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Ask HN: What was the toughest decision you have made as a founder?

25 points by skowmunk ↗ HN
For those who are/have been founders among the readers of HN, can you share some perspective on the toughest decisions you have made regarding your start up?

How did you go about making those tough decisions?

Thanks.

17 comments

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adambyrtek
To accept that job offer from Google...
sahillavingia
Thinking about the product before actually working on it. Normally this meant the product wasn't good enough to work on, anyways.
stanley
How much equity to offer to my investors, partners and advisors. It's a difficult game of judging expectations and understanding motivations.
pjy04
To figure out how much my co-founder or partners will get in equity.

Also figuring out who to include in the founding team and how not to make your other friends feel left out.

ambirex
To walk away when I knew my heart wasn't in it but my partners wanted to continue. It wasn't easy because we were barely profitable, it was easy because I respected my partners. They continued to make a modest go of it for many years afterwards.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
junkbit
To return the wallet to its rightful owner
JangoSteve
There were some hard decisions, like when I had to buy out my cofounders, or before that, the first time I actually tried getting someone to pay me for stuff. But the hardest? Quitting my full-time job. Even though I had enough revenue lined up, it was still an extremely difficult decision to make.
taa
To trust a co-founder I just met based solely on mutual passion for starting a company, technology, and getting rich soon.
rtra
Is that a good idea? How did it go?
taa
Well that's what made it a "hard decision." But so far so good. It's been a few month and we've become good friends since then, doing social stuff together not only startup work.
instakill
Realising that the project wasn't going to work out and having to shelve it.
decadentcactus
This although for me on a smaller scale (just personal projects). And ACTUALLY shelving it, not just moving the folder somewhere else until "maybe" I'll keep doing it another day.
thewileyone
Toughest decision was when to call it quits, when you've done everything you could and nothing was working.
_b8r0
This is so true. When things don't go well it's really hard not to think of quitting as pure failure but to focus on what quitting will do for your health, wealth and general sanity.

It needs to be the hardest call to make though, as it has the most impact.

AmberShah
So far, it has been going the part-time, bootstrapping route versus actively trying to raise funding and go full time.
skowmunk
That is tough, been trying the part time route for almost a year. Realized, if nothing else, the delays in implementing would obsolete the idea.

A year ago when I started, there were just 2 major competitors to mine, after a year of working on it part time, now there are half a dozen more good competitors. Not trying to be a skeptic, and I also had other factors against me.

Finally I have decided to quit my job soon and focus on the start up full time, Otherwise I am sure the one I am working on now won't even have a sliver of a chance at success.