You’re trying to take it in a stride and simply vent about it, but this should be something completely benign.
“Awie, Mr. Entrepreneur can’t focus on things that matter because literally everyone in your company told you your thing doesn’t matter?”
They told you they weren’t interested. You keep trying to do your personality cult employee mindset talk to the wrong people. You don’t know other people, this is a you problem. None of those sacrifices should have been forced on those particular people. In your standard, any entrepreneurial endeavor is worth pursuing by merely being entrepreneurial, which is not true.
The harder pill for you to swallow is that this game is actually not available to people that aren’t rich, it’s all an illusion. Congratulations on raising some capital, that structure is real! But the idea that everyone can build something scrappy and take sacrifices if they just get out of an employee mindset is fiction. The people you fawn over were able to do their own seed rounds and just pretend they were taking sacrifices even if they didn’t.
Instead of trying to game your entire psyche like other comments suggest, I recommend to founders to find a person you can actually speak truthfully to.
Drop the marketing talk. Stop talking about the peak potential of every little thing. Stop pretending that everything can or should be optimized. Stop pretending that every event is an emergency. Get your mind and body out of crisis mode. Admit to yourself that the failure of your venture is the most likely outcome, that it always has been the most likely outcome, and that thats ok and you can still learn and grow and make a difference even in failure. That you can do everything right and still lose.
The cognitive dissonance of tech has torn down so many people. Don't let it tear you down. There are conscious choices that you have made and continue to make that make you feel the way that you do. Your body is suggesting you change them.
If your intent was to bring attention to yourself in the 11th hour, you may have succeeded. That attention, however, may not be what you wanted.
As a male, I will not pretend to imagine what you go through because of our differences. I can only speak from my experience as a wimpy appearing introvert who has had earn everything I've ever had because hardly anyone has ever given me anything.
I do not mean to offend and apologize ahead of time in case I do...
To me, this entire thread comes off as whining and can only hurt you. Entrepreneurs must treat obstacles as speed bumps to conquer, not roadblocks to complain about.
I suggest you redirect any energy you put into this thread into making your start-up better and put your trust into that effort. You'll probably have to make it so good that they can't ignore it. That's what everyone should do anyway.
Do you even know how to read? Did I say "being mindful"?
The entitled OP claims they deserve millions of dollars (via a successful startup) - all they had to do was try.
They then blamed everyone else for their failure except themselves. You will NEVER succeed in a startup if you cannot accept fault and be a leader. Actually, my reply is the ONLY reply they need. They don't need to be babied.
Reread their post:
"I tried everything [I was supposed to]" "But no matter what I did, I couldn't seem to get anywhere." "It was as if the world was against me" "no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make any progress" "It was like I didn't even exist in the world of entrepreneurship." "please don't be fooled by the false promises"
That's his point. He is not advocating you stop being a servant to a boss and starting you're own great company ... He's saying a startup is just another boss and really you should become some sort of acetic monk and live off the land, grow your beats and yams or whatever. You shouldn't even want any "stuff" what's wrong with you??!! It's just crap.
My dark take on that is it’s business people’s fault that they focus on party activities and asking me to mainly play those, while pretending with useless tasks as a side, especially if what engineers view as barbecue activities actually bring home the bacon using acidic-narconian logics from Gamma quadrant.
If you think you have better understanding for the challenges and know better than the party people at materializing it or cash it out for a larger sum, just downright steal that idea and start your own company. They’ll get mad if it works, that’s hypothetical.
If you don’t, just start gliding from day one and don’t feel guilty for it. Your responsibility extends absolutely no further than your paycheck goes, not a thousandths inch more. Don’t care where the money came from. There could be micro-guilts on you for micro-not being able to meet micro-expectations, but in return you’re not paid or given equities that your achievements would be worth in the term anyway, so it’s a fair game, a fair and stupid game.
This blind spot is the undercurrent to his whole essay. While there are definitely startup founders who can experience regret of an alternative life, the author completely ignores the opposite situation: the play-it-safe employee who has "friends & family" but has demons of "unfulfilled potential" constantly gnawing at him.
>, you should probably spend more time learning about your own brain, and trying to form enduring friendships, and less time worrying about money and start-ups and equity and things.
This assumes that one cannot create enduring friendships while in the act of building startups. People can pursue goals of becoming a Navy SEAL, climb Mt Everest, hunt for the Higgs-Boson, etc and cultivate friendships while spending time on activities that require intense focus.
>For whatever reason — maybe it’s generational — today’s founders feel the need to be the hero of their own inner narratives. For them, start-ups embody a kind of happy confluence of making a lot of money, changing the world, showing everyone how smart and wonderful they are, and, ultimately, becoming their awesome true authentic selves.
The author has a dismissive tone using phrases like "for whatever reason", "showing everyone how smart and wonderful they are", and "becoming their awesome selves". Sure, manipulate the reader by only describing caricatures of egotism.
