34 ms·

Why I Quit My Job, Killed a Company in Six Weeks, And Still Feel Great

95 points by Schwolop 14y ago

ljd 14y ago
"I don't care enough about money to run a startup business." It sound like you don't have to worry about connecting a job/business with your desire to create. Build a great workshop at your home and work on projects that you are passionate about. If you start to build something that you think has market viability you have the experience needed to vet the idea in the market. Something that can be done on a lunch hour or over weekends, depending on the demographic.
- Schwolop 14y ago
  I'll have to worry about money eventually, but I'm one of those risk-adverse engineers so by the time I quit my job in the first place I'd saved up almost two years of runway. I'm definitely still creating. Watch this space.
  - ljd 14y ago
    Good luck, I'm excited for you!
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - sigkill 14y ago
    I'm just wondering if you're not working on any of the three ideas at all, why not mention them atleast? Someone else may benefit out of it. On the other hand, if you plan to re-visit them in the future...
    - Schwolop 14y ago
      Well they're still described on the company website, but I didn't want to drive traffic to them when I'm not actually going to pursue them (commercially at least).
Simucal 14y ago
I find it pretty refreshing to have someone candidly discuss their failed ambitions. The selection bias of insanely successful startups on HN can lead to a skewed perception of actual success rates. These are the kind of posts I need from time to time to keep myself grounded in reality so I can make better decisions.
- Schwolop 14y ago
  I totally agree that there's a selection bias for stories about successful outliers. On the other hand, it's not as if anyone is out there saying "Try it! You'll probably succeed!" Quite the opposite; almost everyone knows and admits that 9/10 fail. Eric Ries has a great line in his talks about this. I'm paraphrasing it, but it's something like: "9/10 startups fail. I know yours is awesome so it won't, but the guy on your left; his will. The girl to your right; hers will. Same goes for their neighbours too." Despite the failure, it was worth doing. I learnt a lot. About startups, about customers, and also about me. And besides, failing is faster than success! Thanks for the kind words.
  - bravura 14y ago
    Perhaps the real problem is your counter-reaction: "almost everyone knows and admits that 9/10 fail." A lot of people think that, but it's not 9 out of 10 startups that fail. It's FAAR worse odds than that.
    - Dylan16807 14y ago
      Oh? How far worse.
      - bravura 14y ago
        I seem to have the number 1% as the success rate in my head. Doing some Googling gives a number like 10% success, but it's not clear whether these figures are only for companies that received VC-funding. So actually, I'm not sure. Point taken.
technotony 14y ago
I'm not even sure this should be regarded as a 'failure'. You took a risk, approached it the smart way through customer validation, and realized early enough that it wasn't going to work out that you didn't damage relationships with anyone. This is actually showing a smart, intelligent process at work.
SparksZilla 14y ago
This was a great post. I have a lot of respect for you for being so honest and open. Do you want your next gig to be related to robotics? Side note: I remember when my first phase of 'burnout' hit me and I literally got sick at a meeting with a bunch of investors. There's a whole post to be done on taking care of yourself in a startup there.
- Schwolop 14y ago
  Thank you. I lied a lot as a teenager, became really good at it, then realised my life would actually be easier if I just told the truth all the time. I hope my next gig will be somewhere amongst the union of robotics, consumer tech, useful, helps humanity, and scalable. It wouldn't have to be robotics (but robotics can be arbitrarily vague anyway), as long as there's room for me to learn and I can actually see people using what I've created.
  - SparksZilla 14y ago
    Yeah I had a history of bending the truth until I realized it just got me in more trouble than it was worth. Interesting article in Esquire on 'Radical Honesty' you might enjoy here: http://www.esquire.com/features/honesty0707 http://www.esquire.com/features/honesty0707 -- You have to take it with a grain of salt, but a good read at the very least.
    - Schwolop 14y ago
      That was a fun read. A bit further than I take my honesty however...
      - SparksZilla 14y ago
        100% agreed.
    - jholman 14y ago
      That was great. I'll have to share it with my loved ones. I like to think of myself as being radically honest, and I generally trend to saying "Yes" to "Does this dress make my butt look fat", and it often goes badly. But I'm a damn long way from Blanton as portrayed in that piece. Also, I don't drink, partly because I want to remain in control of myself, which relates to honesty. I guess I don't trust people to like me when I'm drunk. Maybe where other people might give up drink (e.g. for Lent), maybe I should try giving up sobriety. Might not be optimal for job performance, though.
austenallred 14y ago
"I didn't care enough about money to run a startup." There's the rub. A startup cannot be about the money - it's about changing the world and the way people live. If you are already doing that and feel fulfilled in your job (which most entrepreneurs simply can't), then more power to you. You don't start a company for the sake of starting a company, you start a company because a startup is the only possible means by which you can bring to pass the change you want to see in the world and live the lifestyle you want to live. Michael Arrington compared it to becoming a pirate. "The potential for riches was just an argument for the venture. But the real payoff was the pirate life itself." That having been said, I love the refreshing honesty about the reality of startup failure. A small part of me wishes more people wrote the stories of their failure; TechCrunch would be 90% people running through savings and eating ramen and 10% successful exits. Thank you for giving a real perspective into what entrepreneurship can be like.
- michaelt 14y ago
