7 ms·

Entrepreneurshit

381 points by ndemoor 14y ago

antonioevans 14y ago
On point 100% as usual. You are focused, you are afraid, and you are resilient. One thing you do see due to the ups and downs is the future. By eating the shit in your industry you see whats going on. You know...fuck...this is going to happen in at least 3-6 months. Not saying you can do anything about it but you can be part of the "conversation".
pjsullivan3 14y ago
After coming off a failure I think the part that really resonated with me talking about the fear of disappointment. I've been so afraid of disappointing others that believed in me and thought they wouldn't look at me with the same amount of respect. What I've found is that they saw it as much more of accomplishment then I almost did. The other part is "You’re unemployable. You’re an entrepreneur." I am now in the process of meeting lots and lots of companies, big, small, new, old, re-invented and I'm finding that maybe its a case of once you've been a CEO you will always be a CEO. We will see what comes.
- xal 14y ago
  You mean that you hear from companies that they don't want to hire you because you have been an entrepreneur? That can't be right, it's the kind of person everyone seeks. Hack, I've paid millions in the past buying companies mostly to hire such people.
  - carlio 14y ago
    It means that once you've been in that position, you can't stomach being an underling any more, you're too impertinent and used to making decisions rather than following them. That's my take on it at least.
    - pjsullivan3 14y ago
      Yea thats what I am getting at, but I also feel that when your an entrepreneur you have an attitude that may not be in line with a more corporate setting.
FrankFrank 14y ago
Yep. And we will keep the grind going. There is no try.
tinco 14y ago
This sort of post is why I read HN, in my opinion posts like this should get more upvotes than Steve's death. For some reason I find it very reassuring to read articles that tell about all the downsides of being an entrepreneur. It makes me feel like I know about all the obstacles that are coming my way, but also confident that I could handle/deal with them. Ofcourse this might be terribly naieve. But then comes the article that naivety is an essential founder's trait, and I'm restored in my faith :P I wouldn't mind if every article submitted to HN was some founder's anecdote, big or small, keep them coming :)
- JBiserkov 14y ago
  >I wouldn't mind if every article submitted to HN was some founder's anecdote, big or small, keep them coming :) In the beginning HN was called 'Startup News', if I remember correctly.
- fatbird 14y ago
  The thing I wonder about is how the knowledgeable and experienced can write articles like this, explicitly recognizing that an adrenaline/stress high is a necessary component, and not think that we need to find a better way to encourage entrepreneurship than the current "ten set out and nine don't make it" method.
  - tinco 14y ago
    How would you envision this? 9 out of 10 ideas are just bad, or 9 out of 10 executions are just bad, and you can't know which ones are good or bad ahead of time. The amount of stress comes from the fact that you constantly need to reassure yourself and your stakeholders that your startup is a 10%er and not a 90%er. I'm not a VC so I don't have all the data, but from my point of view I see no way out of this system.
    - fatbird 14y ago
      I don't have a replacement model, because I'm not a VC, just a guy with one startup experience under my belt. My intuition and meagre experience tell me that a less competitive, more guided atmosphere would be better, with more emphasis on slow growth businesses rather than "the next ..." Even PG has said that the whole business is structured to find the one out of hundred that brings thousandfold returns, in order to finance all the gambling with the other 99. What about a system that funded more broadly, looking for more modest returns and with clearer goals for the entrepeneurs? There's a strong "death or glory" ethic that pervades startup culture, that I think chases out more modest businesses, to all our detriment. Look at the back-and-forth here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4799163 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4799163. Ryan Carson writes about going it alone, and PG pushes back with data from the pressure cooker side that co-founders are empirically necessary; Carson, though, was writing just about how a more modest business plan can be successfully executed by a single founder.
feniv 14y ago
Great post. Knowing that there are so many others out there going through the same unforgiving grind day in and day out is a strange kind of inspiration. Thanks!
lubujackson 14y ago
This is all true... if you play the VC game of growing your business before you have revenue to support the growth. The fact is many web-based businesses can be built without spending all your time raising money that you need because of a self-fulfilling burn-rate crisis. Some businesses need VC, but you should ALWAYS avoid VC if you can.
- gfodor 14y ago
  Yeah I'd tend to agree here -- a lot of this stress in this article can be mitigated by a) attacking an idea that leads to revenue quickly, or at least can be market validated clearly quickly and b) only raising the stakes (ie, raising money, going after "whale" purchase orders) once this revenue or validation has materialized. As a nice side effect, the process of raising money or landing sales once you've got some validation not only reduces the risk of failure but also makes the process a lot easier and less time consuming anyway. (Kickstarter is a hell of a way to do this nowadays.) It's still going to be a stressful ride but getting a few things like this right early on can basically "de-leverage" your risk profile in starting a company from being (metaphorically) 100x to "merely" 10x.
jamesjguthrie 14y ago
Great article!
slaxman 14y ago
This is powerful stuff!
minimax 14y ago
