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How Not to Die (2007)

paulgraham.com

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Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#81

Post by tlb »

shawnz wrote: post #79
tlb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that when pursuing purely personal interests, publicly committing to a deliverable helps me get it done. I say I'm going do something by a given date as a way of putting myself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating. People's motivation systems vary a lot, but it works for me.

I feel the same way, but apparently there's some research to the contrary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21080132

The conclusion there is that "People who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen." But that's not a claim about causality. It can be explained by there being two kinds of people in the world: doers and blowhards.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#82

Post by bumblebee4 »

excalibur wrote: post #60

> When we were visiting Yahoo to talk about being acquired, we had to interrupt everything and borrow one of their conference rooms to talk down an investor who was about to back out of a new funding round we needed to stay alive. So even in the middle of getting rich we were fighting off the grim reaper. This sounds like it was pulled directly from an episode of Silicon Valley .

As an investor, won't you pull this move just to get better conditions? The founders are fixated on closing the deal so they will put up with almost any condition that you throw at them?

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#84

Post by DoreenMichele »

andygcook wrote: post #26

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'v…

The updates around that time were the hardest ones send out

The people who don't want to have those hard discussions are the ones that have their startup die. People who don't reply to emails are often people who are having negative feelings they don't want to deal with.

Maybe they don't have answers and are afraid to give a status report that includes an admission that they simply don't know. Maybe they don't want to be the harbinger of bad news and are waiting until things get better.

Neither of those is a constructive response. Neither of those fixes the problem.

Avoidance tactics are usually about emotional reactions. They usually aren't actually tactical choices for effectively addressing a problem.

There are exceptions. There are times when silence is golden or when it is the least worst option. I doubt that ever applies to dealing with an ongoing relationship with your investors.

(I'm not someone with startup experience. I just know something about people.)

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#85

Post by diego »

philwelch wrote: post #76
diego wrote: post #22

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 e…

I think the point where you stop trying to pivot into higher and higher growth opportunities and accept your fate as a sustainable but small business could be classified as a form of “death” (perhaps “undead”) if your original goal really was to get rich.

Then it becomes a tautology. If you manage to avoid not getting rich, you get rich.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#86

Post by kian »

philwelch wrote: post #75
samatman wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$5k is a high strike price, but this is the point of a commitment device. By putting a cost on failure, you can sort between "I genuinely no longer want to do this" and "I'm getting akrasia because doing things is hard and quitting is easy". If you've made the cost of walking away higher than the expected value of the commitment (five grand would be a lot of money to make on many books), you should have some strong,…

Thanks for introducing me to the word “akrasia”!

Read "Breakdown of Will" by George Ainslie, if this is your first introduction to that word.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#87

Post by gfodor »

You can def be typing while your startup dies. Maybe it's the exception not the rule though.

My last startup was firing on all cylinders, with addicted early adopters, and our team literally shipped features the last day we could pay them because they loved the project and team so much. It didn't matter much to the VCs who declined to invest further. If you can't pay your people, they can't eat, and they can't work on the startup any further. So if you're not profitable, you're always subject to investor sentiment and calculus to survive, and that can often be a totally separate question of if you still have the drive to push further and continue to reply to emails.

In those scenarios where you have investors, you can't just go into 'hibernation mode' and get the founders back on the ramen lifestyle to keep going if you are hitting the trough, because on the way down you will be forced to sell or liquidate all the existing IP and other assets to help existing investors and debtholders recoup their losses. So you're left with nothing but the idea, and insofar as you want to continue to pursue similar ideas you run the risk of getting sued since you've sold the IP.

So, its certainly possible for the market to 'correct' you out of existence, even if you have the deepest will to keep going and are willing to sacrifice almost anything to do so. The best thing you can do at this point is to move on and try to leverage what you've learned or the networks you've built into something you're similarly interested in.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#88

Post by JesseAldridge »

It should be stated that the flip side of not giving up is incurring the massive opportunity cost of years of lost compensation. That can easily be over a million dollars for a good software engineer.

If you're a genius, then sure, not giving up makes a lot of sense. But if you're just pretty smart, you better think two, three, or four times before committing to do a startup. It's really easy to end up over thirty and broke.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#89

Post by philwelch »

diego wrote: post #85
philwelch wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point where you stop trying to pivot into higher and higher growth opportunities and accept your fate as a sustainable but small business could be classified as a form of “death” (perhaps “undead”) if your original goal really was to get rich.

Then it becomes a tautology. If you manage to avoid not getting rich, you get rich.

Some tautologies work. I think giving up is a more common failure mode than dying of old age while constantly trying to build a startup but never succeeding. Obviously it’s more reasonable to give up at some point, but that point is going to be later than most people emotionally assume it to be. I don’t think many people will try and follow pg’s advice and be constantly repivoting their startup for 40-60 years of their life.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#90

Post by heavenlyblue »

Swizec wrote: post #42
diego wrote: post #22

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 e…

> only a small fraction of the companies that avoid dying manage to explode And none of the companies that die do. Surviving gives you infinitely better odds of success than dying. That said, for personal success it is often important to let bad projects die.

>> Surviving gives you infinitely better odds

It's a false dichotomy. It's like comparing the chances of you living to the age of 60 given that a brick had fallen on your head yesterday to someone who didn't get that lucky yet (rephrasing as "what are the chances you are dead if you're already dead?").

You have to compare the odds before the fact.

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