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This post really misunderstands what both success and failure are. Getting into YC or raising money isn't success. And trying an idea out for a few months bef
by birken 12y ago
This post really misunderstands what both success and failure are.
Getting into YC or raising money isn't success. And trying an idea out for a few months before giving up on it isn't failure.
Building a success startup takes a long long time. Years. Lots of years. Maybe the idea is bad, but giving up on it after a couple of months really proves nothing. All it has proven is that the founders are the type of people that are readily willing to bail out at any moment, and that is a quality that doesn't lead to startup success. The "nightmare" described in this post is a joke compared to the depths some highly successful startups have gone through. Techcrunch wrote a bad story about me? Really? Try having to decide whether to lay off people to make payroll or having spent years on an idea only to still be not sure if it is working on not.
- minimaxir 12y ago> The "nightmare" described in this post is a joke compared to the depths some highly successful startups have gone through. Techcrunch wrote a bad story about me? Really? From the narrative, it sounds like there's a causal link between the TechCrunch article and the startup forcibly being summoned to office hours to ask what the hell is going on. Which says more about YC/PG's policies than it does about the startup founders.
- birken 12y agoI realize the actual nightmare is that after a few months of all-night coding the founders didn't launch the next facebook, but still: > We had much bigger problems than the piece, to be sure, but launching with an article that roundly mocked us was one of the final nails in the coffin. Hint to startup founders: It doesn't matter if Techcrunch writes about you or what they write about you. If you are letting that affect your perception of your company in a large way, you are doing it wrong. Though to Techcrunch's credit, in this case they really did a good job of reporting.
- yesimahuman 12y agoHaving been in an accelerator before, I definitely related to their sense of dread that they might mess up this opportunity and never be successful again because of it. Watching peers strike it big must have been super hard. I quickly realized after that most "success" is exaggerated in the media, etc. and true success takes a lot longer than we expect. Raising $1M isn't success. Hell, raising $5-30M in today's climate isn't success. "Success" is such a vague concept that it's best to just focus on being happy and building cool shit and growing it year after year. It takes time.
- 31reasons 12y ago>>"Success" is such a vague concept Actually its not in terms of business. Success = Profit + Long term sustainability in doing so.
- untog 12y agoSuccess can also be short term growth and being bought by a larger company, in this industry.
- yesimahuman 12y agoSuccess is the most loosely defined, illogical concept in the startup world. When your friends are raising big rounds, you think they are successful, even though most of them won't survive beyond the runway that round gives them (esp. at that stage). Yet the media and the community celebrates founders for all sorts of things and call it "success" when it's not. So yes, it's incredibly vague, and the existence of an accounting formula means nothing in the founder psyche.
- CPLX 12y agoActually it's not that either. Success in a business context means a positive rate of return on the resources invested. Or to refine one step further, a return that is positive and superior to the next best alternative for the deployment of said resources at a given level of risk.