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The last day

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111–120 of 167 posts

Re: The last day

#111

Post by MrJagil »

I am not an entrepreneur in the HN-sense, so i may just be naive but... Why do you have to shut down you web company once you run out of money? I mesn, can't you just lay off the employees, close the office, take the servers to your basement, get a 'real' job and turn your startup into a hobby?

I mean, the only really necessary expense there is to running a wep-app or whatever, is the electrical bill, right? I assume you've build something in those two years, why flush it away?

Honest question, hope to learn more about the nuances of being a founder!

Re: The last day

#112

Post by kayloos »

intenex wrote: post #91
tptacek wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again: it's not that there are people in the world who are worse off. There are always people in the world that are worse off. Most people in the world are much worse off than most Americans. It's that most Americans are worse off than this person. This is startup exceptionalism. It is the intersection between nerd exceptionalism and the myth of the heroic entrepreneur, both of which are virulent memes in our culture…

Wow, I'm with chernevik on this one. Both perspectives were great to be brought up, but frankly, what's the difference with most Americans being worse off than this person and most of the people in the world being worse off? You are in fact saying the same thing - this guy has less right than he feels to be so sorry for himself. Hacker News fosters a prominent startup community. Of course we're going to commiserate w…

I wish you could make your point in fewer words.

Re: The last day

#113

Post by Sarien »

While this story is sad I think it is super important for YC. This page is usually crowded with stories and posts of people telling you how they made it and what you can do to be super successful yourself. Stories like this one serve the important purpose of unskewing our views on how easy it is to start a company and get rich. There are reasons why people like 9-5 jobs at big companies (first and foremost probably safety) and it is important not to lose track of them reading all those "you just need to write everything on pink flashcards and your startup is going to make millions next week" stories. :)

Re: The last day

#114

Post by duiker101 »

A sad story, but if you start by getting 4000$ of chairs you are doing something wrong, no wonder your expenses were bigger than the revenues.

Re: The last day

#116

Post by rwallace »

duiker101 wrote: post #114

A sad story, but if you start by getting 4000$ of chairs you are doing something wrong, no wonder your expenses were bigger than the revenues.

The cost of buying eight chairs is negligible compared to the other costs associated with hiring eight people. It may be that the company's expenses were too high, but if so, they needed to be cut by hiring fewer people. Buying cheaper chairs is a piss-poor way to save money.

Re: The last day

#117

Post by Tichy »

chernevik wrote: post #74
tptacek wrote: post #54

The amount of privilege built into this "painful failure" is disquieting. Here's a person whose biggest problem in life appears to be that he's in debt and, for the moment, unemployed. But: he was the CEO of a company funded to the tune of 8xFTE, and can thus almost certainly walk into hundreds of VP/Product Management or Business Development roles immediately, all of which will pay him more than any of his technical…

Fuck you. I daresay my problems are somewhat worse than those of the OP's CEO. He isn't in a divorce, doesn't have kids, does he? And yeah, even if my problems are worse, they're still distinctly First World. It isn't as if I have trouble finding potable water for my kids, or have to worry about teenager "soldiers" raping my daughter. So maybe I too am Entitled. And perhaps I too should just Shut Up. But I don't thin…

Your problems hurt simply because you are so sorry for yourself. Get over yourself.

Re: The last day

#118

Post by rwallace »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #34
NathanKP wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument could be made that giving as much of yourself as possible is a crucial ingredient to making the startup worth it. After all if you are holding back the product and business isn't building itself. Of course it probably isn't healthy to make a business the center of your life, but people who do will likely have a higher chance of success in that business because they are willing to put forth a lot more eff…

Of course it probably isn't healthy to make a business the center of your life If you don't, though, you will likely be outcompeted by those who do. It's a simple, obvious truth, not a value judgement.

It's a falsehood that appears intuitively obvious. Working stupid hours destroys not only your productivity and personal life but also your judgment, to the extent that you lose the ability to judge your degree of cognitive impairment. It's like coming into work blind drunk: not only are you a liability to yourself and others but you don't realize how much of a liability you are. You may well end up being outcompeted by someone who put in forty hours a week of smart, correctly applied work.

Re: The last day

#119

Post by lmm »

electic wrote: post #12

I am a co-founder and when I bootstrapped my company we made a pact to make sure the startup had to support its own weight. It had to pay its own bills. It had to grow its own customer base. It was a person. Everything we did, everything we made, everything we said, everything we coded, made the startup stand on its own feet. Granted, things change after series A but I say this because if you find yourself using your…

Where did you get the money from to start it? No-one's going to buy anything from a startup that does nothing, and doing anything means at a minimum some labour (and usually buying some stuff as well). Unless you're very well-connected, if you're not investing yourself why would anyone else do so? If you happen to be wealthy already then great (I suspect most successful startups are founded by children of rich families), but if not your choices are either spend time acquiring money to put into it, or use the money/credit you have.

Re: The last day

#120

Post by smikhanov »

tptacek wrote: post #72
srid68 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you underestimate the pain created due to expectations, Greater the expectation, greater the pain. Startups are being promoted to every one all over the world as the way to create wealth after mentioning minimally that 90 to 95% startups will fail. If i am 48 year old guy working in a Manufacturing Factory in the US, i can definitely see from far off that i may loose my job. When i can predict my outcome, i c…

Think of the comment thread that would ensure from someone writing an article about not making it into Harvard or Stanford, and instead having to go to the University of Michigan. That strikes me, literally, as a comparable disappointment.

There's a whole movie about not getting to the university one wanted: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1174732; the story presents life after this failure as almost ruined.

While I totally agree with your "failing as a startup founder hurts, but it's not the end of the world" stance, comparing this to not getting into university is not correct. Someone's life changes for worse dramatically and almost irreversibly when this happens. After a failed startup you just move on.

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