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I am (not) a failure: Lessons learned from six failed startup attempts
- Fokamul 2y ago-I failed six startups attempts, (btw I'm multi-millionaire) Americans are weird :)
- julianeon 2y agoIf he didn't say or imply that, his advice would be discounted as that of a (probable) loser.
- lisper 2y agoI suppose a truer test of character would have been if I had not had one big win fall into my lap that offset all the non-wins. But one of the messages I was hoping to convey is that one's life trajectory includes a lot of randomness. The best you can hope to do through volitional action is slightly tilt the odds in your favor. But that might be enough.
- jebarker 2y agoOne point in your story that I think is worthy of kudos is that you left Google. I’m not sure how certain the riches were at that point, but presumably you could have chosen to just ride that wave longer. That’s a really hard thing to do.
- lisper 2y agoThanks, but my motives for leaving were a lot less kudo-worthy than you might think. When I left in October 2001, success was far from certain. If I knew then what I know now I probably would have stayed, and I probably would have put a lot more effort into climbing the (very steep!) learning curve.
- myheartisinohio 2y agoGotta build stuff bro
- superkuh 2y agoThe difference between a failure and a success when starting a business is if you can afford (monetarily) to fail. if you can afford it just keep failing till something sticks. If you're not well off, well, too bad.
- gottorf 2y ago> if you can afford it just keep failing till something sticks. In the sense that infinite monkeys will eventually put out Shakespeare. In reality, money and time are both limited ;-)
- Salgat 2y agoThey may be limited, but most folks can't even afford to enter the startup founder game to begin with.
- huijzer 2y agoIsn’t that the whole idea of a business? To make money. (Sounds like I’m kidding but I’m not really. Many of the richest people were very poor at some point. For example, Andrew Carnegie or Levi Strauss. Also Arnold Schwarzenegger started from nothing in the US.)
- recursive 2y agoThere are a lot more people with the idea of making money than there are people making money. Also, there are a lot more poor people than startup founders. Hm, there must be more to it.
- Salgat 2y agoThe point being made though is that business success is greatly influenced by existing wealth, since it gives you the luxury of being able to absorb the costs and risks involved. People like to give a few rare exceptions to the rule as somehow evidence that this isn't true. The best analogy I've seen is that starting a business is like playing a game at a carnival. The more tickets you buy, the more attempts you have to win the prize. Meanwhile most folks are the carnival workers, never being able to get a chance to play the game in the first place.
- oldpersonintx 2y ago[dead]
- kevmo314 2y agoThis line in the article resonated with me: > First, it sets the stage for what was to come, and second, while it was unquestionably a success, it was not my success. I used to think that success was being successful the way I wanted and I was often frustrated because things were working but not because of the way I wanted them to. Turns out, it's doubly difficult to make things not only work but also work the way I want. I've since tried to be more open-minded and see wins that perhaps I didn't expect or want still as wins and it's made me feel a lot more successful. One might scoff and say I should hold myself to a higher standard, but at the end of the day, success is only an intrinsic feeling anyways. It's not a measurable metric so I might as well feel better about the progress I'm making. In the context of the article, the author could see these all as failures, but it sounds like some of these were pretty successful. In fact, the author concludes as much, finding happiness in the "failures". It's all an arbitrary label anyways.
- hinkley 2y agoI’ve had a lot of coffee breaks with highly placed peers who expressed concern because our boss was sure our success came down to one or two attributes and seemed completely blind to all the ways we saved him from himself. If apathy ever took over the team, we would burst into flames because of all of these details. There’s a great old aphorism that sounds like sarcasm if you don’t understand this: “Take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves.” Any halfway sane team is dominated by people who are all too happy to jump on the Big Things. But for want of a nail, the kingdom can be lost. And if you cannot see his importance, and fire the farrier to hire more knights, then everybody loses.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- numpy-thagoras 2y agoWhen you see a successful boss, look around for his successful reports. They're always the ones cleaning up the boss' messes. The truth is that we all need to be saved from ourselves at some point (sometimes as education, other times as hard lessons), but tech culture certainly pushes that far with the "gifted visionary" mythos. A gifted visionary's much vaunted "Ideas > Details" only works when the detail people are there to make it work.