A few (dissenting) points: If you want to eat healthy at O'Hare, you can find a salad or sandwich in any terminal. If you really want to blow your calorie budget, go find one of the Goose Island bars in terminal 1 or 3. Have a Matilda. It's fantastic. Next point: I really dislike working for bosses with a misplaced sense of paternalism. If there are risks or uncertainties facing the business, don't hide them from your employees. Transparency breeds trust, which you'll need if you expect your engineers to put in the kind of hard work that's required when a company is starting up. Last point: look, if a life of flying around the country and working long hours is your idea of a tortured life only a special breed of men known as "entrepreneurs" can bear, then you need to pull your head out of your ass. That life is stressful and that it takes hard work to get ahead are universal truths. The rest of us aren't just coasting along in a risk-free world. Double secret bonus last point: why all the cussing?
- mrkurt 14y ago
  Your first point is dead on, although I'm lazy and just go to XOCO in terminal 1 most of the time ... I think, perhaps, you interpreted him differently than I did on your other points: 2. I don't think he's talking about paternalism, I think he's talking about dealing with very intense, private insecurity about the state of a company. There is something not quite unlike doom facing company nearly every day, and it's incredibly hard to filter actual uncertainties that companies should account for. It's important to be both transparent and conservative with negativity, but not for paternalistic reasons. 3. There's not a special type of person that handles stress better, exactly, there's a special type of stress that comes with trying to start/run a company. And it's not really worth it if you're thinking in pure outcome based terms. As an example, I picked my family up (we have 4 kids) and moved them cross country in August because it seemed like the best decision for my company. It was an excruciating choice in a way that a normal, career based moves haven't been. I suspect anyone could have handled that flavor of stress since I'm not uniquely stress resilient. x. I think intense word choice can occasionally reflect the intensity of what you're talking about in a way that forced mildness undermines. So why not?
  - minimax 14y ago
Lucadg 14y ago
in other words this life sometimes sucks but it way better than working for somebody else. I'd rather have some deep lows, some very steep highs and a constant background noise saying "you're going to fail", than sitting there, watching out of the window and knowing I am not testing my full potential. Because when you try to reach your limits you always fall, that's when you know them. Then you stand up again and go for the next limit. Once you tasted that, there's no way back.
dschiptsov 14y ago
There are many types of entrepreneurs but we could define a two major groups - those who are seeking a niche to make money by what they produce and love to do, and those who are seeking a niche to become a middle-men, a parasite, a cheater, a wise-guy, a "manager" of others. It seems that in every kind of business, including criminal, those who are capable to produce have very few troubles, while the second group, the wast majority, have much more suffering, just because, well, no one really need them. So, before thinking about entrepreneurship, become good at something first. Then you will be able to create and notice opportunities. It doesn't not work in opposite direction - one cannot create an opportunity being of no good in any other field.
SagelyGuru 14y ago
I don't know about the article but this is one of the best HN headlines I had seen in a long time :)
nhangen 14y ago
This is the most complete and representative post on entrepreneurship I've ever read, at least according to my own experiences. I do listen to Mark's podcast, but this is by far the best of his best.
dools 14y ago
Haha "I only have $6,000 in the bank!!".
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  $6k is nothing unless you have a stable, steady stream of income.
  - dools 14y ago
    No, $0 is nothing.
ahoyhere 14y ago
This is ONE way to be an entrepreneur, certainly not the only one. I don't mean to brag, because I'm sure none of you care about my "little dipshit company," but there are people out there who deserve to know that this kind of adrenaline junkie lifestyle as described in the article is not "entrepreneurship" as a whole but just one type of person's interpretation of it. We, for example, got back a couple weeks ago from a 2-week trip to Arizona. We (biz owners (my husband + I) plus our employee) went to attend a conference in Scottsdale -- not to demand speaking slots or to impress anyone, just to learn, to experience it. Because, hey, Arizona is gorgeous in October, we had decided to extend our trip and rent a convertible, and a 4-bedroom house in beautiful Sedona, AZ with a private pool and heated spa tub, for a week. We spent 3 days of that as a company retreat, and then the rest was just my husband & I hanging out. During the 3 days when we were working, we all used the spa every night to stargaze. In the middle of the days, we'd take a break and go hiking. When our employee went home, we just bummed around a day, then we rented a jeep and went off-roading. This year, my husband and I decided to draw about $160k of profit out of our biz to pay for a mortgage down payment and various fixings for our new (old) house. Then we bought a nice car, in cash. (Honestly I would have preferred to get a loan, but there was a problem with the fact that we hadn't gotten our PA driver's licenses yet. Long boring story. Patched over, as so often, with money.) Our finances are secure. Our products may be "boring"… but they are growing very nicely and our customers are happy. Our employee can feel secure about her salary. We own 100% of our company… nobody can tell us what to do, except possibly the government, but they don't seem to care. Certainly we don't have to worry about SEC filings. This weekend, I co-taught a bootcamp as part of my favorite product, 30x500. It's only on a weekend because that's