
How to know when your startup is failing - justswim
https://www.kapwing.com/blog/how-to-know-when-your-startup-is-failing/
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ksaj
I worked for 1 week at a startup. The founder tried twice to convince me that
he is the original Satoshi. He also told me similar fantastic stories every
day, such as how he got blown straight through by scud missile shrapnel when
he was in military special ops in one of 3 wars he fought in, yet somehow came
out without scars or any ongoing physical medical issues related to it. He's
also really scrawny - not something I'd expect from even a retired soldier
after so much deployment. He constantly felt people were playing tricks on him
(like the cleaner moving his network cables around just to annoy him, someone
deleting all his monitoring video footage despite the fact that it is kept in
his home, the military suddenly claiming they've never heard of him... it goes
on and on even though the time was so short... I swear he hired me just to
have an audience), and he shooed constructive and strategic people out of his
life over stories of bizarre situations and especially confrontations that
most surely weren't triggered by happenings in the real world. He talked a lot
about PTSD, but other than overwhelming paranoia, the symptoms he showed were
far from that.

It takes a certain level of creativity to be successful in a startup. But his
type of creativity made it pretty clear to me that I could expect his startup
to fail spectacularly. Recently he suggested that his VC people are starting
to push him away. Everyone has ideas, but not everyone has the clarity of mind
to turn them into something tangible.

This guy doesn't need VC. He needs a psychiatric evaluation. It's extremely
hard to tell if his startup idea was one of his many delusions or not, and
there is a VC company holding the can for him even now. I'm absolutely
surprised they've stuck with him this long. He must hide it well around them.

So that's one way to tell if a startup can survive - is the founder capable of
seeing it through without going completely mad? I hope it's not what you're
dealing with.