- scarface_74 2y agoHow are any of these not failures?
- mock-possum 2y agoThe author is saying that he is not a failure, despite his business ventures failing.
- scarface_74 2y agoConsider the only thing he mentioned as part of his priority stack is wanting to have a successful startup, how is he not a failure?
- liontwist 2y agoEvery negative and uninsightful comment in this thread is coming from the same person
- scarface_74 2y agoIt’s not “insightful” because I don’t drink the “startup” think happy thoughts kool aid? I assume the purpose of the startup is to make money and hopefully make more than the alternative of just getting a job. If my priority stack is “be a successful founder” over all else and I fail at doing so, how am I not a failure based on my own criteria?
- liontwist 2y agoNobody is asking you to drink kool aid. In this thread are numerous nuanced disagreements with people sharing pros and cons of difficult life choices they made. I would suggest reading and reconciling these comments with your own life experience and values, in the best possible faith. If you have zero interest in startups. These threads and this forum might not be of interest to you.
- rebalh 2y ago[dead]
- andrewstuart 2y agoSo few…..
- random3 2y agolol - are we going to see a larger echo post? :)
- andrewstuart 2y agoThat would take some courage.
- random3 2y agoWhen going through crazy stuff as a founder, I always thing "this is going to make for a very intersting story some day". Looking back I doubt I'll remember them all and, while keeping things in full throttle, I wonder if I'll ever get to write about anything... My conclusion is that most interesting stories remain burried and we're lucky to see anythign real (as in true stories) surfacing, because people that are crazy enough to enjoy these pains, hardly have any time to write about them. Meanwhile we're presented with a somewhat skewed reality that's both less interesting, less real and overly biased towards glamor. The title of a somewhat :) unrelated book keeps popping in my head "Reality is not what it seems".
- Traubenfuchs 2y agoThe right moment to start writing down things you have regretted not to having written down in the past is now.
- random3 2y agothe thing with startups as founder / founding teams is that most days are actually good stories - so yes, the best way is to write as you go. the thing is perhaps this is in fact the best way to motivate (or demotivate) the startup craft - you end up learning by drinking from the firehose daily. I believe there are few other types of activities that have such a forcing factor to learn and most are generally some sort of crisis (war, etc.) and so entrepreneurship is likely the least damaging one (at least for everyone else than the team haha)
- Retric 2y agoYou’ll recall a surprising number of details if you start trying to write even an outline of stuff down. Many may not have actually happened, but it’s still worth considering even decades later.
- chasd00 2y agoHeh “it could be the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others” - despair.com
- 2y ago
- pockmarked19 2y agoIt’s important to think not in terms of success or failure, but in terms of philosophy and mistakes. If you’re focused on the outcome there isn’t much you can improve on, the reasons for failure are many. Mistakes on the other hand stem from flaws in your philosophy, which you can readily revise. In a lot of the cases presented here, the mistake that stands out is working with the wrong people.
- gruntledfangler 2y ago> Why don't the banks care? Because they treat the cost of fraud as just another cost of doing business, and they pass it along to you, the consumer. And they do it in a diabolical, stealthy way that you don't notice. But that's another story. Desire to know more intensifies
- jackthetab 2y agoIn the past, my knee-jerk reaction would have been "Yes, exactly!" Then I heard patio11's podcast on debanking[1]. It gave me some interesting views into fraud and compliance and $STUFF. Highly recommended. [1] https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/debanking-patrick-mckenzie/ https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/debanking-pat...
- lisper 2y agoSee https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-credit-card-fraud.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-cre... That's actually the start of a multi-part series: https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-credit-card-fraud_24.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-cre... https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-credit-card-fraud_27.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-cre... https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-credit-card-fraud_28.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-cre... https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/cutting-to-chase-repeal-california.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/cutting-to-chase-repeal-... https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/a-simple-solution-to-credit-card-fraud.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/a-simple-solution-to-cre... Keep in mind all that was written twelve years ago and the world has changed a lot since then.
