I read this post so many times when I was working on my startup (https://first.io). I particularly love this quote: "Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!"
In fact, I even had it as a banner on my desktop for a while: "JUST KEEP TYPING!"
I do wonder if pg would write that again in 2019. We've seen many startups die while charging forward before finding product/market fit. Talking to customers comes before typing.
Not a startup, and not necessarily dying, but here’s a personal anecdote of mine that goes against this:
In 2016 I was working on a UX team, making improvements to components that were used across the entire front-end of the new platform we were building. One spring afternoon I was working on a new hierarchical selector widget while a quarterly executive town hall was playing on the projector in our team room. Midway through writing an AngularJS directive, our head of product surprise announced that we were pivoting and that the platform we had been building for the past year was going to be mostly thrown out. I basically closed my editor and never touched that component again.
The upshot here is that in startups or big companies, change can come very suddenly. And when big problems with a strategy are only known to those at the top, it makes the sudden changes even more surprising for those down the ladder. If you’ve got a bad board, you might find out about a change that you need to make the day that you need to make it.
It's interesting, because 'just keep typing' is often among one of the worst bits of advice you can give a software engineer. More code doesn't mean good code, nor does repeatedly slamming your head against a problem work towards actually solving said problem.
I think a lot of what I see in this post is a mixture of survivorship bias/selection bias. We want to believe that the reasons startups succeeded was because they just kept trying, while not seeing the many that did die mid keystroke due to any number of reasons.
I feel like I can share this particular piece of gossip - hopefully it's useful to someone - I'm not particularly interested in going after this particular slice of business:
So we just had a sales guy join from a large electronics components distributor - the kind that handles the interfaces between
a) globally known consumer hardware brands both in "the west" and in PRC
b) the hardware manufacturers (mostly PRC, some TW)
c) the component manufacturers (mixed)
I had been assuming they had been running some super sophisticated globally integrated software system. I was really curious about how this stuff actually worked, in real life. It turns out it's just excel sheets and phone-calls in the end. They are working to introduce ERP systems, but..no.
This seems like something that's ripe for a software-based revolution.
This. So much this. The whole electronics manufacturing industry runs on Excel sheets. Every BOM, inventory list etc. is in Excel. Because that's what your manager knows how to use, because that's what their managers knew how to use, and so on.
It came with Windows so that's that, they can't be bothered to try anything else. Not even after mangled sheets cause repeated mistakes.
I would so love to work on something like this, but when people won't even use a free solution suggested by one of their trusted employees, selling one will be tough.
I am starting a bootstrapped business along the lines now. My take is that sellzong a solution won't work. You have to compete with Excel, and all the reasons you just stated, and SAP (or any other ERP-System they might use if any). Selling a service is different story so. If you can show them that you as a subcontractor, in my case as a 4PL, can deliver better performance or solve some of their pain points you can use whatever solutions you want. And being more efficient and software-heavy only helps you.
All you have to do is give them their data in the se excel sheets they are used to. Preferably by e-mail, portals and such are the devil.
BOMs as a service! I like it, but I'm not quite sure how it would work. A lot of the errors that creep into these documents are things only someone very familiar with the company and the product design would spot. You'd almost have to be onsite.
Ah, I won't touch BOMs or production for the time being! More the logistics side of things. But I remember a discussion I had back the day regarding config management and BOMs. And yeah, there definitely is a market for good BOM / Config Management solution as a service. The trick would be to figure out which BOM to use so. But especially in the aerospace and defense sector there should he money to be made.
Ah, sounds a lot like the solar sector. Chinese manufacturers, close to now ERP-usage, inefficient processes. And being a b2b market doesn't hurt neither if you ask me. Also, the MVP when compared to excel shouldn't be the hardest thing in the world. I only expect the sales cycle to be rather long.
I think the solar sector may be different. The component sector has a vast number of components in use (like 500k+ different parts, I dunno), and like 100+ component suppliers.
Seems they got acquired for $12MM about seven years after their last seed round, per CrunchBase. That's perhaps a "soft landing" --- not a "success". The founders probably got something, but maybe not much, since there may have been debt to pay.
'Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with "but we're going to keep working on the startup," you are in big trouble.'
Since many start-up ideas are bad ones, it often will be rational for start-up founders to quit and do other things.
I still don't even believe that. A bad idea, as long as it produces an asset of value, is okay. You can move your asset to a more viable market. That is what a real pivot is. Pivoting is not "we have nothing but an idea, so we change our idea."
> A bad idea, as long as it produces an asset of value, is okay. You can move your asset to a more viable market.
Sorry but it sounds to me that you are not speaking from experience but just from reading many "startup culture" posts. In reality there just are many startups that have ideas and build products that never get to profitability. Most even have users that love the product but that doesn't help you if you can't get enough money.
And ideas matter a lot. Some are just almost impossible to execute to profitability while others are a relatively easy win. I have seen both and no, you can not just "move the asset to a more viable market".
I love this. I have read it a few times in the last years. This and Never Quit If [1] from Jason Lemkin have been essential for me to keep pursuing and never stop building my startup [2].
I almost quit a year ago, exactly today, then my company got acquired. A story (with pictures! only on Twitter though, link at the bottom.)
This is what I looked like last March 27.
[horrible pic]
One month prior... My dad passed away. I wasn't having a good month. But that wasn't what happened on March 27. I took a photo on March 27 because it was probably the worst I had felt in the last 5 years. Even worse than my dad's death. (We had a complicated relationship).
