I built another one that I left (it's still going) and am now the director of software at a startup that went through the same Techstars class mine did.
I tried and "failed" a couple of times in the last 14 years. Having a family pushed me to decide to settle down for some time. I started working as a software engineer at Apple a week ago. The itch is still there though ;-).
The first time I picked the wrong co-founders (friends and all were engineers).
The second time I picked the wrong project.
The third time my co-founder died.
The fourth time I wanted to do it alone but I almost burned out before my family started to send the signal that it was time for a change but I still think the tech and project are excellent though.
He had a scooter accident. My feeling is that he probably had the accident because he was really pushing himself too much: he was barely sleeping 3h per night and in the end his life was totally unbalanced with lots of prescription pills to support it (sleeping pills, caffeine for day time, weight loss pills, etc).
i worked at a startup with a couple of failed founders -- basically you grab the next best engineering job you can find and lick your wounds until you're either ready to start again or give up completely
I left my company due to cofounder conflicts and lack of traction (we had a few customers, but weren't able to raise funding and I didn't see it going anywhere). I was really depressed for a while, and for lack of a better idea started doing freelance/contract development. After a couple of years of that, I got the itch to work on a startup again and decided to come back to the Bay Area for that. I got a job at a seed-funded company as their first employee.
You don't find "returning to work" has a stigma with the bouncing around?
Meaning, startup to "big corp" or "any company" doesn't mind you were bouncing around.
I'm just curious how dev's go through the interview/hiring process with the jumping around like that. As a more Operations dude, it hurts me pretty badly, even though I "jump" a lot with startups. Requires more explanation.
It all comes down to the messaging / how you position yourself when you interview. If each 1-2 year stint was a good learning experience and that made you a better ops / dev, then you need to present that on your resumes / cover letters. Also, ideally while doing startups, you've also met a ton of people where you know that if the current project doesn't work out you can always work with / for one of them!
You just need to be able to construct a persuasive narrative. Not, "I hated it and so I left" but more "the new gig offered me opportunities not available". I've bounced around a fair amount between long-term gigs, and it's never really been a problem.
During the past 10 years I tried launching startups a few times, failed most of the times within 6-12 months. After each failure I spent 3-6 months trying some more relaxing things (public speaking, dancing, standup comedy), and then got back to doing startups again and again.
Right now I'm quite tired of all that, but fortunately the past micro-startup & investments brought in around $300k which would be enough to live comfortably for ~5 years in Poland.
Right now I'm 30 years old, and the plan is to keep on trying. What changed during the past 10 years is that I'm no longer striving to go all in with a financed business and spend 70-hour workweeks. I don't want to build a billion-dollar business. Instead, I want to build something much smaller which will allow me to have personal life as well.
Like snowboarding or extreme sports. It's a different kind of stress - short bursts. Compared to all-encompassing never ending kind of consistent stress when doing startups.
They're all b2b with high ($500k+) customer lifetime values, but the first business, in the best case, could serve about 30 clients simultaneously. The second could serve (in the best case) a few hundred. The startup could serve thousands.
Adding onto this: for those who have failed and started again, did the failure affect your fundraising campaign once you did get traction on a startup?
I ran out of gas and left my cofounder; divorced; worked a succession of small startup jobs, some better than others; ended up back at Apple. I have ideas that I cannot express at Apple and so may end up taking another whack at the piñata, now that a) I am not in the throes of a crumbling personal relationship and b) I've gone round the carousel once, so I have some idea how the world works.
I regret the way I left my startup, but at the time I was under an abominable amount of pressure outside work, and I just sort of shot out sideways, like a watermelon seed being squeezed between thumb and forefinger. I do not regret leaving Apple to do the startup, not in the least.
I don't think it is possible to do with more than two of work stress; personal life stress; physical safety or health stress simultaneously. One at a time is ideal, but most startups have work stress and physical stress (due to time) simultaneously.
You don't have to be single and childless to do a startup successfully, but if you have family life or interpersonal relationships, they have to be good ones, or at least low stress ones.
When people say stress they usually mean distress and zero of that is ideal. 'One at a time' for a period of time can be enough to topple you and the life you have for a long time or forever.
The raise and the kabuki around it is at the very best a necessary evil -- bring your own capital on board if at all possible.
Having raised, you are under no obligation to do what your angels want you to do -- at the size we were, we spent a totally disproportionate amount of time sucking up to the Angels rather than just getting on with it.
Don't pivot to something that nobody wants to work on, simply because the investors want you to.