- mritchie712 2y ago> So why hasn't it been done? The answer is simpler: it's not that big of a problem to the people that would need to solve it (visa, banks) Yes, it' billions of dollars per year, but that's on a denominator of trillions. > In 2022, global payment card transaction volume surpassed $40 trillion, with the U.S. accounting for over $9.5 trillion 1 . If we consider the $5 billion in unauthorized purchases reported by Security.org 2 , the percentage of fraudulent transactions in the U.S. would be approximately 0.05%. 1 - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tudQcmL8lNH49iZZ8wRB88KWo-iA6uRMdk9PUWuu8Zw/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tudQcmL8lNH49iZZ8wRB88KW...
- ktallett 2y agoThose with no failures never tried. Now I'm the complete opposite of someone who would usually say that but I believe it to be true. Failure at things is ok, it's just part of doing stuff. Just like death is an outcome of life. Anyone who tells you they have never failed either hasn't ever tried anything or is a liar and protecting their ego. It's ok to admit you made mistakes or failed or that you don't know something.
- zabzonk 2y ago> Growing up, I had two major life ambitions: to become a tenured university professor, and to found a successful startup company. why the hell those two? I eventually - into my thirties- worked out that i wanted to be a good computer programmer, and a good photographer. managed the first, but not the tatter - two bored. What I mean, is why did you have those ambitions growing up. I don't think most normal young people really can't think what they want to do until later in their lives.
- MattPalmer1086 2y ago> why the hell those two? I would guess to be free to pursue interesting ideas, and then make money off them.
- zabzonk 2y agowhy tenured? (I can't be sacked?). why startup? (well, why at all, but also cannot easily be sacked, should the startup actually work). just my opinion, and not to badmouth, but this sounds like a somewhat insecure person.
- dasil003 2y agoThat's a weird take, he's talking about youthful ambitions. Tenured professor is a pretty standard bar for academic success, and startup us shorthand for building a scalable tech company from scratch. These seem like perfectly cromulent ambitions to me, not sure how insecurity enters into it or why I would care if it did.
- motoxpro 2y agoIt's just a success metric + an activity Tenured (metric) + professor (activity). He defined his, same as you did: Good (metric) + programmer (activity) The activity is just what people find interesting and the metric is what you strive toward. Imposing the idea that the only reason you pursue originality is so that they can't get sacked is a very wild take.
- lisper 2y ago
- r_thambapillai 2y agoI thought this was a very powerful meta learning, something that abstracts across all the experiences. > And I think my current happiness stems mainly from the fact that I like the person I've become, someone who can fail again and again and again and again and still find a way, for the most part, to be happy. Curious if you have any other learnings that are less specific to a particular endeavour but hold tru/derive from your experiences across all of them
- lisper 2y agoAuthor here. AMA.
- var_cw 2y agothere seems to be a common theme around not believing in the idea/product/people too deeply, thus leading to faulty or mis-step execution. would it be right to say that? a contrast to others who are not a "failure"? mad respect to you for being open. thanks for sharing.
- pyb 2y agoI had the same question reading this. Ron, which was the idea you had highest conviction in?
- naijaboiler 2y agosolve problem people care about, and charge from day 1
- lisper 2y agoSmart Charter. I think that might still be a viable business even today, though I have not really kept up with the industry so I don't know. Ironically, today I have a part-time consulting gig at a company designing network switches, and I see them wrestling with the exact same problems we were tackling 30 years ago. So FlowNet would be a very close second.
- drewr 2y agoI personally know of one ongoing effort whose founders think it's very much still viable. Well done uncovering and acting on it back in the day, Ron. Too bad about the outcome. I'm grateful you spent the time to write these stories. Thank you as well for being a public champion of lisp, for which I owe a great deal of my own undeserved success.
- 2y ago
- paul7986 2y agoFailure here too I guess but my downfall per my experiences in dealing with many who made it to the biggest names in tech is my morality. I can't lie/cheat/steamroll over ppl to get to the top.