So yeah. We were dead. Like dead dead. I got my cofounders together on Monday, March 26 (today) for our team meeting. I laid out our situation and that I was going to fire myself.
[journal entry photo explaining the situation]
I woke up a lot of days and worked as hard as I could. But honestly it didn't matter. My fate had actually been set in motion five to ten years prior.
I didn't give up, and I didn't sit on my laurels. Ironically, I started reading a book called "Performing Under Pressure", and the entire premise of the book is basically: Act like you're not under pressure and you'll do your best work.
See, this idea that I had been working on? I started working on the seeds for it in roughly 2008. It's the same idea I'm working on now. Here's me giving a talk about the idea in 2011, roughly 3 years before founding Vidpresso.
As @justinkan and now my coworkers at Facebook know, I'm tenacious AF about this idea, and I know it's gonna happen.
But last year, it didn't seem like it was going to happen. Not only that, it seemed like the entire last 7 years were about to unwind, and I was going to start back from scratch.
Lots of entries like this one in my
@dayoneapp.
[Dead tired journal image.]
And some like this one unfortunately. #openup #mentalhealth #suicide
[suicidal journal image]
But then, one week later. This entry hits my journal.
[Wow, yesterday was insane. journal entry]
Then my journal kind of goes silent because I got really busy for a while.
This isn't some sort of rags to riches story: I knew my idea was solid and I can have people vouch for me, I'm tenacious AF, don't give up, and really the issue with me was that my idea was / is too early (still!)
But the other lesson is that for a certain subset of people: You'll probably always be happiest working on the problem you find most interesting, with your best friends, at a company who cares about your interests. Find that, and hold on to it.
It took me a long time to get those things together, but I think I have all of them now. It's very, very surprising, but I've learned a lot and I'm very grateful.
I now want to try to help others. If you're in your founder journey, feel free to DM! I'll try to help! It takes a long time though... it took me well over 10 years, and I'm still just getting started. Don't be in a hurry.
Also an addendum: The timing is really what worked out. We happened to have the right tech at the right time with the right partners. I'm in love with my job at FB, mostly because I had been derisking it for years.
When we joined FB, Interactivity had just become very important to FB. So it really was all about timing and persistence. We were in the game long enough for it to work out.
---
It doesn't work out for everyone, but it did for me. :)
Any tips, strategies, ideas you have behind the "Bootstrapping Plan"?
I am personally trying to balance Paul's advice of "the number one thing not to do is other things" with being able to bootstrap for an indefinite period of time.
It wasn't easy, but it was necessary for me to get over the "rent and health insurance hump". I do agree that it's hard to reconcile bootstrapping/consulting with pg's advice to "not do other things".
My main advice is: make sure consulting (or whatever "auxiliary income source" you are spending time on) is a means-to-an-end for you, and that it doesn't become the main thing. And also make sure to carve out time to actually work on the startup daily -- whether that's early mornings, "lunch breaks", or late nights. (In my case, it was all 3 :-) ...)
Avoid the easy way out. During my multi-year consulting/bootstrapping journey, I got a lot of offers to join other startups or take on big consulting clients. But I knew that wasn't what I wanted, however tempting. Ultimately, I had to turn down lucrative short-term gain for taking a stipend salary on my startup when it finally landed seed funding. Pulling the trigger on that was tough, but worth it, in retrospect. This was only possible because I had already mentally convinced myself that consulting/bootstrapping revenue was a means-to-the-end for the startup.
But yeah, life is messy, and we aren't all in the privileged position of being able to work without income for months or years on end, which unfortunately is often the vantage point taken by some of our "wise startup elders".
One small piece of practical advice based on some mistakes I saw other founders make: don't use debt.
Thank you for the comment, and both pieces are great. You even answered my question directly - way back in 2011!
"If I hadn’t worked on my consulting projects last year, Parse.ly would have died. PERIOD. PG is often right, but he’s wrong on this one. I agree that startups require your undivided attention. But surviving isn’t a compromise — it’s a necessity. Do it however you possibly can."
> One of the most interesting things we've discovered from working on Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating.
Oh, boy. Why can't we have a world where I can pursue my interests without the fear of loosing something. I guess if people read Bertrand Russell [0] instead of Paul Graham, the world would be a better place.
This is a bad faith read. He was specifically talking about startup founders. The cliche idea is that one of startup startup founders’ main motives is getting rich. PG said this wasn’t the case in practice, and that fear of failure was more important.
This has no bearing on what motivates people to do things generally in their spare time.
>Oh, boy. Why can't we have a world where I can pursue my interests without the fear of loosing something
A startup is not about "pursuing interests," that's a side project. A startup is about making money by eating market share. Every product or service that comes out of it is intrinsically connected to that goal.
You are free to pursue whatever interest you want on your own time, especially in this field. Every cloud provider gives you a free tier; most major database server software are free; all the major Git providers give you free private repos; every major library is free and open source; as is every major operating system and IDE, compiler, linker, interpreter, syntax checker...
In fact, as an individual, you will be hard pressed to actually find paywalls stopping you from using new technologies.
Of course it would be nicer if we all got free stuff without having to work for it. But this isn't about that, this is about business.
I'm guessing your interests you want to pursue without fear are not the "if you want to get millions of dollars" mentioned? I don't think "In Praise of Idleness" would help much with that one.
I find that when pursuing purely personal interests, publicly committing to a deliverable helps me get it done. I say I'm going do something by a given date as a way of putting myself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating.
People's motivation systems vary a lot, but it works for me.
The conclusion there is that "People who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen." But that's not a claim about causality. It can be explained by there being two kinds of people in the world: doers and blowhards.
