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My 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 bad

My 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 ago
  Yup, 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 ago
  It 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).
- z33k 2y ago
  Worse than not trying is trying and experiencing burnout and/or destitution. When you fail, it can be due to many things. Not everything in the world is controllable. This is one of the reasons why expecting zero ”What ifs” at the end of your post-mortem is unreasonable.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - agumonkey 2y ago
    I don't think there's any absolute rule here. I'm pretty convinced that a startup would be healthier for me rather than my safe day job. The amount of churn and nascent burn out due to chasing tech debt and tickets surrounded by demotivated people is really bad. I guess being aware of what you need and can afford is key.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- teaearlgraycold 2y ago
  Most people don’t want to start a business. They might fantasize but it’s not something they would enjoy doing. It’s fine to realize you have other goals and to work on them instead.
- makerdiety 2y ago
  This (very popular) sentiment you have can basically be abstracted into the “fear of missing out” meme. It's an unnecessary predicate, it's founded on presupposition and bias, and it's really detrimental to all serious long term analyses. There's no proof that this personal feeling should be listened to or given behavioral authority, especially when it suspiciously conforms to the aesthetic that is widely shared by many who end up having only achieved a mundane life, despite “noble” projects launched because of arrogant egos. This social phenomenon which sponsors the freedom and agency of people fit only to be busy drones is wasting global resources on bourgeois affairs. Elon Musk and his eventual epic failure at super-industrialism is a great example of this harmful sinful pride. The “what if” has only served to help overvalue ordinary potential, when that capability should have been limited to simple tasks, industries, and affairs. It's a mind virus riding on the waves of language and the beastly body of rationality, a false reality having been successfully disguised as a legitimate object to perceive within the cognitive sphere of humanity. It is deviation that surely has contributed to the collapse of the great liberal humanism project, the real goal of democracy and its encompassing civilization having been the quiet and stable enslavement of a massive surplus of dull brains and basic bodies. A mass of uninteresting genetic carriers who would do well to never worry about what is outside the scope of their common destinies. The dialectic that there can be morbid peace if you would just test out the hypothesis that you can become a great man is an incomprehensibly devised thinking trap that can filter out men who don't know what the fuck is going on in the grand universe. But God (or simply nature) works in mysterious ways and I'm glad that hubris was created to serve as an instrument for learning what not to ever do. And to materially benefit from, salvaging from the failures of future past technologies being a huge possibility to leverage. Your supposed tragedy is my informed opportunity, to paraphrase Jeff Bezos. EDIT: If you ever invent warp drive or faster than light travel or functional nuclear fusion, I'll be looking forward to the blueprints of such treasures and strategic advantages ;)
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Nope. I never lived one minute wanting to either start a business or be an early employee at one - I’m 50.
- solumos 2y ago
  Assuming that the process of failing doesn’t cost you your peace — which is certainly a risk.
- liquidpele 2y ago
  Yea, wondering “what if” is totally worse than being dead in a gutter.
duxup 2y ago
I'm on the ordinary working job track. I like it. But if you're young, got the time ... I think it's worth a shot, or two, or more.
- jrockway 2y ago
  I think there are upsides and downsides to starting young. On the one hand, you don't have much to lose, so failure is softer. On the other hand, you're missing some experience that would be useful. I worked for a startup whose founder was a super young guy who had never had a job before being CEO. He was missing experiences like "what do I hate when my boss does" and so needed to repeat all the same mistakes. This resulted in things like... postmortem reviews with action items like "we should dock people's pay if installs are done incorrectly" instead of "we should ensure that the install crews have the tools they need to do the install correctly". (That action item was one of the few battles there that I won. We gave every installer a toolbox containing the tools to do the job. This improved the success of installs greatly. But who needs a meeting to come up with an "idea" like this?)
  - duxup 2y ago
    At least if young you got the energy, time, usually fewer family obligations, maybe even naive enough to do something others won't (as a good thing) and ... you know if that's the lifestyle you want. But I hear you starting at zero life experience, that is bad. I would find it pretty painful to work at a start up and have to talk to the founder "bro let's talk about the basics of picking your battles" and do it ... well.
  - DonnyV 2y ago
    I think having an entrepreneur's mindset and starting young can work. But you will end up like every billionaire we know. Elon, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, etc. They all started young as CEOs and didn't think twice about stepping on everyone and anyone around them to get the top. Now after years of this you have people that are very powerful and have no idea how the common person lives or how it feels like to work for someone.
- scarface_74 2y ago
999900000999 2y ago
I'm starting to think you really need to be well connected or at least come from an upper class background to win here. Steve Jobs is sort of an exception here, not only was he adopted , but he was adopted by a very middle-class family . I find myself really good at developing small apps, but very bad when it comes to the business side. I would love to find someone to work with who's good with business. But so far I've just been time scammed a few times by morons who come up with insanely impractical ideas . And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want to give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're able to build the entire thing out from scratch. If you discuss modest technical limitations they'll berate you for corrupting their vision.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > I'm starting to think you really need to be well connected or at least come from an upper class background to win here. In my local startup community there are a lot of entrepreneurs and small startups founded by MBA students and recent college grads who clearly come from wealthy backgrounds. Nearly all of them either fail quickly or continue for years without getting any traction beyond their parents’ connections’ businesses. The other side of being wealthy and well connected is that it’s really tempting to fall back on a job with your family connections or to play startup for a few years while burning through “seed” money from the family without the real pressure of needing your startup to succeed. > And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want to give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're able to build the entire thing out from scratch. There are a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs who need a cofounder but don’t want to give cofounder equity. The majority of successful founders and founding engineers I know had past working experience together. There are exceptions, but most of the time when someone goes searching for a cofounder or founding engineers because they don’t have anyone in their network, it doesn’t work out. It can work and does sometimes, but it’s so rare that I’m very surprised to hear success stories. There are just too many people in the startup community looking to “hustle” their way into an MVP without giving anything up in the process. Also a lot of people who want to be “cofounders” and get 50% of your company in exchange for doing as little work as they can. I was in a startup Slack for a while. Every other week someone would come in asking for advice about how to evict a deadbeat “cofounder” from their company who had secured 1/2 or 1/3 of the equity but wasn’t contributing anywhere near the other cofounders.
financltravsty 2y ago
