership percentage. I think you'll find that founders are properly incentivized.
  - whateveracct 6y ago
    I don't think your proposed metric takes into account the opportunity cost of founders not doing something else (hence "surplus labor")
graaben 6y ago
I spent some time in a fairly well known startup incubator. What always stood out to me is that the other founders in the program seemed to be more interested in playing the part of a "startup founder" than they did in actually building their companies. They would hold hours and hours of coffee meetings, pitch deck reviews, and presentations, but spend very little time each day actually coding or making sales calls. I think a lot of this hustle culture comes down to wanting to feel productive, but at the same time wanting to avoid the difficult problems that come along with being an entrepreneur. It's a lot easier to talk about how hard you are working than to actually do the work itself.
shadowprofile77 6y ago
I know of many people who have started business (either startups or more classical business models) without working anywhere near as dramatically hard as this woman describes what she did. Since her product niche and product both sound like pretty decent areas for entry and business, what I don't understand is why she had to work so damn hard. Is there a missing part to the narrative or is this just a case of someone exaggerating hustle porn so they can sell a good story about passion and "pouring heart and soul" into something?
- shadowprofile77 6y ago
  And I can't imagine this applying to smaller (but possibly scalable) one-person businesses. Many of those are started and even become remarkably profitable by people working on them with relatively part-time effort. Right here on HN, across several occasional posts asking readers to name their small business success stories, there are many examples. Not the same as startups like this one, sure but not so different as to justify the absurd gut wrenching she describes in this post.

170 points by allenleein 6y ago

> So the only thing we could do to compete was to make ourselves into multiple people, 10x if we could. An easy way to 10x ourselves was by not having a personal life and not taking care of ourselves. Sounds great

alfonsodev 6y ago

I've seen similar situations from close, it makes you think twice about asking for money, the moment you get funds you also get a runway, and that can be a huge stress, for some more than others, it depends if you have all your shit together before starting, some people might have traumas and attach their self worth to the outcome, and everything becomes a big drama under the stress, others might avoid conflict and explode at a later stage, there are so many ways people break under pressure. > I’ve come to believe that a big part of our jobs as founders is to manage our own emotions through the emotional rollercoaster called building a startup. I totally agree with that, I'd go even further saying is not a big part, but it is THE big part. Necessary but of course not sufficient for a unicorn, but you need it to be able to persist .

pritovido 6y ago

Ohh, the hard work theater... Humans love human sacrifices, all the ancient cultures did it. Human's effort is not linear. Try this: Go outside, measure some distance by counting steps, like 500 meters, or measure it with google earth. Experiment A: Then take your clock and start running your distance multiple times, do for example 5 Kms, apply more and more effort until it is reasonable but not that exhausting and can sustain it. Run for 20 minutes. Write down your time and how do you feel. Experiment B: Now do the same thing another day but applying all the effort you can. Then you will be forced to stop in order to rest and not die. Then try again, stop when you can't do more and so on until you make the distance. Write down your time and how do you feel. Compare both times. Compare your feelings in both situations. You will be surprised at the results. You can do bigger distances if you are trained, like 20 kms, because it represents better work load. In places like Singapur, or China and now the US(it used to be different in the past because of religion) they are living their lives like in experiment B. In places like Germany or Israel they live their lives like in experiment A. In Germany people is not less productive than in America, or Singapur. Quite the contrary. In China people work all the time, they sleep on work, but the intensity of work is very low. Working all the time means you can't be excited for work. All work, no fun,your mind sabotages you. Jews invented the system that forced everyone to stop working at least one day a week. Christians inherited that and dominated the world. Now the US goes backwards, glorifying hard work until you die in your 30s because of cancer. I have known several guys die very young of cancer in the startup scene and it is not a coincidence. The immune system and organs are depressed by constant stress. Stress is good if you can rest. Tissues are not repaired. They eat badly and don't sleep. Do not do that. Do the above exercise with your work. Measure the real output of your work. Force yourself to rest and be with your family, go hiking or to the beach like in experiment A. Work as hard as you can,and do not take breaks, like in experiment B. Do that for a week and compare your output results. You will be surprised.

