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Don’t emotionally bootstrap your startup
- msy 3y agoI have absolutely no idea what this self-involved waffly collection of buzzwords is trying to say and I'm upset I won't get back the time I wasted trying to read it.
- username_my1 3y agoseriously ! everything in life is cost / result equations .... it might be easier for some than others to start a company (network, location, background, experince, timing, team, intelligence ...) but everyone pays something in exchange for a result. your emotional labor as a founder is clearly a huge one, you should be aware of it, but the article is foundementally ignoring that fact that there is a price for everything. we all so the "pasty" elon musk ... it's not that it's the only way to build amazing things and so many people look that way playing video games .... my point is, anyone wants to build something and not pay for it (emotionally, financially, reputation ....) is just unaware what the word build means.
- tmikaeld 3y agoLong time since I've wasted time on an article so complex and full of jargon without actually getting to any point. There's no structure, with a lot of assumptions of prior knowledge, personal anecdotes, metaphors and ambiguity, like, wow.. ironic for someone that wrote a book about "designing conversations that matter".
- heleninboodler 3y agoYes, this writing is infuriatingly light on actually saying what the hell he means. I spent the entire thing trying to determine if "don't emotionally bootstrap" mean you should bootstrap, but don't be emotional about it, or if it meant you shouldn't bootstrap your emotions or ... what. I think this phrase must have popped into his head as a stunningly insightful concept that made a great blog post title so he just barfed it out and patted himself on the back for being so clever. And in the only spot he actually even uses the phrase "emotionally bootstrap", it appears to be a one-time thing that might be the same thing as "inner bootstrapping," which he talks about a bunch and contrasts to "outer bootstrapping," all while defining neither. I closed the page somewhat angrily and then was delighted to come back to the HN comments and see a chorus of WTF.
- igetspam 3y agoI appreciate your sacrifice and thank you for the review. I won't waste my time.
- TX81Z 3y agoAgree totally, and I’ll go further, this writing quality and lack of meaning is literally poorer quality than I’d expect from Bard, let alone GPT-4. We’re getting to the point that the best tell it’s written by an average human is that it’s below the quality of a machine.
- jansan 3y agoCan someone tell me what this is about? I did not understand it. Also, my definition of a sticky note seems to be outdated.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoI think what he is trying to say: some people pride themselves in being bootstrapped, and his point his a bit of investment would probably allow to company to become competitive and the founder wouldn't have such a stressful time while also making more money in the end. So basically swallow your pride.
- taneq 3y agoIf that's the message then it seems to miss the motivation for being fully bootstrapped, which (as I see it) is owning a profitable company without outside interests dictating what you do. Given a choice between owning a $X company outright, and owning 10% of a $X*100 company, if both could pay me enough salary to be comfortable then I'd take outright ownership every time. I don't need to be a billionaire, I just need to be free to do my thing.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoYou can take investment without doing the full seed, a, b, c, d, f rounds. Outside of the hyped startup worlds there are other ways. Or just do an a if you have half of a decent company.
- seanhunter 3y agoIt's someone who loves the sound of their own voice telling some poor person how clever he is and how poor her choices are when she is trying to do something difficult and the one objectively poor choice she has made is the fatal decision to ask the author's opinion.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoAlso dont emotionally go for investment. The problem with the situation is that the entrepeneur he describes is in this phase where the running of the business got so time consuming that it trumps longterm development, wether that's finding investment or developing the company structurally. That's a hard spot to be in.
- gizmo 3y ago> I have a coach, I work with an executive coaching mastermind as I deepen my own executive coaching practice, I have a men’s group that meets weekly (it’s like crossfit for my emotions), a therapist and a slack channel filled with innovation consultants who are all more talented than me, and generous with their insights. And...yet...It can still feel lonely and hard sometimes. My take is that startups are intrinsically hard: you’re out of your comfort zone, you don’t know if you’re making good decisions, and you have to repeatedly deal with setbacks and other roadblocks. No amount of therapy-adjacent talking will change that. I wonder if I’m completely out of touch with the younger generation of founders.
- ritzaco 3y ago> I have a coach, I work with an executive coaching mastermind as I deepen my own executive coaching practice I see a lot more more people advertising 'executive coaching' services than I see people looking for the same. Is the business coaching insdustry as pyramid-scheme-y as it seems (i.e. let me coach you on how to run a successful coaching business' similar to 'buy my course on how to make lots of money by selling courses') or is it actually valuable (and people who get coaching maybe just don't talk about it openly? Or there's a market of buyers who just happen to be completely separate from anyone I know or follow?)
- ffgjgf1 3y agoPresumably the people who are actually any good at this are off running their own businesses etc. So who are you left with? A small of number of “retired” ex-executives who might actually be quite good at ‘coaching’ and a huge number of grifters?
- bubblethink 3y agoOr maybe it's more like a lawyer/consultant. In many situations, you know what needs to be done, but you'll run it by the lawyer because the lawyer has a lot more data and has seen this game many times before. So you are relying on their bank of information and pattern matching ability.
- mhluongo 3y ago> Presumably the people who are actually any good at this are off running their own businesses etc. Some of the good coaches are multi-exit former CEOs. They use coaching as a way to angel invest and still be involved in early companies. I'm sure there are plenty of inexperienced coaches with poor results... but I know at least a handful that are great.