when the majority of my students can attend. I plan to take the next couple days off, just cuz. I can do that whenever, of course… and often do, because I have a chronic illness which is exacerbated by stress. So I keep stress low and live a very chillaxed kind of life. I expect that, as a 3- or maybe 4-person company, we'll break $1 million in gross yearly revenue in the next 24 mos… probably more like 12-18. All without begging, nagging, scrambling, fundraising, pitch-decking, obsessive emailing, jockeying, etc. My biggest stress this year is about how to reinvest another six figures into our biz so we pay less taxes (and changing bookkeepers). I don't like paying taxes more than we have to, but honestly I'm not sure what to spend it on after we max out our 401(k)s. I expect downvotes for this. Probably because it sounds like I'm bragging. Probably because the reason the above article is so popular is because people like it when authors "get real" about the "harsh realities" of running a business. Deep inside, they believe that if it doesn't hurt horribly, it must not be worth it. So this kind of "truth" is appealing, and what I say will be labeled as some kind of crazy outlier, I got lucky, I'm famous, etc, etc., surely nobody could really make this kind of money off time tracking so I must be embroidering the truth, etc. But if you want to create a business -- as opposed to a drama-filled life -- there truly is a less painful way: Create a small product for small business which creates value, then charge money for it. It's stupid simple. It's not easy, but then again, it's not all that hard, either. And it works, over and over and over again. Yes, our first year building the product income streams while consulting kinda sucked… but it didn't suck at THIS level described by the post author. The main suckitude came from the fact that the more we worked on our real products, the less we wanted to consult… we still never had to travel away from our families, stump, beg, wheedle, or go without money. And we don't have to convince somebody else to buy us, fund us, love us, millions of people to use what we made, to make that short & minor sacrifice pay off. Sometimes pain is meaningful and necessary. But sometimes it's just pain.
scott_meade 14y ago
Wish there were more explanation as to "why?". If someone enjoys voluntarily living such an unsustainable lifestyle, fine. Everyone needs to get their thrills somehow. But when it comes to playing with other peoples' plans, emotions, money and lives; then for "the rush" seems like a thin reason to live every day wearing a game face for employees, creditors, and family. Glad to have Amy Hoy pointing out that Suster's view of the world is far from the only definition of entrepreneur!
pelargir 14y ago
Some people become entrepreneurs because they want to make loads of money. Others do it for the freedom and lifestyle it affords them. It just depends on what your priorities are. Personally, I prefer setting my own hours over driving a BMW.
bryanjclark 14y ago
Observation: nearly every single slide in that presentation that describes entrepreneurs exclusively features men in the (bad) clip art. Just sayin': you can do better than that.
ryanackley 14y ago
As I was reading this, I couldn't help but juxtapose this article on top of the first world problems meme on everything this guy was saying. "I had to miss a full day with my family, camping in the mountains...to raise $150 million" Poor guy! This would be more relevant coming from someone who utterly failed.
paraschopra 14y ago
I may be in the minority here (and I certainly have nothing against Mark), but I really dislike such _implicit_ glamorization and heroism of entrepreneur hardships. There two specific problems with the post: a) in general (unless you are lucky), all good things require hard work so what's so special about entrepreneurship?; b) this interpretation of entrepreneurship is clouded by a specific type of startup (and I am guessing for a founder with a specific personality type who gets a kick out of such emotional turmoil -- I am probably like that but it doesn't change the argument). Athletes, politicians, charity workers, soldiers, scientists and many others work hard even when outcomes are unpredictable. Even people with so-called "normal" jobs may require episodes of such unpredictability and hard work. Why specifically elevate entrepreneurship? And, frankly, such lifestyle even for an entrepreneur is a choice. I see no point in re-iterating the obvious that doing a startup may be hard if you are aiming to build a huge business. If it were easy, most people would be doing it, no? I fail to see the whole point of the article. To be fair, I did write about how is it in the life of an entrepreneur (specifically it was about my day): http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/startup-an-emotional-roller-coaster-ride.htm http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/startup-an-emotional-ro... but my aim there was to document how is the day in life of a founder at a startup that is still in early days and I tried hard to avoid generalizing or glamorizing the hardships. Looking back, I think I should have been more specific and objective in documenting the day (rather than making generalizations on the nature of entrepreneurship and heroism contained in living through such a day).
rdl 14y ago
If you live in the Bay Area, there's not a whole lot of travel which can't be done in your car. That's the whole point of being in the capital. Maybe it's different if you're in LA. I go to Vegas a couple times a year for conferences (which I could skip, but I enjoy them), and have met with investors and BD partners in Seattle, but if I had to do a business without going more than 10 miles from I-280 in the Bay Area, it could be done. (I'm curious if you could do it without leaving MV/PA/MP!) (with enterprise or b2b, maybe there's a little bit more call to go to DC, maybe Boston, NYC, maybe a few other cities, but absolutely not for consumer, and if you don't enjoy travel, you could probably get away with no travel.)

