Building a company is fucking hard
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Re: Building a company is fucking hard
#2Two important points in that essay:
You will need friends
You will need mentors
This is 100% true, so I have a question. How do you find those when you're already spending all of your time on your startup and new to town without a support network in place?
Re: Building a company is fucking hard
#3Yes, yes it is.
Source: started a company and learned many things the hard way.
Re: Building a company is fucking hard
#4Two important points in that essay: You will need friends You will need mentors This is 100% true, so I have a question. How do you find those when you're already spending all of your time on your startup and new to town without a support network in place?
Meetups are a good place to start imo. Signal vs. noise is sometimes bad, but good groups of people who are building cool things exist almost everywhere.
Re: Building a company is fucking hard
#5Two important points in that essay: You will need friends You will need mentors This is 100% true, so I have a question. How do you find those when you're already spending all of your time on your startup and new to town without a support network in place?
A co-working space helps in my experience. Although it's still really hard (at least for me, as an introvert) to build such network. It's scary, but it's the only way.
Re: Building a company is fucking hard
#6Two important points in that essay: You will need friends You will need mentors This is 100% true, so I have a question. How do you find those when you're already spending all of your time on your startup and new to town without a support network in place?
Some of the best advice I’ve ever received was to only enact one big change at a time.
Moving to a new city and leaving your support networks behind is a big change.
Quitting your job and starting a company is a big change.
Doing them together is perhaps not the wisest course of action.
Re: Building a company is fucking hard
#7There's an old adage that successful people surround themselves with success. It's all about cohort - if you don't have other friends who are pushing themselves the way you are, it will be very, very, hard. It doesn't matter if you're in tech and your friend is in gardening, what matters is the shared struggle, and dreams. It helps knowing you're in a boat others have been in before.
Spouses/partners can understand and support - but (most) haven't been through it, and there's just a different conversation that can be had with others who have. That's not a negative, it's a reminder that it really does take all types.
Re: Building a company is fucking hard
#8Two important points in that essay: You will need friends You will need mentors This is 100% true, so I have a question. How do you find those when you're already spending all of your time on your startup and new to town without a support network in place?
Facebook/Twitter.
Its definitely hard to make friends as an adult, so why not reach back into the past and pull an old friend out of the hat?
I moved to NYC at 27 with no friends, no family, only a job offer. It took me 6 months to get settled and in an apartment that I felt comfortable with my wife moving up to. But in that 6 months, I had co-workers that turned into friends, strangers from the neighborhood that turned into friends, and old friends that I reconnected with now that I was 2000 miles away from running into them randomly at a party, funeral, or starbucks.
So if you have a job, start hanging out with those people after work. You can easily find friends and mentors in that group.
Re: Building a company is fucking hard
#9I think Mark Cuban on Shark Tank used to tell founders this. Don't start a company because you have a world-altering idea. Start a company because you love starting companies.
Re: Building a company is fucking hard
#10If I set out to tell you the story of my life, there isn’t much – and yet, a whole lot! I’ve only been up and around for about 4 years, a happy ignorant high school teenager before that. I have yet experienced more in these four years than most people do in all of their lives.
Ah, the folly of youth. Of course you are more special than everyone else. Of course you are smarter than everyone else. Of course you have experienced more than everyone else.
I certainly was as well at 22.
”When I was seventeen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-five, I was astonished at how much he had learned in eight years.”