- sinoue 2y agoWhat a fun read. I hope you'll try again! “If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.” ― W.C. Fields
- hinkley 2y agoDespair.com poster: Quitters never win. Winners never quit. People who never win and never quit are stupid.
- lisper 2y ago> What a fun read. Thanks! > I hope you'll try again! Thanks for the encouragement, but I just turned 60. Running a company is too demanding for me to try it again. My ambition now is to be a writer and find an audience that wants learn the easy way things that I had to learn the hard way.
- latchkey 2y ago> But we couldn't figure out a way to procure drivers. I briefly worked for Grab the company, which was another SE Asia "Uber". Among other things, at one point they procured drivers in Saigon by giving the wives/families free chicken meat. This way, they could prepare the drivers meals to take while they were out on the road all day long. Kind of a local spin on tech workers free meals.
- not2b 2y agoMultiple "diabolical" (his word, not mine) plans to fool people about what the business really is (an attempt to get in the door with one pitch, then pivot to the real plan and steal their lunch) did not work out. Sorry about that, but putting out this post won't help this guy execute on similar plans in the future.
- flyinglizard 2y agoThat's just business. I can't think of any business that's not set out to displace some other business, whether by competition or simply elimination.
- not2b 2y agoCompetition is fine. Deception, though, is more problematic, and if multiple pitches depend on it (like market a service to brokers to get their info but don't tell them the plan is to eliminate their jobs), people will be on to you if you aren't a very good sociopath. Perhaps look for more win/win opportunities.
- redcobra762 2y agoI'm genuinely curious as to what gave you the impression that he intends to try again. I read this as a brief little memoir of a man who has since moved on to bigger and better things.
- ianburrell 2y agoWhat are you talking about? I don't see any deceptive companies. Most didn't get to the point of having customers to deceive. Startups changing their plan is normal and expected. The investors have board seats and leverage if they don't like the pivot.
- naijaboiler 2y agobuilding a business is much more than having a great idea. Its a different skill by itself. Skills PhD's don't prepare you for.
- jfengel 2y agoMy main lesson from running a startup: don't. And if you do, quit when the going gets tough. Perseverance does not pay off. Obviously it doesn't always end badly. But we get a massively skewed view from survivor bias. My life turned out pretty damn well once I got a plain ordinary job working for someone else. But I don't kid myself: when it comes to starting a startup, I did fail. The main lesson I learned was that I was always going to.
- seany62 2y ago> My main lesson from running a startup: don't. I hear this a lot and I think it is good advice because the only person who should actually start a startup is the one who sees this but still does it.
- xeromal 2y agoYup, it takes people who think they can't fail to be truly successful. Very similar to an athlete's mindset. You have to have the skill and innate talent but you also have to believe your shit doesn't stink
- cheinic63892 2y ago> My main lesson from running a startup: don't. Worse than failing is not trying. You will live your life always wondering “what if”. When you fail, you will have an answer to the above question and can live in peace.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- orochimaaru 2y agoIt depends. Why do you want to start something? Do you really believe in it? I mean there's got to be a certain set of "hell yes" questions that need to be answered in the affirmative. Otherwise you're not missing much. Work for something that pays well, solve interesting problems, spend time at home with your family and friends. The problem is when you're wanting to start something because someone else did it and don't have the implementation or execution perseverance (or just don't believe in it strongly).
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y agoI've heard from top investors that the best companies usually get immediate and rapid traction. Sometimes theres a figma story where it takes a while, but thats usually BS. Generally either the product is right, or its not, and you know very quickly. They usually dont want to tell founders this, they want them to struggle through in the off chance it works
- Ecoste 2y agoThanks for the interesting read! How did you support yourself through all of the failed startups?
- _zagj 2y ago> To this day I'm pretty sure that plan would have worked if we had actually executed it. It was a brilliant plan if I do say so myself. In fact, it was so brilliant that it convinced Richard Branson to acquire the company before we launched for $10M. We started the company as Smart Charter, but we launched as Virgin Charter. It's noteworthy that he's portraying selling before launch as a failure, and while ultimately the acquirer didn't follow his vision and the business didn't pan out (and perhaps the author never even got to liquidate his shares), it's still arguably more of a success than Loopt (raised $39M, sold for $43.4M), which Sam Altman and his backers had no reservations about portraying as a huge success that springboarded him to YC president and later to AI kingmaker.