True, but still, I think there's an important point in that talking more won't necessarily make someone more of a doer. It could just make them more of a blowhard.
Commitment device... they're really interesting but they can also cause you to do stupid things.
One example of a commitment device is to tell your friend something like "I'm going to write a book and get it published in six months and if I don't I'll give you $5k"
... the problem is, what if you legitimately decide that writing a book is just not for you?
$5k is a high strike price, but this is the point of a commitment device.
By putting a cost on failure, you can sort between "I genuinely no longer want to do this" and "I'm getting akrasia because doing things is hard and quitting is easy".
If you've made the cost of walking away higher than the expected value of the commitment (five grand would be a lot of money to make on many books), you should have some strong, intrinsic reason for it.
Maybe its so awful that it’s worth $5000 not to have to do it anymore—but at least you won’t quit over anything smaller than that, and the number of times you will regret losing $5000 and your self-respect will probably be outweighed by the number of times you accomplish something you might not have otherwise and at least take a little bit of lasting pride in it.
Firstly, pg isn’t addressing the overall question of living a good life, he’s addressing how to start a startup that doesn’t fail. Which may or may not be a good life decision even by pg’s standards.
Secondly, a lot of people have conflicting desires and actually want one of those desires to win out. For instance, some people want to be in good shape, but they also want to lay around on the couch all day reading novels or watching TV or playing video games. If you do that every day for a few months, you will not be in good shape. You want to be in good shape but you don’t want to go to the gym, so you are unhappy. The solution may very well be to trick yourself into doing things you don’t want to do, by making yourself want to do them, because you want to reap the benefits of having done the thing.
And yeah, people are motivated more by fear than by hope. It sucks but it’s true. Our evolutionary environment led us to prioritize not losing things like social status or safety over trying to attain our wildest dreams, because most of the mammals before us who ignored risks to their safety and social status didn’t reproduce.
I don't think "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich" has proven true. I've invested in startups (including YC ones) that followed this to a tee. They never found product-market fit, they could have been going forever, investors forgot about them. Some are still going, some managed to get acquired, some closed shop.
It's really a false dichotomy, only a small fraction of the companies that avoid dying manage to explode. You just don't hear about the rest.
I guess the idea is not to just "hang in there (but keep doing what you're doing)" but rather "hang in there (while innovating around your problem/change course, etc, until you get it right)".
It's a false dichotomy. It's like comparing the chances of you living to the age of 60 given that a brick had fallen on your head yesterday to someone who didn't get that lucky yet (rephrasing as "what are the chances you are dead if you're already dead?").
I think the point where you stop trying to pivot into higher and higher growth opportunities and accept your fate as a sustainable but small business could be classified as a form of “death” (perhaps “undead”) if your original goal really was to get rich.
Some tautologies work. I think giving up is a more common failure mode than dying of old age while constantly trying to build a startup but never succeeding. Obviously it’s more reasonable to give up at some point, but that point is going to be later than most people emotionally assume it to be. I don’t think many people will try and follow pg’s advice and be constantly repivoting their startup for 40-60 years of their life.
A lot of the reason business owners aren't more content with "small but sustainable" is because it isn't compatible with the venture capital model. It doesn't "return the fund".
That’s all well and good, but I think pg is writing more for founders who want to go big. And just like on StackOverflow, it’s not necessarily helpful to derail conversations around “how to do X” with arguments over “whether you should want to do X in the first place”.
If you have taken enough VC that the only way to get any value at all is through a huge exit, this statement is true. If you run a normal business, it is not true :)
No, I'm talking about companies that didn't even get to take VC funding in some cases. Building a stable business doesn't mean you get rich. The world is filled with middle class folk running stable businesses.
When they said "this statement" I think they meant the statement you were talking about not the statement that you made.
That once you've taken on enough funding, your options are get rich or die. Not that if you build a non-vc stable business your options are get rich or die.
> The distributors want to prevent the transparency that comes from having prices online.
Some manufacturers are worse, they don't publish datasheets (looking at you, Intel VDSL chipset department, laptop keyboard manufacturers, Broadcom). It's almost as if there are companies that want to lock out anyone not a multi-million company to tinker with their products...
For us the main indication of impending doom is when we don't hear from you. When we haven't heard from, or about, a startup for a couple months, that's a bad sign. If we send them an email asking what's up, and they don't reply, that's a really bad sign. So far that is a 100% accurate predictor of death.
Can someone at YC comment on if this is still a good proxy for startup failure?
From a personal perspective, we've sent out an investor update every single month [1] for our startup over the last four years. We also almost ran out of money at the end of 2017. The updates around that time were the hardest ones send out, but I can confirm they did help keep the company alive by forcing me to create and articulate a survival plan to our investors to get to profitability, which we pulled off [2] and are still going strong today.
> but I can confirm they did help keep the company alive by forcing me to create and articulate a survival plan to our investors
I think that's a lot of your answer right there. The companies that don't respond, don't articulate a plan and get feedback on it, or perhaps additional help. It's not that companies that keep communication open won't fail, but the ones that don't keep it open do (according to this).
The updates around that time were the hardest ones send out
The people who don't want to have those hard discussions are the ones that have their startup die. People who don't reply to emails are often people who are having negative feelings they don't want to deal with.
Maybe they don't have answers and are afraid to give a status report that includes an admission that they simply don't know. Maybe they don't want to be the harbinger of bad news and are waiting until things get better.
Neither of those is a constructive response. Neither of those fixes the problem.