Always baffled me how little commercial sense HNers had when I was growing up and reading this forum. It's as if no one taught them -- or they just don't have the sense for it? -- that a startup is just a vehicle to make money. There's nothing special about it. You can make lots of money without a "startup." You can make lots of money doing many different things even without a business entity. It's just an abstraction for linguistic convenience. My biggest wakeup was finding people much less educated and much less intellectually gifted and much less socioeconmically privileged making a lot more money than what could be considered their betters in more prestigious and, on the surface, well remunerated professions. If you don't want to make money, don't go into business. Stay at your job and grind a career out. If you have the desire to make money, your senses will naturally sharpen as you use them more to achieve that end. Otherwise, if you go and "build a startup" for any other reason than making money you will fail barring extraneous circumstances. Baffling that this isn't common sense, really. But my fault. I keep forgetting a professional forum is just a proverbial water cooler, where you get to see a wide mix of people in your profession -- and all the different backgrounds, values, ideas, and ways of seeing the world -- most of which are continuous works in progress that culminate only at death.
- mandmandam 2y ago
  > a startup is just a vehicle to make money That is what's taught in many start up schools, for good reason. A startup can't ignore money without great luck. However, it's not actually true. Lots of people start companies to make things better in some way, rather than to make bank. Some of them make bank regardless. Many businesses just tick along, but don't care about 'success' as determined by yacht size/botox per square inch/'status'. > if you go and "build a startup" for any other reason than making money you will fail barring extraneous circumstances. The idea that motivating people by money is the only or even best option is a major propaganda point in the class war (and quite silly if you think about it).
- jeffreyq 2y ago
  Very :+1: > Always baffled me how little commercial sense HNers had when I was growing up and reading this forum. How long have you been reading HN? How have you felt the "HNers" w.r.t. nose-for-commerciality (and along whatever other dimension you think is relevant) change over time?
jimbob45 2y ago
Would you feel the same way if you had effectively infinite money? (e.g. you were Bill Gates' secret daughter he sends a million to each month).
makerdiety 2y ago
You don't ever have to worry about survivor bias from me. Because I know not to esteem highly those men who believe that family formation and a business enterprise building commitment can both exist at the same time. Either you devote your entire being to the invasive alien job that is learning how to extract value from civilization's economically receptive citizens or you pack up your bags and head back home on the plane that can depart from the place where great men are selected and trained. Being a startup founder is much, much more intense than some special forces soldier life. You learn better values and habits than some punk that will have peaked at the earning of the title of U.S. Marine, to use a stark contrasting example. Or a black ops Delta Force guy who just has to navigate a huge forest in the dark on the dangerous way back to friendly territory, while the compared startup founder needs to develop an entire science for the navigation of profitable markets that no human has ever seen before, let alone taken advantage of before. A nerd like Richard Feynman can be much more tougher than someone that can do a thousand pushups without stopping and shoot an M4 carbine at a target 900 meters away. Is Elon Musk even a good example of a successful startup founder or businessman, despite his billionaire status? Logical skepticism says no. And the brainwashing that popular ideology does says yes. After all, didn't Elon Musk fuck and impregnate some bitches during his rise to a big bank account? He could have been using that time and energy to colonize Mars before this twenty-first century ends. He's not serious about what he says he wants. A terrible role model to look up to.
edelwiess 2y ago
I dont understand why starting an enterprise has become such a scary thing in the tech world. So many people start businesses, so many mom and pop shops etc. IMHO startups have become scary to start because we jump too quickly into starting them or have too grand expectations from outset.
- muzani 2y ago
  A mom and pop restaurant can compete with Burger King and Starbucks. It's not quite the same with tech, as they can pay the $300k salaries for people to do the same thing you do, and they can buy out your market. Basically everything that can be done with money is stacked against you, and all you have as a startup is more grit than all these straight A students who graduated from ivy leagues.
- chefandy 2y ago
  The way friends approached startups in the .com era seemed to be more like “hey, [friend]… we know how to write code, and we think we can address [thing] in [some market] better than [incumbent], so let’s spend nights and weekends hacking together a working proof of concept. It might not be representative, but the people I’ve known that wanted to start tech businesses in the past 15/20 years approached it the way people start restaurants. You can’t slowly ramp up most restaurant concepts with a DIY budget— you need to invest a lot upfront, and you need a lot of existing expertise for even pretty trivial concepts. (And before people say food trucks and catering and private chef and the like— catering and private cheffing are totally different businesses with very different processes and institutional knowledge, and in most places, food trucks aren’t dramatically cheaper than opening a small restaurant.) Folks seem eager to start acting like a CEO and delegating things to people paid with investor money rather than making something themselves and getting it off the ground. Maybe that’s what the business requires? Maybe in software markets, customers aren’t interested in scrappy small players anymore, perhaps worried about lack of support, shitty UX, them going out of business or whatever. Just speculation. Not even going to pretend I’ve got broad non-anecdotal knowledge on this.
  - Earw0rm 2y ago
satvikpendem 2y ago
Funny how things change over time on Hacker News, an ostensibly startup forum that now more and more seems to be just another tech forum, and any relationship to YC and startups is now merely incidental, it seems.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
>And if you do, quit when the going gets tough. Perseverance does not pay off. Rare, wise words. (in a world, where 'follow thy dreams' philosophy is venerated).
wouldbecouldbe 2y ago
It’s just not true. Maybe a unicorn yeah. But to create a a decent software business that pays the bills is well within anyone’s reach in this world. And yeah actually perserverance is one of the main keys to success. In most markets there are players making a good income, if you are not there is just something you are missing .
- scarface_74 2y ago
  So “anyone” can build a business that nets as much as a “senior” enterprise CRUD developer in a major city in the US? That’s around $150K.
  - wouldbecouldbe 2y ago
    As a developer, that's for sure possible, it might take a few years. Even if you make less in the beginning, you can more easily live in places that are cheaper if your living situation allow you. There are many opportunities online available. Start with acquisition and build from there. I did it myself a few times, and have friends who made way more. The biggest secret, sticking to it.
ErigmolCt 2y ago
The narrative around startups is so often shaped by the success stories that get the most attention, but those stories are the exception
mlacks 2y ago
What happened to Hacker News man
icedchai 2y ago
I agree. Toughing it out usually doesn't pay. I was at a startup from "birth" (first employee and lead engineer) to "death" (acquisition for pennies on the dollar.) The first couple years were exciting, super fun. We built a great team, had an interesting product that solved a niche problem, several early customers. But the business model just didn't work out. It wasn't enough to sustain a real company. The downward spiral began...
tschellenbach 2y ago
Personally I think it's about perseverance, but mostly with an emphasis on learning and growing. You iterate, you learn and you eventually build up a skillset that is hard to stop even if things don't go your way. It's not for everyone though. Bar is super high, risk is high, long work weeks with little balance are the entry ticket.

