10 ms·

My startup is broken

111 points by caseysoftware 4y ago

thirdplace_ 4y ago
I've experienced joining a startup and noticing there are so much work to do. I started to write a list of stuff to do and it's huge. Difficult to prioritize correctly. Very tempted to yak-shake all over the place.
- vosper 4y ago
  And here I am with my puny razor, when I could have been shaking the thing!
- ryanbrunner 4y ago
  I've worked for small (< 100 employees, and mostly < 20) startups for more or less my entire career, and one thing that's been helpful for me is to never try and think about EVERYTHING you need to do, and aggressively try to eliminate any effort to do so. If you have any influence over a backlog, roadmap, or list of stories, advocate eliminating anything that's not an immediate concern (bugs are an exception - sometimes it makes sense to purge outdated bugs, but it shouldn't be done lightly). Delete the stories, take things off your roadmap. Almost without exception, they do nothing but generate stress about an insurmountable amount of things to do, more than half of the things won't ever be worked on (which is good! it means you learned something else was more important), and will just lead to people, both internal and external, getting frustrated that "things aren't getting done" even when they are.
  - lbriner 4y ago
    I think this sounds great in theory (and I do agree with you) but depending on how many people you have in the company, you will have sales arguing for one thing, devs arguing for another, product might want another and marketing need the stats to do their job. One of the hardest things is prioritising dissimilar tasks, especially since the return on investment is not always easy to see or might take a number of weeks/months. Maybe the marketing stats really help marketing target more of the right people but maybe they don't or maybe something unrelated stopped the figures from improving after you did the work. I suspect someone has done research on how to add real cost/benefit to some of the intangible things to try and objectively rank them.
    - ryanbrunner 4y ago
      Oh for sure, I don't think what I'm suggesting is a solution in any way for how you decide what's most important. But a lot of times, "throw everything on the roadmap / backlog" is really a non-solution in disguise - rather than making tough decisions about what's most important, the answer becomes "everything".
- caseysoftware 4y ago
  There will ALWAYS be a long list of things to do. You have to prioritize on what will a) move the business forward or b) unlock other people/opportunities that will move the business forward. That could mean improving features, sales funnel, marketing, hiring, or a ton of other things. It really matters on what the risks/opportunities are at any given moment.
manuelabeledo 4y ago
If there is one thing I have learnt from working at startups, successful or not, it would be that turnover is extremely high in the first few years, and that’s fine. I have interviewed countless candidates who have a romanticised idea of what a startup is. Perhaps it didn’t help that HR kept using euphemisms like “fast paced” or “extreme ownership” in job postings, I don’t know. Reality is, not many people are ready to work in a constant state of uncertainty. When the company didn’t get the expects funding, uncertainty might as well be seen as almost chaos. The author softens it a little bit by saying that, in startups, everything is a “variable”, which I believe is, again, an euphemism. But I guess that it would be way harder to hire if you said the bad parts out loud: in their early stages, startups are messy, chaotic, and you never know if you are going to make it to the next week, regardless of how awesome the product is.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
  It might be harder to hire, but you'd probably end up with people who thrive in that environment. Will this get you to where you want to be faster? Dunno.
  - traceroute66 4y ago
    > It might be harder to hire, but you'd probably end up with people who thrive in that environment. This is a key point. As you do when you run startups, you wear many hats, and one of the hats I frequently wore was that of interviewer. In that role you very quickly develop a smell-test for the corporate-type. It is an inevitable fact that the majority of responses from any job ad will come from people whose immediately previous job(s) were in the corporate environment. That's fine, nothing wrong with that. But you have to structure your interview technique as such that you try to determine if they are more the corporate-type who has become accustomed to the cushy life of the corporate world (teams, departments, tight job descriptions, guaranteed 9–5 life etc.). The problem with those who have become accustomed to the corporate world is that they'll never change. The mentality becomes too engrained, they seriously struggle and cause headaches for their colleagues. The more years they've spent in corprate-land, the worse it is. I would often find the classic "do you have any more questions for me?" at the end of the interview to be the most revealing of all as to the mindset of the candidate.
ThalesX 4y ago
I've started my career in enterprise environments, and recently on my 3rd startup. As the author mentions, startups to seem to be broken, going after everything and finding product market fit and others... While this is true, I can't help but shake the feeling that adding corporate-planning to a startup-environment would actually calm down things and would still hit targets. I do get a bit frustrated when startup leadership don't think about brokenness because 'that's the way startups are'. I have a friend, big corporate leader; I suspect he'd restructure any startup into something more performant in terms of delivery in less than a quarter.
