
Ask HN: how many years have you "wasted" on failed startups?  And any regrets? - resdirector
Over the last few days I've seen people post their lists of failed startups.  What is not clear, however, is how many man-hours (or man-months or man-years), that were spent on these failed startups: were they working full-time on them, burning their own finances, or were these side-projects while working in full-time employment?<p>So I was wondering: how many man-hours (man-months, man-years etc) have you spent on your "failed" projects?  And do you have any regrets?<p>(NB: I use the terms "wasted" and "failed" loosely).
======
scottw
I've spent most of my adult life in failed startups in some form or another.
Some were funded, most were bootstrapped. Probably 6-8 man-years if I subtract
my dances with full-time employment (I'm doing contract work now and working
on another startup on the side with a partner).

I have no regrets. I've asked myself a couple of times if it was worth it, and
to be honest I can't think of anything else I would have rather been doing at
the time. It's not like playing slot machines, hoping someday to hit the
jackpot. It's more like an obscure artist trying to find his niche—you do it
because this is who you are.

If I never have a big success, I'll die satisfied knowing I was doing what I
felt I should be doing. I read a quote from a post on this list some years
ago, I wish I could remember the source. But it was something like, "When I
look back on my career, I want to say, 'Boy, that was a fun ride!' not 'Boy, I
sure felt safe!'"

~~~
mike
I think the quote is from Tom Preston-Werner's post "How I Turned Down
$300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub" [http://tom.preston-
werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-down-3...](http://tom.preston-
werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-down-300k.html)

~~~
scottw
And how's that for serendipity: the original was posted exactly two years ago
to the day.

------
jlees
Depends how you define 'failed' -- I spent about 20 months (and all my money,
and some other people's) on a startup that has ultimately gone nowhere, but
has taken me to some fantastic places and will undoubtedly be part of the
reason I succeed.

It'll take me another year or so to pay back all that I owe, and to get to
financial break-even; and another year or two to save enough to start my next
big project, at worst, but that's not stopping me doing stuff on the side, oh
no.

Lessons:

Build a product. I turned out to be awesome at selling an idea, and myself,
but got too caught up in that to actually execute on a product. I'm only now
turning the work I did over that time into something useful to hopefully
recoup some of the money, sweat and tears I poured in.

Follow your instinct. (YMMV. I've learnt over the last two years that my
instinct is usually spot on, and spending months convincing myself otherwise
is entirely fruitless.)

No experiences are ever wasted. Coming to YC to interview (we didn't get in)
was absolutely worth it and was part of the reason I've ended up in the
Valley.

Pick a landlord who won't mind if you pay your rent a little late.

Pick advisors who understand your business and who understand business itself.
Running a web platform startup I had an advisor who had never started his own
company and who didn't understand Twitter (a core part of my technology).

People will evangelise you if you impress them. Do it.

------
jmathai
First startup was a consulting firm when I was 21. I turned freelance clients
into a business with a partner. I left my job to focus full time on it for
about 6 months burning through savings (I did have a mortgage).

Second startup was a photo sharing startup 3 years later in 2004. We both left
our jobs at ClearChannel before we got funding but secured an angel round
about 3 months later. That lasted a year and a half before we ran out of
money. We made the mistake of rebranding and rewriting the product with the
funding (won't do that again). By the time we were ready to market 9 months
had gone by and we didn't have a lot of money left.

Currently bootstrapping and looking for when I can leave my day job. We don't
have traction yet but I spent 4 weeks hitting the streets and talk to
customers (students).

I'm 32 now and after every startup I swear I'm done but I can't not do this.
It's in my blood. I apologise to my wife on a regular basis for it. Thankfully
she's always been supportive. Two times since we got married 3 years ago and
I've looked her in the eyes and said "I think I need to quit my job" twice
already.

Hoping the third time is a charm :)

------
joshu
You can't think about things like this. You are, at the core, composed of your
history of things that you tried and what you learned doing them.

As I learned here, you cannot give in to regret. You have to pick yourself up
and resolve not to make the same mistakes.

