Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Not to Die (2007)

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 140 posts

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#21

Post by perfunctory »

> One of the most interesting things we've discovered from working on Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating.

Oh, boy. Why can't we have a world where I can pursue my interests without the fear of loosing something. I guess if people read Bertrand Russell [0] instead of Paul Graham, the world would be a better place.

[0] http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#22

Post by diego »

I don't think "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich" has proven true. I've invested in startups (including YC ones) that followed this to a tee. They never found product-market fit, they could have been going forever, investors forgot about them. Some are still going, some managed to get acquired, some closed shop.

It's really a false dichotomy, only a small fraction of the companies that avoid dying manage to explode. You just don't hear about the rest.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#23

Post by mschuster91 »

From the part about Octopart:

> The distributors want to prevent the transparency that comes from having prices online.

Some manufacturers are worse, they don't publish datasheets (looking at you, Intel VDSL chipset department, laptop keyboard manufacturers, Broadcom). It's almost as if there are companies that want to lock out anyone not a multi-million company to tinker with their products...

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#24

Post by codingdave »

jessmartin wrote: post #3

I read this post so many times when I was working on my startup ( https://first.io ). I particularly love this quote: "Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!" In fact, I even had it as a banner on my desktop for a while: "JUST KEEP TYPING!"

I do wonder if pg would write that again in 2019. We've seen many startups die while charging forward before finding product/market fit. Talking to customers comes before typing.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#25

Post by pixelmonkey »

ErikAugust wrote: post #20
pixelmonkey wrote: post #19

I wrote a 2012 reflection on this post, "Why Startups Die", that I think still holds up: https://amontalenti.com/2012/10/03/why-startups-die

Any tips, strategies, ideas you have behind the "Bootstrapping Plan"? I am personally trying to balance Paul's advice of "the number one thing not to do is other things" with being able to bootstrap for an indefinite period of time.

I wrote a little about how I bootstrapped for a couple years via tech consulting projects here:

https://amontalenti.com/2011/04/02/not-for-the-faint-of-hear...

It wasn't easy, but it was necessary for me to get over the "rent and health insurance hump". I do agree that it's hard to reconcile bootstrapping/consulting with pg's advice to "not do other things".

My main advice is: make sure consulting (or whatever "auxiliary income source" you are spending time on) is a means-to-an-end for you, and that it doesn't become the main thing. And also make sure to carve out time to actually work on the startup daily -- whether that's early mornings, "lunch breaks", or late nights. (In my case, it was all 3 :-) ...)

Avoid the easy way out. During my multi-year consulting/bootstrapping journey, I got a lot of offers to join other startups or take on big consulting clients. But I knew that wasn't what I wanted, however tempting. Ultimately, I had to turn down lucrative short-term gain for taking a stipend salary on my startup when it finally landed seed funding. Pulling the trigger on that was tough, but worth it, in retrospect. This was only possible because I had already mentally convinced myself that consulting/bootstrapping revenue was a means-to-the-end for the startup.

But yeah, life is messy, and we aren't all in the privileged position of being able to work without income for months or years on end, which unfortunately is often the vantage point taken by some of our "wise startup elders".

One small piece of practical advice based on some mistakes I saw other founders make: don't use debt.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#26

Post by andygcook »

For us the main indication of impending doom is when we don't hear from you. When we haven't heard from, or about, a startup for a couple months, that's a bad sign. If we send them an email asking what's up, and they don't reply, that's a really bad sign. So far that is a 100% accurate predictor of death.

Can someone at YC comment on if this is still a good proxy for startup failure?

From a personal perspective, we've sent out an investor update every single month [1] for our startup over the last four years. We also almost ran out of money at the end of 2017. The updates around that time were the hardest ones send out, but I can confirm they did help keep the company alive by forcing me to create and articulate a survival plan to our investors to get to profitability, which we pulled off [2] and are still going strong today.

--

[1] The template we use for investor updates if you're curious: https://app.tettra.co/teams/tettra/pages/investor-update-tem... [2] The story about how we almost ran out of money but survived: https://tettra.co/blog/navigating-the-depths-of-nearly-faili...

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#27

Post by ErikAugust »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #25
ErikAugust wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any tips, strategies, ideas you have behind the "Bootstrapping Plan"? I am personally trying to balance Paul's advice of "the number one thing not to do is other things" with being able to bootstrap for an indefinite period of time.

I wrote a little about how I bootstrapped for a couple years via tech consulting projects here: https://amontalenti.com/2011/04/02/not-for-the-faint-of-hear... It wasn't easy, but it was necessary for me to get over the "rent and health insurance hump". I do agree that it's hard to reconcile bootstrapping/consulting with pg's advice to "not do other things". My main advice is: make sure consulting (or whatever "auxil…

Thank you for the comment, and both pieces are great. You even answered my question directly - way back in 2011!

"If I hadn’t worked on my consulting projects last year, Parse.ly would have died. PERIOD. PG is often right, but he’s wrong on this one. I agree that startups require your undivided attention. But surviving isn’t a compromise — it’s a necessity. Do it however you possibly can."

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#28

Post by graeme »

perfunctory wrote: post #21

> One of the most interesting things we've discovered from working on Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating. Oh, boy. Why can't we have a world where I can pursue my interests without the fear of loosing something. I g…

This is a bad faith read. He was specifically talking about startup founders. The cliche idea is that one of startup startup founders’ main motives is getting rich. PG said this wasn’t the case in practice, and that fear of failure was more important.

This has no bearing on what motivates people to do things generally in their spare time.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#29

Post by nexuist »

>A variant is to stay in touch with other YC-funded startups. There is now a whole neighborhood of them in San Francisco. If you move there, the peer pressure that made you work harder all summer will continue to operate.

Funny how much that single sentence changed what life was like on the West Coast. Now we are witnessing mini-Valleys springing up in other cities desperate to replicate what San Francisco did for startups.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#30

Post by MetalGuru »

The biggest issue with the article is clearly correlation vs. causation. He admits to it. I think this advice can be dangerous for someone sacrificing a great deal for a startup that has a extremely low probability of success because “PG says I’ll be a millionaire as long as I just don’t let my startup die”
Post reply on HN