  There's the rub. A startup cannot be about the money - it's about changing the world and the way people live. My reading of the post wasn't that the guy only cared about money - just that a start up operates in the intersection of exciting world changing technology and commercially viable technology. And the guy's exciting world-changing ideas weren't his commercially viable ideas.
  - Schwolop 14y ago
    More the opposite - I care about money only to the extent that it allows me to stay out of trouble. I don't want to be a millionaire, I'd just like $5M sitting in a bank account at 5% so I don't ever have to think about money again. The technologies/products I was exploring - while awesome, some verifiably so according to the customers we spoke with - weren't likely to lead to profitable businesses. I had to learn the difference between a good idea and a good business model. This is a valuable lesson for any entrepreneur. As something to play around with as a hobby or technology demo they're still great ideas, but as businesses they're not viable (and in one case, perhaps just not yet.)
useflyer 14y ago
What impressed me most about your experience is how disciplined the process was, and how you approached building a startup in a way that takes most entrepreneurs magnitudes longer to learn. While it may look like a failure, if anything you've achieved an incredible success and compacted a long, arduous process into an incredibly short timeframe. Congratulations. Money begins as the driving force to launching a company, but I've learned that once you get going, you quickly forget about money as the reason for building a company, and begin to appreciate the process of BUILDING. As much as you think you're done, I see the underpinnings of an entrepreneur, if you can stomache it.
- Schwolop 14y ago
  I can't stress enough that it wasn't just me doing this - I had a great pair of co-founders, even though they weren't as committed and ultimately walked away from the business. They helped a lot with the cold-calling and face to face meetings. A large part of what I learnt was that I really dislike cold calling! But you're right I'm probably not done. I still like this world; making stuff, fixing people's problems, innovating, etc. What I've learnt is that I certainly don't want to be the CEO/hustler. I like technology more than money. I should sit on the CTO/product side of the fence if I do it again.
DigitalSea 14y ago
Am I the only one who wants to know the answer to this question: what now? You quit a great job, tried building a startup and failed - you have a family and mortgage to factor in to the equation, where to from here? I am guessing that the author has some savings to live off, but I want to know how it all ends. What does your wife think of all of this? So many unanswered questions that have my head buzzing with nervousness and curisotity here.
- spullara 14y ago
  I get the impression that he is using the occasion of his failure to announce his availability for employment.
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    And jolly good luck to him. HNers: do people think that someone who has got the startup thing out of their system themselves will make a better employee?
- jan_g 14y ago
  His wife is most probably furious. Women are in general much more averse to risk-taking than men (especially after having kids). At least that is the case with my wife. Every crazy idea I have, I run it first through my wife. She shreds 99% of them ;). "Think of the children", "How will we pay mortgage", "In fall we have to renovate older child's bedroom". Etc.
  - Schwolop 14y ago
    She's a lot more risk adverse than me, but I ran the numbers, we had about two year's runway, and as I said when I started out "at least if I fail it'll be quick!" :-)
    - DigitalSea 14y ago
      Ah awesome, glad to hear man. I guess it's silly of me to assume that you wouldn't have thought well-ahead, but wanted to be sure. I've got ambitions of launching my own startup ideas but I'm doing it whilst employed full-time, so hard to balance free time between family, freelance work and my partner.
gsk 14y ago
This is a honest post and very valuable. "why did I quit a job that met all these criteria? The easy answer is that I knew I didn't want to be an academic. But since the job was a stepping stone to a similar, higher paying job in industry, there's a more complex answer hiding away in here somewhere." That answer could be: Freedom.
felipebueno 14y ago
Judging by the title I would say you are bipolar in manic phase. =P But it's a pretty inspiring post. =)
Apreche 14y ago
I want to hear about how you are paying for rent and food now with no job and a failed company.
- Schwolop 14y ago
  Savings. I had almost two years runway to start out. I've only burnt two months worth.
tocomment 14y ago
Could his "magic torch" product be repurposed to stabilize a laser pointer? I just sat through a presentation and the guy's laser pointer was shaking like crazy the whole time. Thoughts?
jeremyt 14y ago
First, I want to say thanks for putting yourself out there. However, I think there's one thing that needs to be reiterated, for everybody who's reading hacker news and thinking about starting a company: The world probably does not need yet another incarnation of project management/collaboration software. If I had a dollar for every first-time entrepreneur who told me they were starting a new project management tool for team collaboration app, I'm probably have enough to A-round my own company. That's not to say it's not possible to succeed here – Trello is a case in point – but one has to realize that Joel has been in the project management space for probably close to a decade. It's even probable that he would've failed except for the fact he has such a large online following that just happens to be his target audience. To use the example below, if 9/10 startups fail then probably 49/50 of project management/collaboration startups fail. By all means, do a startup, but at least give yourself a fighting chance.
- Schwolop 14y ago
  Where did you get the idea I was doing project management/collaboration software? We were building a hardware device to allow collaboration through existing physical whiteboards. Not another online whiteboard application.