- morgante 2y agoIt's interesting how at least several of the failures were good ideas with bad timing/execution that others have replicated successfully. iCab: Uber obviously was very successful with this ~same premise Smart Charter: I assume you can easily book a private jet online now? Founder's Forge: linking record-keeping and payment is what makes Ramp great; 10 years of fintech innovations made executing this much easier Spark Innovations: this is basically the premise of Airtable
- rsanek 2y agoAs they say: ideas are easy, execution is everything.
- naijaboiler 2y agoideas are cheap. everyone has them. building a succesful business out of ideas is hard. really hard.
- s__s 2y agoIt’s honestly both. A good idea that’s actually feasible and has some kind of moat is extremely hard to come by.
- antidamage 2y agoMost things that are new but not working can be solved by "I should try this again later" after the landscape has changed a little, whether that's supporting technologies, how receptive your market is, if your market even exists yet.
- philipwhiuk 2y ago> Spark Innovations As I understand it, the competitor in this space is Anaplan.
- NickC25 2y agoOf course you're not a failure. You still put food on the table, provide for your loved ones, and have a roof over your head. You've got battle scars, and stories that are worth their weight in gold. Your experience is probably extremely useful for the right startup.
- justmarc 2y agoWinston Churchill's words, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
- Joel_Mckay 2y agoThere are many reasons to do a startup, but people should only call it a business when the goal is either a tax deduction mitigation and or rapid entry into profit traction. 1. Don't use some clever or hard to remember name with a weird spelling. While easier to Trademark, the users and customers won't differentiate your site from the sea of attention grabbing garbage. 2. If people have zero paying customers, and zero revenue... than the hard fact is they were never in business, and should have founded a nonprofit instead (common for opensource support service entities.) 3. Often copyright and patents are infeasible for small business, and people simply can't build or defend things like a large firm. Thus, initially design products/services to last maybe a year or simply be disposable... When 270 desperate cloners show up to dilute the market sector... people quickly understand why they can't rely on Android, Steam, or Apple ecosystems to protect their bottom line. 4. There is zero loyalty without treasure. The only people that care if your firm goes into the red is you, and maybe the small-time shareholders. Most people can't take the constant adversarial posture with problematic staff, opinionated shareholders, and high-demand customers. Everyone thinks a CEO is lame till you become a CEO for a year or two... Every conversation from that point on is about money or marketing, and most people keen on building things tend to burn out of the role eventually due to social isolation. 5. No company lasts forever, if the operation is a projected liability it is your job to respond accordingly. Even if that means executing an exit strategy, and firing the entire problematic division. 6. Ask business people about their memorable experiences, and not about their money source. The superficial apparent function of a business is usually very different from the actual revenue model. Best of luck, =3
- antics 2y agoThere is one other way in which you are not a failure, and I am sure that I am not alone in thinking about it: I have been reading your words for 15 years, from the time I was a baby CS major. That's really true, e.g., here[1] is a comment from 11 years ago where I mentioned that a lisp you wrote for the Apple //e informed a lisp for the Apple //e that I wrote. Especially in my college years (2009-2013, ish), the world seemed smaller, and to me, a lot of what you wrote was like looking through a keyhole into the real world. Grown-ups can apparently write lisp at JPL[2]! Google was chaotic[3][4][5][6] to work in 2000, especially if you commuted from Burbank. A name change[7]. And, variously, surveillance, more lisp stuff, etc. Now I'm an adult and I still haven't professionally written lisp, but I'm glad to have read about it anyway. Anyway, it might surprise you to learn that when I think of your writing, though, I think of your HN comments first. There is a kind of influence that you can only get with a steady, unthanked build-up of seemingly-small contributions over a long period of time. In the right place they compound. I probably cite you to other engineers once a month or so. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6199857#6200414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6199857#6200414 [2]: https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080212170839/https://xooglers.blogspot.com/2005/11/hello-world.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080212170839/https://xooglers.... [4]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090408003924/http://xooglers.blogspot.com/2005/11/in-beginning.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090408003924/http://xooglers.b... [5]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090408013612/http://xooglers.blogspot.com/2005/11/wormgear-turns.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090408013612/http://xooglers.b... [6]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090408003913/http://xooglers.blogspot.com/2005/11/day-one.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090408003913/http://xooglers.b... [7]: https://flownet.com/ron/eg-rg-faq.html https://flownet.com/ron/eg-rg-faq.html
- chasing 2y agoAlso remember that your fail state might be someone else’s success state. Like being part of an IPO that lets you spend the majority of the rest of your career working in your own ideas.
