I wonder what the stress would be like if you were running a bootstrapped, profitable business instead of betting everything on one big break, as in VC backed companies. I follow IndieHackers (https://indiehackers.com) and people seem to be pretty chill on there, just treating it as more like a small business making 5 figures a month instead of trying to build unicorns.
Emotional debt in startups
51–60 of 64 posts
Re: Emotional debt in startups
#52I agree with this article, from a slightly different perspective. I’m a solo founder, company started 2015, went through accelerator, VC funding, etc. There’s a certain level of emotional stress I can handle, and with everything that goes into making a startup succeed, I was right at my limit for multiple years. Looking back (with my startup profitable, stable, running well), the thing I hate thinking about most is s…
hi cj. Look... humbly said... just some thoughts from some experiences: 1. "Friends" can be a very bad influence. It really depends on their quality and most times you don't know that until a decade later. The bad influence can be insidious and barely noticeable but it adds up. The influence is not even intentional, it just comes from the inner insecurities that we all have, it's a human thing. In some cases for me i…
Comments like this are why I normally avoid posting personal things on HN.
Re: Emotional debt in startups
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Verrrrrry few people earn 3-4 million in the corporate world by 37. Depending on whether you get an undergrad or a masters, that’s ~12-15 years of work. That means you’d have to AVERAGE 200K-333K per year, over your first 12-15 years, to hot that. That’s really, really rare - considering you’d be starting at a much lower salary, you’d have to be at ~$500K by your mid 30s. Founding startup(s) is really, really hard, b…
Read this analysis: https://www.myroadtofire.com/blog/how-engineers-can-fire-in-... You have to be an L5 engineer at Google. And I know a guy earning $700k per year at 32-33 in ARM. Plus other VPs. Depends on your vantage point, but starting a startup is way harder. Personal experience here.
That analysis is for a software developer, in the Bay Area, going straight to Google out of undergrad. That’s already the exceptional case.
The author of this post is non-technical, and from Austria, this path was not an option. Or speaking from my experience, as a software developer in Canada, starting salaries out of school at your average Canadian tech company are ~$60-70K CAD, and as a senior developer you’re looking at ~$100-150K CAD. Even getting to $200K (CAD, not USD) by 37 would be rare for a Canadian software developer.
Your comment was “Honestly corporate salaries will earn you 3-4 million by the time you are 37 or so”, as if that’s easy/normal. It isn’t, it’s exceptional and rare.
For a tiny fraction of the world, earning $3-4 mil by 37 in the corporate world is a possibility, but for the vast, VAST majority, like well over 99% of the world, it isn’t, at all. Globally, the annual salary to be in the top 1% of earners is ~$32K USD. In America, it’s ~$420K USD, but that’s made up largely of C-suite executives and business owners who are well above 37 years old.
Most startup founders are deciding between “work in the corporate world until I’m 60-65, or try founding a startup.” Based on that, some still give startup founding a shot, even though they know it’s going to be super hard and will likely fail.
Re: Emotional debt in startups
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
if you think there’s no bullshit meeting as a founder, think again. think how many meetings you need to do to raise funding, meet with prospects, network. very quickly your ability to do things as you think they should be done diminishes as you hire people who you hopefully trust to do things as they think should be done.
If you are building a B2B VC backed startup. There are many who simply run bootstrapped business making 5 figures a month. See https://www.indiehackers.com/products
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Re: Emotional debt in startups
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this discount the enormous satisfaction that comes with creating your own thing. 9 - 5 working for somebody else can feel a lot longer than 6 - 9 working on your own biz. Especially when you're talking in decades. And striking gold doesn't always have to be the desired outcome. Simply achieving freedom and autonomy is success.
I've heard it's common for people to accept a lower income to live like this and I can understand why. No need for bullshit meetings and you can do things as you think they should be done.
One of the big benefits I found of 'doing my own thing' was the ability to pick and choose who to interact with - whether that was a meeting, call, email, etc.
Re: Emotional debt in startups
#56It seems to me we are doing something really wrong if people have so very much emotional baggage from their success. I saw some TV show where some guy said he flew more than a hundred missions in the Air Force and was shot at in all of them. He went into commercial real estate after he left the Air Force. He figured it would be less nerve wracking than that. With nerves of steel, he made a killing. I've spent plenty…
With all due respect, I think you're missing the point. It's not about whether one is, or should be, tough enough, or is overly sensitive. As with technical debt, there's necessarily going to be a certain amount of emotion that needs to be discharged; and as with technical debt (or financial debt), there's nothing wrong with incurring it and paying it off, if that's part of your plan to succeed. The only mistake is n…
"The only mistake is not recognizing that you're incurring debt, and not having a plan or means to deal with it. Unacknowledged debt of any kind compounds and eventually destroys." True story!
