

The Fine Line Between Fear and Courage - jen_mcfadden
http://bhorowitz.com/2011/08/08/the-fine-line-between-fear-and-courage/

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tchock23
The first part of this post deserves its own discussion. Deciding who is going
to lead the company is the most important conversation that founders can have
in the first week (or even before starting the company). I made this mistake
and my employees (and mental stability) paid dearly for the next five years.

In my case, we had an early discussion that led to an argument, and it just
never resolved itself. As a result, employees never really knew who their boss
was and the marketplace/customers never knew who actually led the company. No
one ever had the "authority" to make the call since the founders were equals
in every regard, and every decision took twice as long. Even our acquirers
couldn't really figure out who did what.

I would love to see Ben (or someone here on HN) share a separate post just
around this topic...

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amirmc
If you managed to get as far as an acquisition, then it can't have been all
bad.

Devil's advocate: Every decision may have taken twice as long but perhaps they
were _better_ decisions as a result?

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tchock23
Very true... At times there was an advantage to having a counter point to
every decision, so I admit that it wasn't all bad.

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akkartik
_"Over the past 10 years, technological advances dramatically lowered the
financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a
great company remains as high as it has ever been."_

Not quite, because technology has chipped away at least a little bit at the
number of fork-in-the-road decisions that can't be undone. If a choice is
easily undone it's not really a choice anymore. You can just try both options,
in series or in parallel.

~~~
ca136
Trying multiple options in series or in parallel is often not the best
business decision. What type of choices are easily undone by new technology?

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akkartik
The technological choices are the obvious ones. Should we build on this
platform or that one? They're probably not the highest priority in the grand
scheme, but their effects are also most systematically underestimated, I
think.

As technologies add leverage the same number of people can do more. So you can
get away with hiring less, and run less risk of needing to close down
divisions. Or you can raise less money and run less risk of too-many-cooks
syndrome in the boardroom.

I'm sure these considerations are more obvious in small internet startups that
are struggling to get off the ground. My point was just that you don't need
quite the _same_ amount of courage as before because at least a few life-or-
death decisions have been taken off the table.

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ca136
When I started my first company I was more naive than courageous. I quickly
learned that being an entrepreneur takes a huge toll on all aspects of your
life. Elon Musk describes it best:

 _Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of
death_

But even after all the challenges, I still can't help being excited to take on
the next challenge.

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petenixey
I enjoy Ben's posts a lot but they do sometimes have a ring of feel-good
entrepreneurial astrology about them.