Avoidance tactics are usually about emotional reactions. They usually aren't actually tactical choices for effectively addressing a problem.
There are exceptions. There are times when silence is golden or when it is the least worst option. I doubt that ever applies to dealing with an ongoing relationship with your investors.
(I'm not someone with startup experience. I just know something about people.)
Wild guess but I'd be remiss not to express this saturnine suspicion: probably because it's Doreen. She posts a lot, mostly solid content like the above post, some of which hard hitting. Some people take offense, she's often greyed out for no reason and regularly gets pretty harsh criticism. I would be shocked if she doesn't have some auto downvotes for every post. Unfortunately.
I recognise it's not constructive to express this suspicion of sexism, except perhaps as a message of support, so hereby: Doreen, you have my +1. Ignore the haters.
There's probably an element of truth to that, but it's also a large forum that gets about 5 million unique visitors per month and I'm a demographic outlier on multiple axes, so I simply express myself differently from the way most people here do. (I also focus on things that would never occur to most people here, which can easily be perceived as irrelevant.)
I suspect a high percentage of the downvotes I get -- and I do get quite a lot of them, but I have no data on what's "normal" -- are simply people who have no idea I'm a woman, don't think the way I do, don't have the background knowledge I have, can't see how it's pertinent and are unaware of me being someone with any particular expertise that anyone "should" respect or be interested in. (Edit: In fact, I fairly often get feedback that the person I'm arguing with assumed I was male simply because it is HN and HN is overwhelmingly male, which lefthandedly implies "Doreen blends and does not read as girly.")
In this case, the downvotes occurred after I added the qualifier that I don't have startup experience, so a very good guess is that it was downvoted by someone who thinks my knowledge of how people work doesn't apply and I'm just some blowhard and armchair politician who shouldn't have added "low value content" to HN. The degree to which I have formally studied people topics (negotiation, social psychology, etc) is something alien to a lot of STEM folks who see that as a soft science and not something you can really understand with any confidence.
There is a lot of hand-wavy BS in areas like psychology. I'm quite critical of such things myself, though it often doesn't go over well for me to do that either because the degree to which I think I understand a more bright line standard for how to study social phenomenon is also not seen by most people as anything believable.
On the upside, my latest parenting blog is something some people have expressed real interest in. That's an area of social expertise and it might eventually get real traction, unlike so many of my projects.
(Hopefully, the mods will come along and hide this entire discussion of why my comment was temporarily greyed out before being upvoted. Discussion of downvotes is something the guidelines ask people to not engage in. I'm not redacting this comment cuz reasons. But this is all off topic.)
> Hopefully, the mods will come along and hide this entire discussion of why my comment was temporarily greyed out before being upvoted. Discussion of downvotes is something the guidelines ask people to not engage in. I'm not redacting this comment cuz reasons. But this is all off topic.
I have to say, I don't have an issue with downvote discussions when they are initiated by someone other than the original poster. Such conversations frequently lead somewhere interesting, as this one did, whereas the opposite type (in which the original poster complains) never does.
I sometimes come across fully grayed out comments that I simply cannot imagine why anyone would ever downvote. I upvote these, but I'd very much like to know why they were downvoted in the first place. Did the author get their facts wrong? Is there an angle I'm missing? Could the comment be construed as offensive?
I've heard it suggested that no one should downvote comments without leaving a reply on why they downvoted. This strikes me as completely unreasonable, but allowing users (who aren't the OP) to ask "hey, why was this downvoted" in cases where they're legitimately confused seems like a good compromise.
I do also see how this might get out of hand if it was officially allowed... but maybe worth a try?
I actually don't have a problem with the original poster asking why they get downvoted either, I think there is often a learning opportunity in such a situation. What does annoy me is if the person then gets an explanation, but digs in, and it turns into a you're-wrong-I'm-right discussion, but to be honest I don't see that happening that often.
>> I sometimes come across fully grayed out comments that I simply cannot imagine why anyone would ever downvote. I upvote these, but I'd very much like to know why they were downvoted in the first place. Did the author get their facts wrong? Is there an angle I'm missing? Could the comment be construed as offensive?
Even here people confuse downvotes with "i don't like it"s.
I don’t know, this doesn’t reflect my experience here. Either your comment is insightful or not.
For example regarding your previous comment,
I found it interesting on the psychology topic, but slightly off topic regarding the subject. The discussion is about startups and investors as entities, not as persons, and the OP explicitly ask for information of someone with experience startup investors, specifically YC.
In short your comment is interesting but not relevant to the discussion. Personally I don’t downvote these kind of comments but I can understand other people do. Nothing to do with your background or how you think in my opinion.
If you sort by most upvoted instead of most recent, you get a better idea of why I have been averaging about 1000k/mo with this handle for nearly two years straight:
> Avoidance tactics are usually about emotional reactions.
Sometimes it's not really tactics, it's often just a complete mental breakdown. I have founded a startup when I was 22, and completely not ready for something that would be so emotionally hard; it ended up in a a few months long depressive episode, during which I completely ghosted almost every person I knew.
Suffice to say, being emotionally and psychologically stable is one of the main traits for a CEO, and avoidance is often a very good "smell" of problems in that department.
>A variant is to stay in touch with other YC-funded startups. There is now a whole neighborhood of them in San Francisco. If you move there, the peer pressure that made you work harder all summer will continue to operate.
Funny how much that single sentence changed what life was like on the West Coast. Now we are witnessing mini-Valleys springing up in other cities desperate to replicate what San Francisco did for startups.
> Now we are witnessing mini-Valleys springing up in other cities desperate to replicate what San Francisco did for startups.
