How Not to Die

"I'm not sure you realise just how scary the thought of failing in front of so many hard-working people is..."

Failure has a different meaning in Silicon Valley (kind of). There have been a couple of quiet fizzle outs from WFP that I'm sure of, and I've spoken to two of the guys from those fizzle outs since then...one is working on new ideas, and another has moved to another company (perhaps the most flexible of the bunch, in that they changed their entire business model and started from scratch during the program) from the same program that raised some money and he's happy and enthusiastic. While there is a bit of averting of the gaze when I asked how things were going, the fact that they were there at a YC event and talking about new things tells me they will probably go on to great things.

It's the folks who went back home, went back to consulting or school, who aren't going to be among the winners in the end. Which comes back to pg's assertion that just by staying in touch and staying involved you could very well guarantee success...I'm not sure if it's the cause or the effect, but I do think the folks who've stuck around and keep coming to the events and keep in touch with other YC'ers will probably do well.

"People concentrate way too much on success stories without looking at the failure stories."

By what definition of "too much"? I see nothing wrong with focusing on studying the best--the ones that made it. Those are the people to emulate. Why spend your limited time studying the ones that failed? Sure, learning from mistakes is great. But I suspect I'm going to weather the storm better if I learn about mistakes from people who made it through to the other side--rather than from people who blew it and ended up bankrupt. I really don't think I'd like to be facing a problem and thinking, "Oh, wait, I read about this...it turned out horribly...we're dead!" Much better to think, "Well, Evan Williams had exactly this problem with Blogger. And look how that turned out! Just gotta keep plugging away."

Just a thought. I don't really think we need a lot of post-mortems while we're in the early stages. Maybe later when we have a huge success on our hands and want to know how to avoid becoming the next SGI (Google uses SGI internally to mean, "company that has huge success and then made huge mistakes", because Google has actually moved into nearly all of the old SGI buildings in Mountain View as SGI has atrophied into a shell of itself--seeing how business and management heavy Google has become in the past year makes me think they didn't think hard enough about SGI...).

"Hang in there. Stay plugged in. Oh, and in case you didn't get it the first time, don't give up."

The most influential, well-written paragraph I've ever read!

I'm on my second startup. My first was a "failure" by some definitions of failure (it paid the bills, bought me a 350Z, and worked me nearly to death for seven years...it never really stopped being a service business despite my attempts to convince myself that I was selling products--I consider it a failure, but I learned a lot).

"Wisdom and exhaustion in equal parts, I'd suspect, and only one side is going to win."

Agreed. I'm just stubborn enough to keep trying. I'm also lucky enough to have a fantastic business partner, which I didn't have the first time around (I should have brought him on back then...he was already doing contract work for me on a regular basis).

This time around I put much tighter time constraints on myself. I'm not giving myself 7 years to figure out if I have a failure on my hands. Every 6 months I evaluate where we are, and if I don't see clearly how to get to the next level, it's time for a serious change. So far, that hasn't happened...wisdom gained from the previous startup seems to have allowed me to avoid most pitfalls.

But that's true for anything you read, online or otherwise. All advice or opinions have qualifiers that you need to evaluate.