95 points by Schwolop 14y ago

ljd 14y ago

"I don't care enough about money to run a startup business." It sound like you don't have to worry about connecting a job/business with your desire to create. Build a great workshop at your home and work on projects that you are passionate about. If you start to build something that you think has market viability you have the experience needed to vet the idea in the market. Something that can be done on a lunch hour or over weekends, depending on the demographic.

Schwolop 14y ago
I'll have to worry about money eventually, but I'm one of those risk-adverse engineers so by the time I quit my job in the first place I'd saved up almost two years of runway. I'm definitely still creating. Watch this space.
- ljd 14y ago
  Good luck, I'm excited for you!
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- sigkill 14y ago
  I'm just wondering if you're not working on any of the three ideas at all, why not mention them atleast? Someone else may benefit out of it. On the other hand, if you plan to re-visit them in the future...
  - Schwolop 14y ago
    Well they're still described on the company website, but I didn't want to drive traffic to them when I'm not actually going to pursue them (commercially at least).

Simucal 14y ago

I find it pretty refreshing to have someone candidly discuss their failed ambitions. The selection bias of insanely successful startups on HN can lead to a skewed perception of actual success rates. These are the kind of posts I need from time to time to keep myself grounded in reality so I can make better decisions.

Schwolop 14y ago
I totally agree that there's a selection bias for stories about successful outliers. On the other hand, it's not as if anyone is out there saying "Try it! You'll probably succeed!" Quite the opposite; almost everyone knows and admits that 9/10 fail. Eric Ries has a great line in his talks about this. I'm paraphrasing it, but it's something like: "9/10 startups fail. I know yours is awesome so it won't, but the guy on your left; his will. The girl to your right; hers will. Same goes for their neighbours too." Despite the failure, it was worth doing. I learnt a lot. About startups, about customers, and also about me. And besides, failing is faster than success! Thanks for the kind words.
- bravura 14y ago
  Perhaps the real problem is your counter-reaction: "almost everyone knows and admits that 9/10 fail." A lot of people think that, but it's not 9 out of 10 startups that fail. It's FAAR worse odds than that.
  - Dylan16807 14y ago
    Oh? How far worse.
    - bravura 14y ago
      I seem to have the number 1% as the success rate in my head. Doing some Googling gives a number like 10% success, but it's not clear whether these figures are only for companies that received VC-funding. So actually, I'm not sure. Point taken.

