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Building a company is fucking hard

nvdk.co

51–60 of 181 posts

Re: Building a company is fucking hard

#51
post #14

Building a company is not hard. (Look around, we are surrounded by businesses). Building financially and ethically sustainable business that employs people that are truly happy to work there IS hard.

Ethics is a really hard continuum to manage when financial factors are at play.

Building Ethically sustainable business model requires A LOT MORE effort and the positive results usually dont come overnight and tend to have long term outlook with focus on individuals/society as a whole. In todays world of "instant gratification" this is not a desired approach to running business.

Most businesses "don't even go there" - hence we are surrounded by the world we live in.

Re: Building a company is fucking hard

#53
post #29
post #15

> I have yet experienced more in these four years than most people do in all of their lives. Lol, hearing that from a 22 year old.

A lot of old people have been comfortable their entire adult lives.

Have you asked them? You might be surprised.

Everyone's got problems.

Re: Building a company is fucking hard

#54
post #15

> I have yet experienced more in these four years than most people do in all of their lives. Lol, hearing that from a 22 year old.

I think anybody that would say this is very likely completely right about it, despite their age.

There's a lot of potential life experience out there, not all of it good. And a lot of people go through extraordinary hardships that they didn't choose. A great example of someone who's experienced both the difficulties of running a business and the difficulties of running for your life is Intel chairman Andy Grove:

" He was born András Gróf into a not religious Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, which was ruled by a military dictator whose government persecuted Jews. That Gróf was not a Jewish surname may have helped his family avoid some of the worst of the persecution. As a small child, Grove had scarlet fever, which not only nearly killed him but also rendered him partly deaf. With the advent of World War II and Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, Hungary abandoned its official neutrality and joined the Germans. In 1944, when the war went badly for Germany, the Nazis overthrew the Hungarian government, fearing that the Hungarians were about to make peace with the Soviets. The rounding up of Jews for death camps and slave labor soon began. Grove's father was forced to serve in the German army at the Eastern Front, where he endured appalling tortures for the amusement of German soldiers. Grove and his mother hid under false names with a Christian family; almost every day was a close call, as soldiers snatched Jews off the streets and out of their homes. Then the Soviets fought their way into Budapest, bringing with them more persecution (and the rape of Grove's mother).

Grove wanted to be a journalist, but he discovered that journalistic success depended on the whims of political correctness, and he decided to enter a field where subjectivity would not affect judgments about his work; he chose to study chemistry. In 1956 Hungarians tried to replace their Communist government with a democracy, and the Soviet Union in vaded their nation. There was fighting in Budapest's streets as young people tried to repel soldiers and tanks with small weapons and bottles filled with gasoline. Soviet troops began snatching young men and imprisoning, torturing, or killing them. Grove and his best friend, Janos Lanyi, fled to Austria, dodging Soviet troops, crawling in mud, afraid all the way. He had lived 20 years under murderous oppression, surviving by always remaining alert to the possibility that even a simple attempt to purchase a loaf of bread could cause him to disappear along with many other young Hungarians."

-- https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/biography/F-L/Grove-And...

Re: Building a company is fucking hard

#56
post #11

A millennial complaining that success requires effort? I'm shocked! Joking aside, yes, building a business requires far more work than it may seem to the prospective first-timer. Fortunately there are some excellent book to help you know what to expect and what you need to plan for when starting a business. Michael Gerber's "The E-Myth Revisited" is the one book I would recommend as a starting point (and I would not…

At 22, he's almost Gen Z...

Re: Building a company is fucking hard

#57

Two 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?

These aren't really true in my experience.

I never had someone I'd consider a 'mentor'. And I've had friends but I don't spend a lot of time with them and they don't relate to my business at all.

At the same time, I managed to build a business earning mid-6-digits per month. Not spending time futzing about with other people allowed me to focus on the actual craft and make the product really good. Not having "friends" to distort my thinking and pull every discussion towards common thought patterns and easy-to-understand platitudes allowed me to take my business in new directions that I understood but that others were unable to see or accept.

If you really want to do something different, and seriously intense, very very few people will understand or have what it takes to participate. Put simply, 1-in-1000 people only appear once per thousand people. If you're trying to do a 1-in-1000 challenge, it's almost guaranteed that everyone around you is not up to it. (Of course it's highly likely you aren't up to it either, but you can't walk away from yourself. On the chance that you are up to it, you don't want to screw that up by averaging your results out with people who are far less capable and driven than you).

Re: Building a company is fucking hard

#58
post #15

> I have yet experienced more in these four years than most people do in all of their lives. Lol, hearing that from a 22 year old.

It is difficult to take someone seriously when they introduce themselves by saying something like that. Experiencing life is not a competition, nor is it a valid bragging point. I guess it is good to know that there are some painfully obvious lessons that are not learned by building a company.

Indeed, whenever I hear something along those lines, its obvious that I talk to young immature person, who experienced quite a bit in a very narrow part of life, and not much more. Arrogance never helped anybody, did it.

Truly experienced people who properly seen-it-all get a proper dose of humility about themselves, the world and the others. You can really feel it from them. Unlike this kiddo.

Re: Building a company is fucking hard

#59
post #7

There'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 a…

100% agree. I don't have any friends that pushed themselves to start an IT company and being successful. I only know people who claimed to do the best but failed miserably within the first year of their start-up. I made also failures in my startup as well, but we closed because we were approaching the zero budget and without having real customers. Partners who are not in IT cannot fully understand the struggle of run…

It's interesting to me that you categorize your failures differently than the "people you know".

Re: Building a company is fucking hard

#60
post #15

> I have yet experienced more in these four years than most people do in all of their lives. Lol, hearing that from a 22 year old.

In fairness, I feel like I had more formative experiences between 16-20 than I have since (35). Young adulthood tends to be eventful and formative in a way people's 30s usually aren't. Throw in entrepreneurship... It's not that far fetched.
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