If you're in business with a friend, make sure you both have comparable skin in the game -- I could float off because I hadn't relocated my family from a different continent. And I lost a friend because of the way I behaved -- much, much worse than losing investor cash.
Don't be pie in the sky flakes about which color your M5 is going to be.
My first startup failed after a couple years. My co-founder and I were pretty worn out, and I had some medical issues. After a month of recovery (both from the biz and med stuff) I started contracting at two promising startups half-time. I went full-time at the beginning of this year, only to have a side project take off. Currently running that with the same co-founder and a new one.
Had a startup (rather, small company that was established in the hosting space), sold it when I was 19. Took that money, paid out employees, and tried to start something new and fresh.
That failed. Had a co-founder that wasn't dedicated. Had some tech that I could sell and did sell, but I still considered it a failure because I never hit the mark I wanted.
Consulted, took some jobs with startups here and there. Those startups failed for some reason or another so I went back to consulting.
I'm now consulting and lending myself out to people/businesses with ideas, usually spending about 30 hours a week doing so. I spend another 10 volunteering and tutoring, and another 20 whipping up ideas of my own and seeing if I can find something that I'm confident enough to run with.
My plan is to keep on trying. I have a book of ideas that I want to execute. I'm mostly just waiting for the right idea and the right front-end guy. I'll usually crank out an MVP and never release it because I fear it failing (and I'm not a popularizer); sooner or later, though, I'm confident something will stick when I find the right people to execute with (or they find me)
You should publish your book of ideas as a GitHub repo and submit it here. It might help you find a perfect cofounder for one of your ideas, etc. Or just get general feedback. :)
I'm a pretty decent front-end developer and looking for a back end developer as well :) my email is aladin.bensassi@gmail.com Contact me if you wanna talk it through
After 4 years of working to build a big VC fundable startups (3 different products), I was pretty burnt out. I am continuing the last product, but now my focus is on building lifestyle startups which brings about $1m revenue every year.
Joined a job on the side, which would help pay my bills and help my family settle down. In the meanwhile, I would be chipping along to build my small revenue generating startup.
For those whose startups failed and ended up working as an engineer at another company, what would you say is the main difference between the company you work at now and your failed startup? Basically, what lacked in your startup that ultimately led to it's failure?
I consulted for a couple years, joined someone else's startup, consulted again, and am currently very much enjoying a real 9-5 job with a great salary, decent benefits, excellent coworkers, and the best work-life balance I've ever enjoyed.
I may not have won the startup lottery, but I've never been happier.
I looked for a startup job specifically because pg says joining a startup is the next best thing, and then managed to join a growth stage startup. What's changed from doing a startup is I no longer have to think about if the company will survive in x months and I am just focusing on the technical side of things. My days have become easier and I get more positive outcomes each day, but in the long run, I feel like I have to get back in the game.
While I was working on my own (small) startup, I took a contract at a job search engine in 2004, called Indeed.com. I ended up joining as employee #1, and stopped working on my own startup about a year later. Fast forward to 2012, Indeed.com was acquired for a cool billion. After that, I started Searchify.com (still going), and I'm currently living in Argentina, traveling through Patagonia at the moment.
Internet is generally slower, there is no 4G yet. Wifi is actually pretty common it seems, but I'm in a fairly popular part of Patagonia right now (San Martin de Los Andes and Bariloche). Tomorrow I'm driving South towards a town called El Chaltén, where there is apparently NO cell coverage, because the people who live there don't want it. I'll have to depend on Wifi 100% there.
Aside from Internet coverage, Patagonia is beautiful, if you like lakes and mountains (and glaciers)!
After a previous failure, my co-founder (and co-brother) and I are moving to the bay area this month, from LA. We're keeping our expenses low and plan to drive for Uber part-time as a way of avoiding day jobs.
Even though I'm married and have a newborn, we're sharing a place and living like (healthy) college students. We've both turned down huge salaries to work together indefinitely.
I love creating products for people. I love solving problems and I love writing code. The stress of a startup feels like a small price to pay to create something great. And I really want to create something great.
Doing a startup with a sibling, that's always intrigued me. I've thought about talking to my brother about it a few times. Just feels like it might be incurring too much risk to the personal relationship. What is your experience of that aspect of doing a startup like?
I have a lot of siblings, so I know it wouldn't in most cases. But with my brother it's working great. Knowing each other so well makes it easy to cut to the truth of things. And there's a level of trust that simplifies issues that can otherwise be difficult.
I'm in a startup with my brother. I would say it depends on the type of relationship you have with your brother, we can resolve various issues easily and quickly.