------
DanI-S
No matter how many precious post-work hacking hours are burned on things that
turn out to be a dead end, it probably adds up to less than the average person
spends watching TV...

~~~
conjectures
That's what I keep telling myself :)

------
frobozz
I spent 7 years, full time in failed startups, I would declare 3-4 of that
"wasted".

For the first 2-3 years, we were reasonably well funded (by both Investors and
customers) and doing interesting work. I was drawing a reasonable but not
optimal salary, and getting paid each month.

After about 3 years, the money was getting tight, on paper, salaries had
remained flat, but they weren't being paid regularly or in full. However, we
were targeted for acquisition by a major software company, who pulled out (due
to having made a different, but unrelated major acquisition). At this point,
one of my colleagues had the good sense to call it a day, and go work at a
bank.

We spent the next year keeping our heads above water, drawing reduced salary
when cash flow allowed, looking for that major company to come back and buy
us.

Here is where, in hindsight, the wasted years kicked in. I stuck around
looking for the jackpot like a bad gambler, as, I think, did my colleagues.
The company was making just enough income that the downfall was a slow bleed,
rather than a haemorrhage. We stagnated, I stopped doing anything interesting,
and stopped caring. Eventually I left for something more stable. I was not
alone in my egress.

Some of my former colleagues are still at it, I believe that with fewer mouths
to feed, they are profitable enough, even though they are even more stagnant
than before.

------
patio11
I've burned perhaps a hundred hours on projects which did not go anywhere in
the last five years. Actually, I don't like that phrasing. Let me try again: I
have spent a hundred hours learning that I have better options than two ideas
which seemed like winners until I had done some work on them.

~~~
jaxn
You have only wasted 100 hours in the last five years?!? Holy crap that is
awesome efficiency. That is only about 2.5 weeks of going down a fruitless
path.

~~~
patio11
Closer to four months, given how many hours I had to work on my business at
the time. It is still cheap at the price, though.

------
jbm
2-3 years on Searching.com/Searching.ca. I definitely regret a wide swath of
it, mostly not being more daring and trying out more things. They had me (a
junior programmer albeit with a College degree) building out large parts of
their infrastructure, then switching things at the drop of a dime. (picked up
some good skills in the aftermath)

There were so many opportunities for me to have left.

\- When I realized the business plan basically was formulated around a domain
name.

\- When a superior said "We don't have to build anything new, what people want
is one place to get everything and we'll provide it to them". (Basically a
"Don't innovate" directive)

\- When the investors sued because they contended they company was trying to
steal corporate resources (mostly domain names). (I don't think my boss was,
but clearly there was a lack of trust on both sides)

\- When a superior asked us to all go onto Digg and "digg down" people who had
taken issue with him for trying to purchase wiki.com for 2 million dollars.

Eventually, even the depressed shadow-of-myself left after my boss said "I'm
going to make Bittorrent legal! The labels will have to accept it because it
will be the same as a swap meet". I realized the writing was on the wall and I
had to get out. (This was... after 6 months of not getting paid)

I left about a month after and had a more interesting startup experience at
Soundpedia (didn't work out either, but I have zero regrets and loved every
minute of it)

I regret that I let my early start on RoR waste away while I was building
stuff in PHP and Perl/Mason for them. (ouch) I regret that I didn't have the
courage to try to do something on my own, or to go to the states to try
working for a more properly managed startup. I regret that I didn't have a
more social environment (since I was working remotely). Finally, I regret that
I let myself get carried away. It was a classic story of manipulation of a
green wild-eyed college kid. Someone posted a while back about the classic
pattern of manipulation in an open source project and my experience fit that
to a T.

Now when I look back, I can kinda laugh about it all. I learned, moved on, and
I gained a lot of skills after doing so. Was I stupid? Hell yes; but it's the
kind of stupid you can get away with once in your life.

Would I work for a startup again? Absolutely, even if I had no stake in the
business. However, no more remote working, and I won't accept a job where I
can't perform excellently.

------
rokhayakebe
You are an artist. You think of ideas, and you turn them into software others
can interact with. You are always in the process of creation. There is not one
second wasted, so long as your goal is to create. Painters do not look back at
the last 100 canvases and ask "How many hours have I wasted?". They just
paint. So paint, or should I say "Code".

------
jawns
I'm one of the people who posted a list of failed startups ("10 web start-ups
(all mine) ... and why they failed").

I've been fortunate to always have a day job that I enjoy, and I've never
really sunk big money into any of my side projects, so I'm not in debt.

I look at much of the time I've spent on my projects as time that I would have
"wasted" some other way, if I weren't working on them.

Although none of my projects brought me fortune or fame, here's what I got out
of them:

* Better coding skills, which has certainly helped me in my day job.

* An assortment of functions and classes that I can re-use in future projects.

* A lot of fun.

~~~
nubela
Link please? Thanks!