The author doesn't mention the other legitimate sentiments such as, "I don't to be a cog in someone else's wheel", or "I don't want to optimize algorithms to make people click on ads"[1]
The author doesn't seem to acknowledge the existence of people who will not be fulfilled with friends unless they are satisfied with what they are doing with their life. A similar scenario is a family man who isn't fulfilled by settling into a domestic routine. He has children; at best, he loves them but at worst, he's apathetic and sees them as constant reminders of ambitions that were killed. The girlfriend/wife unexpectedly got pregnant and now he feels trapped.
This comment came off as really grumpy. You have exactly the "get in line" attitude the author was complaining about.
You come across as incredibly entitled and arrogant in your post, I hope for the sake of the success of any future "start ups" you participate in, it's not the case.
Entitled? I don't think he feels entitled to some measure of success. I think he feels entitled to a healthy dose of experience, which is what he'll get.
Arrogant? Read his post again. I'm not getting the arrogance vibe.
"I have no deference to authority figures and have never been shy to voice my opinions, oftentimes to my detriment." This doesn't make you a good entrepreneur, it makes you an asshole.
1. Those aren't mutually exclusive. 2. It doesn't make you an asshole, it makes you one of the few who can make a difference.
You hit it on the head, this is everything wrong with the startup community, your path should be to a viable business, doing something you love, not just wealth.
I get a whole lot of that (even from my family: my sister told me "So, mom and I were talking in the car, and it's great that you're doing this startup, but honestly I don't think you'll succeed.") When I gave notice today, I had to listen to my boss go on about how I was too young to start a startup (I'm 26), how he spent about 15 years after getting his Ph.D learning about business and working in the industry, how my technical skills were too weak (nevermind that I wrote two of his products, and he's never seen me program in a language other than Java), and how if my idea was any good at all, I'd have been able to secure funding for it (nevermind that we're not interested in outside funding until we have some traction).
I've found that the best response is to sit there, listen carefully, take note of any valid points, and ask followup questions if you need more information on one. You may learn something: despite the overall negativity of the conversation, my boss had many points that I'm going to want to keep in mind as we move forwards.
Understand, there is a lot of self-justification going around when it comes to entrepreneurship. As long as rich people are the distant Bill Gateses and Warren Buffets, people can put them up on a pedestal or say "Oh, they got lucky." But if someone you've grown up with or someone who used to work for you gets rich, you have to ask yourself "Why them and not me? Are they just smarter than me?"
Many smart people will do just about anything to avoid admitting that others are smarter than them, so they instinctively say "Oh, he's just going to fail." And when you succeed, they'll say "Oh, he just got lucky." If you succeed again they'll start saying "The game is rigged!".
But if you stoop to their level and say "Oh, look how smart I am, of course I'm going to succeed," you're just engaging in self-justification yourself. And that's a dangerous mental attitude to get into, because it blinds you to details. The reason you're smart in the first place is because you pick up details that other people don't; you can easily become stupid by believing yourself smart. This comes from experience: I did precisely this in high school and college, and then found that when I actually tried to get something done, the results were much more disappointing than I would've liked.
(Therapy for myself: I think you're smarter than me, I think you will succeed, and I think that if you do succeed, it will be because of skill. But keep what I say in mind anyway. It may be useful.)
What does this even mean? People aren't chess pieces. Just because you walk two spaces to the left and one space forward, doesn't mean you're a knight for the rest of the time you're at the company.
Contribute to your product offering as much as you can. Participate in discussions. Talk to customers. If you're lucky, your consulting customers and your product prospects will overlap. Over time, ramp up revenue so that you can wean yourself off consulting.
This attitude that there's some status hierarchy of kinds of people in a startup is toxic. Working companies are comprised of people who will move mountains to get stuff done. You can spend tons of time pushing on the mountain of external funding, or you can push on the mountain of getting immediate and comfortable levels of cash from consulting. Both have their upsides and downsides. Either way: you're going to have to do stuff you wouldn't otherwise want to do.
I fully agree with the general HN guidelines, and believe they've been incredibly effective at making this a smart and civil discussion forum, but I respectfully disagree with this interpretation of my comment.
The original article is very thinly argued, and I do believe it's perpetuating negative dynamics that don't reflect well on the general VC/startup community and the author in particular.
The author of the article is essentially arguing that the only thing that matters is proximity to power, status, and wealth, and one should pursue it at the cost of one's own dignity for almost no renumeration.
Given that the author themselves is in fact powerful, wealthy, and holds high status, his statement should properly be parsed as self-serving propaganda. He's basically saying "find people like me and be their handservant" in as many words. My response contains no more dismissive scorn than his original post.
Your comments in this thread are illogical, antiquated, and misogynistic.