- syntheweave 4y ago
  It's built into the startup concept that the people who make them are mostly going to be driven, action-oriented "doers" who stick things into the gears of organizational machinery at random to try to make them turn. A smarter founder will know to check assumptions, but it's a case of putting armor where the bullet holes are: sheer persistence is way more important, and where new companies are most likely to fail is in giving up on one or more types of roadblocks and trying to choose only certain fights when they need to persist and come up with some immediate thing that addresses every challenge and change, even if it's not a real or permanent solution or the specific thing they want to be focused on. The other way to go is, well, the slow way: study the problem, build consensus, look before you leap. While older founders who are bootstrapping will tend to act more conservatively like this, it's not favored by startups of the VC money sort, not because it's actually a worse way to go, but because it isn't playing the game - it doesn't result in huge investment opportunities where a giant market share is captured in a short time frame. If you go in aiming to build consensus you may actually benefit society, but you aren't going to "capture" things. After all, capturing means "I win, you lose". Thus, a startup that does get to the point where they are rapidly soaking up market share is likely to have a dysfunctional quality of being dissatisfied with the thing the business is currently about: there always has to be a next thing to conquer. Thus another re-org, new hires, repeat until you've attained tech giant status.
  - TheNewsIsHere 4y ago
    With my own business I’ve experienced just about everything you’ve mentioned here. We are explicitly not seeking hyper growth, and we are fine with the “traditional” approach that says “businesses take {three,five,seven} years to become profitable.” From a financial perspective my cofounders and I aren’t doing this to get the 45,000 square foot mansion in the hills overlooking Veil. We just want to use our skills to do something that helps other businesses as a means to building a tidy retirement nest egg. Several family members have done that same thing in each of our families in the past. And yet we’ve still fallen into some of the same traps any startup in technology falls into. We recently decided to exit the Atlassian ecosystem (prior to their recent issues) and have been doing so while we’re still under the grandfathered pricing for their cloud offerings. We didn’t want to wait until the last minute. We bought ourselves some time so we didn’t want to rush it either. Just deciding to step back and replace tooling can be difficult. It means you’re tying up a LOT of cycles in internal work, but sometimes that’s a good call to make. We had been using Jira for anything “taskable” but we have both internal/code work and external/billable work, and we weren’t managing either very well in Jira. It’s easy to say “we will lose a lot of history and velocity” but you can export data, and the velocity you lose continuously by not using tooling that works for you, can be much more harmful. It can be difficult to SEE that you need to step back and reevaluate something as big as your tasking or documentation management. For us, we decided to use this as an opportunity to look with fresh eyes at everything and ended up replacing virtually all of our tools and infrastructure. We even replaced all but one core AWS service in our application and moved everything else to Linode. We replaced our billing system too. We moved from Chargebee, which was vastly over complicated for our current needs to the point where we hated using it, to using pure Stripe and project management with ActiveCollab. We said no to some business while we did that, but from the inside perspective our lives are much easier, our revenue cycle is more consistent and manageable (and actually -happens-) now that our billables are in a revenue-aware tasking system (ActiveCollab) instead of a pure-task tracking system (Jira). We’re OK with taking our time because slowly we’ve been seeing just how to build this business effectively, and for us that’s far more important than scale or quarterly returns right now.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lkrubner 4y ago
For some years now, I've been a big proponent of the idea that, as a community, we should write about startups with more realism and with less hype. Especially for the sake of more junior people, we should try to illustrate what euphemisms like "very fluid" or “fast paced” actually mean. I know some readers of Hacker News have read my book, How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps, and I really wish more people would do what I did and write with real honesty about how chaotic and frustrating early stage startups can be. Yes, they can be exciting, but also they can be stressful. And mind you, I work at a startup right now, so it's not as if one bad experience scared me away from startups forever. But I do think we should have more truthful writing, so that people who decide to work at a startup have a better idea of what they are getting into. (Also, some people worry that writing honestly about a startup will hurt their career, but my book only helped my career. As it became more and more popular, I got more and more offers to consult with various entrepreneurs.)