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 ago
Yup, 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 ago
It 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).
z33k 2y ago
Worse than not trying is trying and experiencing burnout and/or destitution. When you fail, it can be due to many things. Not everything in the world is controllable. This is one of the reasons why expecting zero ”What ifs” at the end of your post-mortem is unreasonable.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- agumonkey 2y ago
  I don't think there's any absolute rule here. I'm pretty convinced that a startup would be healthier for me rather than my safe day job. The amount of churn and nascent burn out due to chasing tech debt and tickets surrounded by demotivated people is really bad. I guess being aware of what you need and can afford is key.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
teaearlgraycold 2y ago
Most people don’t want to start a business. They might fantasize but it’s not something they would enjoy doing. It’s fine to realize you have other goals and to work on them instead.
makerdiety 2y ago
This (very popular) sentiment you have can basically be abstracted into the “fear of missing out” meme. It's an unnecessary predicate, it's founded on presupposition and bias, and it's really detrimental to all serious long term analyses. There's no proof that this personal feeling should be listened to or given behavioral authority, especially when it suspiciously conforms to the aesthetic that is widely shared by many who end up having only achieved a mundane life, despite “noble” projects launched because of arrogant egos. This social phenomenon which sponsors the freedom and agency of people fit only to be busy drones is wasting global resources on bourgeois affairs. Elon Musk and his eventual epic failure at super-industrialism is a great example of this harmful sinful pride. The “what if” has only served to help overvalue ordinary potential, when that capability should have been limited to simple tasks, industries, and affairs. It's a mind virus riding on the waves of language and the beastly body of rationality, a false reality having been successfully disguised as a legitimate object to perceive within the cognitive sphere of humanity. It is deviation that surely has contributed to the collapse of the great liberal humanism project, the real goal of democracy and its encompassing civilization having been the quiet and stable enslavement of a massive surplus of dull brains and basic bodies. A mass of uninteresting genetic carriers who would do well to never worry about what is outside the scope of their common destinies. The dialectic that there can be morbid peace if you would just test out the hypothesis that you can become a great man is an incomprehensibly devised thinking trap that can filter out men who don't know what the fuck is going on in the grand universe. But God (or simply nature) works in mysterious ways and I'm glad that hubris was created to serve as an instrument for learning what not to ever do. And to materially benefit from, salvaging from the failures of future past technologies being a huge possibility to leverage. Your supposed tragedy is my informed opportunity, to paraphrase Jeff Bezos. EDIT: If you ever invent warp drive or faster than light travel or functional nuclear fusion, I'll be looking forward to the blueprints of such treasures and strategic advantages ;)
scarface_74 2y ago
Nope. I never lived one minute wanting to either start a business or be an early employee at one - I’m 50.
solumos 2y ago
Assuming that the process of failing doesn’t cost you your peace — which is certainly a risk.
liquidpele 2y ago
Yea, wondering “what if” is totally worse than being dead in a gutter.

