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Diary of a Failed Startup

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Re: Diary of a Failed Startup

#21

Post by edw519 »

Excellent post! One of the best ever. Very pg-esque.

It must take a lot of personal strength to put your failures out there for others to learn from. Thank you.

It's very, very difficult to wear both the developer and the evangelist hats at the same time: being a developer requires that you be very pessimistic, so you can see and fix all the problems in your design, while being an evangelist requires that you be very optimistic, so others can feed off your passion.

pg has mentioned many times that a startup is very difficult for a single founder. If I remember correctly, he says that because it's too much work for one person.

This is a slightly different angle that I had never really thought about. In effect, you'd have to be "Sybil" with multiple personality disorder to pull it off.

I tend to think of myself as a "very optimistic developer". I doubt I'd even try what I'm doing if I wasn't. Does this mean I may miss major design defects because of my rose colored glasses?

Re: Diary of a Failed Startup

#22

Post by gscott »

nostrademons wrote: post #17
maxklein wrote: post #16

This is one of the better posts on this site. Long, insightful and educational. I'm sure Tang will be successful in the future, as he comes across and intelligent and humble.

Thanks. :-) There's actually a whole archive of posts (linked on the right) that detail my thinking at various points in the venture; I haven't seen it mentioned here, so I dunno if people don't know about it or haven't gotten around to reading anything but the postmortem or just aren't interested. Some of them may be helpful to folks though; there's a bunch on quitting the day job from July 07 and a lot of Pylons/Dj…

Seems like all of the work you did you might want to open source or look for buyers for it. It seems like you made it pretty far.

Re: Diary of a Failed Startup

#27

Post by mechanical_fish »

jrockway wrote: post #26

From the article: Linux started as a terminal emulator. Huh?

http://www.mach-linux.org/reviews/justforfun.html

Even better, a video of Linus Torvalds speaking on the history of Linux at the Computer Museum in 2001:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=WVTWCPoUt8w

Re: Diary of a Failed Startup

#28

Post by ojbyrne »

edw519 wrote: post #21

Excellent post! One of the best ever. Very pg-esque. It must take a lot of personal strength to put your failures out there for others to learn from. Thank you. It's very, very difficult to wear both the developer and the evangelist hats at the same time: being a developer requires that you be very pessimistic, so you can see and fix all the problems in your design, while being an evangelist requires that you be very…

This was the part of the article that resonated the most with me. I wonder if this is the mechanism by which startups end up as big companies with totally useless IT departments - the people who built the stuff become identified as pessimists, and get starved for resources, good people leave, end up in a vicious cycle.

Great post.

Re: Diary of a Failed Startup

#29

Post by thwarted »

jrockway wrote: post #26

From the article: Linux started as a terminal emulator. Huh?

UNIX being a corporate project with billions of dollars of capital seems to be a slight mischaracterization (at least according to what wikipedia currently says, "some financial support from Bell", on the UNIX topic). Eventually it received more support, but it didn't start out like that.
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