"I would guess that your pilot example was less about nerves of steel than about someone who had learned to handle (i.e., process) a lot of stress effectively--which is just a way of saying that nerves of steel is more about efficiently incurring and discharging debt than about withstanding cumulative effects."
In your view, how does withstanding cumulative effects and efficiently incurring differ?
Re: Emotional debt in startups
#57Glad to see this kind of stuff coming out into the mainstream. I think the author did a good job of normalizing and explaining this.
> Glad to see this kind of stuff coming out into the mainstream. I was debating saying the following, for fear that the HN crowd will not like to hear it: This is not just "coming out into the mainstream". This is mainstream, and has been for longer than the tech industry has existed. Many adults have always known this - it's not something unique to founders or startups. When someone outside of the tech world reads t…
I am not talking about emotional intelligence becoming mainstream. In that, I agree with you.
Instead, I am talking about how the methods to work through emotional debt becoming mainstream.
I am speaking as a long-time meditator. I have worked through a number of really intense issues. The most recent relating to my wife's miscarriage a couple months ago. I was fortunate in that my manager gave me some space with that ... but believe me, the guilt from not being able to keep up with the team would come up.
The methods I have used are certainly not mainstream, and draws from a wide variety of traditions. From where I look, a lot of people are just rediscovering those methods, but are still scratching the surface.
While people know there is something off -- it leaks into a search for "work life balance", or a growing realization of the overwork culture in the name of productivity -- actually employing the therapeutic methods is not really mainstream.
The reaction to the pandemic is a great example. I see a lot of people getting caught by their existential anguish, what the Hindu and Buddhists call dukkha. I see this not just from people inside tech, but also the people outside of tech. I sensed it and saw it in the first few days when people were panick buying things at the grocery store. Making runs to buy up all the chickens they can. I see it in the reports as parents have to homeschool their kids for the first time. I see it in folks as the boredom settles in with the confinement.
I don't just see it in the mainstream. The folks who dabble in the alternative spirituality got caught up in this too.
It is clear to me that this author has faced his own dukkha. That's a journey that is ... no backyard picnic. There is an deep-seated aversion to this work. That is at the root of carrying the emotional traumas.
What is brilliant about the author is that, he is speaking about this as a leader. He is turning these methods our modern society have abandoned, and reintroducing them.
So yeah, he talks about "emotional debt". That isn't what I was talking about becoming mainstream. It is facing existential crises and the dukkha that he is slipping in there. Once you start on this kind of work, it goes into the rabbit hole, and surfaces up a lot of things.
Re: Emotional debt in startups
#58This strikes me as the wrong framing. It's more about managing your expectations and maintaining a clear-eyed view of the way forward. Life rarely goes as planned. Three rules of thumb I try to remember in a crisis or setback are Gerald Weinberg's set of Rhonda's Revelations: What looks like a crisis is the end of an illusion. When change is inevitable, we struggle most to keep what we value most. When you create an…
Interesting reframe, thank you.
Re: Emotional debt in startups
#59I hear you. I also think framing emotions through an analogy of finance send you down the wrong path. It requires a great deal of emotional energy to do things that are uncomfortable. And stretching yourself beyond your comfort zone as first time founder compounds the experience. But emotional “debt” cannot be paid back in the same way technical or monetary debt can be. Those are tools. Pushing yourself too hard can…
Refuel, drive fast, walk slow, repeat ;)
Re: Emotional debt in startups
#60Any serious investigation of stress and how to cope with it will lead to a conversation about activities that energize you, and activities that soothe. Pairing these with stressful events (especially ones you can schedule) can take the edge off. Self-soothing becomes problematic when it is unacknowledged and thus unregulated. Like binging on whatever ice cream is in the frigde after a hard day at work or a difficult conversation with your partner, versus having a little of your favorite ice cream as a reward for making a difficult call to a relative or going to that appointment you've been putting off.
Scrum has been so co-opted by management that it tries to disallow any sort of self-soothing on a project. I am forever having to misrepresent the importance of work that I 'needed' to do that perhaps not everyone else sees the wisdom of. Either hiding it entirely or overselling it. Because if I have to deal with the consequences (including dealing with other people who are affected) of this goddamned piece of code any longer I'm going to quit, and what will happen to your precious schedules then?
"Refactoring" 1st Ed is, through this lens, formalized self-care represented as philosophy instead of psychology. For many of us it feels good (or at least, not doing it feels awful) but we can't say that, so we make it about ethics.
There was a videotaped interview with Joel Spolsky a ways back, and I couldn't tell you a thing about what he was being interviewed about except for his answer to the warmup question, which was delivered half jokingly, about how over time his job has changed to psychotherapist, and that his bookshelf has slowly converted to a few technical books and a lot of psychology books. Of course we cannot be serious about such things, so he had to joke about it.