- jacquesm 4y ago
  I would change one little bit in your comment: 'they also can be stressful' -> 'they also will be stressful'. A start-up is pretty much guaranteed to be a constant source of major stress either because of the success or because of the lack of it. Success will bring its own kind of problems and those can be very stressful indeed. I know lots of founders but I don't know a single one that did not have to deal with stress on a daily basis. Perseverance is often listed as a key requirement for success, I think stress resistance really should be added to that list, it is something you will have to learn how to deal with or it will cause you major grief.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- krallja 4y ago
  My new favorite question to ask interviewers is “the job description says ‘fast-paced`, can you give me an example of what that looks like for you?”
  - ss108 4y ago
punnerud 4y ago
I like this last advice: “ think of your company as a child: When a kid is healthy, and growing, they outgrow their shoes. You don’t blame the kid. You just find new shoes.”
lucidguppy 4y ago
There's a couple of things going on here. Schools in the US and perhaps elsewhere DO NOT TEACH STUDENTS about how to handle failure states and anxiety. It is the biggest blind spot the US has and it is biting us in the butt. A big part of the culture is about perfectionism (perhaps rooted in religion - perhaps rooted in kids TV shows - sports culture) - and that needs to be replaced with "blameless continual improvement". The best performers are those that divorce failure states from emotions and anxiety. XYZ isn't finished yet - no you're not done.... that's TOTALLY ok. Every homework assignment starts off with a grade of F - you work on it to get to a C, B, or A. A startup's work is never done, there really is no success state, and that's OK too. You're helping to make the product better, you're delivering features to customers. Your making the task pipeline faster with your automation tools. Things suck - but you're making life easier for everyone tomorrow. The reason why things are so bad now, is because before, things were worse. Its a much more positive way of looking at things for me. Yeah, things can improve, but we've done a lot to make things better. Also https://www.businessinsider.com/astronaut-chris-hadfield-in-space-there-is-no-problem-so-bad-you-cant-make-it-worse-2014-3?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/astronaut-chris-hadfield-in-... - there is no problem so bad that you can't make it worse. The best thing you can do is separate your emotions from the situation because they degrade your executive functions. I disagree with the "quit your bellyaching" sort of conclusions. It gives off a very https://reddit.com/r/wowthanksimcured https://reddit.com/r/wowthanksimcured vibe.
- xoa 4y ago
  I think you make some really strong points here and I completely agree that learning to deal with inevitable failure and working through it matters. I'd offer one small addition though: >XYZ isn't finished yet - no you're not done.... that's TOTALLY ok. Every homework assignment starts off with a grade of F - you work on it to get to a C, B, or A. A startup's work is never done, there really is no success state, and that's OK too. You're helping to make the product better, you're delivering features to customers. Your making the task pipeline faster with your automation tools. Things suck - but you're making life easier for everyone tomorrow. It's worth noting at the same time however that "effort" alone isn't enough. Some ideas really just don't work, either because it turns out it's not something the market actually values, is simply beyond any amount of effort with present technology, oneself/one's organization simply doesn't possess the capability to execute on it (often for perfectly good structural reasons), etc etc. If the homework assignment is "wacky acme item a grand total of 12 people in the world want that will cost hundreds of millions", "factor this 256-bit key" or some equivalent of "develop a working Unified Field Theory" it's unlikely most of us are getting an "A"! Obviously IRL it's not typically so clear, but non-domain expert stakeholders (be it management, users or clients) don't always have any great way to understand themselves that their "simple" requests may be a grabbag of "one of the interns can knock this off in an afternoon", "if the team focuses this can be done in a few months", "if this was Apple/Google/Microsoft devoting massive resources to a cutting edge unit they might pull it off in the next few years" and "ask our a strongly superhuman virtual intelligence descendants in another 50-100 years". It's a job for professionals to help inform what's possibly feasible and what isn't too, and an organization which just says yes isn't healthy. But of course not everyone has the luxury of just packing their bags even if an organization's sales side constantly writes checks development can't cash. It's also a classic startup trap to spend too many resources on tooling/infra that will make life easier for a tomorrow which will never come because they go under first. Getting the balance right between ugly hacks needed to hit targets cheaply and scaling if the startup works is often super hard. In all this implementation is more important than ideas, and a lot of solid hard work on something junk is still going to fail. So I think it's also important to emphasize that sometimes no amount of working on it will get from an F to a C, B, or A. There is a time to cut losses, and some initial effort should be expended on getting a feel for basic viability before too much time is sunk so it's possible to pivot away. All while not losing hope about trying again because you can definitely always get that C, B or A in a future effort. No perfect map for that either though. Is grand success just over that next hill, or just a slide down into quicksand? And sometimes a very valuable effort comes out of some side project or individual feature that customers love in an overall product which bombs.