- yapyap 2y ago(n+1)th time’s the charm
- mindwok 2y agoThanks for writing this, I enjoyed every one of these. Something that jumped out at me from these attempts is the lesson that when you want to take on an entrenched business model, you need to do it in a way that isn’t directly at odds with the existing model. Secondly, you seemed to learn that and apply it brilliantly. I would love to know what went on behind the scenes of those banks deciding to pull the pin on your idea for startup forge.
- agumonkey 2y agoVery interesting story. Especially the bit about impostor syndrome.. to most people he had already secured enough skills and experience for a lifetime of confidence.. but turns out we all have our own measure of skills and success. Thanks for sharing
- gond 2y ago>Failure #5: “One by one, every bank that had initially responded positively changed their minds. Worse, not a single one of them would tell me why.[…] I never got a straight answer from any of the banks about why they changed their minds.” Is anybody around with enough insight in that business to make an educated guess as to what happened?
- antihipocrat 2y agoSome possibilities - Bank operators responding to queries have no idea why a decision was made - Banks rely on algorithms to determine credit worthiness, these are run centrally so a bank manager at a branch may say positive things but the system generates a report independently. - The algorithms also can raise flags for other risks, such as anti money laundering. The bank will not disclose anything if a flag has been raised as a regulatory requirement.
- hathawsh 2y agoSince around the start of the Internet, there has been a steady decline in the number of banks and credit unions in the US. [1] They have mostly consolidated with other financial institutions. The shrinkage seems attributable to customers moving their banking online and no longer depending on tellers, buildings, or geographical location in general. Most banks are seeing this happening and acting as conservatively as they can. They are avoiding change because they don't want to be the next victim of the financial industry crisis. It's not a shadowy cabal; it's really just the fear of going out of business. A few key banks, OTOH, are embracing change and innovating. Having strong relationships with them is key to making progress. It takes a very long time; 6 years sounds too short. I'm not sure the startup timeline could ever stomach the length of time it takes to build those relationships. So my guess is that the author didn't have as strong a relationship as what he actually needed. My company has also worked with enthusiastic executives who turned out not to have as much weight in the company decisions as they hoped. [1] https://usafacts.org/articles/whats-behind-the-decline-in-us-banks/ https://usafacts.org/articles/whats-behind-the-decline-in-us...
- sails 2y ago> It's not a shadowy cabal; it's really just the fear of going out of business. Thanks for the insight, I was wondering about this point. I generally tend to try and attribute what _feels_ like coordinated cabal behaviour to general incompetence or lack of control. This feels like one of those situations. I've worked around banks and this erratic behaviour is pretty common, and mostly due to short term personal motivations, and lack of coordination rather than an excess of coordination (i.e. collusion - which is not to say that banks aren't guilty on this point, but I think mostly not the case)
- pier25 2y agoYou only fail when you don't learn from your mistakes.
- blindriver 2y agoYou're definitely not a failure, but maybe startups aren't your thing. There's no shame in that. I know I would never be able to start my own startup. You tried 6 times and every time it has failed, and it's clear that things like living close to the beach is a very high priority for you (I wish I could pull that off). Maybe it's just the universe telling you to get a good paying job and give your family some stability until you retire?