Illogical -- "Not everybody make a fortune doing entrepreneurship and that's why it's hard." It's hard because not everybody gets rich? No, it's hard because you're doing something difficult; the difficulty level has nothing to do with getting rich. Many people work on startups for reasons other than cashing in.
Antiquated -- suffering depression, in no way, makes you "psychologically weak".
Misogynistic -- life tip: if you find yourself using the phrase, "man up", you should reconsider your entire personality.
For the record, I'm currently in one of the downswings of the startup roller coaster ride, and am suffering from depression. You know nothing about me, or my situation, but offer your anti-sympathetic comment regardless.
Seriously, please rethink your opinions. Or, at the very least, stop sharing your thoughts.
To anyone else suffering from mental health issues, especially while running a startup, I strongly suggest internalizing this line: "Failing sucks—there is no way to sugarcoat that. But startups are not life-and-death matters—it’s just work."
Then find a person (therapist, significant other, family, friends) who can offer you support. Someone who is as sympathetic as hippich is ignorant.
Hey there. I am actually the author. I completely agree with your point. The issue I was having starting the company where my immaturity and naivety hurt me was investing too much into "my problems, my issues, my company." I think a lot of people fall in this trap and come to that realization that you made that placing value into yourself or accomplishments is where you'll inevitably falter. I actually wrote something as an antidote later about the importance of shared purpose in organizations: https://medium.com/@DanielTawfik1/fencing-in-the-mirror-23d5...
Couldn't agree more with krisneuharth. I think many people have posted on this thread in an attempt to provide constructive, candid feedback to help you out, but the way you are reacting so negatively to it all is really counterproductive.
One trait you'll find in any successful entrepreneur is the ability to have a thick skin and be open to feedback from others, even when it isn't what they want to hear. That doesn't mean you need to act on or even agree with others' advice, but if you really want to increase your chances of success you need to be able to at least hear others out in a respectful way.
I think you're being a bit hard on him. I read the post and saw a guy who's having a hard time emotionally but decided to do keep the company going to honor his friend, and wrote this post to help others going through a similar experience.
Chances are, if he hadn't included the bit about how he's handling his startup, you wouldn't be reading it here.
I've got to say here that I read the essay with the same distaste as Atwood, particularly because of its opening paragraphs. I loved the message, and agree with the theory, but I had a tough time with the presentation.
The connotation that it isn't natural to be an employee and as such those that do are by extension "unnatural" is troubling. I realize that you're not saying "all corporate programmers suck", but clearly, people who have the courage, will, and sheer balls to found their own companies have a unique talent that isn't shared by all.
Of course, the programmers you work with are in perfect harmony with startup life. For them, having a boss is not the way to go. They need to be entrepreneurs. It's in their being.
Some people though, are perfectly happy being employees. These people should not be starting their own companies. They should continue to enjoy life and have fun on their corporate scavenger hunts. They are innately different than the startup founder. That much is obvious.
To extend and equate this difference with being "lesser" - whether by choice, ignorance, or chance - is where you run into trouble with a lot of us. You're inserting a good/bad comparison into an exercise that should remain strictly an examination of difference. Hence, Atwood's suggestion of narcissism.
Of course being a founder is "natural" to you. I've learned that it is to me as well, and no doubt it's natural to everyone on this site.
Sure, a lot of people that work for corporations should look to embrace startups, especially those that are disgruntled. No, startup founders are not a select few geniuses; they are those of a given talents. Surely you of all people realize this. To suggest that everyone shares these talents, or that those who don't are somehow misguided sounds more like religion than business though.
Finally, I don't even think this post was needed. This post suggests that a great many people who read the essay didn't understand it, due to their lack of intellect. In fact, it is more likely that they understood it perfectly, and the problem lies more with how the author chose to support the thesis.
I think the above came off as overly harsh. I'm sure you're a talented entrepreneur. I have just been seeing so many blanket statements being put out there about startups, and as a guy with a startup who works pretty hard on it - this one rubbed me the wrong way.
I like this thoughtful example. Problem is, like what you've outlined, 90% of this conversation happens in the entrepreneur's head which is precisely the complaint!
You’re trying to take it in a stride and simply vent about it, but this should be something completely benign.
“Awie, Mr. Entrepreneur can’t focus on things that matter because literally everyone in your company told you your thing doesn’t matter?”
They told you they weren’t interested. You keep trying to do your personality cult employee mindset talk to the wrong people. You don’t know other people, this is a you problem. None of those sacrifices should have been forced on those particular people. In your standard, any entrepreneurial endeavor is worth pursuing by merely being entrepreneurial, which is not true.
The harder pill for you to swallow is that this game is actually not available to people that aren’t rich, it’s all an illusion. Congratulations on raising some capital, that structure is real! But the idea that everyone can build something scrappy and take sacrifices if they just get out of an employee mindset is fiction. The people you fawn over were able to do their own seed rounds and just pretend they were taking sacrifices even if they didn’t.
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