No matter how many precious post-work hacking hours are burned on things that turn out to be a dead end, it probably adds up to less than the average person spends watching TV...
That's what I keep telling myself :)
Ask HN: how many years have you "wasted" on failed startups? And any regrets?
31–40 of 50 posts
Re: Ask HN: how many years have you "wasted" on failed startups? And any regrets?
#32I spent probably 6 months to an entire year working on failed or unreleased projects. Some were just little things to learn the language, like a trojan written in VB6 that would do various annoying to the user (like "earthquake" their windows), to a couple of sites I've recently launched that are currently too complicated and/or just not valuable to anybody except me. My outlook at this point is admittedly pessimisti…
- It is far better to release a crappy implementation of something awesome than it is to release an awesome implementation of something crappy. Awesomeness in the idea is easier and more valuable than awesomeness in the implementation. Doesn't this conflict with the general sentiment that ideas are near-worthless unless implemented well? Can you elaborate? Are you referring to rapid iterations (i.e. have a 'good idea…
"The general sentiment" is not a universal truth.
Re: Ask HN: how many years have you "wasted" on failed startups? And any regrets?
#33Spent: a few years on a bevy of projects (some ambitious, some lame)
Wasted: not a second
Re: Ask HN: how many years have you "wasted" on failed startups? And any regrets?
#34I spent 7 years, full time in failed startups, I would declare 3-4 of that "wasted".
For the first 2-3 years, we were reasonably well funded (by both Investors and customers) and doing interesting work. I was drawing a reasonable but not optimal salary, and getting paid each month.
After about 3 years, the money was getting tight, on paper, salaries had remained flat, but they weren't being paid regularly or in full. However, we were targeted for acquisition by a major software company, who pulled out (due to having made a different, but unrelated major acquisition). At this point, one of my colleagues had the good sense to call it a day, and go work at a bank.
We spent the next year keeping our heads above water, drawing reduced salary when cash flow allowed, looking for that major company to come back and buy us.
Here is where, in hindsight, the wasted years kicked in. I stuck around looking for the jackpot like a bad gambler, as, I think, did my colleagues. The company was making just enough income that the downfall was a slow bleed, rather than a haemorrhage. We stagnated, I stopped doing anything interesting, and stopped caring. Eventually I left for something more stable. I was not alone in my egress.
Some of my former colleagues are still at it, I believe that with fewer mouths to feed, they are profitable enough, even though they are even more stagnant than before.
Re: Ask HN: how many years have you "wasted" on failed startups? And any regrets?
#35I spent two and a half years in 2000 to 2002 developing some sort of global cloud computing platform 10 years too soon :) -see below.
Then I've spent another couple of years on and off, (re)developing an archive management system that may finally become a reality soon, at its 4th iteration and rewrite :)
Anyway these were years well spent; I've learnt a lot.
The first startup story: it ran out of cash, utter failure and sad ending. Basically we had glorious plans of world domination :) but we never had the money to actually make it. The CEO (who brought us 90% of the funding) ended completely broke after burning through € 15 millions in a couple of years. We went through quite a spectacular series of failures :
* we started the project 6 months to 1 year late. Real work started in
March 2000, just before the dotcom bust (Doh).
* we weren't actually technically qualified to make it through, though we
tried hard. The project was too complex and too ambitious from the start,
would have needed literally 100s of millions to build.
* our main partner and support (SGI) wasn't doing too well.
* our CEO never managed to get any additional funding. Instead of calling
a quit after the first year, he kept the sinking boat running, without
enough resources and people.
* he literally burnt money : we bought a huge stack of hardware, worth
more than half a million euros, without having any resources to even *turn
it on*, simply because he *promised to*. We had a huge colo with big iron
hardware not even in a runnable state. Sigh...Re: Ask HN: how many years have you "wasted" on failed startups? And any regrets?
#36I've spent most of my adult life in failed startups in some form or another. Some were funded, most were bootstrapped. Probably 6-8 man-years if I subtract my dances with full-time employment (I'm doing contract work now and working on another startup on the side with a partner). I have no regrets. I've asked myself a couple of times if it was worth it, and to be honest I can't think of anything else I would have rat…
That quote is awesome. I will use that to recruit people in my startup. Thanks quote-source-that-scottw-cant-remember!
Just don't use it as an excuse to underpay your employees.
Re: Ask HN: how many years have you "wasted" on failed startups? And any regrets?
#37I'm one of the people who posted a list of failed startups ("10 web start-ups (all mine) ... and why they failed").
I've been fortunate to always have a day job that I enjoy, and I've never really sunk big money into any of my side projects, so I'm not in debt.
I look at much of the time I've spent on my projects as time that I would have "wasted" some other way, if I weren't working on them.
Although none of my projects brought me fortune or fame, here's what I got out of them:
* Better coding skills, which has certainly helped me in my day job.
* An assortment of functions and classes that I can re-use in future projects.
* A lot of fun.
Re: Ask HN: how many years have you "wasted" on failed startups? And any regrets?
#38I spent probably 6 months to an entire year working on failed or unreleased projects. Some were just little things to learn the language, like a trojan written in VB6 that would do various annoying to the user (like "earthquake" their windows), to a couple of sites I've recently launched that are currently too complicated and/or just not valuable to anybody except me. My outlook at this point is admittedly pessimisti…
"People are generally incapable of abstraction. If you are the "x of y"" -> That's not abstraction, that's metaphor, and people are very capable it. In fact, it's how we do most of our thinking.
Re: Ask HN: how many years have you "wasted" on failed startups? And any regrets?
#39Something that's kicked around here a lot: fail quickly. If a project doesn't fit success criteria I give it about a month before it's pivoted or done.
A month, really? Wow.
Re: Ask HN: how many years have you "wasted" on failed startups? And any regrets?
#40Many years, and no more wasted than the smaller amount of time I've spent working for big companies.
I guess I'd rather produce a technical success that fails for other reasons (unconnected to me, of course :-) than do work that frequently is a failure for reasons much closer to what I do (e.g. impossible projects that are mandated nonetheless because of politics).
I dislike bureaucracy and loathe office politics, so despite their downsides most startups are a better match for me.