technotony 14y ago

I'm not even sure this should be regarded as a 'failure'. You took a risk, approached it the smart way through customer validation, and realized early enough that it wasn't going to work out that you didn't damage relationships with anyone. This is actually showing a smart, intelligent process at work.

SparksZilla 14y ago

This was a great post. I have a lot of respect for you for being so honest and open. Do you want your next gig to be related to robotics? Side note: I remember when my first phase of 'burnout' hit me and I literally got sick at a meeting with a bunch of investors. There's a whole post to be done on taking care of yourself in a startup there.

Schwolop 14y ago
Thank you. I lied a lot as a teenager, became really good at it, then realised my life would actually be easier if I just told the truth all the time. I hope my next gig will be somewhere amongst the union of robotics, consumer tech, useful, helps humanity, and scalable. It wouldn't have to be robotics (but robotics can be arbitrarily vague anyway), as long as there's room for me to learn and I can actually see people using what I've created.
- SparksZilla 14y ago
  Yeah I had a history of bending the truth until I realized it just got me in more trouble than it was worth. Interesting article in Esquire on 'Radical Honesty' you might enjoy here: http://www.esquire.com/features/honesty0707 http://www.esquire.com/features/honesty0707 -- You have to take it with a grain of salt, but a good read at the very least.
  - Schwolop 14y ago
    That was a fun read. A bit further than I take my honesty however...
    - SparksZilla 14y ago
      100% agreed.
  - jholman 14y ago
    That was great. I'll have to share it with my loved ones. I like to think of myself as being radically honest, and I generally trend to saying "Yes" to "Does this dress make my butt look fat", and it often goes badly. But I'm a damn long way from Blanton as portrayed in that piece. Also, I don't drink, partly because I want to remain in control of myself, which relates to honesty. I guess I don't trust people to like me when I'm drunk. Maybe where other people might give up drink (e.g. for Lent), maybe I should try giving up sobriety. Might not be optimal for job performance, though.

austenallred 14y ago

"I didn't care enough about money to run a startup." There's the rub. A startup cannot be about the money - it's about changing the world and the way people live. If you are already doing that and feel fulfilled in your job (which most entrepreneurs simply can't), then more power to you. You don't start a company for the sake of starting a company, you start a company because a startup is the only possible means by which you can bring to pass the change you want to see in the world and live the lifestyle you want to live. Michael Arrington compared it to becoming a pirate. "The potential for riches was just an argument for the venture. But the real payoff was the pirate life itself." That having been said, I love the refreshing honesty about the reality of startup failure. A small part of me wishes more people wrote the stories of their failure; TechCrunch would be 90% people running through savings and eating ramen and 10% successful exits. Thank you for giving a real perspective into what entrepreneurship can be like.

michaelt 14y ago
There's the rub. A startup cannot be about the money - it's about changing the world and the way people live. My reading of the post wasn't that the guy only cared about money - just that a start up operates in the intersection of exciting world changing technology and commercially viable technology. And the guy's exciting world-changing ideas weren't his commercially viable ideas.
- Schwolop 14y ago
  More the opposite - I care about money only to the extent that it allows me to stay out of trouble. I don't want to be a millionaire, I'd just like $5M sitting in a bank account at 5% so I don't ever have to think about money again. The technologies/products I was exploring - while awesome, some verifiably so according to the customers we spoke with - weren't likely to lead to profitable businesses. I had to learn the difference between a good idea and a good business model. This is a valuable lesson for any entrepreneur. As something to play around with as a hobby or technology demo they're still great ideas, but as businesses they're not viable (and in one case, perhaps just not yet.)

useflyer 14y ago

What impressed me most about your experience is how disciplined the process was, and how you approached building a startup in a way that takes most entrepreneurs magnitudes longer to learn. While it may look like a failure, if anything you've achieved an incredible success and compacted a long, arduous process into an incredibly short timeframe. Congratulations. Money begins as the driving force to launching a company, but I've learned that once you get going, you quickly forget about money as the reason for building a company, and begin to appreciate the process of BUILDING. As much as you think you're done, I see the underpinnings of an entrepreneur, if you can stomache it.