Without the culture to support it.
A bunch of broke ideas people sitting in a wework or coffee shop with no angel investor in sight, no diversity in VC portfolios. There is a reason that interest rates are negative, because nobody wants to “stimulate the economy“ by giving broke entrepreneurs their money
There have been mini Silicon Valley attempts for much longer than there has been a ycombinator. If this sentence changed anything, it is something very small.
what's the neighborhood he was referring to? I'm interested to know if it still exists or if it's just been assimilated into the greater Bay Area tech scene.
The biggest issue with the article is clearly correlation vs. causation. He admits to it. I think this advice can be dangerous for someone sacrificing a great deal for a startup that has a extremely low probability of success because “PG says I’ll be a millionaire as long as I just don’t let my startup die”
Or end up a zombie startup. I'm not buying this stuff. It sounds more like an exploration of what works than a recommendation. Signs of success rather than suggestions for how to succeed.
> keep typing
Telling you about our progress leads to success? I believe you have your cause and effect out of order.
> 90% of those who get into Newsweek would survive.
Source? I see no evidence to support this is the survival factor. Why did those who got into Newsweek get there? It's comorbidity at best.
> “In fact, it's kind of weird when you think about it, because our definition of success is that the founders get rich.“
Does this not appear to be really terrible to others? That the metric of success is just founders getting rich? At minimum, what about employees? But really, shouldn’t we be aiming higher where the companies are creating useful impact on the world and improving it?
I understand he’s saying this as a contrast to the investors getting rich, but this train of thought and the people chasing it is what has caused SF to lose its soul IMHO.
You noticed how evil that sentence is, same as me. And you are getting downvoted, also like me. Start-up culture has no soul. They think having soul is a weakness. They are interested in getting rich, and nothing else. It's an empty, greedy culture.
Thank you. I was surprised at my downvotes with no comments, reread what I wrote, and still agree with it. Sad that apparently this isn’t a common sentiment. Life is about so much more than just money, and given we have such a limited time on earth, we should strive to have some positive impact on the world.
Maybe invest some more time and fix the already present TLS setup by bringing it up to the current state of the art. If you try to connect via HTTPS Firefox stops me from proceeding with a warning about not being able to negotiate a common cipher (SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP).
I think this essay was valid for the year it was written (2007) where much fewer people were doing startups, lots of good ideas had not been executed yet, mobile was about to take off. Just like the belief in 2007 that "real estate prices can never go down" lead to the real estate bubble/crash that eventually invalidated that statement, if everyone starts beleiving if they start a company and never give up they will become rich even if their idea is bad, will end up invalidating that very belief.
Things were really really different then. Youtube was two years old, Facebook had only been open to non students for less than a year. Things like making databases of electronic parts or other less sexy B2B style ideas were often still wide open green fields with almost no competition. Plus just making websites work was tough, the cloud existed but just getting servers to work and stay up was a non trivial part of launching something.
You can't just do the X + Software formula anymore and expect to get anywhere.
2007 was In the shadow of the post 2000 crash. People were still debating with me if going in to Computer Science even made sense (aren’t they sending all those jobs to India?). The financial crisis would happen just a few months later and take almost 10 years to recover.
There’s a bias when looking at the past. We tend to assume the future was both inevitable and easily predictable. Not like these uncertain times today.
Now pre-2000s was a little different. VCs were taking to me on the phone about my “robotics” company. I was 10.
> When we were visiting Yahoo to talk about being acquired, we had to interrupt everything and borrow one of their conference rooms to talk down an investor who was about to back out of a new funding round we needed to stay alive. So even in the middle of getting rich we were fighting off the grim reaper.
This sounds like it was pulled directly from an episode of Silicon Valley.
Well maybe it was the reverse :) Silicon Valley producers had many consultants in Silicon Valley.
And there was even a podcast I saw on YouTube where a former YC company founder worked for Silicon Valley after his startup shutdown. He moved down to LA as far as I remember.
Or they could have just read PG's blog. The writers got a lot of stuff right so I wouldn't doubt it. Though I guess I was surprised there was no "ycombinator" in the show. There was Erlich and his hacker house / accelerator, who doesn't seem a lot like PG :)
As an investor, won't you pull this move just to get better conditions? The founders are fixated on closing the deal so they will put up with almost any condition that you throw at them?
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=769163
In fact, I even had it as a banner on my desktop for a while: "JUST KEEP TYPING!"
In 2016 I was working on a UX team, making improvements to components that were used across the entire front-end of the new platform we were building. One spring afternoon I was working on a new hierarchical selector widget while a quarterly executive town hall was playing on the projector in our team room. Midway through writing an AngularJS directive, our head of product surprise announced that we were pivoting and that the platform we had been building for the past year was going to be mostly thrown out. I basically closed my editor and never touched that component again.
The upshot here is that in startups or big companies, change can come very suddenly. And when big problems with a strategy are only known to those at the top, it makes the sudden changes even more surprising for those down the ladder. If you’ve got a bad board, you might find out about a change that you need to make the day that you need to make it.
I think a lot of what I see in this post is a mixture of survivorship bias/selection bias. We want to believe that the reasons startups succeeded was because they just kept trying, while not seeing the many that did die mid keystroke due to any number of reasons.
Their market cap is 4b, so very unlikely. Probably ended up with a few million each, with a large chuck of it being some type of shares.