duxup 2y ago

I'm on the ordinary working job track. I like it. But if you're young, got the time ... I think it's worth a shot, or two, or more.

jrockway 2y ago
I think there are upsides and downsides to starting young. On the one hand, you don't have much to lose, so failure is softer. On the other hand, you're missing some experience that would be useful. I worked for a startup whose founder was a super young guy who had never had a job before being CEO. He was missing experiences like "what do I hate when my boss does" and so needed to repeat all the same mistakes. This resulted in things like... postmortem reviews with action items like "we should dock people's pay if installs are done incorrectly" instead of "we should ensure that the install crews have the tools they need to do the install correctly". (That action item was one of the few battles there that I won. We gave every installer a toolbox containing the tools to do the job. This improved the success of installs greatly. But who needs a meeting to come up with an "idea" like this?)
- duxup 2y ago
  At least if young you got the energy, time, usually fewer family obligations, maybe even naive enough to do something others won't (as a good thing) and ... you know if that's the lifestyle you want. But I hear you starting at zero life experience, that is bad. I would find it pretty painful to work at a start up and have to talk to the founder "bro let's talk about the basics of picking your battles" and do it ... well.
- DonnyV 2y ago
  I think having an entrepreneur's mindset and starting young can work. But you will end up like every billionaire we know. Elon, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, etc. They all started young as CEOs and didn't think twice about stepping on everyone and anyone around them to get the top. Now after years of this you have people that are very powerful and have no idea how the common person lives or how it feels like to work for someone.
scarface_74 2y ago

999900000999 2y ago

I'm starting to think you really need to be well connected or at least come from an upper class background to win here. Steve Jobs is sort of an exception here, not only was he adopted , but he was adopted by a very middle-class family . I find myself really good at developing small apps, but very bad when it comes to the business side. I would love to find someone to work with who's good with business. But so far I've just been time scammed a few times by morons who come up with insanely impractical ideas . And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want to give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're able to build the entire thing out from scratch. If you discuss modest technical limitations they'll berate you for corrupting their vision.

