4 ms·

Thanks for being so raw and honest about this - even the less glamorous parts. It isn't easy to talk honestly about issues like gendered expectations and appro

by Fede_V 12y ago

Thanks for being so raw and honest about this - even the less glamorous parts. It isn't easy to talk honestly about issues like gendered expectations and approaching VC, black hat marketing, or emotional manipulation for Visa, and a lot of people would have chosen to gloss over those aspects, but it takes a lot of guts to be upfront about the darker sides of running your company. Reading this, it confirmed an important lesson that I learned in a completely different setting (grad school). It's much, much better to do an impossible project with an excellent mentor and fantastic coworkers, than an easy project full of low hanging fruits with colleagues you can't stand. People who were in the former condition all flourished, even if it meant pivoting to a completely different project after having invested 2 years in a dead end idea. People in the latter camp burnt out completely and almost uniformly dropped out of grad school. The few that stayed were basically running on spite the entire time.

ehurrell 12y ago
> Reading this, it confirmed an important lesson that I learned in a completely different setting (grad school). It's much, much better to do an impossible project with an excellent mentor and fantastic coworkers, than an easy project full of low hanging fruits with colleagues you can't stand. This really is a vital lesson, but can be difficult to learn. After the first startup I was in folded I helped found another with some of the same people, because I believed we were a good team that could go somewhere. Quite soon after we pivoted from an interesting problem to 'low-hanging fruit', and the team dynamics began to change rapidly, in a way that prevented progress (suddenly there was a lot of ego). It quickly became clear that things were untenable, so I left. Since leaving everything has pointed to it being the only correct choice. I still made the mistake of trusting them to tie up financials properly. Things can degrade faster than your loyalties account for, but you can pick yourself up and learn from it.

by Fede_V 12y ago

ehurrell 12y ago

> Reading this, it confirmed an important lesson that I learned in a completely different setting (grad school). It's much, much better to do an impossible project with an excellent mentor and fantastic coworkers, than an easy project full of low hanging fruits with colleagues you can't stand. This really is a vital lesson, but can be difficult to learn. After the first startup I was in folded I helped found another with some of the same people, because I believed we were a good team that could go somewhere. Quite soon after we pivoted from an interesting problem to 'low-hanging fruit', and the team dynamics began to change rapidly, in a way that prevented progress (suddenly there was a lot of ego). It quickly became clear that things were untenable, so I left. Since leaving everything has pointed to it being the only correct choice. I still made the mistake of trusting them to tie up financials properly. Things can degrade faster than your loyalties account for, but you can pick yourself up and learn from it.