So we just had a sales guy join from a large electronics components distributor - the kind that handles the interfaces between
a) globally known consumer hardware brands both in "the west" and in PRC
b) the hardware manufacturers (mostly PRC, some TW)
c) the component manufacturers (mixed)
I had been assuming they had been running some super sophisticated globally integrated software system. I was really curious about how this stuff actually worked, in real life. It turns out it's just excel sheets and phone-calls in the end. They are working to introduce ERP systems, but..no.
This seems like something that's ripe for a software-based revolution.
It came with Windows so that's that, they can't be bothered to try anything else. Not even after mangled sheets cause repeated mistakes.
I would so love to work on something like this, but when people won't even use a free solution suggested by one of their trusted employees, selling one will be tough.
All you have to do is give them their data in the se excel sheets they are used to. Preferably by e-mail, portals and such are the devil.
Since many start-up ideas are bad ones, it often will be rational for start-up founders to quit and do other things.
If the startup is able to execute on building things of unique value, I don't necessarily think it is rational to stop.
So often however, the startups don't build anything unique, and many don't seem to build anything at all.
A good idea doesn't mean you won't fail. A bad idea does mean you will fail.
Sorry but it sounds to me that you are not speaking from experience but just from reading many "startup culture" posts. In reality there just are many startups that have ideas and build products that never get to profitability. Most even have users that love the product but that doesn't help you if you can't get enough money.
And ideas matter a lot. Some are just almost impossible to execute to profitability while others are a relatively easy win. I have seen both and no, you can not just "move the asset to a more viable market".
Is Uber a bad idea, given it is not profitable?
Feel free to share your experience, since you are implying you have any.
Or pivot. If I'm remembering it right, PG has an entire essay about pivoting.
[1] https://www.saastr.com/never-quit-if/
[2] https://standups.io
I almost quit a year ago, exactly today, then my company got acquired. A story (with pictures! only on Twitter though, link at the bottom.)
This is what I looked like last March 27. [horrible pic] One month prior... My dad passed away. I wasn't having a good month. But that wasn't what happened on March 27. I took a photo on March 27 because it was probably the worst I had felt in the last 5 years. Even worse than my dad's death. (We had a complicated relationship).
So yeah. We were dead. Like dead dead. I got my cofounders together on Monday, March 26 (today) for our team meeting. I laid out our situation and that I was going to fire myself.
[journal entry photo explaining the situation]
I woke up a lot of days and worked as hard as I could. But honestly it didn't matter. My fate had actually been set in motion five to ten years prior.
I didn't give up, and I didn't sit on my laurels. Ironically, I started reading a book called "Performing Under Pressure", and the entire premise of the book is basically: Act like you're not under pressure and you'll do your best work.
https://www.amazon.com/Performing-Under-Pressure-Science-Mat...
See, this idea that I had been working on? I started working on the seeds for it in roughly 2008. It's the same idea I'm working on now. Here's me giving a talk about the idea in 2011, roughly 3 years before founding Vidpresso.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vYJ0w3UuM0
As @justinkan and now my coworkers at Facebook know, I'm tenacious AF about this idea, and I know it's gonna happen.
But last year, it didn't seem like it was going to happen. Not only that, it seemed like the entire last 7 years were about to unwind, and I was going to start back from scratch.
Lots of entries like this one in my @dayoneapp. [Dead tired journal image.]
And some like this one unfortunately. #openup #mentalhealth #suicide
[suicidal journal image]
But then, one week later. This entry hits my journal.
[Wow, yesterday was insane. journal entry]
Then my journal kind of goes silent because I got really busy for a while.
But then this really cool thing happened.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/13/facebook-vidpresso/
This isn't some sort of rags to riches story: I knew my idea was solid and I can have people vouch for me, I'm tenacious AF, don't give up, and really the issue with me was that my idea was / is too early (still!)
But the other lesson is that for a certain subset of people: You'll probably always be happiest working on the problem you find most interesting, with your best friends, at a company who cares about your interests. Find that, and hold on to it.
It took me a long time to get those things together, but I think I have all of them now. It's very, very surprising, but I've learned a lot and I'm very grateful.
I now want to try to help others. If you're in your founder journey, feel free to DM! I'll try to help! It takes a long time though... it took me well over 10 years, and I'm still just getting started. Don't be in a hurry.
Also an addendum: The timing is really what worked out. We happened to have the right tech at the right time with the right partners. I'm in love with my job at FB, mostly because I had been derisking it for years.
When we joined FB, Interactivity had just become very important to FB. So it really was all about timing and persistence. We were in the game long enough for it to work out.
---
It doesn't work out for everyone, but it did for me. :)
threa...
This lands into my list of valuable quotes. Thanks.
https://amontalenti.com/2012/10/03/why-startups-die
I am personally trying to balance Paul's advice of "the number one thing not to do is other things" with being able to bootstrap for an indefinite period of time.
https://amontalenti.com/2011/04/02/not-for-the-faint-of-hear...
It wasn't easy, but it was necessary for me to get over the "rent and health insurance hump". I do agree that it's hard to reconcile bootstrapping/consulting with pg's advice to "not do other things".
My main advice is: make sure consulting (or whatever "auxiliary income source" you are spending time on) is a means-to-an-end for you, and that it doesn't become the main thing. And also make sure to carve out time to actually work on the startup daily -- whether that's early mornings, "lunch breaks", or late nights. (In my case, it was all 3 :-) ...)
Avoid the easy way out. During my multi-year consulting/bootstrapping journey, I got a lot of offers to join other startups or take on big consulting clients. But I knew that wasn't what I wanted, however tempting. Ultimately, I had to turn down lucrative short-term gain for taking a stipend salary on my startup when it finally landed seed funding. Pulling the trigger on that was tough, but worth it, in retrospect. This was only possible because I had already mentally convinced myself that consulting/bootstrapping revenue was a means-to-the-end for the startup.