- babyent 2y agoThat was a good read. What impressive perseverance, and also a positive outlook. But, reading it made my FOMO worse. I guess one has to experience it fully to apply it. Or maybe not. I quit my job a year ago to pursue my own ideas. Like the author, I had made some money from a IPO. The post-IPO environment with heavy bureaucracy killed the vibe and I quit. Note that it wasn’t a Google tier company, but I made enough money that I could take a risk for some years without income. For me it has only been a year. But I feel like a huge loser at times. In no scenario will I give up until I’m utterly defeated or captured the castle - I’m not a quitter. But this feeling gnaws at my soul. I have failed to find a co-founder. Most of my friends are not interested in startups. So, I have had to look elsewhere. Between people who screwed me over equity, people who didn’t want to do the work, and my own imposter syndrome (I’m from a low ranked state college, and people I meet in SF are elites), I feel horrible and alone. I tried and even successfully built some projects over the past year, but ultimately nothing worked out. Now, I’ve decided screw it. All the advice about sell first and get a co-founder - sounds great on paper. And I have some doubts around that whole belief but that’s not important. I know actual pain points I’ve faced in my decade long career. I’ve done both highly technical and highly functional work. I’ve talked to enough people and validated my idea. I wish this thing existed and that I’d worked on it sooner instead of trying something different with randoms. So, I’m just going to go and build it. I like building things, and I’ve gotten enough recommendations and performance reviews that point out that I’m good at delivering value for the customer and making sure my team succeeds. So I’m building a product. I am able to dogfood my own product as I build it which is great. It’s a somewhat complex, b2b AI enterprise product, and having built multi-billion dollar enterprise software and delivered multiple multi-million dollar implementation projects, I feel that there is really no rush. Most enterprise software and organization processes are awful and not well engineered nor well thought out. If this fails, whatever. I tried. If it works, amazing. I like building good things and have a track record of doing so, albeit for others. But I fear I will keep feeling like a failure until it is successful. On the other hand, it would be very cool to build a solo founded enterprise product and deliver actual success. Anyway, thought I’d share my thoughts it feels good to type it out. Thanks to the author of the article for sharing.
- bjelkeman-again 2y ago
- jackcosgrove 2y agoThere is currently a risk asymmetry in startup world that drives away people who could do good work. Investors know the long odds of success, so they invest in twenty to thirty companies and wait for one to get big. Founders and employees can't diversify like that, because you only have so many working years. To mitigate this we have decided to award successful founders with huge paydays as a lure to others to throw their hats in the ring. This has some malign effects, namely unsuccessful founders and employees get bupkis. It also attracts the wrong sort of personality to be a founder, selecting for too much risk appetite. (At least what I consider the wrong sort for building a sustainably profitable business.) I have an idea for how to solve this and I wonder if it's already been tried or if there are holes in it. The idea is to spread the risk of starting a company across something like an accelerator class. If one company in that class gets big, it would be contractually obligated to hire and grant shares from some pool to other members of that class. This would be at the cost of the winning founders' stakes. The upside for winners would be much lower, but the downside would be lower too. This would attract a different sort of person to this accelerator, and be a differentiator for selecting talent.
- WalterSear 2y agoNot having to remunerate failed founders and starting employees for their effort is a cornerstone of the VC business model.
- tptacek 2y agoThey're investors. Why would they pay you for failing to generate a return?
- jackcosgrove 2y ago"Failing for generating a return" makes it sound like a skill issue, when it was probably mostly bad luck with the business model you tried out. Negative results can be as valuable as positive results in science, why not in business? Greedy optimization can also get you stuck in local minima. Why does any investor participate in VC? As an asset class it underperforms. There's something more that motivates people than return. Cool factor, bragging rights, and also I think a concern for growth and the macro outlook. In my model the reserved pool of shares for failed founders would come out of the winning founders' pool. It's spreading risk across founders, not diminishing the stake of investors.
- ltbarcly3 2y agoWith 6 failures and no successes I don't want to k ow what they think, its like some kind brain virus.
- pretoriusdre 2y agoGreat article. We hear so much about the unicorns of the world that we sometimes forget about the countless other failed ventures. In these cases, it doesn't mean that the idea was bad, or that the founders weren't good enough. Sometimes it's just that luck wasn't on-side.