luxurytent 4y ago
I’m at an early stage startup. We’re just 6 engineers and 6 more on sales/logistics side. Things move slow, and then fast. The benefit of so much being incomplete or just not there (lol what observability?) is that we collectively know it’s not there. We know no one can really change it today, so we put more effort and focus into the more pressing need — which is developing the product. I find pleasure in that ability to focus.
Ozzie_osman 4y ago
To fix it, you need a mix of first principle thinking and best practices. Almost every startup I've seen has a bias and does one but not the other. You need best practices because countless other startups have faced some variation of what you are facing. Whether it's hiring, marketing, product, engineering. Collectively, these problems have been solved before. Learn from others. You need first principle thinking because your situation is still somewhat unique, and best practices may not be best for you. Also, the best practices you hear or read about are riddled in all sorts of biases. So the first thing I ask a startup I'm advising is around trying to identify where their bias is and help them fix it.
- _pdp_ 4y ago
  First principle thinking does not solve anything in practice. It is just a philosophy. You can make an argument that it can increase your chances of success but it does not guarantee anything.
dhoe 4y ago
The other side of this is when you're at a startup and bring in more people from a non startup background, and they all immediately start complaining how process x was way more organized at HP or AWS or wherever they were before. At the pace we were hiring at my last job, I got to hear the same suggestions for improvement week after week while onboarding newbies - it was pretty amusing. Of course we fixed what we could as fast as we could, but the amount of things that was ridiculously broken was obviously still huge.
qiuyesuifeng 4y ago
It's really hard for those startups in this status...
ryukoposting 4y ago
As someone 1.5 years into working for a startup, this was cathartic. That opening paragraph says everything I've felt. The highs are really high, and the lows just feel stupid. My boss was in <very important magazine's top young professionals list> last year. The next day, I couldn't find an allen key because someone took the whole rack. One day, the product is on the cover of <well-known scientific journal>. The next day the `develop' branch doesn't compile because someone merged a change to a submodule without updating the other repos.
- caseysoftware 4y ago
  I'm glad it resonated well. The swings between the highs and lows are regular, frequent, and irritating but it happens to everyone. Just saying it out loud can be a good release. Do it.
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
I’m really curious why people love working at startups when big companies pay 2-5x more and have less stress. Is it that the uncertainty, stress, and more working hours are exciting? Is it actually just the lottery ticket aspect? I know startups have some advantages in terms of building something new and having more impact on the product, but it seems hard to outweigh the day-to-day unpleasantness. I’ve worked at both and I’ll never go back to a startup. I’m really unclear as to why they appeal to people. Maybe those factors just don’t bother other people that much?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gmassman 4y ago
  All companies have unique cultures. Just because a company is a startup doesn't inherently mean everyone works crazy hours, is under a huge amount of pressure, or is forced to sacrifice work-life balance. That may be the case in some places, and at certain points in time those factors will apply. But more often than not I'm a 40 hr/week senior engineer who has time to spend with friends, practice violin, cook meals, etc. The lower pay isn't low - I'm making plenty for the Bay Area. The stress isn't too high - we have important customers with product expectations, so we test thoroughly before we release changes. I may not be in the weeds writing code every week because I need to wear the product and QA hats too, but overall I love being a high impact player on a team making an impact in a market I care about. Whether the company takes off or doesn't, I'm happier building something with minimum overhead and maximum flexibility.
- aranchelk 4y ago
  At smaller and newer companies (startups being one variation) I love the ability to execute and build things properly without regard for bad established policies or political infighting. These are issues I’ve encountered working for larger orgs. I’ve never taken a pay cut moving from a larger org to a smaller one. I feel way more stress being idle than I ever do from external pressure. It’s a personality type.
  - 4y ago
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Michael Dell observed that each time his company doubled in size, he had to change all the processes. Manual processes had to be automated; automated processes could be expanded to handle customers in a more nuanced way; and on and on. Growth is painful and chaotic.