But yeah, life is messy, and we aren't all in the privileged position of being able to work without income for months or years on end, which unfortunately is often the vantage point taken by some of our "wise startup elders".
One small piece of practical advice based on some mistakes I saw other founders make: don't use debt.
"If I hadn’t worked on my consulting projects last year, Parse.ly would have died. PERIOD. PG is often right, but he’s wrong on this one. I agree that startups require your undivided attention. But surviving isn’t a compromise — it’s a necessity. Do it however you possibly can."
Oh, boy. Why can't we have a world where I can pursue my interests without the fear of loosing something. I guess if people read Bertrand Russell [0] instead of Paul Graham, the world would be a better place.
[0] http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
This has no bearing on what motivates people to do things generally in their spare time.
Perhaps he selects for those who prepare well to not fail to get his approval.
A startup is not about "pursuing interests," that's a side project. A startup is about making money by eating market share. Every product or service that comes out of it is intrinsically connected to that goal.
You are free to pursue whatever interest you want on your own time, especially in this field. Every cloud provider gives you a free tier; most major database server software are free; all the major Git providers give you free private repos; every major library is free and open source; as is every major operating system and IDE, compiler, linker, interpreter, syntax checker...
In fact, as an individual, you will be hard pressed to actually find paywalls stopping you from using new technologies.
Of course it would be nicer if we all got free stuff without having to work for it. But this isn't about that, this is about business.
People's motivation systems vary a lot, but it works for me.
One example of a commitment device is to tell your friend something like "I'm going to write a book and get it published in six months and if I don't I'll give you $5k"
... the problem is, what if you legitimately decide that writing a book is just not for you?
By putting a cost on failure, you can sort between "I genuinely no longer want to do this" and "I'm getting akrasia because doing things is hard and quitting is easy".
If you've made the cost of walking away higher than the expected value of the commitment (five grand would be a lot of money to make on many books), you should have some strong, intrinsic reason for it.
Secondly, a lot of people have conflicting desires and actually want one of those desires to win out. For instance, some people want to be in good shape, but they also want to lay around on the couch all day reading novels or watching TV or playing video games. If you do that every day for a few months, you will not be in good shape. You want to be in good shape but you don’t want to go to the gym, so you are unhappy. The solution may very well be to trick yourself into doing things you don’t want to do, by making yourself want to do them, because you want to reap the benefits of having done the thing.
And yeah, people are motivated more by fear than by hope. It sucks but it’s true. Our evolutionary environment led us to prioritize not losing things like social status or safety over trying to attain our wildest dreams, because most of the mammals before us who ignored risks to their safety and social status didn’t reproduce.
It's really a false dichotomy, only a small fraction of the companies that avoid dying manage to explode. You just don't hear about the rest.
And none of the companies that die do. Surviving gives you infinitely better odds of success than dying.
That said, for personal success it is often important to let bad projects die.
It's a false dichotomy. It's like comparing the chances of you living to the age of 60 given that a brick had fallen on your head yesterday to someone who didn't get that lucky yet (rephrasing as "what are the chances you are dead if you're already dead?").
You have to compare the odds before the fact.
A lot of the reason business owners aren't more content with "small but sustainable" is because it isn't compatible with the venture capital model. It doesn't "return the fund".
That once you've taken on enough funding, your options are get rich or die. Not that if you build a non-vc stable business your options are get rich or die.
> The distributors want to prevent the transparency that comes from having prices online.
Some manufacturers are worse, they don't publish datasheets (looking at you, Intel VDSL chipset department, laptop keyboard manufacturers, Broadcom). It's almost as if there are companies that want to lock out anyone not a multi-million company to tinker with their products...
Can someone at YC comment on if this is still a good proxy for startup failure?
From a personal perspective, we've sent out an investor update every single month [1] for our startup over the last four years. We also almost ran out of money at the end of 2017. The updates around that time were the hardest ones send out, but I can confirm they did help keep the company alive by forcing me to create and articulate a survival plan to our investors to get to profitability, which we pulled off [2] and are still going strong today.
--
[1] The template we use for investor updates if you're curious: https://app.tettra.co/teams/tettra/pages/investor-update-tem... [2] The story about how we almost ran out of money but survived: https://tettra.co/blog/navigating-the-depths-of-nearly-faili...
I think that's a lot of your answer right there. The companies that don't respond, don't articulate a plan and get feedback on it, or perhaps additional help. It's not that companies that keep communication open won't fail, but the ones that don't keep it open do (according to this).
The people who don't want to have those hard discussions are the ones that have their startup die. People who don't reply to emails are often people who are having negative feelings they don't want to deal with.
Maybe they don't have answers and are afraid to give a status report that includes an admission that they simply don't know. Maybe they don't want to be the harbinger of bad news and are waiting until things get better.
Neither of those is a constructive response. Neither of those fixes the problem.
Avoidance tactics are usually about emotional reactions. They usually aren't actually tactical choices for effectively addressing a problem.
There are exceptions. There are times when silence is golden or when it is the least worst option. I doubt that ever applies to dealing with an ongoing relationship with your investors.
(I'm not someone with startup experience. I just know something about people.)
I recognise it's not constructive to express this suspicion of sexism, except perhaps as a message of support, so hereby: Doreen, you have my +1. Ignore the haters.