Aurornis 2y ago
> I'm starting to think you really need to be well connected or at least come from an upper class background to win here. In my local startup community there are a lot of entrepreneurs and small startups founded by MBA students and recent college grads who clearly come from wealthy backgrounds. Nearly all of them either fail quickly or continue for years without getting any traction beyond their parents’ connections’ businesses. The other side of being wealthy and well connected is that it’s really tempting to fall back on a job with your family connections or to play startup for a few years while burning through “seed” money from the family without the real pressure of needing your startup to succeed. > And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want to give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're able to build the entire thing out from scratch. There are a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs who need a cofounder but don’t want to give cofounder equity. The majority of successful founders and founding engineers I know had past working experience together. There are exceptions, but most of the time when someone goes searching for a cofounder or founding engineers because they don’t have anyone in their network, it doesn’t work out. It can work and does sometimes, but it’s so rare that I’m very surprised to hear success stories. There are just too many people in the startup community looking to “hustle” their way into an MVP without giving anything up in the process. Also a lot of people who want to be “cofounders” and get 50% of your company in exchange for doing as little work as they can. I was in a startup Slack for a while. Every other week someone would come in asking for advice about how to evict a deadbeat “cofounder” from their company who had secured 1/2 or 1/3 of the equity but wasn’t contributing anywhere near the other cofounders.

financltravsty 2y ago

Always baffled me how little commercial sense HNers had when I was growing up and reading this forum. It's as if no one taught them -- or they just don't have the sense for it? -- that a startup is just a vehicle to make money. There's nothing special about it. You can make lots of money without a "startup." You can make lots of money doing many different things even without a business entity. It's just an abstraction for linguistic convenience. My biggest wakeup was finding people much less educated and much less intellectually gifted and much less socioeconmically privileged making a lot more money than what could be considered their betters in more prestigious and, on the surface, well remunerated professions. If you don't want to make money, don't go into business. Stay at your job and grind a career out. If you have the desire to make money, your senses will naturally sharpen as you use them more to achieve that end. Otherwise, if you go and "build a startup" for any other reason than making money you will fail barring extraneous circumstances. Baffling that this isn't common sense, really. But my fault. I keep forgetting a professional forum is just a proverbial water cooler, where you get to see a wide mix of people in your profession -- and all the different backgrounds, values, ideas, and ways of seeing the world -- most of which are continuous works in progress that culminate only at death.

mandmandam 2y ago
> a startup is just a vehicle to make money That is what's taught in many start up schools, for good reason. A startup can't ignore money without great luck. However, it's not actually true. Lots of people start companies to make things better in some way, rather than to make bank. Some of them make bank regardless. Many businesses just tick along, but don't care about 'success' as determined by yacht size/botox per square inch/'status'. > if you go and "build a startup" for any other reason than making money you will fail barring extraneous circumstances. The idea that motivating people by money is the only or even best option is a major propaganda point in the class war (and quite silly if you think about it).
jeffreyq 2y ago
Very :+1: > Always baffled me how little commercial sense HNers had when I was growing up and reading this forum. How long have you been reading HN? How have you felt the "HNers" w.r.t. nose-for-commerciality (and along whatever other dimension you think is relevant) change over time?

jimbob45 2y ago

Would you feel the same way if you had effectively infinite money? (e.g. you were Bill Gates' secret daughter he sends a million to each month).