yowlingcat 6y ago
> Jews invented the system that forced everyone to stop working at least one day a week. Christians inherited that and dominated the world. Ostensibly, Christians dominated the world by pioneering monotheistic proselytization. The day of rest didn't necessarily preclude Abrahamic religion from continuing the human sacrifice culture carried over from the polytheistic Canaanite roots of early Judeo-Christian religion. To the contrary, human sacrifice was elevated to the foundational myth vis-a-vis prophetic martyrship and symbolic rebirth. On the whole, I agree with your broader point. Sacrifice cultures and result oriented cultures are intrinsically at odds with each other -- at some point, the culture must decide what is more important: appearances, or sustainable throughput? Cultures that decide to prioritize the latter almost all converge to your experiment A.
bob33212 6y ago
This is true 99.99% of the time. Someone like Elon Musk is an outlier. He can actually be productive 18/hours a day for a while. Most of the "Hustle" and pour 100% into the business types I know are including a lot of Coffee meetings, Logo Design Meetings, VC meetings in their 12/hour days.
ido 6y ago
This is absolutely not the case in Israel, which is as dog-eat-dog competitive as any. The German speaking countries are indeed better (Austria even more so than Germany).

kevsim 6y ago

As a startup founder in Europe, who works what I think of as a lot, but also finds time to make dinner for my kids and read to them at night, this type of article always gives me anxiety and/or guilt. Am I hustling enough? Is it wrong to watch Netflix on Saturday night instead of coding? What about that walk/workout - was there time for that? We have users for our service [0], they're happy and they're paying us but it always makes me wonder if the competition is doing more and out hustling us. I guess there's no way to know and at some point you need to draw your own line in the sand in terms of work/life balance. 0: https://kitemaker.co https://kitemaker.co, the super fast, hotkey-driven product management tool/issue tracker that has deep integrations to GitHub, Figma, Slack, etc.

rorykoehler 6y ago
All this hustle porn is meaningless. Why are you doing it? Everyone is doing it to escape the system. Anyone that says different is lying to us or to themselves. You can't escape the system if it kills you first.
- Taylor_OD 6y ago
  Pace is what is relevant here. You can probably get more done faster by putting in more hours. However for the vast majority of companies shipping something sooner rather than later really will not intact the company bottom line. Lot's of deadlines are meaningless and do little but add stress. If you can get comfortable, and build a culture around, a more relaxed or even livable pace you will be much happier and have happier engineers.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    Working longer hours, like hiring more engineers to a team, has diminishing returns. You can maybe sprint for a few months (I’ve certainly done it) but it takes years to see a startup through.
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  > Everyone is doing it to escape the system. This really resonates a lot with me. Yet it's really rare to hear people talk about it in the startup world.

k__ 6y ago

I think, in many industries speed isn't that important. Sure, a new feature shouldn't take a year, but also new stuff every week isn't the key. If you don't do what your competitors do and you communicate it well, this can already be enough to differenciate. It's not always a sprint, where everyone runs the same race. If all your competitors run in the same direction, but you choose a different one, you can very well walk for some time.

aogaili 6y ago

The truth about starting startup in the Silicon Valley bubble, there are many ways to start a business and pursuing what you believe without slaving once self at work and ignoring their teeth for a decade.

laurent92 6y ago
The thing is, an immense market has opened because of Internet in general, and it is up for grabs. In 20, 30 years, we may meet economic shrink and we’ll be in a replacement market instead of an investment market. By then, Tracy will own a territory in this market, others won’t. She’s digging a place for her and her descendents. It’s extremely tempting to grab the land that is available, as it has real consequences on the future.
- achairapart 6y ago
  This reminds me of that story about the gold rush and people selling shovels...
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  This. My risk profile and my fomo are in constant conflict
- fisf 6y ago
  Predicting the economic future 20-30 years down the line is very ambitious, even more so because markets are changing faster then ever. I don't think that trying to dig a place over this timescale, given this uncertainty, should be a justification to sacrificing a big chunk of your life -- very few companies can expect to survive so long. So, basically, if you are not seriously rich by that time, the additional effort might not make a difference. There are reasons to invest one's life into a business (loving what you do, belief in doing the right thing, adding to the world, etc.), but market forces should not be on this list.
- toyg 6y ago
  Looking back 20 years, occasionally I have the same view: “if only I had stuck to X, I’d be a millionaire now”. But the truth is that I just wasn’t built for X, I would have been just another one of those 90% of businesses that fail, and cutting my losses by getting a regular “salaryman” job gave me the peace of mind to focus on what I actually like - which often happens to be coding for the pleasure of it. 20 years ago we thought Internet Explorer would be the last browser we’d ever use, and... it just wasn’t. The network effects enabled by the internet, when triggered in the right way at the right time, can sweep through established markets faster than in most other sectors, and it will probably continue to be like that for a very long time.

