
What They Don't Tell You About Starting a Startup - drm237
http://www.adeologue.com/adeologue/2008/04/what-they-dont.html
======
sutro
As women forget the pain of childbirth once they hold their babies in their
arms, so it is with startups. New life is awkward, messy, and painful. The
antidote and the amnesia for startup pain is the creation of a product or
service that people like enough to pay for.

~~~
tptacek
(1) Women don't "forget the pain of childbirth" when they hold their babies.
Giving birth, I'm told, really fucking hurts.

(2) In contrast to giving birth, where the pain at least (mostly) ends after
the main event, the pain of running a company _continues_ long after launch.

~~~
mdemare
Yes, it really hurts, and women really forget just how bad it was, otherwise
they'd stop at one child. Hormones somehow alter their memories. Kinda
Orwellian, actually.

~~~
cglee
Just wondering, are any of you female that are commenting on this?

It just reminds me of the male pundits sitting around debating abortion
(assuming yall're male).

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adityakothadiya
Hi all, I wrote that article because I'm experiencing few things that I wanted
to share. I'm working on starting a startup, handling all marriage and day job
responsibilities. I find it very challenging, but I still push myself because
it's my character flaw - that I want to start a startup. To make this happen,
I'm also looking for building a founding team. For that, I'm talking to few
people who shared their interest of starting a startup.

Whenever I talk to some young professional, the most common observation I have
seen is - almost everyone wants to start a startup, literally almost everyone.
But the fact is - they just don't know what it takes to make it work -- the
insane hard work at initial stages. They just talk about success stories, but
when it comes to put the time and build stuff, they disappear. And that's how
I got inspired to share this thought on my blog.

I am not saying we should take that advice seriously and stop working on our
dreams. That advice was more for those people who "think" they want to start a
startup, but probably don't understand the reality to make it happen.

-Aditya (Adeologue.com)

~~~
dennykmiu
Aditya - good luck. It is possible to have a great family (I have same wife
for the last thirty years and we have two teenage kids) and do startups at the
same time. Pick you teammate carefully. I wrote about my own criteria in the
following ("turn off the light and see if you run away from them").

<http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2008/03/team-building.html>

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paul
Why does it have to be painful? Maybe he's just doing it wrong.

~~~
diego
Perhaps painful is not the right word. It is extremely challenging and
demanding, and it can take over your life and take a toll on your health. This
is because you have to constantly inject energy into a startup or it will fade
away. You get used to making tough decisions all the time with incomplete
information, and uncertainty is the norm. Even when business looks great you
know that things could change overnight for a number of reasons (market
conditions, Google giving away what you are selling, etc).

I've been running a successful (as in, quite profitable) startup as a solo
founder for the past three years. If my today self sent a fax to the past
letting my old self know what it would be like... Well, that probably wouldn't
change anything. Maybe we are just masochists.

~~~
dennykmiu
Pain is definitely not the word. Pain is a very good excuse not to do it.
Startup is in fact sort of like child birth. It is very emotional and no one
can describe the experience (especially not men) unless you have been through
it. I think few woman would recommend against having a child because of the
pain even though there is tremendous amount of pain involved. They would tell
you that you shouldn't be a mother if you are nor ready to be one. And like
motherhood, entrepreneurship turns out to be a responsibility as well.

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skmurphy
W. Edwards Deming observed "Nothing happens without personal transformation."

I think it's this personal transformation that's one of the hardest things
about a startup. You start out wanting to change the world and end up at 3AM
wondering what's gone wrong and realizing that it's you has to change first.

Barry Moltz wrote a great book "You Have To Be A Little Crazy" that addresses
the emotional roller coaster that every entrepreneur faces, observing
"Entrepreneurs start businesses because..they have no choice. Passion and
energy drive them on good days and sustain them on bad days." Some references
follow:

[http://www.amazon.com/You-Need-Be-Little-
Crazy/dp/079318018X...](http://www.amazon.com/You-Need-Be-Little-
Crazy/dp/079318018X/)

<http://www.barrymoltz.com/>

[http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2006/12/27/you-need-to-be-a-
lit...](http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2006/12/27/you-need-to-be-a-little-
crazy/)

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dennykmiu
No one could've said it better than this. Read the following ...

"I’ve often told people that this thing [startup] is worse than heroin. I’ve
also told people that I think I’ve proved that entrepreneurism is deep in my
soul. I’ve been away, but inexorably I come back. It started when I was
younger than ten – I can recall the emotions such ideas generated then, and I
know I still work the same way."

[http://foundread.com/2008/04/18/why-you-must-embrace-
rejecti...](http://foundread.com/2008/04/18/why-you-must-embrace-rejection-to-
succeed/#comment-7582)

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Tichy
What if you are doing it the second time around, and are already rich from the
first time? Is it still painful, and will people still spend as much time on
it? Somehow I can not imagine they would. Seems to me the first time is
painful because of the pressure: financial worries, the worry to be a failure
in life, stuff like that. Would not be so much the case if you already made
it?

Also, isn't it amusing how such links are inevitable called "what they don't
tell you about..." rather than simply "It is painful to do a startup"?

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attack
Yes, more advice from people that failed at least a few times instead of know-
it-alls who think their anecdote is the huge secret to success.

~~~
dennykmiu
Actually very few entrepreneurs do one startup and become an overnight
success. So even if they talk about their success, they are implicitly talking
about their failure (or recovery from past failure which might need to future
success). I think the mistakes that most of us make is to think that there is
a formula, a formula for success or a formula for failure. There is no
formula.

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mixmax
The other thing they don't tell you is that you can fail. And that it hurts
when you do.

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dualogy
Entrepreneurship is about not caring what anyone else is or is not "telling
you".

~~~
dennykmiu
My own experience is that entrepreneurship is an obsession and an addiction.
It is a character flaw. It is the deep desire to create and destroy at the
same time. It is worse that a disease because disease at least has a curl, or
the potential for a curl. The following are my recent articles on how to
accept such a predicament and deal with setback and rejection, and how to
recover from them.

[http://foundread.com/2008/04/18/why-you-must-embrace-
rejecti...](http://foundread.com/2008/04/18/why-you-must-embrace-rejection-to-
succeed)

<http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/10/riding-a-bike.html>

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jamess
Top startup tip: Never take advice from someone who doesn't know the
difference between "advice" and "advise."

~~~
nadim
"Even as high as DH5 we still sometimes see deliberate dishonesty, as when
someone picks out minor points of an argument and refutes those. Sometimes the
spirit in which this is done makes it more of a sophisticated form of ad
hominem than actual refutation. For example, correcting someone's grammar, or
harping on minor mistakes in names or numbers." [1]

[1] <http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html>