We think alike most of the time and if not, we know how to resolve it due to living with each other for a long time. That being said, we do have different roles and only certain parts of the startup are worked on together (frontend app etc..).
Clear and concise responsibilities are what is going to help the most. If you are competitive, you are usually the most competitive with your own blood, which can get messy if you fight over the same thing.
I funded my brother's business and would do it again in a heartbeat. It's a huge advantage to truly know the character of a potential business partner before you even start.
I know we could both laugh/cry it off together if he lost every cent. Others may doubt whether that's really true, but I have my own evidence.
I kept creating stuff, learned to code, ended up being on the front page of the website that taught me to code, made a website that was in Time Magazine, and started another startup that is now well funded and growing rapidly.
Just keep making stuff, stay afloat, and manage your mood - stay healthy, stay happy, but PRODUCE AND PUBLISH LOTS OF WORK!
8 months since I stopped working on the failed startup. Learnt how to code in Ruby on Rails by building small side projects in the evenings/weekends & also worked full time in the last 8 months. Going to start working on something again from this week. Life has brought me back to where I was before - but with a few lessons learnt, better skills & more humility than last time.
It was near Redding, CA. Unfortunately the monastery needed a website built for them so I spent quite a bit of time working online. I couldn't escape it. But building and maintaining a website for a few hundred users was much more relaxing then building and maintaining one for tens of millions.
I was a user, still have it embedded on my wedding site (though dead): http://dovandrebe.com/. Hadn't followed what came of it/you. Thanks for sharing your journey!
Someone should start a blog interviewing failed startup founders and letting them tell their stories and share their lessons, really in-depth. Maybe even bring in other people for multiple perspectives.
The problem is these lessons are, for the most part, already out there. Unfortunately, some things you just have to go through to really learn. All of the mistakes I made were ones I read about. It just took me a while to recognize that my mistakes were the same as the ones I read about.
That said, if somebody did start that blog I would definitely read it.
Yeah, this was the biggest surprise for me in founding my own startup. I had worked for two previous startups to learn what to do and what not to do, and went into my own startup with a whole laundry list of pitfalls to avoid. It turns out that I ended up committing almost every one of them (except the ones that were management-related, and those only because we never got big enough to employ people. I think that when I ended up becoming a team lead at my job later, I ended up committing a bunch of them too, or nearly committing them and catching myself right before).
The nice thing about having knowledge and experience is that oftentimes it shortens the time required to realize you're making a mistake. Folks who haven't done this before and haven't read about other peoples' experience can sometimes waste years doing something that clearly isn't going to work. If you've read about it before you might catch yourself after a few months, and if you've personally experienced it from the other side it might take you a couple weeks. But it really does require committing the mistake, learning (painfully) from it, and then doing it the right way a couple times before you'll start getting it right automatically
Founders, if you're willing to share your experience on a blog, hit me up. My email is on my profile. Anonymity guaranteed.
I'm not sure about what the format will be yet, but I'm thinking of interviews which will be transcribed, with the audio as an option. I'm open to other suggestions.
:) Love Mixergy, but I think pretty much all of these are "How I started, struggled/failed, and then succeeded. Here are the action steps I can share with you".
This would be more like Founders At Work... Failed Founders Out Of Work ;)
Spent 5+ years at Google after that, worked on a bunch of cool projects, finessed my technical skills, learned how to push through difficult projects until completion, rebuilt my confidence, and recently left to try again. We'll see how it works out this time.
Nope, I didn't. Thanks, I'll delete them next time I bother logging into blogger (I haven't in like 5 years). You'd think that spammers would realize that Blogger uses rel=nofollow and so they get zero Google-juice from this, but I guess not.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] threadWow, don't see that one too often (fortunately)! Was it a kinda-sorta-expected thing (cancer, age, etc) or was it out of the blue?
What happens when you take 10million in VC and then fail?
Compare to a 100k angel round and then fail?
Meaning, startup to "big corp" or "any company" doesn't mind you were bouncing around.
I'm just curious how dev's go through the interview/hiring process with the jumping around like that. As a more Operations dude, it hurts me pretty badly, even though I "jump" a lot with startups. Requires more explanation.
Right now I'm quite tired of all that, but fortunately the past micro-startup & investments brought in around $300k which would be enough to live comfortably for ~5 years in Poland.
Right now I'm 30 years old, and the plan is to keep on trying. What changed during the past 10 years is that I'm no longer striving to go all in with a financed business and spend 70-hour workweeks. I don't want to build a billion-dollar business. Instead, I want to build something much smaller which will allow me to have personal life as well.