111 points by caseysoftware 4y ago

I've experienced joining a startup and noticing there are so much work to do. I started to write a list of stuff to do and it's huge. Difficult to prioritize correctly. Very tempted to yak-shake all over the place.

vosper 4y ago
And here I am with my puny razor, when I could have been shaking the thing!
ryanbrunner 4y ago
I've worked for small (< 100 employees, and mostly < 20) startups for more or less my entire career, and one thing that's been helpful for me is to never try and think about EVERYTHING you need to do, and aggressively try to eliminate any effort to do so. If you have any influence over a backlog, roadmap, or list of stories, advocate eliminating anything that's not an immediate concern (bugs are an exception - sometimes it makes sense to purge outdated bugs, but it shouldn't be done lightly). Delete the stories, take things off your roadmap. Almost without exception, they do nothing but generate stress about an insurmountable amount of things to do, more than half of the things won't ever be worked on (which is good! it means you learned something else was more important), and will just lead to people, both internal and external, getting frustrated that "things aren't getting done" even when they are.
- lbriner 4y ago
  I think this sounds great in theory (and I do agree with you) but depending on how many people you have in the company, you will have sales arguing for one thing, devs arguing for another, product might want another and marketing need the stats to do their job. One of the hardest things is prioritising dissimilar tasks, especially since the return on investment is not always easy to see or might take a number of weeks/months. Maybe the marketing stats really help marketing target more of the right people but maybe they don't or maybe something unrelated stopped the figures from improving after you did the work. I suspect someone has done research on how to add real cost/benefit to some of the intangible things to try and objectively rank them.
  - ryanbrunner 4y ago
    Oh for sure, I don't think what I'm suggesting is a solution in any way for how you decide what's most important. But a lot of times, "throw everything on the roadmap / backlog" is really a non-solution in disguise - rather than making tough decisions about what's most important, the answer becomes "everything".
caseysoftware 4y ago
There will ALWAYS be a long list of things to do. You have to prioritize on what will a) move the business forward or b) unlock other people/opportunities that will move the business forward. That could mean improving features, sales funnel, marketing, hiring, or a ton of other things. It really matters on what the risks/opportunities are at any given moment.

manuelabeledo 4y ago

If there is one thing I have learnt from working at startups, successful or not, it would be that turnover is extremely high in the first few years, and that’s fine. I have interviewed countless candidates who have a romanticised idea of what a startup is. Perhaps it didn’t help that HR kept using euphemisms like “fast paced” or “extreme ownership” in job postings, I don’t know. Reality is, not many people are ready to work in a constant state of uncertainty. When the company didn’t get the expects funding, uncertainty might as well be seen as almost chaos. The author softens it a little bit by saying that, in startups, everything is a “variable”, which I believe is, again, an euphemism. But I guess that it would be way harder to hire if you said the bad parts out loud: in their early stages, startups are messy, chaotic, and you never know if you are going to make it to the next week, regardless of how awesome the product is.

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
It might be harder to hire, but you'd probably end up with people who thrive in that environment. Will this get you to where you want to be faster? Dunno.
- traceroute66 4y ago
  > It might be harder to hire, but you'd probably end up with people who thrive in that environment. This is a key point. As you do when you run startups, you wear many hats, and one of the hats I frequently wore was that of interviewer. In that role you very quickly develop a smell-test for the corporate-type. It is an inevitable fact that the majority of responses from any job ad will come from people whose immediately previous job(s) were in the corporate environment. That's fine, nothing wrong with that. But you have to structure your interview technique as such that you try to determine if they are more the corporate-type who has become accustomed to the cushy life of the corporate world (teams, departments, tight job descriptions, guaranteed 9–5 life etc.). The problem with those who have become accustomed to the corporate world is that they'll never change. The mentality becomes too engrained, they seriously struggle and cause headaches for their colleagues. The more years they've spent in corprate-land, the worse it is. I would often find the classic "do you have any more questions for me?" at the end of the interview to be the most revealing of all as to the mindset of the candidate.