I suspect a high percentage of the downvotes I get -- and I do get quite a lot of them, but I have no data on what's "normal" -- are simply people who have no idea I'm a woman, don't think the way I do, don't have the background knowledge I have, can't see how it's pertinent and are unaware of me being someone with any particular expertise that anyone "should" respect or be interested in. (Edit: In fact, I fairly often get feedback that the person I'm arguing with assumed I was male simply because it is HN and HN is overwhelmingly male, which lefthandedly implies "Doreen blends and does not read as girly.")
In this case, the downvotes occurred after I added the qualifier that I don't have startup experience, so a very good guess is that it was downvoted by someone who thinks my knowledge of how people work doesn't apply and I'm just some blowhard and armchair politician who shouldn't have added "low value content" to HN. The degree to which I have formally studied people topics (negotiation, social psychology, etc) is something alien to a lot of STEM folks who see that as a soft science and not something you can really understand with any confidence.
There is a lot of hand-wavy BS in areas like psychology. I'm quite critical of such things myself, though it often doesn't go over well for me to do that either because the degree to which I think I understand a more bright line standard for how to study social phenomenon is also not seen by most people as anything believable.
On the upside, my latest parenting blog is something some people have expressed real interest in. That's an area of social expertise and it might eventually get real traction, unlike so many of my projects.
(Hopefully, the mods will come along and hide this entire discussion of why my comment was temporarily greyed out before being upvoted. Discussion of downvotes is something the guidelines ask people to not engage in. I'm not redacting this comment cuz reasons. But this is all off topic.)
I have to say, I don't have an issue with downvote discussions when they are initiated by someone other than the original poster. Such conversations frequently lead somewhere interesting, as this one did, whereas the opposite type (in which the original poster complains) never does.
I sometimes come across fully grayed out comments that I simply cannot imagine why anyone would ever downvote. I upvote these, but I'd very much like to know why they were downvoted in the first place. Did the author get their facts wrong? Is there an angle I'm missing? Could the comment be construed as offensive?
I've heard it suggested that no one should downvote comments without leaving a reply on why they downvoted. This strikes me as completely unreasonable, but allowing users (who aren't the OP) to ask "hey, why was this downvoted" in cases where they're legitimately confused seems like a good compromise.
I do also see how this might get out of hand if it was officially allowed... but maybe worth a try?
Even here people confuse downvotes with "i don't like it"s.
For example regarding your previous comment, I found it interesting on the psychology topic, but slightly off topic regarding the subject. The discussion is about startups and investors as entities, not as persons, and the OP explicitly ask for information of someone with experience startup investors, specifically YC.
In short your comment is interesting but not relevant to the discussion. Personally I don’t downvote these kind of comments but I can understand other people do. Nothing to do with your background or how you think in my opinion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=DoreenMichele
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=DoreenMichele
Sometimes it's not really tactics, it's often just a complete mental breakdown. I have founded a startup when I was 22, and completely not ready for something that would be so emotionally hard; it ended up in a a few months long depressive episode, during which I completely ghosted almost every person I knew.
Suffice to say, being emotionally and psychologically stable is one of the main traits for a CEO, and avoidance is often a very good "smell" of problems in that department.
Funny how much that single sentence changed what life was like on the West Coast. Now we are witnessing mini-Valleys springing up in other cities desperate to replicate what San Francisco did for startups.
Without the culture to support it.
A bunch of broke ideas people sitting in a wework or coffee shop with no angel investor in sight, no diversity in VC portfolios. There is a reason that interest rates are negative, because nobody wants to “stimulate the economy“ by giving broke entrepreneurs their money
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technology_centers
Scroll down to "Places with 'Silicon' names"
1. Bootstrap 2. Reach cash flow positive asap.
Or end up a zombie startup. I'm not buying this stuff. It sounds more like an exploration of what works than a recommendation. Signs of success rather than suggestions for how to succeed.
> keep typing
Telling you about our progress leads to success? I believe you have your cause and effect out of order.
> 90% of those who get into Newsweek would survive.
Source? I see no evidence to support this is the survival factor. Why did those who got into Newsweek get there? It's comorbidity at best.
Does this not appear to be really terrible to others? That the metric of success is just founders getting rich? At minimum, what about employees? But really, shouldn’t we be aiming higher where the companies are creating useful impact on the world and improving it?
I understand he’s saying this as a contrast to the investors getting rich, but this train of thought and the people chasing it is what has caused SF to lose its soul IMHO.
The entire start-up industry is a get-rich-quick scheme and a cancer on society.
Things were really really different then. Youtube was two years old, Facebook had only been open to non students for less than a year. Things like making databases of electronic parts or other less sexy B2B style ideas were often still wide open green fields with almost no competition. Plus just making websites work was tough, the cloud existed but just getting servers to work and stay up was a non trivial part of launching something.
You can't just do the X + Software formula anymore and expect to get anywhere.
There’s a bias when looking at the past. We tend to assume the future was both inevitable and easily predictable. Not like these uncertain times today.
Now pre-2000s was a little different. VCs were taking to me on the phone about my “robotics” company. I was 10.
This sounds like it was pulled directly from an episode of Silicon Valley.
And there was even a podcast I saw on YouTube where a former YC company founder worked for Silicon Valley after his startup shutdown. He moved down to LA as far as I remember.
Oh yeah here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kk03M3XfVY
https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-technical-advisor-for-silic...
Or they could have just read PG's blog. The writers got a lot of stuff right so I wouldn't doubt it. Though I guess I was surprised there was no "ycombinator" in the show. There was Erlich and his hacker house / accelerator, who doesn't seem a lot like PG :)