5 ms·

A great quote sticks in my mind, shared with me by a founder who was going through hard times with his startup. The company was going through a bad spot, and o

by nlh 4y ago

A great quote sticks in my mind, shared with me by a founder who was going through hard times with his startup. The company was going through a bad spot, and one of his investors suggested just giving up and returning the existing capital to the investors. An advisor then said: "It's not their money anymore. Don't you dare give up." He didn't, he persevered, and the company had a fine outcome years later. I would not blindly follow OP's advice.

Ensorceled 4y ago
> They shouldn’t go through down-rounds, cap table restructurings, multiple major pivots, or team transitions. After all that, is it even the same company? No. They should just shut down and start over. The article is talking about pivots not a lack perseverance ...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pram 4y ago
And that founders name? J. Robert Oppenheimer!
user3939382 4y ago
I burnt years of my life following advice like this when I was young and didn’t know better. If your formula is sufficiently wrong, which is the rule not the exception, you can’t make up for it with perseverance. There’s a selection bias in these stories you hear. Stories about people who gave it their all and failed aren’t popular.
- anonymouse008 4y ago
  What would you do differently? How do you know now that you were wasting your time? These moments make you more powerful than ever to be able to articulate why those precious (auto corrected but worked) times were not the myths you heard.
  - ineedasername 4y ago
    I think a lot more people persevere past the point of salvation than persevere against long odds and succeed. There's no clear cut answer to determining 100% of the time, in the moment, if failure is a foregone conclusion, but that doesn't mean you should stick it out until the bitter end. Since most startups fail anyway, if you're already near failure mode then the bias should be in needing an extremely compelling reason-- beyond blind perserverence-- to keep going. Otherwise just salvage anything that might be salvaged and try something else with the new benefit of experience. "What would you do differently" is easily answered with "anything but the thing that just failed."
    - SiempreViernes 4y ago
      > I think a lot more people persevere past the point of salvation than persevere against long odds and succeed One would hope so, that's the definition of long odds!
      - ineedasername 4y ago
        Yes, I realized that semantic issue when I wrote it :). But I figured the meaning was clear enough anyway and I would have tried to hold my ground rhetorically against a counter argument purely on that basis, though I do enjoy arguing from positions where I can't possibly wrong.
  - jacobr1 4y ago
    Guess: when you validation of the problem, validation that there is money to fix the problem, but don't yet have validation that your particular solution or business mode has product-market fit. Though I've worked at a few startups, I don't have enough experience to know to know the above generally applies. But if there isn't a market for your product, no amount of effort is going to fix it. I don't mean existing market, sometimes good products make their own category ... but you need to have evidence that is true.
  - 0x20cowboy 4y ago
    > How do you know now that you were wasting your time? For me, this is very hard advice to give, and I usually equate it to running. When you run, it often hurts after a while. There is a kind of hurt that you just need to push through, and then there is the kind of hurt that will cause bad or long term damage. It’s sometime hard to know the difference. You can sometimes quit when you shouldn’t have, and you’ll probably cause an injury or two figuring out the other kind. Over time you learn what “fake pain” and “real pain” are - in my experience - only after the fact and learning from the past. This is bad advise so don’t follow it, but I’ve found quitting first, and then feeling horrible about yourself when you find out you shouldn’t have allows you to collect more data than pushing on something that will never work for X years.
- smachiz 4y ago
  Certainly true, but start ups pivot and find success all the time. Or redefine what success is if they're early enough and wind up in great lifestyle businesses that'll never be unicorns or deca unicorns or whatever. I guess the moral of the story is really be sure that you are holding a losing hand, and that you can't play go fish instead of poker.
  - urbandw311er 4y ago
    “All the time” is quite a vague non-quantitive phrase though. How many startups successfully pivot? How many fail? What is that as a percentage? Personally I think that’s a more useful indicator of risk when deciding.
- onion2k 4y ago
  If your formula is sufficiently wrong, which is the rule not the exception, you can’t make up for it with perseverance. You can make up for it by examining your formula and experimenting with changes to it though, even when something is hugely wrong. Persevering with the same thing when it doesn't work is stupid; understanding that and trying to fix it is not. It's what startups call pivoting. You might still fail if you pivot but you'll definitely fail if you stop.