2008: Pivoted to a somewhat more scalable and clearly defined small business.
2011: Started a true startup.
2013: Realized I'd started the wrong startup. Got a job at somebody else's growth stage startup.
~2018: Will start another startup. But this time I'll have a hell of a lot more understanding, expertise, connections, and
What's the difference? Truly curious. The singular focus?
They're all b2b with high ($500k+) customer lifetime values, but the first business, in the best case, could serve about 30 clients simultaneously. The second could serve (in the best case) a few hundred. The startup could serve thousands.
I regret the way I left my startup, but at the time I was under an abominable amount of pressure outside work, and I just sort of shot out sideways, like a watermelon seed being squeezed between thumb and forefinger. I do not regret leaving Apple to do the startup, not in the least.
You don't have to be single and childless to do a startup successfully, but if you have family life or interpersonal relationships, they have to be good ones, or at least low stress ones.
When people say stress they usually mean distress and zero of that is ideal. 'One at a time' for a period of time can be enough to topple you and the life you have for a long time or forever.
Having raised, you are under no obligation to do what your angels want you to do -- at the size we were, we spent a totally disproportionate amount of time sucking up to the Angels rather than just getting on with it.
Don't pivot to something that nobody wants to work on, simply because the investors want you to.
If you're in business with a friend, make sure you both have comparable skin in the game -- I could float off because I hadn't relocated my family from a different continent. And I lost a friend because of the way I behaved -- much, much worse than losing investor cash.
Don't be pie in the sky flakes about which color your M5 is going to be.
And then back to another startup. ;)
That failed. Had a co-founder that wasn't dedicated. Had some tech that I could sell and did sell, but I still considered it a failure because I never hit the mark I wanted.
Consulted, took some jobs with startups here and there. Those startups failed for some reason or another so I went back to consulting.
I'm now consulting and lending myself out to people/businesses with ideas, usually spending about 30 hours a week doing so. I spend another 10 volunteering and tutoring, and another 20 whipping up ideas of my own and seeing if I can find something that I'm confident enough to run with.
My plan is to keep on trying. I have a book of ideas that I want to execute. I'm mostly just waiting for the right idea and the right front-end guy. I'll usually crank out an MVP and never release it because I fear it failing (and I'm not a popularizer); sooner or later, though, I'm confident something will stick when I find the right people to execute with (or they find me)
Joined a job on the side, which would help pay my bills and help my family settle down. In the meanwhile, I would be chipping along to build my small revenue generating startup.
I may not have won the startup lottery, but I've never been happier.
Aside from Internet coverage, Patagonia is beautiful, if you like lakes and mountains (and glaciers)!
Even though I'm married and have a newborn, we're sharing a place and living like (healthy) college students. We've both turned down huge salaries to work together indefinitely.
I love creating products for people. I love solving problems and I love writing code. The stress of a startup feels like a small price to pay to create something great. And I really want to create something great.
Kudos got knowing what you want and going for it.
We think alike most of the time and if not, we know how to resolve it due to living with each other for a long time. That being said, we do have different roles and only certain parts of the startup are worked on together (frontend app etc..).
Clear and concise responsibilities are what is going to help the most. If you are competitive, you are usually the most competitive with your own blood, which can get messy if you fight over the same thing.
I know we could both laugh/cry it off together if he lost every cent. Others may doubt whether that's really true, but I have my own evidence.
Just keep making stuff, stay afloat, and manage your mood - stay healthy, stay happy, but PRODUCE AND PUBLISH LOTS OF WORK!
That said, if somebody did start that blog I would definitely read it.
The nice thing about having knowledge and experience is that oftentimes it shortens the time required to realize you're making a mistake. Folks who haven't done this before and haven't read about other peoples' experience can sometimes waste years doing something that clearly isn't going to work. If you've read about it before you might catch yourself after a few months, and if you've personally experienced it from the other side it might take you a couple weeks. But it really does require committing the mistake, learning (painfully) from it, and then doing it the right way a couple times before you'll start getting it right automatically
Great point.
Btw. seems the site you're linking to in your profile isn't working :)
Founders, if you're willing to share your experience on a blog, hit me up. My email is on my profile. Anonymity guaranteed.
I'm not sure about what the format will be yet, but I'm thinking of interviews which will be transcribed, with the audio as an option. I'm open to other suggestions.
I'd say "Anonymity is an option if you need it.", especially these days.
Spent 5+ years at Google after that, worked on a bunch of cool projects, finessed my technical skills, learned how to push through difficult projects until completion, rebuilt my confidence, and recently left to try again. We'll see how it works out this time.