381 points by ndemoor 14y ago

On point 100% as usual. You are focused, you are afraid, and you are resilient. One thing you do see due to the ups and downs is the future. By eating the shit in your industry you see whats going on. You know...fuck...this is going to happen in at least 3-6 months. Not saying you can do anything about it but you can be part of the "conversation".

pjsullivan3 14y ago

After coming off a failure I think the part that really resonated with me talking about the fear of disappointment. I've been so afraid of disappointing others that believed in me and thought they wouldn't look at me with the same amount of respect. What I've found is that they saw it as much more of accomplishment then I almost did. The other part is "You’re unemployable. You’re an entrepreneur." I am now in the process of meeting lots and lots of companies, big, small, new, old, re-invented and I'm finding that maybe its a case of once you've been a CEO you will always be a CEO. We will see what comes.

xal 14y ago
You mean that you hear from companies that they don't want to hire you because you have been an entrepreneur? That can't be right, it's the kind of person everyone seeks. Hack, I've paid millions in the past buying companies mostly to hire such people.
- carlio 14y ago
  It means that once you've been in that position, you can't stomach being an underling any more, you're too impertinent and used to making decisions rather than following them. That's my take on it at least.
  - pjsullivan3 14y ago
    Yea thats what I am getting at, but I also feel that when your an entrepreneur you have an attitude that may not be in line with a more corporate setting.

FrankFrank 14y ago

Yep. And we will keep the grind going. There is no try.

tinco 14y ago

This sort of post is why I read HN, in my opinion posts like this should get more upvotes than Steve's death. For some reason I find it very reassuring to read articles that tell about all the downsides of being an entrepreneur. It makes me feel like I know about all the obstacles that are coming my way, but also confident that I could handle/deal with them. Ofcourse this might be terribly naieve. But then comes the article that naivety is an essential founder's trait, and I'm restored in my faith :P I wouldn't mind if every article submitted to HN was some founder's anecdote, big or small, keep them coming :)