  - zivkovicp 4y ago
    This is good life advice also, the key is self-examination and having the open mindedness to see and act on errors.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    > You might still fail if you pivot but you'll definitely fail if you stop. I think this is a skewed way to look at it, because it doesn't take into account what happens once you failed. Fail your startup after a year, get hired as an employee and grow your career for a few years, and you have immensely more chances to be in a good place to succeed than if you choose to push and spend years before failing your startup. Failing is the rule for startups, by far not the exception. Persevering at some point becomes sunk time fallacy, not something to be proud of.
    - leaflets2 4y ago
      Yes, "failing" is not the right word, for the people in the startup. "Doing something else instead" is a better word
  - bootstrapper35 4y ago
    Someone once said "Startups don't die, they commit suicide". I was working on a small bootstrapped product for some 3 years. I had great opportunity at the time, because I was still young and living with my parents and I didn't have to work for money at the time. I got some pushback after launch, but I was tired of the sacrifice and started freelancing and moved out to live on my own. I never formally declared that I quit, I just thought that I would do it in my off time. I had little imagination that this would practically meant that I'm quitting because I was not getting anything done with that approach. 2 years later, I decided to get back to it again. I started laying low, go back to living with my parents (this time I did earn money though), but I unlocked some 40h/week for my product experiments. After some 6 months of experimenting with the old idea and realizing of how horrible the code was, deciding to rewrite it from scratch, I came upon a related, but different idea that I have found actually to be useful myself and I saw just how superior it was to the previous idea and how it solved pretty much every problem with the old product. I also made many mistakes with the old product launch, that was just due to being too inexperienced (being too greedy with the price, not marketing to enough people - and of course, giving up way too quick). I'm still working on the new product. Not sure if it will succeed in any way but I do not want to lose momentum. I'm learning tons. While working on the current idea, I have 2 new ideas for bigger products. I guess if it fails I will try the VC route with something new. BUT do I wish I could go back in time to the time when I stopped, I would be 2 years ahead and likely launching the new product now. My story is of someone who did not succeed yet. If I persist and not die too soon (like literally die), my story will fall under "survivorship bias".
- hodgesrm 4y ago
  > If your formula is sufficiently wrong, which is the rule not the exception, you can’t make up for it with perseverance. It's not a simple decision, at least based on my personal experience. If you have a good team, a good market, and economics that let you exist in the market until you get the product right, it's worth hanging in there for a really long time. The reason there's "selection bias" on persevering is that it's how a lot of companies actually succeeded. It's not just tech, either. There's a reason why people like Eddie Cantor said "It takes 20 years to make an overnight success."
nine_k 4y ago
Those who persevere succeed can tell the stories about perseverance saving their company. Those who persevere and fail may tell how not quitting early enough continued the agony, but also can tell how just a bit more help could have led them to success, but odds were just all stacked against them. Those who saw a failure coming and quit are likely not to tell much about it, there's no glory at it. This all produces a kind of evolutionary / social pressure to persist and maybe win even when the chances are slim. The winner takes all. The losers persist at their (and, in a sense, everyone's) expense of "malinvestment", but they, and the price they pay, is handwaved away and forgotten. Evolution is about advancement of a species, not of a particular organism; progress is about advancement of an industry, not a particular company. I'm with the "wind it down properly if it's not working" crowd though. One reason is that you have to fire people, and it's nicer to still be able to give them some severance pay.
spoonjim 4y ago
I did the same, persevered, and threw away 11 years on a company I should have thrown in the rubbish after 1. The only thing that saved my career afterwards was family nepotism. It's often investors who push the "never give up" thinking because those 11 years just come out of their LP's bank accounts, not out of bedtime stories with their kids.
melony 4y ago
Survivor bias!
fragbait65 4y ago
I've been a technical advisor for several startups, I'd say that overall this advice is wrong. Most startups stay in it way longer than they should. I'm happy that things worked out in your example, but they generally don't. Mostly because founders reason with their feelings instead of applying logic, statistics and probabilities of success.
- lawl 4y ago
  It really depends on what the end game is. Diplomacy? Might make sense to wait and see what kind of rocks you find.

