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.
(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.
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.
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 - 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").
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.
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.
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:
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."
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"?
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.
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.
"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]