- mikesabbagh 2y agoseems his problem is mainly marketing and finding product market fit. I suffer from the same syndrome
- ErigmolCt 2y ago> ...even a long string of failures in specific endeavors doesn't necessarily translate to failure in life. I needed to hear that!
- mettamage 2y ago> In the real world, research is not a Platonic quest for objective truth. It is, first and foremost, a human endeavor, deeply intertwined with human ambitions and foibles, including my own. Such a painful thing to realize, this is also the reason why I never attempted to do a PhD.
- jongjong 2y agoThis author has never seen failure. Well, their only glaring failure is their lack of self-awareness.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wakasaka 2y agoyou can be a failure depending the time interval used.
- shahzaibmushtaq 2y agoI learned one of the most important lessons from six (and a half) failed startup attempts: Brilliant ideas are not enough. You also need a brilliant mindset, vision and execution. And the help of a sensible co-founder if needed along the way.
- hubraumhugo 2y agoTo everybody reading this and having doubts about starting your own venture: DO IT! Yes it's a lot of risk, yes most startups fail, and yes you could make more money at FANG. However, this is one of the most exciting times to build a startup, thanks to AI. The big winners of the all the AI advancements (especially OS) are devs and AI startups: - No more vendor lock-in - Instead of just wrapping proprietary API endpoints, developers can now integrate AI deeply into their products in a very cost-effective and performant way - Price race to the bottom with near-instant LLM responses at very low prices are on the horizon It's as if your product automatically becomes better, cheaper, and more scalable with every major AI advancement. This leads to a powerful flywheel effect: AI improves product -> better product attracts more users -> users generate more data Besides the product perspective, AI also allows you to operate your startup a lot more efficiently. Will we see a single-person unicorn soon? Very likely not. Will we see very successful small and bootstrapped startups? Yes, already the case.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoAnd, even if it doesn't work out, at least we made the AI vendors a little more money.
- keeptrying 2y agoI’d say what actually made his ventures fail is his Google shares. Having a fallback scenario doesn’t allow for the complete focus and ruthlessness to succeed at company building. Weirdly I know the SVP Eng at that Virgin charter company. The great thing about this article is that they talk about startups dying before they even really start … I think this is the common case that’s never talked about.
- sjducb 2y agoOne of the failures is selling a business to Richard Branson for $10 million.
- eadmund 2y agoMostly very insightful article, except for one thing: the reference to the early 1990s recession as ‘the first Bush recession.’ Ancient peoples would sacrifice their kings when there was a drought or a bad harvest, and we are not much better. Presidents do not actually control the economy, and neither do governments in general. Granted, they have more effect on the economy than ancient kings did upon the weather. Still, economic cycles move mostly on their own. And of course that 1990s recession ended in March 1991, in roughly the middle of Mr. Bush’s term (he left office in late January 1993): one might just as well refer to ‘the first Bush recovery.’ Neither moniker is really accurate: ‘early 1990s recession’ is best.
- theonlyjesus 2y agoDo people that create startups have debt in their own name after the startups fail? Or does the debt go down with the company and does the founder walk away debt free?
- DanielHB 2y agoDepends on how you set up the company. Usually most startups are done with a limited liability company which usually causes the debt to go down with the company while keeping your personal finances safe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability_company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability_company > The owners of the LLC, called members, are protected from some or all liability for acts and debts of the LLC, depending on state shield laws. But to start a company you need some cash injection, that can come from your personal finances. Now you could get a personal loan to then inject into your company, which would make you personally liable for said loan. Personal loans are easier to get than company loans (because you can't default on them as easily), but I never heard anyone do that. Usually you are only personally liable if you commit some sort of crime like fraud.
- kjellsbells 2y agoVery entertaining! I'm always struck by the sheer serendipity of these stories. It appears that everything after Google was possible because of the safety net created by Google's IPO, and the author's time at Google itself ultimately came about because he and Urs hit it off over Lisp and Smalltalk. What would hace happened if the author had been allergic to dogs and had ended up at JPL because of their Fortran skills?
- fsndz 2y agoDamn, one year at google and the author was basically set for life.