by nlh 4y ago

Ensorceled 4y ago

> They shouldn’t go through down-rounds, cap table restructurings, multiple major pivots, or team transitions. After all that, is it even the same company? No. They should just shut down and start over. The article is talking about pivots not a lack perseverance ...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

pram 4y ago

And that founders name? J. Robert Oppenheimer!

user3939382 4y ago

I burnt years of my life following advice like this when I was young and didn’t know better. If your formula is sufficiently wrong, which is the rule not the exception, you can’t make up for it with perseverance. There’s a selection bias in these stories you hear. Stories about people who gave it their all and failed aren’t popular.

anonymouse008 4y ago
What would you do differently? How do you know now that you were wasting your time? These moments make you more powerful than ever to be able to articulate why those precious (auto corrected but worked) times were not the myths you heard.
- ineedasername 4y ago
  I think a lot more people persevere past the point of salvation than persevere against long odds and succeed. There's no clear cut answer to determining 100% of the time, in the moment, if failure is a foregone conclusion, but that doesn't mean you should stick it out until the bitter end. Since most startups fail anyway, if you're already near failure mode then the bias should be in needing an extremely compelling reason-- beyond blind perserverence-- to keep going. Otherwise just salvage anything that might be salvaged and try something else with the new benefit of experience. "What would you do differently" is easily answered with "anything but the thing that just failed."
  - SiempreViernes 4y ago
    > I think a lot more people persevere past the point of salvation than persevere against long odds and succeed One would hope so, that's the definition of long odds!
    - ineedasername 4y ago
      Yes, I realized that semantic issue when I wrote it :). But I figured the meaning was clear enough anyway and I would have tried to hold my ground rhetorically against a counter argument purely on that basis, though I do enjoy arguing from positions where I can't possibly wrong.
- jacobr1 4y ago
  Guess: when you validation of the problem, validation that there is money to fix the problem, but don't yet have validation that your particular solution or business mode has product-market fit. Though I've worked at a few startups, I don't have enough experience to know to know the above generally applies. But if there isn't a market for your product, no amount of effort is going to fix it. I don't mean existing market, sometimes good products make their own category ... but you need to have evidence that is true.
- 0x20cowboy 4y ago
  > How do you know now that you were wasting your time? For me, this is very hard advice to give, and I usually equate it to running. When you run, it often hurts after a while. There is a kind of hurt that you just need to push through, and then there is the kind of hurt that will cause bad or long term damage. It’s sometime hard to know the difference. You can sometimes quit when you shouldn’t have, and you’ll probably cause an injury or two figuring out the other kind. Over time you learn what “fake pain” and “real pain” are - in my experience - only after the fact and learning from the past. This is bad advise so don’t follow it, but I’ve found quitting first, and then feeling horrible about yourself when you find out you shouldn’t have allows you to collect more data than pushing on something that will never work for X years.
smachiz 4y ago
Certainly true, but start ups pivot and find success all the time. Or redefine what success is if they're early enough and wind up in great lifestyle businesses that'll never be unicorns or deca unicorns or whatever. I guess the moral of the story is really be sure that you are holding a losing hand, and that you can't play go fish instead of poker.
- urbandw311er 4y ago
  “All the time” is quite a vague non-quantitive phrase though. How many startups successfully pivot? How many fail? What is that as a percentage? Personally I think that’s a more useful indicator of risk when deciding.
onion2k 4y ago
If your formula is sufficiently wrong, which is the rule not the exception, you can’t make up for it with perseverance. You can make up for it by examining your formula and experimenting with changes to it though, even when something is hugely wrong. Persevering with the same thing when it doesn't work is stupid; understanding that and trying to fix it is not. It's what startups call pivoting. You might still fail if you pivot but you'll definitely fail if you stop.
- zivkovicp 4y ago
  This is good life advice also, the key is self-examination and having the open mindedness to see and act on errors.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  > You might still fail if you pivot but you'll definitely fail if you stop. I think this is a skewed way to look at it, because it doesn't take into account what happens once you failed. Fail your startup after a year, get hired as an employee and grow your career for a few years, and you have immensely more chances to be in a good place to succeed than if you choose to push and spend years before failing your startup. Failing is the rule for startups, by far not the exception. Persevering at some point becomes sunk time fallacy, not something to be proud of.
  - leaflets2 4y ago
    Yes, "failing" is not the right word, for the people in the startup. "Doing something else instead" is a better word
- bootstrapper35 4y ago
  Someone once said "Startups don't die, they commit suicide". I was working on a small bootstrapped product for some 3 years. I had great opportunity at the time, because I was still young and living with my parents and I didn't have to work for money at the time. I got some pushback after launch, but I was tired of the sacrifice and started freelancing and moved out to live on my own. I never formally declared that I quit, I just thought that I would do it in my off time. I had little imagination that this would practically meant that I'm quitting because I was not getting anything done with that approach. 2 years later, I decided to get back to it again. I started laying low, go back to living with my parents (this time I did earn money though), but I unlocked some 40h/week for my product experiments. After some 6 months of experimenting with the old idea and realizing of how horrible the code was, deciding to rewrite it from scratch, I came upon a related, but different idea that I have found actually to be useful myself and I saw just how superior it was to the previous idea and how it solved pretty much every problem with the old product. I also made many mistakes with the old product launch, that was just due to being too inexperienced (being too greedy with the price, not marketing to enough people - and of course, giving up way too quick). I'm still working on the new product. Not sure if it will succeed in any way but I do not want to lose momentum. I'm learning tons. While working on the current idea, I have 2 new ideas for bigger products. I guess if it fails I will try the VC route with something new. BUT do I wish I could go back in time to the time when I stopped, I would be 2 years ahead and likely launching the new product now. My story is of someone who did not succeed yet. If I persist and not die too soon (like literally die), my story will fall under "survivorship bias".
hodgesrm 4y ago
> If your formula is sufficiently wrong, which is the rule not the exception, you can’t make up for it with perseverance. It's not a simple decision, at least based on my personal experience. If you have a good team, a good market, and economics that let you exist in the market until you get the product right, it's worth hanging in there for a really long time. The reason there's "selection bias" on persevering is that it's how a lot of companies actually succeeded. It's not just tech, either. There's a reason why people like Eddie Cantor said "It takes 20 years to make an overnight success."