JBiserkov 14y ago
>I wouldn't mind if every article submitted to HN was some founder's anecdote, big or small, keep them coming :) In the beginning HN was called 'Startup News', if I remember correctly.
fatbird 14y ago
The thing I wonder about is how the knowledgeable and experienced can write articles like this, explicitly recognizing that an adrenaline/stress high is a necessary component, and not think that we need to find a better way to encourage entrepreneurship than the current "ten set out and nine don't make it" method.
- tinco 14y ago
  How would you envision this? 9 out of 10 ideas are just bad, or 9 out of 10 executions are just bad, and you can't know which ones are good or bad ahead of time. The amount of stress comes from the fact that you constantly need to reassure yourself and your stakeholders that your startup is a 10%er and not a 90%er. I'm not a VC so I don't have all the data, but from my point of view I see no way out of this system.
  - fatbird 14y ago
    I don't have a replacement model, because I'm not a VC, just a guy with one startup experience under my belt. My intuition and meagre experience tell me that a less competitive, more guided atmosphere would be better, with more emphasis on slow growth businesses rather than "the next ..." Even PG has said that the whole business is structured to find the one out of hundred that brings thousandfold returns, in order to finance all the gambling with the other 99. What about a system that funded more broadly, looking for more modest returns and with clearer goals for the entrepeneurs? There's a strong "death or glory" ethic that pervades startup culture, that I think chases out more modest businesses, to all our detriment. Look at the back-and-forth here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4799163 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4799163. Ryan Carson writes about going it alone, and PG pushes back with data from the pressure cooker side that co-founders are empirically necessary; Carson, though, was writing just about how a more modest business plan can be successfully executed by a single founder.

feniv 14y ago

Great post. Knowing that there are so many others out there going through the same unforgiving grind day in and day out is a strange kind of inspiration. Thanks!

lubujackson 14y ago

This is all true... if you play the VC game of growing your business before you have revenue to support the growth. The fact is many web-based businesses can be built without spending all your time raising money that you need because of a self-fulfilling burn-rate crisis. Some businesses need VC, but you should ALWAYS avoid VC if you can.

gfodor 14y ago
Yeah I'd tend to agree here -- a lot of this stress in this article can be mitigated by a) attacking an idea that leads to revenue quickly, or at least can be market validated clearly quickly and b) only raising the stakes (ie, raising money, going after "whale" purchase orders) once this revenue or validation has materialized. As a nice side effect, the process of raising money or landing sales once you've got some validation not only reduces the risk of failure but also makes the process a lot easier and less time consuming anyway. (Kickstarter is a hell of a way to do this nowadays.) It's still going to be a stressful ride but getting a few things like this right early on can basically "de-leverage" your risk profile in starting a company from being (metaphorically) 100x to "merely" 10x.

jamesjguthrie 14y ago

Great article!

slaxman 14y ago

This is powerful stuff!

minimax 14y ago

A few (dissenting) points: If you want to eat healthy at O'Hare, you can find a salad or sandwich in any terminal. If you really want to blow your calorie budget, go find one of the Goose Island bars in terminal 1 or 3. Have a Matilda. It's fantastic. Next point: I really dislike working for bosses with a misplaced sense of paternalism. If there are risks or uncertainties facing the business, don't hide them from your employees. Transparency breeds trust, which you'll need if you expect your engineers to put in the kind of hard work that's required when a company is starting up. Last point: look, if a life of flying around the country and working long hours is your idea of a tortured life only a special breed of men known as "entrepreneurs" can bear, then you need to pull your head out of your ass. That life is stressful and that it takes hard work to get ahead are universal truths. The rest of us aren't just coasting along in a risk-free world. Double secret bonus last point: why all the cussing?

mrkurt 14y ago
Your first point is dead on, although I'm lazy and just go to XOCO in terminal 1 most of the time ... I think, perhaps, you interpreted him differently than I did on your other points: 2. I don't think he's talking about paternalism, I think he's talking about dealing with very intense, private insecurity about the state of a company. There is something not quite unlike doom facing company nearly every day, and it's incredibly hard to filter actual uncertainties that companies should account for. It's important to be both transparent and conservative with negativity, but not for paternalistic reasons. 3. There's not a special type of person that handles stress better, exactly, there's a special type of stress that comes with trying to start/run a company. And it's not really worth it if you're thinking in pure outcome based terms. As an example, I picked my family up (we have 4 kids) and moved them cross country in August because it seemed like the best decision for my company. It was an excruciating choice in a way that a normal, career based moves haven't been. I suspect anyone could have handled that flavor of stress since I'm not uniquely stress resilient. x. I think intense word choice can occasionally reflect the intensity of what you're talking about in a way that forced mildness undermines. So why not?
- minimax 14y ago

