

Founders Need Rock Hard Abs - jordancooper
http://jordancooper.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/founders-need-rock-hard-abs/

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swombat
_After two months of product development, business planning, and strong
forward momentum, my friends just got their first real “punch to the
stomach.”_

Being rejected by YC is _far_ from a "real punch to the stomach". The point of
the article is absolutely right. You need a quasi-inexhaustible supply of
rock-hard abs to run a start-up. Sometimes, things go _very_ wrong. As the
comments on [http://danieltenner.com/posts/0005-starting-up-with-a-
friend...](http://danieltenner.com/posts/0005-starting-up-with-a-friend.html)
showed, it can oh-so-easily happen that you find yourself losing your best
friends over your start-up.

After I launched my first start-up, my father's advice was: "Are you prepared
for the possibility that it might all fall apart in complete disaster in 6
months?" I didn't know how right he was, but having that in my mind certainly
helped prepare me.

I'll close with a quote from the ever-insightful "If" poem by Kipling:

    
    
      If you can make one heap of all your winnings 
      And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
      And lose, and start again at your beginnings
      And never breathe a word about your loss;
      If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
      To serve your turn long after they are gone,
      And so hold on when there is nothing in you
      Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
    
      ...
    
      Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
      And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

~~~
martincmartin
What's worse? Having it all fall apart in complete disaster in 6 months? Or
having it require continual Herculean effort to keep it limping along for
years?

~~~
gloob
_Or having it require continual Herculean effort to keep it limping along for
years?_

Perhaps "Sisyphean" would be a more evocative adjective, in that particular
situation.

------
efsavage
"p.s. i don’t use spell check - deal with it"

Advice from someone who can't be bothered with the most basic details and
easiest remedies? I'll pass.

~~~
nbroyal
This type of comment has always bothered me. I'll admit it, I don't really
understand what the guy has against spell check. However, is it really THAT
big of a deal that this guy's work may contain some misspellings? Furthermore,
neither his lack of a willingness to use spell check nor the mistakes
contained within the message (as long as it is still coherent) says anything
about the quality of the actual content. It just seems dismissive for the most
trivial of reasons.

EDIT: With all that said, I'm not vouching for the quality of the post one way
or another. I'm just saying, judge the content by the content and nothing
else.

~~~
lmkg
What's more off-putting is the up-front refusal to use a spellcheck. It means
that he's aware he has a problem and refuses to fix it.

If there were more of an explanation, it might endear me to the guy. If he dug
into some of the haphazard history of English spelling conventions and refused
to adhere to illogical paradigms, I'd give him credit. If he mentioned
something from communications theory, I'd give him a pass. But the explicit
statement that "my idiosyncrasies are higher priority than your user
experience" is not a good statement to make. It's a significantly worse
impression than a simple typo, and a stronger one because it's intentional
instead of an oversight.

~~~
bmm6o
Totally with you, though I might not find intentional misspellings as
endearing as you. I'll add to your list that I can cut a lot of slack to non-
native speakers.

But his situation is even worse than you say: He's aware that he has a
problem, and he's also aware of the existence of a virtually effortless,
automatic solution to this problem. Even if it only makes his writing 1%
clearer, isn't it a free 1%?

If his site were ugly, and he apologized for not being a better designer, then
ok, I can understand that. There's a slight barrier to having an aesthetically
appealing site. But it's 2009 - what is he composing in that doesn't have
automatic spellcheck? The contents of this very text box are being checked for
spelling.

(I'll avoid commenting on the phrase "deal with it"; maybe it was funnier in
his head.)

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kwamenum86
"and at some point the dude that’s throwing all the blows get’s tired"

annnnnd....that's where the analogy broke down. I thought it was a bit
disjointed. All that talk of strong abs was unnecessary. But strip out the
attempt at clever humor and you have an important message, I think.

------
philwelch
Sometimes I wish these bloggers could just say what they mean without throwing
in tortured analogies and pop culture references.

------
petercooper
The secret of Tim Ferriss's success.

------
jordancooper
discussion around spell check is interesting...it was just a funny way of
saying "i suck at spelling, sorry about that." I try to catch everything, just
wanted to set a disclaimer that the spelling and grammar in this blog is not
going to be of a professional caliber...