ThalesX 4y ago

I've started my career in enterprise environments, and recently on my 3rd startup. As the author mentions, startups to seem to be broken, going after everything and finding product market fit and others... While this is true, I can't help but shake the feeling that adding corporate-planning to a startup-environment would actually calm down things and would still hit targets. I do get a bit frustrated when startup leadership don't think about brokenness because 'that's the way startups are'. I have a friend, big corporate leader; I suspect he'd restructure any startup into something more performant in terms of delivery in less than a quarter.

syntheweave 4y ago
It's built into the startup concept that the people who make them are mostly going to be driven, action-oriented "doers" who stick things into the gears of organizational machinery at random to try to make them turn. A smarter founder will know to check assumptions, but it's a case of putting armor where the bullet holes are: sheer persistence is way more important, and where new companies are most likely to fail is in giving up on one or more types of roadblocks and trying to choose only certain fights when they need to persist and come up with some immediate thing that addresses every challenge and change, even if it's not a real or permanent solution or the specific thing they want to be focused on. The other way to go is, well, the slow way: study the problem, build consensus, look before you leap. While older founders who are bootstrapping will tend to act more conservatively like this, it's not favored by startups of the VC money sort, not because it's actually a worse way to go, but because it isn't playing the game - it doesn't result in huge investment opportunities where a giant market share is captured in a short time frame. If you go in aiming to build consensus you may actually benefit society, but you aren't going to "capture" things. After all, capturing means "I win, you lose". Thus, a startup that does get to the point where they are rapidly soaking up market share is likely to have a dysfunctional quality of being dissatisfied with the thing the business is currently about: there always has to be a next thing to conquer. Thus another re-org, new hires, repeat until you've attained tech giant status.
- TheNewsIsHere 4y ago
  With my own business I’ve experienced just about everything you’ve mentioned here. We are explicitly not seeking hyper growth, and we are fine with the “traditional” approach that says “businesses take {three,five,seven} years to become profitable.” From a financial perspective my cofounders and I aren’t doing this to get the 45,000 square foot mansion in the hills overlooking Veil. We just want to use our skills to do something that helps other businesses as a means to building a tidy retirement nest egg. Several family members have done that same thing in each of our families in the past. And yet we’ve still fallen into some of the same traps any startup in technology falls into. We recently decided to exit the Atlassian ecosystem (prior to their recent issues) and have been doing so while we’re still under the grandfathered pricing for their cloud offerings. We didn’t want to wait until the last minute. We bought ourselves some time so we didn’t want to rush it either. Just deciding to step back and replace tooling can be difficult. It means you’re tying up a LOT of cycles in internal work, but sometimes that’s a good call to make. We had been using Jira for anything “taskable” but we have both internal/code work and external/billable work, and we weren’t managing either very well in Jira. It’s easy to say “we will lose a lot of history and velocity” but you can export data, and the velocity you lose continuously by not using tooling that works for you, can be much more harmful. It can be difficult to SEE that you need to step back and reevaluate something as big as your tasking or documentation management. For us, we decided to use this as an opportunity to look with fresh eyes at everything and ended up replacing virtually all of our tools and infrastructure. We even replaced all but one core AWS service in our application and moved everything else to Linode. We replaced our billing system too. We moved from Chargebee, which was vastly over complicated for our current needs to the point where we hated using it, to using pure Stripe and project management with ActiveCollab. We said no to some business while we did that, but from the inside perspective our lives are much easier, our revenue cycle is more consistent and manageable (and actually -happens-) now that our billables are in a revenue-aware tasking system (ActiveCollab) instead of a pure-task tracking system (Jira). We’re OK with taking our time because slowly we’ve been seeing just how to build this business effectively, and for us that’s far more important than scale or quarterly returns right now.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lkrubner 4y ago

For some years now, I've been a big proponent of the idea that, as a community, we should write about startups with more realism and with less hype. Especially for the sake of more junior people, we should try to illustrate what euphemisms like "very fluid" or “fast paced” actually mean. I know some readers of Hacker News have read my book, How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps, and I really wish more people would do what I did and write with real honesty about how chaotic and frustrating early stage startups can be. Yes, they can be exciting, but also they can be stressful. And mind you, I work at a startup right now, so it's not as if one bad experience scared me away from startups forever. But I do think we should have more truthful writing, so that people who decide to work at a startup have a better idea of what they are getting into. (Also, some people worry that writing honestly about a startup will hurt their career, but my book only helped my career. As it became more and more popular, I got more and more offers to consult with various entrepreneurs.)

