3 ms·

Similarly: yes, indeed, if your company continues interacting with PG and other Y-Combinator-funded companies, then it will not die -- because if it dies, it wi

• gjm11 17y ago
  The companies no longer have that ability, even though the individuals do. Don't get me wrong; I think "keep doing something and stay in touch" is an excellent piece of advice for someone doing something difficult where failure is strongly correlated with losing motivation. But I wonder whether you're overestimating the causal role of demotivation here. Toy model: a startup has some kind of "health score" which varies according to exogenous events; "motivation" is some function of health and d(health)/dt, which is small when the startup is unhealthy and getting healthier; the startup dies if its health goes negative. In this model, motivation has no causal role, it's a pure epiphenomenon; but I bet you'll find that startups that die typically have very poor motivation shortly before their demise, and that poor motivation is a good short-term predictor of failure. Of course, this is only a ridiculous toy model; in reality motivation clearly does have causal effects of its own, but it's also clearly affected by outside causes that themselves have an effect on the success of a startup. An observed correlation between demotivation and death is only weak evidence that demotivation is the underlying problem more than it's a symptom of having no customers, no money, technical problems you can't solve, etc. (Doubtless you have more evidence than that correlation, having seen lots of startups succeed and fail.)