------
photon_off
I spent probably 6 months to an entire year working on failed or unreleased
projects. Some were just little things to learn the language, like a trojan
written in VB6 that would do various annoying to the user (like "earthquake"
their windows), to a couple of sites I've recently launched that are currently
too complicated and/or just not valuable to anybody except me. My outlook at
this point is admittedly pessimistic.

Lessons learned, in no particular order, except for the last:

\- If you need to explain your app to customers in more than one sentence, or
if that sentence contains any four-or-more syllable words, or if any of those
words' definitions fail the above two criteria, it will probably fail.

\- If you are working on a project to scratch your own itch, confirm that
other people have a rash.

\- Do not give in to feature creep, unless that feature presents itself
immediately and without intervention. For example: Back-end features to
improve search results: good. Sliders, filters, color coding, additional
search options, menus, extra words, animations, hover effects, etc, will
probably only confuse people, unless you are a UX genius, in which case those
features will merely go unused.

\- People trust their gut instinct on what something does, rather than read
instructions, or discover, or wander into unfamiliar territory. Find the
design for your product that mimics something people have used to solve a
similar problem.

\- People are generally incapable of abstraction. If you are the "x of y",
that means people need to thoroughly understand x, y, and what it means to
abstract one to the other.

\- People will exert very little effort into learning something unless the
rewards are immediate, have been stated to them by a trusted source, or are
made extremely enticing.

\- Ideas that require a critical mass of users to be useful are easy to come
by, nearly impossible to execute.

\- Hope for the best, expect failure.

\- Stay the fuck away from anything "meta," or anything involving variables.
People like being served things that they pick from a menu, or that people
suggest. The most complicated task the average person has to deal with, on any
regular basis, is probably choosing multiple toppings for a pizza.

\- It is far better to release a crappy implementation of something awesome
than it is to release an awesome implementation of something crappy.
Awesomeness in the idea is easier and more valuable than awesomeness in the
implementation.

\- Presentation is much more important than you'd like to believe.

\- It is far better to be lucky than any of the above. Yes, you can slightly
increase your chances of being "lucky," but don't kid yourself.

~~~
dkokelley
_\- It is far better to release a crappy implementation of something awesome
than it is to release an awesome implementation of something crappy.
Awesomeness in the idea is easier and more valuable than awesomeness in the
implementation._

Doesn't this conflict with the general sentiment that ideas are near-worthless
unless implemented well? Can you elaborate? Are you referring to rapid
iterations (i.e. have a 'good idea' for feature x, and launch a crappy
implementation, AND THEN iterate until the implementation has evolved to
maturity)?

~~~
photon_off
In terms of a product's success, ideas without implementation are as worthless
as implementation of a shit idea. Granted, at least by implementing something
you practice your craft and personally get something out of it, but if the
idea isn't good to begin with, you're not likely to achieve success.

The awesomeness of your idea is like a multiplier. You can easily come up with
an idea 10 times as awesome, and any implementation of that will be presumably
be 10 times as successful. You can't as easily implement something 10 times
better. This is all voodoo mathematics, anyway. You don't have to believe it
if you don't want to.

------
wazoox
I spent two and a half years in 2000 to 2002 developing some sort of global
cloud computing platform 10 years too soon :) -see below.

Then I've spent another couple of years on and off, (re)developing an archive
management system that may finally become a reality soon, at its 4th iteration
and rewrite :)

Anyway these were years well spent; I've learnt a lot.

The first startup story: it ran out of cash, utter failure and sad ending.
Basically we had glorious plans of world domination :) but we never had the
money to actually make it. The CEO (who brought us 90% of the funding) ended
completely broke after burning through € 15 millions in a couple of years. We
went through quite a spectacular series of failures :

    
    
      * we started the project 6 months to 1 year late. Real work started in 
      March 2000, just before the dotcom bust (Doh).
      * we weren't actually technically qualified to make it through, though we 
      tried hard. The project was too complex and too ambitious from the start, 
      would have needed literally 100s of millions to build.
      * our main partner and support (SGI) wasn't doing too well.
      * our CEO never managed to get any additional funding. Instead of calling 
      a quit after the first year, he kept the sinking boat running, without
      enough resources and people.
      * he literally burnt money : we bought a huge stack of hardware, worth 
      more than half a million euros, without having any resources to even *turn 
      it on*, simply because he *promised to*. We had a huge colo with big iron 
      hardware not even in a runnable state. Sigh...

------
nzjames
Sometimes I wonder whether I'd have be better off if I had a low paying second
job rather than _wasting_ countless hours outside of my 9-5 trying to boot
strap start ups.

I'm lucky I just love hacking.