makerdiety 2y ago

You don't ever have to worry about survivor bias from me. Because I know not to esteem highly those men who believe that family formation and a business enterprise building commitment can both exist at the same time. Either you devote your entire being to the invasive alien job that is learning how to extract value from civilization's economically receptive citizens or you pack up your bags and head back home on the plane that can depart from the place where great men are selected and trained. Being a startup founder is much, much more intense than some special forces soldier life. You learn better values and habits than some punk that will have peaked at the earning of the title of U.S. Marine, to use a stark contrasting example. Or a black ops Delta Force guy who just has to navigate a huge forest in the dark on the dangerous way back to friendly territory, while the compared startup founder needs to develop an entire science for the navigation of profitable markets that no human has ever seen before, let alone taken advantage of before. A nerd like Richard Feynman can be much more tougher than someone that can do a thousand pushups without stopping and shoot an M4 carbine at a target 900 meters away. Is Elon Musk even a good example of a successful startup founder or businessman, despite his billionaire status? Logical skepticism says no. And the brainwashing that popular ideology does says yes. After all, didn't Elon Musk fuck and impregnate some bitches during his rise to a big bank account? He could have been using that time and energy to colonize Mars before this twenty-first century ends. He's not serious about what he says he wants. A terrible role model to look up to.

edelwiess 2y ago

I dont understand why starting an enterprise has become such a scary thing in the tech world. So many people start businesses, so many mom and pop shops etc. IMHO startups have become scary to start because we jump too quickly into starting them or have too grand expectations from outset.

muzani 2y ago
A mom and pop restaurant can compete with Burger King and Starbucks. It's not quite the same with tech, as they can pay the $300k salaries for people to do the same thing you do, and they can buy out your market. Basically everything that can be done with money is stacked against you, and all you have as a startup is more grit than all these straight A students who graduated from ivy leagues.
chefandy 2y ago
The way friends approached startups in the .com era seemed to be more like “hey, [friend]… we know how to write code, and we think we can address [thing] in [some market] better than [incumbent], so let’s spend nights and weekends hacking together a working proof of concept. It might not be representative, but the people I’ve known that wanted to start tech businesses in the past 15/20 years approached it the way people start restaurants. You can’t slowly ramp up most restaurant concepts with a DIY budget— you need to invest a lot upfront, and you need a lot of existing expertise for even pretty trivial concepts. (And before people say food trucks and catering and private chef and the like— catering and private cheffing are totally different businesses with very different processes and institutional knowledge, and in most places, food trucks aren’t dramatically cheaper than opening a small restaurant.) Folks seem eager to start acting like a CEO and delegating things to people paid with investor money rather than making something themselves and getting it off the ground. Maybe that’s what the business requires? Maybe in software markets, customers aren’t interested in scrappy small players anymore, perhaps worried about lack of support, shitty UX, them going out of business or whatever. Just speculation. Not even going to pretend I’ve got broad non-anecdotal knowledge on this.
- Earw0rm 2y ago

satvikpendem 2y ago

Funny how things change over time on Hacker News, an ostensibly startup forum that now more and more seems to be just another tech forum, and any relationship to YC and startups is now merely incidental, it seems.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago

>And if you do, quit when the going gets tough. Perseverance does not pay off. Rare, wise words. (in a world, where 'follow thy dreams' philosophy is venerated).

wouldbecouldbe 2y ago

It’s just not true. Maybe a unicorn yeah. But to create a a decent software business that pays the bills is well within anyone’s reach in this world. And yeah actually perserverance is one of the main keys to success. In most markets there are players making a good income, if you are not there is just something you are missing .

scarface_74 2y ago
So “anyone” can build a business that nets as much as a “senior” enterprise CRUD developer in a major city in the US? That’s around $150K.
- wouldbecouldbe 2y ago
  As a developer, that's for sure possible, it might take a few years. Even if you make less in the beginning, you can more easily live in places that are cheaper if your living situation allow you. There are many opportunities online available. Start with acquisition and build from there. I did it myself a few times, and have friends who made way more. The biggest secret, sticking to it.

ErigmolCt 2y ago

The narrative around startups is so often shaped by the success stories that get the most attention, but those stories are the exception

mlacks 2y ago

What happened to Hacker News man

icedchai 2y ago

I agree. Toughing it out usually doesn't pay. I was at a startup from "birth" (first employee and lead engineer) to "death" (acquisition for pennies on the dollar.) The first couple years were exciting, super fun. We built a great team, had an interesting product that solved a niche problem, several early customers. But the business model just didn't work out. It wasn't enough to sustain a real company. The downward spiral began...

tschellenbach 2y ago

Personally I think it's about perseverance, but mostly with an emphasis on learning and growing. You iterate, you learn and you eventually build up a skillset that is hard to stop even if things don't go your way. It's not for everyone though. Bar is super high, risk is high, long work weeks with little balance are the entry ticket.