jacquesm 4y ago
I would change one little bit in your comment: 'they also can be stressful' -> 'they also will be stressful'. A start-up is pretty much guaranteed to be a constant source of major stress either because of the success or because of the lack of it. Success will bring its own kind of problems and those can be very stressful indeed. I know lots of founders but I don't know a single one that did not have to deal with stress on a daily basis. Perseverance is often listed as a key requirement for success, I think stress resistance really should be added to that list, it is something you will have to learn how to deal with or it will cause you major grief.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
krallja 4y ago
My new favorite question to ask interviewers is “the job description says ‘fast-paced`, can you give me an example of what that looks like for you?”
- ss108 4y ago

punnerud 4y ago

I like this last advice: “ think of your company as a child: When a kid is healthy, and growing, they outgrow their shoes. You don’t blame the kid. You just find new shoes.”

lucidguppy 4y ago

There's a couple of things going on here. Schools in the US and perhaps elsewhere DO NOT TEACH STUDENTS about how to handle failure states and anxiety. It is the biggest blind spot the US has and it is biting us in the butt. A big part of the culture is about perfectionism (perhaps rooted in religion - perhaps rooted in kids TV shows - sports culture) - and that needs to be replaced with "blameless continual improvement". The best performers are those that divorce failure states from emotions and anxiety. XYZ isn't finished yet - no you're not done.... that's TOTALLY ok. Every homework assignment starts off with a grade of F - you work on it to get to a C, B, or A. A startup's work is never done, there really is no success state, and that's OK too. You're helping to make the product better, you're delivering features to customers. Your making the task pipeline faster with your automation tools. Things suck - but you're making life easier for everyone tomorrow. The reason why things are so bad now, is because before, things were worse. Its a much more positive way of looking at things for me. Yeah, things can improve, but we've done a lot to make things better. Also https://www.businessinsider.com/astronaut-chris-hadfield-in-space-there-is-no-problem-so-bad-you-cant-make-it-worse-2014-3?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/astronaut-chris-hadfield-in-... - there is no problem so bad that you can't make it worse. The best thing you can do is separate your emotions from the situation because they degrade your executive functions. I disagree with the "quit your bellyaching" sort of conclusions. It gives off a very https://reddit.com/r/wowthanksimcured https://reddit.com/r/wowthanksimcured vibe.

xoa 4y ago
I think you make some really strong points here and I completely agree that learning to deal with inevitable failure and working through it matters. I'd offer one small addition though: >XYZ isn't finished yet - no you're not done.... that's TOTALLY ok. Every homework assignment starts off with a grade of F - you work on it to get to a C, B, or A. A startup's work is never done, there really is no success state, and that's OK too. You're helping to make the product better, you're delivering features to customers. Your making the task pipeline faster with your automation tools. Things suck - but you're making life easier for everyone tomorrow. It's worth noting at the same time however that "effort" alone isn't enough. Some ideas really just don't work, either because it turns out it's not something the market actually values, is simply beyond any amount of effort with present technology, oneself/one's organization simply doesn't possess the capability to execute on it (often for perfectly good structural reasons), etc etc. If the homework assignment is "wacky acme item a grand total of 12 people in the world want that will cost hundreds of millions", "factor this 256-bit key" or some equivalent of "develop a working Unified Field Theory" it's unlikely most of us are getting an "A"! Obviously IRL it's not typically so clear, but non-domain expert stakeholders (be it management, users or clients) don't always have any great way to understand themselves that their "simple" requests may be a grabbag of "one of the interns can knock this off in an afternoon", "if the team focuses this can be done in a few months", "if this was Apple/Google/Microsoft devoting massive resources to a cutting edge unit they might pull it off in the next few years" and "ask our a strongly superhuman virtual intelligence descendants in another 50-100 years". It's a job for professionals to help inform what's possibly feasible and what isn't too, and an organization which just says yes isn't healthy. But of course not everyone has the luxury of just packing their bags even if an organization's sales side constantly writes checks development can't cash. It's also a classic startup trap to spend too many resources on tooling/infra that will make life easier for a tomorrow which will never come because they go under first. Getting the balance right between ugly hacks needed to hit targets cheaply and scaling if the startup works is often super hard. In all this implementation is more important than ideas, and a lot of solid hard work on something junk is still going to fail. So I think it's also important to emphasize that sometimes no amount of working on it will get from an F to a C, B, or A. There is a time to cut losses, and some initial effort should be expended on getting a feel for basic viability before too much time is sunk so it's possible to pivot away. All while not losing hope about trying again because you can definitely always get that C, B or A in a future effort. No perfect map for that either though. Is grand success just over that next hill, or just a slide down into quicksand? And sometimes a very valuable effort comes out of some side project or individual feature that customers love in an overall product which bombs.

