[a0zU]

I mean I doubt anything in that article would come as a huge surprise to a nascent or prospective entrepreneur? It seems like most of article's point is just an anecdotally obfuscated version of, "Entrepreneurship takes time, effort, and has no gauruntees of success." A fairly obvious message I doubt anyone who has seriously considered starting a business hasn't realized.

[PragmaticPulp]

Maybe not news to anyone who has been around for a while, but I’ve been pitched by a lot of naive entrepreneurs who think doing a startup is as simple as asking investors for money and then using that money to pay engineers to build your product.

It’s very common for graduates of our local MBA school who often form teams of 3-6 co-founders who want to split the equity among themselves, take C-level titles, and then hope they can find some technical people to get the work done. I try to have some honest discussions with those who will listen to advice, but many don’t want to hear anything that doesn’t make their journey sound easy

[grp000]

Fuck those people. When I was starting out, I had to work with a company like that. No questions for me, no resources or backup, minimal direction; I was never once relied on for direction or advice despite being the one most qualified to give it, which I did on many occasions, none of it taken.

In fact, after I left, I came to the realization that the leadership team had first licensed the initial product, then basically contracted out all the changes they could do to patent it separately, essentially doing none of the actual developmental work themselves.

Unsurprisingly, it was a shitshow.

[pototo666]

I used to be one of them. I got money, but failed. The process and failure took me hard, both mentally and bodily.

Before my startup, I read a lot about startup. I knew that it would be hard. But knowing is so different from experiencing.

On hindsight, all the stories have successful ending, or the author of the book are successful. Among all the hardship described in the book, the overall tone is optimism.

We should read more about failure, than success.

Now I am on my second startup journey, fulling understand what is awaiting me.

[geoduck14]

>Now I am on my second startup journey, fulling understand what is awaiting me.

I'd be genuinely curious if your response to the same impending hardship makes a difference in the outcome.

Like, does KNOWING about suffering make it easier to go through it?

[jandrewrogers]

The second time is much easier because you can put the hardship in perspective. The first time around there is a lot of uncertainty and self-doubt -- you've never had to deal with the issues before -- and you tend to imagine the bad parts being far worse than they actually are. While it is still hard, the certainty of "been there, done that" greatly reduces the psychological stress in my experience.

Also, being able to anticipate the hardship in concrete terms also allows you to get in front of it and mitigate the adverse effects. You make fewer mistakes, so less of the hardship is self-inflicted.

Entrepreneurship is very difficult even in the best of circumstances, but it is also a skill and experience makes the job significantly easier.

[mettamage]

Can't say anything about entrepreneurship but when I learned to ski between ages 28 and 32, then yes it helps a lot. I could categorise the type of painful falls I'd make and how serious they were. I had whole failure models built on not breaking but falling into the snow.

It took 5 years to ski, especially the first 3 years were a painful process.

(on avg. 1 week per year)

Not sure how much this resembles entrepreneurship.

[pototo666]

Yes it is easier.

Some setbacks may hurt my confidence in my first startup journey. Now I would just drink a cup of coffee and keep working.

[bredren]

Perhaps the culture of the valley has changed, but in my experience this is very common in startup accelerators.

Many are too young to realize the financial and relation hardships that can result from chasing a dream and failing to deliver a fraction of hoped for results.

It doesn’t help to have stories like the Airbnb founders with binders of maxed out credit cards.

[ido]

Even if you "know" it, you don't really know it until it happens to you.

I'm running a small startup (5 months old tomorrow) and everything is "fine" - I have funding (part of it signed, other parts seems very likely to be signed in the immediate future), a team, development is going well - but there are constant obstacles and setbacks and it's a lot harder to keep my cool/spirits than as an employee.

Rationally I know whatever happens I'll be ok (at worst I'll have to get a well paying job as a developer somewhere else) but emotionally it's different, especially when you have employees depending on a salary you're paying.

One thing I found helps a lot is to talk to other entrepreneurs who have been where you are now & I'm very fortunate to have several people like that in my professional network.

[achow]

Yes, but also..

There are just not enough such writings to balance out the (mega) success stories which are obvious result of survivorship bias.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Perhaps, but this is true for just about any endeavor where there are a teeny amount of winners and legions of unreported failures.

I mean, the Olympics are on, and I love it when they interview a gold medalist or their family and they say "this makes all the sacrifice worth it." I always then think of the literally multiple thousands of non-gold medalists who tried just as hard and sacrificed just as much and think "well, that must suck."

Same thing goes for Hollywood actors, you only hear about the stars who were barely making a living before their big break, not the other thousands who were barely making a living and never got a big break so they ended up doing porn on drugs.

[notpachet]

I bet one could get some good traffic on a blog or podcast focused on interviewing the other Olympic contenders who didn't place, to hear their stories. Those people would likely appreciate being able to tell them. I'd definitely subscribe.

As a recent case in point, it was a fluke that Anna Kiesenhofer won for women's cycling. If she hadn't, few of us would likely have heard about her, which would have been a shame because her background is quite interesting. I imagine there are many other competitors like her. (Well, maybe not exactly like her.)

[justicezyx]

Really, if one cannot figure out the lack of aithenticy in most of such success stories, I think they figure out quickly when they jump into the cold water of running a start-up.

It's not that the success stories have any convincing ideas for any aspiring founders anyway.

[zhdc1]

AOM insights is a short, condensed blurb to publicize research. The actual articles themselves by Dean Shepherd and others goes into number of different situations (e.g., grief recovery, family business loss, corporate project failure, and natural disaster recovery).