nine_k 4y ago

Those who persevere succeed can tell the stories about perseverance saving their company. Those who persevere and fail may tell how not quitting early enough continued the agony, but also can tell how just a bit more help could have led them to success, but odds were just all stacked against them. Those who saw a failure coming and quit are likely not to tell much about it, there's no glory at it. This all produces a kind of evolutionary / social pressure to persist and maybe win even when the chances are slim. The winner takes all. The losers persist at their (and, in a sense, everyone's) expense of "malinvestment", but they, and the price they pay, is handwaved away and forgotten. Evolution is about advancement of a species, not of a particular organism; progress is about advancement of an industry, not a particular company. I'm with the "wind it down properly if it's not working" crowd though. One reason is that you have to fire people, and it's nicer to still be able to give them some severance pay.

spoonjim 4y ago

I did the same, persevered, and threw away 11 years on a company I should have thrown in the rubbish after 1. The only thing that saved my career afterwards was family nepotism. It's often investors who push the "never give up" thinking because those 11 years just come out of their LP's bank accounts, not out of bedtime stories with their kids.

melony 4y ago

Survivor bias!

fragbait65 4y ago

I've been a technical advisor for several startups, I'd say that overall this advice is wrong. Most startups stay in it way longer than they should. I'm happy that things worked out in your example, but they generally don't. Mostly because founders reason with their feelings instead of applying logic, statistics and probabilities of success.

lawl 4y ago
It really depends on what the end game is. Diplomacy? Might make sense to wait and see what kind of rocks you find.