Striking out on your own is scary. You are living off savings. Money that you made steadily grinding away working for someone else (quite possibly in a job you disliked, quite possibly in a job that put you under a lot of pressure) dwindles away much more rapidly than you are comfortable with. Surprise expenses will no longer be covered by your next paycheck. Every dollar spent is gone forever. That is painful.
Nothing happens unless you or your co-founder makes it happen. There is no default schedule or routine, no existing processes in place, no-one to hold you accountable.
From 2012 to 2014 I spent about 11 months working on 4 different startup ideas (this time was not contiguous -- I worked for about 18 months between idea #3 and #4). My startup experience was frustrating. Ideas #1 and #2 ended because my co-founders bailed. Idea #3 we really tried to make work, but my co-founder and I argued about everything. Idea #4... idea #4 was a miserable, frustrating, pointless waste of time. My co-founder was working on it for the wrong reasons (they were ex-consulting and were obsessed with getting into an accelerator before we'd committed to an idea). I was also working on it for the wrong reasons. I'd drifted away from wanting to work on a particular idea, and from aiming to solve a particular problem, and instead was pursuing a vague mix of goals. We didn't work together for very long, but I derailed my own plans and put myself in an awkward situation which then made it very tempting to take another job for which I was a bad fit (by coincidence, that was working at an early stage startup in China).
Once I finally quit that job I felt very much like you did while hiking. Deciding to drop my startup ambitions was liberating. With time off to reflect I later realised that I'd drifted away from my own ambitions. After idea #3, I told myself I wanted to work on something "personally meaningful"... and over the following year made this more specific: an idea with a clear purpose -- that is, a goal with a clear "why"; a creatively interesting product that provided clear value to people; and ideally something that built on top of a fundamental trend in technology and which was congruent with my personal life philosophy. Idea #4 was none of these things, but I somehow convinced myself that my co-founder was aligned based on certain things they'd said, and ignored warning signs to the contrary.
When you deal with raw reality, reality will punch you in the face if you delude yourself. At least you know you're learning when you get those reality-punches -- plenty of people manage to cocoon themselves from the consequences of their own delusions. It's true that every failure contains a lesson (perhaps a tightly-wrapped lesson), but failure also carries a heavy cost. I lost a lot of respect for the overly-positive feel-good BS merchants who gloss over these painful truths (and almost always wind up sweeping their own screwups under the rug). The plus side is that once you learn to deal with reality, your odds of success become much, much higher. You set goals and actually achieve them. (Partly as you learn to only set goals that you can actually accomplish.) It's almost magical. However, you do then realise that other people's delusional BS becomes a major obstacle to success, so you have to become ruthlessly selective in who you deal with. If you know how to set goals, and be consistent, and be brutally honest with yourself, and anticipate and plan for challenges, and keep learning as and when you need to, and how to identify your "foxhole comrades" (the people you can rely on when the bullets are flying), and how to avoid or neutralise jokers, meddlers and scumbags... then you will find yourself becoming much, much more efficacious, and you will find the goals you set very often get actualised!
In some ways it's good that we're entering another tech/startups downswing... the entrepreneurial world became way too frothy over the last few years. People were achieving pseudo-successes without learning any valuable lessons or building anything of substance. Maybe the downswing will restore some sanity. (I don't enjoy the prospect of a recession, but this one is long overdue, and many people are going to take some painful "reality punches".)
Anyway, great post! I hope you keep writing and reflecting on your experiences.
Thanks for this post. I also quit the startup that I found with my friend. The reason for quitting was pretty similar. I was depressed and tired. I got health problems connected with the digestive system.
I like how raw and real this post is.
Striking out on your own is scary. You are living off savings. Money that you made steadily grinding away working for someone else (quite possibly in a job you disliked, quite possibly in a job that put you under a lot of pressure) dwindles away much more rapidly than you are comfortable with. Surprise expenses will no longer be covered by your next paycheck. Every dollar spent is gone forever. That is painful.
Nothing happens unless you or your co-founder makes it happen. There is no default schedule or routine, no existing processes in place, no-one to hold you accountable.
From 2012 to 2014 I spent about 11 months working on 4 different startup ideas (this time was not contiguous -- I worked for about 18 months between idea #3 and #4). My startup experience was frustrating. Ideas #1 and #2 ended because my co-founders bailed. Idea #3 we really tried to make work, but my co-founder and I argued about everything. Idea #4... idea #4 was a miserable, frustrating, pointless waste of time. My co-founder was working on it for the wrong reasons (they were ex-consulting and were obsessed with getting into an accelerator before we'd committed to an idea). I was also working on it for the wrong reasons. I'd drifted away from wanting to work on a particular idea, and from aiming to solve a particular problem, and instead was pursuing a vague mix of goals. We didn't work together for very long, but I derailed my own plans and put myself in an awkward situation which then made it very tempting to take another job for which I was a bad fit (by coincidence, that was working at an early stage startup in China).
Once I finally quit that job I felt very much like you did while hiking. Deciding to drop my startup ambitions was liberating. With time off to reflect I later realised that I'd drifted away from my own ambitions. After idea #3, I told myself I wanted to work on something "personally meaningful"... and over the following year made this more specific: an idea with a clear purpose -- that is, a goal with a clear "why"; a creatively interesting product that provided clear value to people; and ideally something that built on top of a fundamental trend in technology and which was congruent with my personal life philosophy. Idea #4 was none of these things, but I somehow convinced myself that my co-founder was aligned based on certain things they'd said, and ignored warning signs to the contrary.
When you deal with raw reality, reality will punch you in the face if you delude yourself. At least you know you're learning when you get those reality-punches -- plenty of people manage to cocoon themselves from the consequences of their own delusions. It's true that every failure contains a lesson (perhaps a tightly-wrapped lesson), but failure also carries a heavy cost. I lost a lot of respect for the overly-positive feel-good BS merchants who gloss over these painful truths (and almost always wind up sweeping their own screwups under the rug). The plus side is that once you learn to deal with reality, your odds of success become much, much higher. You set goals and actually achieve them. (Partly as you learn to only set goals that you can actually accomplish.) It's almost magical. However, you do then realise that other people's delusional BS becomes a major obstacle to success, so you have to become ruthlessly selective in who you deal with. If you know how to set goals, and be consistent, and be brutally honest with yourself, and anticipate and plan for challenges, and keep learning as and when you need to, and how to identify your "foxhole comrades" (the people you can rely on when the bullets are flying), and how to avoid or neutralise jokers, meddlers and scumbags... then you will find yourself becoming much, much more efficacious, and you will find the goals you set very often get actualised!
In some ways it's good that we're entering another tech/startups downswing... the entrepreneurial world became way too frothy over the last few years. People were achieving pseudo-successes without learning any valuable lessons or building anything of substance. Maybe the downswing will restore some sanity. (I don't enjoy the prospect of a recession, but this one is long overdue, and many people are going to take some painful "reality punches".)
Anyway, great post! I hope you keep writing and reflecting on your experiences.
Thanks for this post. I also quit the startup that I found with my friend. The reason for quitting was pretty similar. I was depressed and tired. I got health problems connected with the digestive system.
I am starting to work on my startup and this post made me rethink about how i should approach the process, ty
Awesome article, thanks