Lucadg 14y ago

in other words this life sometimes sucks but it way better than working for somebody else. I'd rather have some deep lows, some very steep highs and a constant background noise saying "you're going to fail", than sitting there, watching out of the window and knowing I am not testing my full potential. Because when you try to reach your limits you always fall, that's when you know them. Then you stand up again and go for the next limit. Once you tasted that, there's no way back.

dschiptsov 14y ago

There are many types of entrepreneurs but we could define a two major groups - those who are seeking a niche to make money by what they produce and love to do, and those who are seeking a niche to become a middle-men, a parasite, a cheater, a wise-guy, a "manager" of others. It seems that in every kind of business, including criminal, those who are capable to produce have very few troubles, while the second group, the wast majority, have much more suffering, just because, well, no one really need them. So, before thinking about entrepreneurship, become good at something first. Then you will be able to create and notice opportunities. It doesn't not work in opposite direction - one cannot create an opportunity being of no good in any other field.

SagelyGuru 14y ago

I don't know about the article but this is one of the best HN headlines I had seen in a long time :)

nhangen 14y ago

This is the most complete and representative post on entrepreneurship I've ever read, at least according to my own experiences. I do listen to Mark's podcast, but this is by far the best of his best.

dools 14y ago

Haha "I only have $6,000 in the bank!!".

flyinRyan 14y ago
$6k is nothing unless you have a stable, steady stream of income.
- dools 14y ago
  No, $0 is nothing.

ahoyhere 14y ago

This is ONE way to be an entrepreneur, certainly not the only one. I don't mean to brag, because I'm sure none of you care about my "little dipshit company," but there are people out there who deserve to know that this kind of adrenaline junkie lifestyle as described in the article is not "entrepreneurship" as a whole but just one type of person's interpretation of it. We, for example, got back a couple weeks ago from a 2-week trip to Arizona. We (biz owners (my husband + I) plus our employee) went to attend a conference in Scottsdale -- not to demand speaking slots or to impress anyone, just to learn, to experience it. Because, hey, Arizona is gorgeous in October, we had decided to extend our trip and rent a convertible, and a 4-bedroom house in beautiful Sedona, AZ with a private pool and heated spa tub, for a week. We spent 3 days of that as a company retreat, and then the rest was just my husband & I hanging out. During the 3 days when we were working, we all used the spa every night to stargaze. In the middle of the days, we'd take a break and go hiking. When our employee went home, we just bummed around a day, then we rented a jeep and went off-roading. This year, my husband and I decided to draw about $160k of profit out of our biz to pay for a mortgage down payment and various fixings for our new (old) house. Then we bought a nice car, in cash. (Honestly I would have preferred to get a loan, but there was a problem with the fact that we hadn't gotten our PA driver's licenses yet. Long boring story. Patched over, as so often, with money.) Our finances are secure. Our products may be "boring"… but they are growing very nicely and our customers are happy. Our employee can feel secure about her salary. We own 100% of our company… nobody can tell us what to do, except possibly the government, but they don't seem to care. Certainly we don't have to worry about SEC filings. This weekend, I co-taught a bootcamp as part of my favorite product, 30x500. It's only on a weekend because that's when the majority of my students can attend. I plan to take the next couple days off, just cuz. I can do that whenever, of course… and often do, because I have a chronic illness which is exacerbated by stress. So I keep stress low and live a very chillaxed kind of life. I expect that, as a 3- or maybe 4-person company, we'll break $1 million in gross yearly revenue in the next 24 mos… probably more like 12-18. All without begging, nagging, scrambling, fundraising, pitch-decking, obsessive emailing, jockeying, etc. My biggest stress this year is about how to reinvest another six figures into our biz so we pay less taxes (and changing bookkeepers). I don't like paying taxes more than we have to, but honestly I'm not sure what to spend it on after we max out our 401(k)s. I expect downvotes for this. Probably because it sounds like I'm bragging. Probably because the reason the above article is so popular is because people like it when authors "get real" about the "harsh realities" of running a business. Deep inside, they believe that if it doesn't hurt horribly, it must not be worth it. So this kind of "truth" is appealing, and what I say will be labeled as some kind of crazy outlier, I got lucky, I'm famous, etc, etc., surely nobody could really make this kind of money off time tracking so I must be embroidering the truth, etc. But if you want to create a business -- as opposed to a drama-filled life -- there truly is a less painful way: Create a small product for small business which creates value, then charge money for it. It's stupid simple. It's not easy, but then again, it's not all that hard, either. And it works, over and over and over again. Yes, our first year building the product income streams while consulting kinda sucked… but it didn't suck at THIS level described by the post author. The main suckitude came from the fact that the more we worked on our real products, the less we wanted to consult… we still never had to travel away from our families, stump, beg, wheedle, or go without money. And we don't have to convince somebody else to buy us, fund us, love us, millions of people to use what we made, to make that short & minor sacrifice pay off. Sometimes pain is meaningful and necessary. But sometimes it's just pain.