wegi 6y ago

While reading the text I was asking myself, whether it is an American or a SV thing, to tilt towards 100% work in the work-life-balance. There was recently an article about successful startups from Utah that worked 9-to-5 and still had a good and scalable business running. I see similar things in Germany. We do not have unicorns, but there are thousands of businesses supporting hundreds of workers. And rarely do they have to sacrifice everything to run those.

romanovcode 6y ago
I was thinking the same thing, she romanticizes work so much it's kind of.. ..weird. Work is work. Especially if you work for someone else - they pay for your time, that is all. Nothing more.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Interesting that this is hard to understand. For generations, craftsmen who have dedicated themselves to the art of their craft have existed. Almost all have "worked for someone else". I saw a monk once, on his hands and knees, maintaining the grass at a temple. This is the craft he has dedicated himself to. Others have chosen other things. It is not hard to see why many see their life's work as important to them. That isn't romanticism. That's just a different preference vector. Personally, having read The Remains of The Day, there are certain end results I would consider failure. But clearly men such as Newton did not consider them that.
  - romanovcode 6y ago
    I don't know man. I don't see the connection between Newton and building CRUD SaaS apps. In fact I see it funny how one can compare himself to those great scientists like that because he/she built an app.
    - yowlingcat 6y ago
      > In fact I see it funny how one can compare himself to those great scientists like that because he/she built an app. I think I see both sides. On one hand, as someone else said, it's not the building a SaaS app that entrepreneurs are proud of -- it's building the business and building the company. That in and of itself is a lot more impressive to me than building just an app. Is it as impressive and historically significant as the great scientific discoveries of Newton? Maybe, but probably not. Or maybe they are apples and oranges. Suppose Newton had a collaborator who built a giant manufacturing empire with his discoveries. Would those two be comparable in terms of "who was more important", or would comparison simply cease to be meaningful at this point? To your point, maybe that's what makes the Newton comparison somewhat of a non-sequitor -- it's at best a reach.

ignoramous 6y ago

Tracy comes off as what Paul Graham defines as "formidable" [0] and so it is no surprise that the essay underlines just how difficult it was on both personal and professional level to startup but PlanGrid overcame it all anyway. But... > I remember on so many occasions; I would turn the corner in our house to find one of my co-founders, who are all tall, strong men, sobbing in a corner, mourning our best friend. I can't help but find this line ironic given the talk is from Future Founders Conference for Women. [0] http://paulgraham.com/convince.html http://paulgraham.com/convince.html

sokoloff 6y ago
It’s in the context of remembering all the people stories most vividly and so fits for me. If you’re arguing to edit out the clause “who are all tall, strong men”, I can sort of see your point, but I think it does paint a useful picture for me and I don’t think we should hold talk authors to sub-sentence standards of perfection.
lovetocode 6y ago
I am not sure what point you are making. I think Tracy is just demonstrating that there is some humility to the process that she may have not expected but she wanted women to know that it is equally as stressful for men as it is for women. My words, not hers.

xivzgrev 6y ago

One of her favorite quotes is, in part, "Life is short. Take care of the ones you love." It seems to contradict one of her main points, which is that work always ended up coming first (otherwise, they'd run out of money, a competitor would beat them, insert $reason). I admire the vulnerability, but she might consider examining what she is professing to value vs what she is actually valuing, and why that might be for her.

blodkorv 6y ago

Think about all those people who always worked more than everybody else and sacrificed everything just to fail. There are very few blog posts about those guys. Its the same with people who study 100% more than everybody else to pass a class but still fail. You hear about those who made it thru, but never the ones who did not have the capacity for their goal. Its up to you to know where you stand in this and what you want to sacrifice. But always remember, romanticizing hard work only does good for society but very rarely for the individual.

hamilyon2 6y ago
Well, does it do good to sosiety? With all the broken families and mental health disabilities?
- xwdv 6y ago
  Society creates new individuals and families, but an individual only has one chance at a good life.
zeroxfe 6y ago
> But always remember, romanticizing hard work only does good for society but very rarely for the individual. As someone who ran two failed startups, it's all about perspective. I gave up a ton to build and run my companies, and failed, but in no way do I regret it, or consider it a sacrifice. The amount that I learned, the people that I met, the skills that I developed, I'd never get from working a regular job. (I wrote a mini-postmortem[1] for my last startup.) There is huge personal value in taking big risks and doing difficult things even when you fail. [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/quid-sudo-shutdown-h-now-mohit-muthanna-cheppudira https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/quid-sudo-shutdown-h-now-mohi...
- blodkorv 6y ago
  There are definitely sometimes you can make it into a learning experience. It depends on what kind of risk you are taking and when you decide its time to throw in the towel, and many other factors.