------
paraschopra
Have been doings tons and tons of side-projects hoping them to fly. I will
tell you a story. When I was in college, I got an offer from Cambridge
University for paid internship (800 pounds per month + travel -- that's a lot
for a student). But I was so enthusiastic about startups (thanks to HN!) that
I declined that offer and started a _so-called_ startup of recruiting people
through social networks. We had a fancy tag-line "infiltrating social
networks' and I distinctly remember having day-dreams of dominating the
recruiting space with that idea. Needless to say, two months of summer and lot
of naivety doesn't translate into success.

No, I don't regret having dropped Cambridge Univ. internship for a failed
startup because at that time it seemed perfectly rational thing to do. I'm
happy about the lessons I learnt from that stint and it made for a great
groundwork for my future startups.

------
jaxn
My only regrets are the ones I didn't fully launch.

------
maxklein
I don't think anything I ever did was wasted, because I never let it fully
consume me and take away all my life. If you're out there having fun and
enjoying yourself, even if one part fails you'll remember the rest. If all you
had was your business and it fails, then you'll have regrets.

------
davidw
I've always gravitated towards startups and small companies, and have, over
the years, not made the money I would have if I'd worked for some BigCo year
in, year out. I do have some regrets there, as it'd be nice to have more
money.

------
rrival
Something that's kicked around here a lot: fail quickly.

If a project doesn't fit success criteria I give it about a month before it's
pivoted or done.

~~~
petervandijck
A month, really? Wow.

------
acconrad
I started a PC tutoring business in high school that was 100% profitable and
then a web design/development firm in college that was also profitable from
day one. The only reason why they "failed" was because I wanted someone else
to pay me a good salary and benefits when I graduated college. I'm working on
a side project at the moment and that may be my first foray into running a
business with people I hire.

Regardless, I would never consider these failures, and here's why:

Any venture you do on your own shows initiative and is practice for your
programming and business skills - that already places you in the top 1% of
software devs. What's the worst that could happen? You build your skills and
work for a great company, because any company that fosters entrepreneurial
innovation (e.g. Google, Facebook) would LOVE to have you if you built
something significant.

So...build a successful business or boost your resume to work for
Google/Facebook? Sounds like a win to me.

------
rdl
Things I regret: \- Not getting more involved in startups earlier (I should
have gotten started in the early 1990s somehow when I first got on the
Internet) \- MIT vs. Stanford; being closer to startup ground-zero would have
been worth it \- Sticking around various jobs (vs. startups) longer than
absolutely necessary; I could have spent maybe 4 years more from 2002-now
working on startups vs. contracting and consulting, if I had been more willing
to take risks.

I think I've spent maybe 12 months total on startups after I should have left
them; sometimes it is clear that for team/market (vs. product) reasons, a
given startup is doomed. Until that point, it's still a worthwhile experience,
as there is a lot to learn, and it's impossible to know it won't be successful
-- after, it is a lot harder to stay motivated, even if the day to day tasks
can still be educational.

------
sp4rki
Failed projects don't necessarily mean projects that failed to provide money,
fun, and/or experience. If your getting at least one of those factors you are
turning a "profit"

------
hga
Many years, and no more wasted than the smaller amount of time I've spent
working for big companies.

I guess I'd rather produce a technical success that fails for other reasons
(unconnected to me, of course :-) than do work that frequently is a failure
for reasons much closer to what I do (e.g. impossible projects that are
mandated nonetheless because of politics).

I dislike bureaucracy and _loathe_ office politics, so despite their downsides
most startups are a better match for me.

------
SudarshanP
5 years. No Regrets. After 3 years at a multinational and 4 patents later, I
quit and learnt a lot. Tried many startups. Burned out. Joined same company
again and quit again after a year... and still exploring the landscape. I
guess I am addicted. :). I wouldn't trade doing this for another 5 years even
if someone offered me a job at a Goog or an FB. 5 years later my
responsibilities may take precedence :).

------
moultano
I "wasted" a year working on projects in a big company that didn't launch.
What I realized at the end of it is that doing anything new is doing research.
Null results are useful in the sciences, even if they don't make you famous,
and null results are useful in product development even if they don't make you
rich. You learn from the experience, and if you share your knowledge, the
world learns.

------
siculars
It's not a "waste", just a learning experience.

------
webbruce
How many of your guys' startups didn't get off the ground? Because of project
creep/funding/lose of interest/other

------
kylebragger
Spent: a few years on a bevy of projects (some ambitious, some lame) Wasted:
not a second