scott_meade 14y ago

Wish there were more explanation as to "why?". If someone enjoys voluntarily living such an unsustainable lifestyle, fine. Everyone needs to get their thrills somehow. But when it comes to playing with other peoples' plans, emotions, money and lives; then for "the rush" seems like a thin reason to live every day wearing a game face for employees, creditors, and family. Glad to have Amy Hoy pointing out that Suster's view of the world is far from the only definition of entrepreneur!

pelargir 14y ago

Some people become entrepreneurs because they want to make loads of money. Others do it for the freedom and lifestyle it affords them. It just depends on what your priorities are. Personally, I prefer setting my own hours over driving a BMW.

bryanjclark 14y ago

Observation: nearly every single slide in that presentation that describes entrepreneurs exclusively features men in the (bad) clip art. Just sayin': you can do better than that.

ryanackley 14y ago

As I was reading this, I couldn't help but juxtapose this article on top of the first world problems meme on everything this guy was saying. "I had to miss a full day with my family, camping in the mountains...to raise $150 million" Poor guy! This would be more relevant coming from someone who utterly failed.

paraschopra 14y ago

I may be in the minority here (and I certainly have nothing against Mark), but I really dislike such _implicit_ glamorization and heroism of entrepreneur hardships. There two specific problems with the post: a) in general (unless you are lucky), all good things require hard work so what's so special about entrepreneurship?; b) this interpretation of entrepreneurship is clouded by a specific type of startup (and I am guessing for a founder with a specific personality type who gets a kick out of such emotional turmoil -- I am probably like that but it doesn't change the argument). Athletes, politicians, charity workers, soldiers, scientists and many others work hard even when outcomes are unpredictable. Even people with so-called "normal" jobs may require episodes of such unpredictability and hard work. Why specifically elevate entrepreneurship? And, frankly, such lifestyle even for an entrepreneur is a choice. I see no point in re-iterating the obvious that doing a startup may be hard if you are aiming to build a huge business. If it were easy, most people would be doing it, no? I fail to see the whole point of the article. To be fair, I did write about how is it in the life of an entrepreneur (specifically it was about my day): http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/startup-an-emotional-roller-coaster-ride.htm http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/startup-an-emotional-ro... but my aim there was to document how is the day in life of a founder at a startup that is still in early days and I tried hard to avoid generalizing or glamorizing the hardships. Looking back, I think I should have been more specific and objective in documenting the day (rather than making generalizations on the nature of entrepreneurship and heroism contained in living through such a day).

rdl 14y ago

If you live in the Bay Area, there's not a whole lot of travel which can't be done in your car. That's the whole point of being in the capital. Maybe it's different if you're in LA. I go to Vegas a couple times a year for conferences (which I could skip, but I enjoy them), and have met with investors and BD partners in Seattle, but if I had to do a business without going more than 10 miles from I-280 in the Bay Area, it could be done. (I'm curious if you could do it without leaving MV/PA/MP!) (with enterprise or b2b, maybe there's a little bit more call to go to DC, maybe Boston, NYC, maybe a few other cities, but absolutely not for consumer, and if you don't enjoy travel, you could probably get away with no travel.)