samdamsamma 6y ago

I am always confused what point is made when people talk about fleeing communism only to work tirelessly to barely keep from becoming homeless under capitalism. I mean, the one undeniable positive about communism is that nobody had to worry about becoming homeless.

throwaway2245 6y ago
Agree - Describing yourself as a "refugee of Communism" is an explicitly political stance which initially put me off reading this article. Was it relevant? Considering that she then describes working beyond the point that it damages her health, I'm not sure that this is such a great advertisement for capitalism. Nobody is a refugee of 'communism' at least as far as nobody is a citizen of communism - communism isn't a nation-state. (In general, people claiming asylum from communist states have been aristocrats with the power to choose to leave, and choose to do so rather than lose their status: so this shouldn't in itself be seen as a claim to poverty or disadvantage)

redis_mlc 6y ago

> My dentist found six cracked teeth, all from grinding at night. For people in their 20s and 30s - if you ever notice teeth grinding, or your dentist warns you about it, try wearing a nightguard or your teeth will shatter in your 40s. Your dentist will then try to replace each with a crown, but eventually the next step is extraction (dental surgery) and implants, which is very elaborate, and expensive (only partially covered by insurance in the US.) Also, as the article mentions, it's a sign of stress that you should look into.

jamesmehaffey 6y ago

You will always naturally prioritize the things that you love, so you should not feel guilty if you also love spending time with your friends or family or walking your dog to the pub on a sunny day. That’s why it’s called work-life balance. I read somewhere that Pink Floyd would stop everything in the studio to watch Monty Python, and I think decompression is a normal and healthy part of work. I often find that elusive solutions present themselves when I have changed gears for a while, but I suppose the real chore is finding the time for the things that you do not love but cannot avoid.

deleted 6y ago

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czep 6y ago

The proper title should be "The Truth about being a YC product". The startup mystique that YC perpetuates is designed to convince very smart people to work extremely hard on a small chance of becoming rich. They become a product in YC's portfolio, which captures just enough unicorns to allow hundreds of others to fail. This example is one of the lucky ones. There are order of magnitude of others who worked as hard but got nothing. The only consistent winners in this game are PG and his investors. You are the product. They're buying your surplus labor at a very cheap rate.

baloney1 6y ago
Is it really a very cheap rate? It seems like it is the market rate to me for newbie founders. If it were "very cheap", every VC and their mom would be rushing to buy in on these types of startups -- and believe me, there are many VCs and a lot of VC money in SV.
headcanon 6y ago
Thats a really cynical interpretation of YC - There's a ton of risk with starting any business, tech especially. You could say the same about any angel or early stage investor or accelerator program. PG and Sam Altman have always been upfront about the risk and expected returns from one of these - in the Startup Class, Altman even says that if your goal is highest expected returns you should go work at a FAANG [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI&feature=emb_logo&ab_channel=HowtoStartaStartup https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI&feature=emb_logo...
fairity 6y ago
> They're buying your surplus labor at a very cheap rate. Have you done the math here? Take the cumulative market cap of YC companies (use a conservative measure). Divide that by the hours worked by founders. Multiply that by founder ownership percentage. I think you'll find that founders are properly incentivized.
- whateveracct 6y ago
  I don't think your proposed metric takes into account the opportunity cost of founders not doing something else (hence "surplus labor")

graaben 6y ago

I spent some time in a fairly well known startup incubator. What always stood out to me is that the other founders in the program seemed to be more interested in playing the part of a "startup founder" than they did in actually building their companies. They would hold hours and hours of coffee meetings, pitch deck reviews, and presentations, but spend very little time each day actually coding or making sales calls. I think a lot of this hustle culture comes down to wanting to feel productive, but at the same time wanting to avoid the difficult problems that come along with being an entrepreneur. It's a lot easier to talk about how hard you are working than to actually do the work itself.

shadowprofile77 6y ago

I know of many people who have started business (either startups or more classical business models) without working anywhere near as dramatically hard as this woman describes what she did. Since her product niche and product both sound like pretty decent areas for entry and business, what I don't understand is why she had to work so damn hard. Is there a missing part to the narrative or is this just a case of someone exaggerating hustle porn so they can sell a good story about passion and "pouring heart and soul" into something?

shadowprofile77 6y ago
And I can't imagine this applying to smaller (but possibly scalable) one-person businesses. Many of those are started and even become remarkably profitable by people working on them with relatively part-time effort. Right here on HN, across several occasional posts asking readers to name their small business success stories, there are many examples. Not the same as startups like this one, sure but not so different as to justify the absurd gut wrenching she describes in this post.