4 ms·
Yeah I'm worried that it reads like I'm trashing my co-founders, but it's not my intent. I don't think there is any way to reflect on what you learned about wha
by orianmarx 18y ago
Yeah I'm worried that it reads like I'm trashing my co-founders, but it's not my intent. I don't think there is any way to reflect on what you learned about what works and what doesn't work in a team environment without the some people interpreting that as trash talking your partners.
A couple of things I should probably point out: the SXSW was supposed to be a team trip and the point was for everyone to have the experience of interacting with a bunch of top notch startup people (we aren't from the valley) and I only proposed it a few weeks ahead of time after we had a lot of people telling us that it was the single most useful thing to attend all year (I didn't even know about it before then). Only two of us ended up going, but that wasn't my intention.
When we landed the YC interview, it meant flying from NYC to LAX for a ten minute interview. We were told that only I needed to fly out, but I said everyone should go because they deserved the trip. This was obviously not the cost-efficient approach, but I think it was a lot better for the team.
As for the Goldman comment, I find this to be a typical programmer retort to any questioning of what they are doing: "If you're so great, why don't you do it yourself?" In fact, I didn't question what he was doing for way too long precisely for that reason, and I think that was a mistake. Now as for doing it myself... there are some areas of technical knowledge that I do not have, which is why I brought people on. Now that I'm on my own again, I'm doing my best to get it done myself.
Hey, you probably wouldn't want me as a cofounder, fair enough. I appreciate the better luck next time comment though.
- nostrademons 18y ago> I don't think there is any way to reflect on what you learned about what works and what doesn't work in a team environment without the some people interpreting that as trash talking your partners. Something I've noticed about writing postmortems: focus on "What would I do differently?" and "What mistakes did I make?" Other people are who they are. You aren't going to change them, and they usually have good reasons for what they do. Most startups fail because of team issues. Mine did - I tried to keep it going for 2 months after my cofounder left, but couldn't. But then, this is my fault. If we'd been further along in development, he might've felt that the startup was a better bet. If I'd listened to him and released the easy version he was proposing, we might've been further along in development (but then, we had good reasons for not doing so...startups are hard). And he certainly had good reasons for leaving - hell, if I'd gotten into HBS, I probably would've left too.
- thorax 18y agoI very much appreciate what you wrote and am very glad it's available. There are lots of great take-aways for my company and, surely, for a lot of people. I'm in the middle of a major release or I'd respond more-- yet, I'm perplexed to come here and see so many people being negative regarding the post. It takes a lot of guts to work on something feverishly for so long and then put things even more on the line afterwards for a post-mortem. It's nothing but good information for people to take in and learn from. Kudos to you for sharing.
- nostrademons 18y agoI also was glad he posted, and didn't find his entries as annoying as some here. Tough crowd, I guess. However, it may be worth noting that tptacek and SwellJoe both have (fairly) successful startups. I don't, and neither do most of the rest of the people here. So when they say something, it's probably worth listening to.
- tptacek 18y agoBy YC standards, my startup sucks: three years in, I'm nowhere close to retirement.