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What Startups Are Really Like

paulgraham.com

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Re: What Startups Are Really Like

#51

Post by jnovek »

patio11 wrote: post #39

I sometimes wonder if the Valley culture doesn't socially construct some of the startup pathologies. For example, startups taking over your life: why does this happen? Is this because startups take over your life and nothing can be done about this? I am skeptical of this: I run a small business, the time demands are rather modest, and I live a life outside of work. I'm surely not uniquely in a position to do this. No…

Well, I usually work more than 40 hrs/week on my startup because I can't stop thinking about it. But sometimes I just run out of gas and only do the bare minimum for a week or two.

Re: What Startups Are Really Like

#52

Post by aristus »

jnovek wrote: post #49
maukdaddy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to get blasted for this, but here goes anyway. I'm willing to bet that the majority of founders are single males who do not understand what marriage is all about. I have not had the experience of being part of a start-up, but I do have 6 years of marriage under my belt. I cannot imagine any circumstance where being someone's co-fonder is in any way like being married to them.

Well, I've been married for five years and I'm a co-founder. I don't know if it's like this for everyone, but for us there are a lot of similarities. I think you can easily s/co-founder/wife/g on the list below. - My co-founder very intimate knowledge about me. My credit score. My favorite things. My political positions. - My co-founder knows me well enough to manipulate me, if he wanted to. - My co-founder is really…

Same boat. It was interesting to invite a third person into our life like that. But this is a commonplace in many professions, no? Cops, soldiers, etc.

Re: What Startups Are Really Like

#53

Post by pg »

patio11 wrote: post #39

I sometimes wonder if the Valley culture doesn't socially construct some of the startup pathologies. For example, startups taking over your life: why does this happen? Is this because startups take over your life and nothing can be done about this? I am skeptical of this: I run a small business, the time demands are rather modest, and I live a life outside of work. I'm surely not uniquely in a position to do this. No…

Viaweb took over my life when we were working on it. I worked all the time I wasn't sleeping. Not because I was inefficient or thought it was the conventional thing to do (I knew practically nothing about startup conventions then) but because there was just so much work to do.

I suppose I could have worked slower and things might have turned out the same anyway. But probably not that much slower. And I certainly had no idea at the time how much margin for error I had.

Re: What Startups Are Really Like

#54

Post by pg »

hop wrote: post #36
pg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a sense. It's because my site is made with Yahoo Store, and there is no obvious way to change the favicon.

Add this to your in the head tag and it should work -- I just emailed you a vanity favicon :)

Unfortunately Store doesn't give you access to the head. Is there something I could stick in the body that would work?

Re: What Startups Are Really Like

#55

Post by cperciva »

_cbsz wrote: post #20
dunstad wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the beginning of section 6. Think Long Term, you say "shear stress", but I think the word you intended to use is "sheer".

It's correct as written. See sense 9 at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/shear -- shearing stress is the stress between two blocks pressed together along a plane and moving in opposite directions parallel to that plane. It's a very nice analogy: the startup is moving fast in one direction and the VC or whatever is moving slowly in another one.

It's a very nice analogy: the startup is moving fast in one direction and the VC or whatever is moving slowly in another one.

Personally I prefer the phrase "impedance mismatch".

Re: What Startups Are Really Like

#56

Post by marcofloriano »

#13 My advice is generally pessimistic. Assume you won't get money, and if someone does offer you any, assume you'll never get any more.

I´m a business wannabe from Brazil and i just laugh when i read that one. Here we dont have ANY chances of getting money from VCs so when we start something new, specially with technology, we never expect to get money. Ramen profit system is not an option at poor countries, it´s the law.

Re: What Startups Are Really Like

#57

Post by mahmud »

maukdaddy wrote: post #47
babyshake wrote: post #32

The line about how "it's like we're married, but we're not fucking" makes me curious about the correlations between a founder's relationship with co-founders and their relationship with romantic partners. You might get some good insight by observing a potential co-founder's behavior toward their romantic partner, or toward potential romantic partners if they're single.

I'm going to get blasted for this, but here goes anyway. I'm willing to bet that the majority of founders are single males who do not understand what marriage is all about. I have not had the experience of being part of a start-up, but I do have 6 years of marriage under my belt. I cannot imagine any circumstance where being someone's co-fonder is in any way like being married to them.

I will tell you one aspect where they're different: I can show a business partner some very evil and cut-throat side of me that I will do anything absolutely necessary to shield from my girlfriend.

Re: What Startups Are Really Like

#58

Post by URSpider94 »

patio11 wrote: post #39

I sometimes wonder if the Valley culture doesn't socially construct some of the startup pathologies. For example, startups taking over your life: why does this happen? Is this because startups take over your life and nothing can be done about this? I am skeptical of this: I run a small business, the time demands are rather modest, and I live a life outside of work. I'm surely not uniquely in a position to do this. No…

From my experience, there are a few things that can make your start-up take over your life: customers, investors, competition and personal drive.

Depending on your market segment, customers can be very demanding. If your web site goes down at midnight on Friday, you can't very well let it wait until Monday at 9:00 to put right, can you?

Investors have fronted you money on the expectation of explosive growth. If you don't deliver that growth, they might not be around the next time that you need cash.

In web-based businesses, speed is a major asset to keep you ahead of the competition. Hopefully, you've got a head start on the copy-cats, but there are more of them, and some of them might even be as smart as you.

Finally, there's personal drive -- as I think you've identified, start-ups do attract a certain personality type who aren't the kind to leave a job half-done and call it a day.

In closing, I would ask you a question -- you run a small business, but is it a start-up? PG has been pretty clear in many of his other essays that these two are not interchangeable. After all, the start-ups that are being discussed here are hoping not to be small businesses for long!

Re: What Startups Are Really Like

#59

Post by coffeemug »

One theme in this essay is that Paul keeps drilling these concepts into founders, and almost every time the founders don't believe him. Paul then reaches the conclusion that it's probably because the founders are too optimistic. I think this bit is wrong.

It's not that we're too optimistic, it's that the process is so subtle that the English language is too coarse to describe it. For example, what exactly does it mean when someone says 95% of the VCs are incompetent? How exactly are they incompetent? To what degree and in what ways? What exactly do they do that makes them appear incompetent? If you've never talked to VCs before, reading that they're "incompetent" probably won't give you a good idea of what an average interaction with them is like.

It's sort of like describing what making love is like for the first time. Very eloquent people have written volumes on this, but it's far too subtle for a written or spoken language. Until you actually do it, you'll only have a very poor approximation in your mind of what it might be like, no matter how much you read. Startups are like that.

Re: What Startups Are Really Like

#60

Post by gcv »

I'd like to (slightly) challenge #8: it seems to me that Dropbox is a counterexample. The Dropbox guys took quite a long time and their first release was quite polished. Not perfect, certainly, but way, way ahead of just minimally functional.
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