Schwolop 14y ago
I can't stress enough that it wasn't just me doing this - I had a great pair of co-founders, even though they weren't as committed and ultimately walked away from the business. They helped a lot with the cold-calling and face to face meetings. A large part of what I learnt was that I really dislike cold calling! But you're right I'm probably not done. I still like this world; making stuff, fixing people's problems, innovating, etc. What I've learnt is that I certainly don't want to be the CEO/hustler. I like technology more than money. I should sit on the CTO/product side of the fence if I do it again.

DigitalSea 14y ago

Am I the only one who wants to know the answer to this question: what now? You quit a great job, tried building a startup and failed - you have a family and mortgage to factor in to the equation, where to from here? I am guessing that the author has some savings to live off, but I want to know how it all ends. What does your wife think of all of this? So many unanswered questions that have my head buzzing with nervousness and curisotity here.

spullara 14y ago
I get the impression that he is using the occasion of his failure to announce his availability for employment.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  And jolly good luck to him. HNers: do people think that someone who has got the startup thing out of their system themselves will make a better employee?
jan_g 14y ago
His wife is most probably furious. Women are in general much more averse to risk-taking than men (especially after having kids). At least that is the case with my wife. Every crazy idea I have, I run it first through my wife. She shreds 99% of them ;). "Think of the children", "How will we pay mortgage", "In fall we have to renovate older child's bedroom". Etc.
- Schwolop 14y ago
  She's a lot more risk adverse than me, but I ran the numbers, we had about two year's runway, and as I said when I started out "at least if I fail it'll be quick!" :-)
  - DigitalSea 14y ago
    Ah awesome, glad to hear man. I guess it's silly of me to assume that you wouldn't have thought well-ahead, but wanted to be sure. I've got ambitions of launching my own startup ideas but I'm doing it whilst employed full-time, so hard to balance free time between family, freelance work and my partner.

gsk 14y ago

This is a honest post and very valuable. "why did I quit a job that met all these criteria? The easy answer is that I knew I didn't want to be an academic. But since the job was a stepping stone to a similar, higher paying job in industry, there's a more complex answer hiding away in here somewhere." That answer could be: Freedom.

felipebueno 14y ago

Judging by the title I would say you are bipolar in manic phase. =P But it's a pretty inspiring post. =)

Apreche 14y ago

I want to hear about how you are paying for rent and food now with no job and a failed company.

Schwolop 14y ago
Savings. I had almost two years runway to start out. I've only burnt two months worth.

tocomment 14y ago

Could his "magic torch" product be repurposed to stabilize a laser pointer? I just sat through a presentation and the guy's laser pointer was shaking like crazy the whole time. Thoughts?

jeremyt 14y ago

First, I want to say thanks for putting yourself out there. However, I think there's one thing that needs to be reiterated, for everybody who's reading hacker news and thinking about starting a company: The world probably does not need yet another incarnation of project management/collaboration software. If I had a dollar for every first-time entrepreneur who told me they were starting a new project management tool for team collaboration app, I'm probably have enough to A-round my own company. That's not to say it's not possible to succeed here – Trello is a case in point – but one has to realize that Joel has been in the project management space for probably close to a decade. It's even probable that he would've failed except for the fact he has such a large online following that just happens to be his target audience. To use the example below, if 9/10 startups fail then probably 49/50 of project management/collaboration startups fail. By all means, do a startup, but at least give yourself a fighting chance.

Schwolop 14y ago
Where did you get the idea I was doing project management/collaboration software? We were building a hardware device to allow collaboration through existing physical whiteboards. Not another online whiteboard application.