- sokoloff 3y agoI used an executive coach years ago, suggested and paid by the company. I would say he was definitely helpful (and maybe even necessary). I don’t see any shame or other negative quality about it, but to P’s point, I also very rarely have any reason to talk about it.
- deepnet 3y ago"It can be lonely at top". It can be lonely anywhere, peer support is very helpful. Founders have to make decisions and cope with crunches and quick decisions amidst many emotions. It can be hard to unpick a bundle of new emotions to find ones gut feeling. Especially as most situations will be new and unique. Time spent sharing with other founders is very valuable. Peer groups and mentors should be in place from the get go
- 4pkjai 3y agoThis guy sounds insufferable. First thing he says to his “coachee” is along the lines of “if I said what you just said to me, how would you feel!” How about you just say what you think, instead of making her guess what you’re saying
- leftnode 3y agoI agree. From his site it appears he's a "coach" that some executive hires to hold an all hands team building exercise that the rank-and-file completely dread. No thanks.
- n4r9 3y agoPlaying devil's advocate here based on my own experience. It's sometimes extremely useful to be prompted to flip perspectives. Many people (myself included) find self-compassion much more difficult than compassion towards others. I remember telling a therapist about various negative thoughts I'd had towards myself, and she said "Now imagine that a friend told you all those things. How would you respond?". The sudden shift in perspective from that simple question was huge. I went from "I'm clearly hopeless" to "Perhaps I do have worth". Ontop of that, it's a powerful thing to encourage someone to do the work themselves rather than doing it for them. Similar to how people often learn mathematics better by solving problems than by reading textbooks.
- matwood 3y agoA similar and also useful technique is to be able to detach and view a situation from the outside.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoAny tips on approaching this? The only thing I can think of is trying to write out a comprehensive description of your life and trying to view it like it belonged to a stranger who asked you for advice or something? It is very strange how the same issue can be viewed so radically different by the same person and where they would otherwise have the presence of mind to propose an effective gameplan towards resolving the "not great parts" if only through the eyes of a stranger
- benreesman 3y agoMust be fucking nice right? “Don’t work an unhealthy amount, and don’t let work get in the way of coping properly with other traumatic experiences casting a long shadow.” Well I guess I’ll have to finally make a few withdrawals from society’s safety net after decades of deposits, oops, there isn’t one, or not one targeted at me. Well I guess family and friends will fill the gap right? Yikes, hearing about bootstraps was actively unhelpful. Well I guess I’ll “knuckle through” and if they find me dead, it will at least be at my desk, mid-keystroke when some blood vessel gave out. And there’s nothing unique to either me or any of my cohort about any of this. It gets called Dickensian sometimes, but even that is a recent name for it. Are there no fucking prisons? No workhouses?
- numlock86 3y agoI wonder what the prompt was for this article. I've seen a lot of work on reverse prompt search for images from Stable Diffusion, but not so much for getting prompts back from ChatGPT output.
- TX81Z 3y agoThis is not the quality one expects from GPT, only a human being could write this nonsense.
- rigelbm 3y agoCritically missing from the text are the definitions of "external" vs "internal" bootstrapping. The author left us all guessing, and by the look of the comments here, no one has figured it out yet, me included.
- heleninboodler 3y agoA few years back, I wrote on a sticky note: "You can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor." Hope that helps.
- that_guy_iain 3y agoRealistically, people aren't getting PTSD from a startup. You get PTSD from an event that was traumatic. C-PTSD is from multiple events that were traumatic. Your startup may be stressful but it's not traumatic and doesn't compare with someone putting a knife to your eye and demanding your money. You're not going to have flashbacks to reading a rejection email - you may replay it which is different from a flashback. The fact this post starts off with something as nonsensical as "knuckling through PTSD from my startup" really says where the entire posts goes and it doesn't change.
- seanhunter 3y agoYou absolutely can get PTSD from a startup. Source: I still have trauma and panic attacks from one startup I co-founded. At the time the stress was so severe I got pneumonia, couldn't sleep etc etc etc.
- that_guy_iain 3y agoIs this actually diagnosed? Panic attacks don't mean you have PTSD nor does being stressed mean you suffered a traumatic event.
- scrollaway 3y agoMaybe try empathy. Startup life can be seriously fucked up and the long hours / low sleep / unhealthy routine it’s easy to fall into can really ruin your life. Coupled with founders fighting, drama boiling over months or years of invested time, etc. What, it’s not traumatic enough for you because you didn’t get to hear a gunshot?
- that_guy_iain 3y agoStartup life may be tough, but it does not cause PTSD. PTSD is literally a thing that is medically defined. They may have came away from their startup journey in a bad place and in need of mental care but almost certainly they did not come away from it with PTSD. It is insulting to those of us who have it when someone says their stress and anxiety are anywhere close to the symptoms we have from PTSD. Just like it's insulting to say you have OCD when you like to have thing colour co-orientated.
- catboybotnet 3y agoI know what emotions are, and I know what bootstrapping is, but what is emotionally bootstrapping? Repressing? We can just call it repressing without the mid/high level management speak. I'm still left wondering what of substance, if anything, was present in the post. Think that's about all the thought I'll give it, though.