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Look - here's my point sans babble-bot 2.0 software: In ANY new endeavor, you need to have balance. Balance is the pre-requisite to the power you need to make
by yamada 19y ago
Look - here's my point sans babble-bot 2.0 software: In ANY new endeavor, you need to have balance. Balance is the pre-requisite to the power you need to make it. The young, naive entrepreneur is supposed to focus on success because this re-weights the equation to give his enthusiasm a higher co-effecient. BUT - this has to be tempered a more mature, wiser presence who builds up your will to overcome and helps you refine your model by discouraging and criticizing you. I know this sounds dysfunctional but it's reality. You don't built muscle by having weights which help you pull them up while writing articles to encourage you to continue. You do so by finding the will to push inside yourself while the weights push against you. If you have a mentor who just blows sunshine and rainbows at you, how will you ever find and develop your entrepreneurial muscles? The other point is that enthusiasm has to be tempered by a cold hard calculation of reality. Not that either is more important - reality is in flux but enthusiasm only goes so far at some moments. Balance. This article just seems to convey a "you think you can do it, we think you can do it, and let's meet every week in a friendly mutual admiration society where everybody thinks they can do it." Cult-like. Aren't you better off in the long run meeting up with people who hate your guts and point out 30 flaws in your idea, so that you can get that much stronger by fixing 20 of them? Sure. It is harsh and brutal. Welcome to the real world of business. The operating motto is, "If you can be discouraged, you should be discouraged." All this article seems to do in my mind is change that to, "If you can be discouraged, well then we'll put you in an artificial environment where you'll receive a lot of outside encouragement at the cost to you of finding ways to develop your own ability to encourage yourself." And it never seems to cover the very real issue of "what if you just don't make it?" You know that venture capital adage of "1 in 10 of our companies go on hit the big time and that's all that matters!"? If that were true, well them we would be awash in thousands of Yahoos and Googles and YouTubes. But we're not. So the odds of making it are at best calculated wrong and at worst lied about. But if you got financing from smart VCs, that means you must have passed many, many prequalifying criteria. So why do you wind up statistically likely to not make it? I'm sure somebody will say, "Well, at YC, OUR criteria is far more clever and wise than any VC, so if you get in YC, your odds of making already are that much greater."
In the end, you need an adult to say - go like gang-busters for 6 months, then if you don't see minimum this that and the other goals met, move on. Leaving it open-ended with a "just keep trying" approach only gives you the impression that if you just hang on, maybe next month will be that special one ... or the next month ... or the next one ... how then do you know it's not next year? Or the one after that? Or next decade? There are plenty of entrepreneurs whose idea was a decade ahead of its time. What happens to them after they maxed out 50 credit cards and mortgaged their homes? Nobody knows because in polite entrepreneurial society, it's best not to talk about very real risks. But ignoring them doesn't make them go away and being really, really committed doesn't reduce them very much. I'm not being pessimistic. I applaud you folks. But I find this go-go cheerleader coaching style dangerous. Hitting the weight room and getting up early in the morning, putting your sneakers on and going for a run will prepare you better for the big game. Listening to the cheerleaders tell you how great you are and how much they believe in you is only setting you up for a rude awakening.
- create_account 19y agoPG and Yamada are the Yin and the Yang of the startup experience. One succeeded and is now overly optimisitic, the other failed and is overly bitter.
- pg 19y agoI don't think I'm overly optimistic. For one thing, I've both succeeded and failed (http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html). But also there are the 58 startups YC has funded over the past 2 1/2 years. With that amount of data, I think I look at the startup business with a fairly clear eye.
- yamada 19y agoI don't think I'm overly pessimistic. I'm saying look at post-2000. What do you have, in reality? Google (intelligence connections), YouTube ... doubtful to have gotten off the ground if one of the co-founders wasn't coincidentally related to Jim Clark ... and MySpace, a "startup" which seems to have been "started up" by Fox itself ... and Facebook, which everybody knows by now is just a greedy jerk who stole somebody else's idea and found a VC firm with intelligence community ties who see a device for gathering info on personal relationships useful. BUT WHAT HAPPENED TO the several people NYT claims may have been the original people behind MyFace? They're suing or writing "I got shafted" memoirs. They didn't make it. What are the consequences? Nobody knows because for the most part such people are politely brushed under the carpet (with MyFace being an exception). Oh and some company that went public last week that does something with servers that I don't understand. What else? What else really made it? Flickr to a lesser extent. All I'm saying is if somebody with who didn't go to Horace Mann and Harvard or Yale and isn't related to somebody who may help behind the scenes came up with "the next big thing" ... NOW ... during THIS time period when China controls more of our economic destiny than silicon valley and wallstreet combined ... well then you should pay close attention to that person. They're super-smart in a way that is directly relevant in cold, hard reality land. But can you find such a person? Who? Thought so. Everybody else just take with a few dozen grains of salt. And people who know how to make it in tough environments will never show you how its done. Why would they? The number one rule in business is "Figure it out for yourself." I'm sorry but there are no shortcuts, no magic formulas, and the sooner you realize that the better. And people who tell you that they have some "system" for pumping out real-estate fortunes, or making a killing in the stock/commodity market, or pumping out multibillion dollar startups at-will (ecompanies, idealab, and the 300 or so "incubators" that got started 1998-2000) never made a penny in anything but getting people to sign up for their magical secret systems. And making money at one time period during certain circumstances does not the expert make. Honestly - who thinks mark cuban could start another company and sell it a year later for $5 Billion today? How about 1 Billion? I doubt he could convince anybody in today's market to give him a loan. I'll say what is being left out. More than likely you will not make it at YC or even Kleiner Perkins. You will probably fail. You might be inspired to come back again having learned much and made good contacts from the experience. But nobody at YC will give you a loan and pay your apartment rent and car bills while you look for a job to pay the bills until you recover and get ready to try again. And you need to be used to that reality because people who called will call less and less and then eventually they won't return your calls. For years. Until they hear you're up to something cool again. If you can deal with that reality, fine. Deal with it 1, 2, maybe 3 or 4 times. If it sounds to cold, rethink how much time you're ready to commit.