

The Psychological Price of Entrepreneurship - dbirulia
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201309/jessica-bruder/psychological-price-of-entrepreneurship.html?utm_content=buffer956c5

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angersock
Had a pretty nasty bout with this earlier this year (if anyone is interested,
I could post more) when our runway ran out--it's fucking horrifying if it
happens.

One of the biggest problems I had was that there simply is no useful roadmap
for this region. If you're a doctor or engineer, schooling is hard, residency
is brutal, but society knows what you're going through and almost anyone can
provide moral support or at least have a frame of reference. Parents know how
to help kids that grow up to be doctors.

Entrepreneurs, though, especially in tech and especially in cities without
large communities with experience have a rough road to hoe: most people don't
even understand what your business is (assuming, even, that _you_ understand
your business), and furthermore don't get how much it sucks having the thing
on your shoulders.

"You get to be your own boss? That's awesome!" but management can still be
terrible, right? And there's no benefits, and no salaries, and mostly just
work.

"When're you getting funded?" people ask, but they either don't know or
pointedly ignore that it _just isn 't that simple_, especially if your local
investing community is aloof and out-of-touch and useless.

So, you bootstrap, yay, but now you're burning through funds you and your
cofounders may or may not have. That has a price too, and the only advice you
get is "hey, maybe get a job or take on client work" but that also ignores the
fact that that takes away time from your startup and can also lead to its own
complications.

When you stop eating out, when you stop leaving the house, when you sleep
during the day when you finally pass out and wake up in the afternoon to watch
the sun set, when you do all the things that are the stigmata of being a young
tech entrepreneur, nobody is there to tell you that it's okay or not okay,
that what's happening is normal or not normal.

You lose your bearings, you lose the telltale signs that you aren't going mad,
you become adrift as only someone obsessively focused on a single product can.

It gets harder to talk to normal people, too. They bitch about their jobs, and
you wonder why they don't just quit, and they wonder why you'd try something
as crazy as you are. You are either pitching and hyping your project, or
trying to sell customers--you don't socialize as such anymore, because you
don't have the time or resources to.

It can get pretty gnarly, pretty quickly. :(

~~~
dbirulia
That definitely sucks... but being employed, unemotional and doing same stuff
day to day sucks even more... it kills you from the inside. Hope everything
goes well with your company now!

~~~
angersock
New company (farther along startup, funded, and doing great work) is a lot
less stressful. I basically view it like a paid vacation where I can focus on
engineering and tech instead of the howling vortex of crazy that is business
and sales. :)

