

I've made a terrible mistake - terriblemistake

I thought starting a statup was my route to freedom, to realizing my dreams, to becoming the person I was meant to be, to happiness.<p>I've made a terrible mistake.<p>My startup was an ego driven delusion. In hindsight, it is clear. I sought fortune, fame, and success. What I needed was mindfulness, humility and reality.<p>This will not apply to all of you. Good luck to those it does not apply to. To all else, wake up before you waste more time, resources and good will on ego-driven nonsense.
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keeptrying
Congratulations you are one of the few people who have experienced the reality
of being an entrepreneur. :). (Not many people learn this throughout their
lives)! That change in perspective is worth quitting your 9-to-5 job (once)
for IMHO. Its impossible to feel this while sitting at your desk making
someone else rich.

And my own story: I quit about 2 months ago and it feels like I have been
going around in circles. But I've learnt hell of a lot - customer development,
building a prototype etc.

Go to sleep and tomorrow morning you will feel like you've gotten another
chance, another opportunity. If you need inspiration read Paul Grahams
articles or [http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-inspiring-
entrepreneu...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-inspiring-
entrepreneurial-quotes)

Best of luck!

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YuriNiyazov
You are posting this from a place where it is at least 1am right now. Stop
being dramatic, get some sleep, and try to remember that period of your life
when every day you'd get home at 7pm at the earliest, after working the whole
day to make someone else rich, and having no energy at the end of the day to
pursue your own interests.

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sdfjkl
I've worked for a guy like this once. He managed to ruin the best ideas and
kill fledgling projects by insisting on adding the latest buzzword features
into products, even if it made no sense at all. This was mainly so he could
ejaculate embarrassing press releases about the newest nonsensical features,
give talks about them and meet people entirely unrelated to our products or
business. One such feature was "Twitter integration" on a locked down, behind-
the-firewall corporate product, another was "GPS support" for a desktop
application.

Whenever a team member got tired of all this and left, he would go through a
routine of badmouthing them, claiming he had fired them because they were
harming the company. Despite a fairly potent team behind him, the company
regularly fell out with customers due to not being able to deliver on the
nonsensical promises he had made.

After a while, despite his excellent bullshitting skills, the company had
earned a reputation for not delivering on promises and the remaining staff had
little to do other than hand over projects to whoever the enraged customer had
appointed to take over. In the end all staff had left, the office relocated to
a basement and his wife (the co-owner and voice of sanity that permitted the
business to even keep going for this long - especially during his lengthy
unexplained absences) had divorced him.

If you care more about fame and fortune than about making a good product,
please don't start a tech company.

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sajid
Not every founder is motivated by material success.

Some people are born entrepreneurs and can't imagine working in any other way.
If you are one of those people then I'd suggest that you first find out what
it is that you love doing, and then build a company around that.

That way, you will be living a life which you find worthwhile, irrespective of
the financial outcome of your venture. You will work harder than ever before
because you'll be doing what you enjoy. And you will find it much easier to
persevere through all the ups and downs of startup life because your business
will be aligned with your personal values and passions.

In short, founding a company in no way excludes mindfulness, humility and
reality. It's all a question of finding the right motivation.

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mfalcon
I don't think you had made a mistake, far from it, I think that this process
helped you became aware of the things you really value. That's a big step
forward.

I'm a similar person: I approach starting a startup as a means to provide me
with enough money in order to have more time to do other things(help others,
build/contribute to great applications that can make the world a better place,
improve my mindfulness).

Of course, you don't need a startup to do those things(I'm already doing them)
but can be of help if you'd like to have more time to do them.

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beck5
Everyone hits lows, take a couple of days and then come back fresh. Perhaps
your product isn't going to make a million this year but thats not the end of
the world, there is always time.

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veyron
Did you already close the startup? What does/did your startup do?

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hrasm
What happened?