luxurytent 4y ago

I’m at an early stage startup. We’re just 6 engineers and 6 more on sales/logistics side. Things move slow, and then fast. The benefit of so much being incomplete or just not there (lol what observability?) is that we collectively know it’s not there. We know no one can really change it today, so we put more effort and focus into the more pressing need — which is developing the product. I find pleasure in that ability to focus.

Ozzie_osman 4y ago

To fix it, you need a mix of first principle thinking and best practices. Almost every startup I've seen has a bias and does one but not the other. You need best practices because countless other startups have faced some variation of what you are facing. Whether it's hiring, marketing, product, engineering. Collectively, these problems have been solved before. Learn from others. You need first principle thinking because your situation is still somewhat unique, and best practices may not be best for you. Also, the best practices you hear or read about are riddled in all sorts of biases. So the first thing I ask a startup I'm advising is around trying to identify where their bias is and help them fix it.

_pdp_ 4y ago
First principle thinking does not solve anything in practice. It is just a philosophy. You can make an argument that it can increase your chances of success but it does not guarantee anything.

dhoe 4y ago

The other side of this is when you're at a startup and bring in more people from a non startup background, and they all immediately start complaining how process x was way more organized at HP or AWS or wherever they were before. At the pace we were hiring at my last job, I got to hear the same suggestions for improvement week after week while onboarding newbies - it was pretty amusing. Of course we fixed what we could as fast as we could, but the amount of things that was ridiculously broken was obviously still huge.

qiuyesuifeng 4y ago

It's really hard for those startups in this status...

ryukoposting 4y ago

As someone 1.5 years into working for a startup, this was cathartic. That opening paragraph says everything I've felt. The highs are really high, and the lows just feel stupid. My boss was in <very important magazine's top young professionals list> last year. The next day, I couldn't find an allen key because someone took the whole rack. One day, the product is on the cover of <well-known scientific journal>. The next day the `develop' branch doesn't compile because someone merged a change to a submodule without updating the other repos.

caseysoftware 4y ago
I'm glad it resonated well. The swings between the highs and lows are regular, frequent, and irritating but it happens to everyone. Just saying it out loud can be a good release. Do it.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago

I’m really curious why people love working at startups when big companies pay 2-5x more and have less stress. Is it that the uncertainty, stress, and more working hours are exciting? Is it actually just the lottery ticket aspect? I know startups have some advantages in terms of building something new and having more impact on the product, but it seems hard to outweigh the day-to-day unpleasantness. I’ve worked at both and I’ll never go back to a startup. I’m really unclear as to why they appeal to people. Maybe those factors just don’t bother other people that much?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gmassman 4y ago
All companies have unique cultures. Just because a company is a startup doesn't inherently mean everyone works crazy hours, is under a huge amount of pressure, or is forced to sacrifice work-life balance. That may be the case in some places, and at certain points in time those factors will apply. But more often than not I'm a 40 hr/week senior engineer who has time to spend with friends, practice violin, cook meals, etc. The lower pay isn't low - I'm making plenty for the Bay Area. The stress isn't too high - we have important customers with product expectations, so we test thoroughly before we release changes. I may not be in the weeds writing code every week because I need to wear the product and QA hats too, but overall I love being a high impact player on a team making an impact in a market I care about. Whether the company takes off or doesn't, I'm happier building something with minimum overhead and maximum flexibility.
aranchelk 4y ago
At smaller and newer companies (startups being one variation) I love the ability to execute and build things properly without regard for bad established policies or political infighting. These are issues I’ve encountered working for larger orgs. I’ve never taken a pay cut moving from a larger org to a smaller one. I feel way more stress being idle than I ever do from external pressure. It’s a personality type.
- 4y ago

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

Michael Dell observed that each time his company doubled in size, he had to change all the processes. Manual processes had to be automated; automated processes could be expanded to handle customers in a more nuanced way; and on and on. Growth is painful and chaotic.