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by adrianhoward
5144 days ago
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Which means... it's time to take the focus away from what TechCrunch and Sequoia are doing, and back to the difficult and often obscure (if intrinsically rewarding, and often lucrative in the long term) campaign to improve one's technical skills through practice and hard work. Ignore TechCrunch and Sequoia - yes please :-) However, I'm unsure about the rest of the advice. This maybe just me - but most of the problems I've had when I started a company for the first time (and second, and ...) are with the business skills not the technical ones. Being better technically doesn't make me better at running a business, finding markets and channels, etc. I see just as many businesses fail through lack of business chops as I do lack of technical chops. The most effective learning I've got in that arena was from starting a business and failing miserably. There may be better ways to learn now - who knows. But I'm pretty certain just focusing on sharpening your technical saw isn't going to make you more likely to succeed. Maybe starting a new business now, in the face of almost certain total and abject failure, is just what the doctor ordered :-) |
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Fair point, but right now the business world (in VC-istan) is loopy and you might learn the wrong things-- things that are only true at the peak of a bubble.
I know someone who had a startup in the late '90s. He didn't know what he was doing and never should have been funded. He ended up raising about $50 million. Being CEO of a transiently important company went to his head, the tide went out, and he crashed and burned. It's 13 years later and he still hasn't emotionally recovered. All of his subsequent effort has failed because he wants his late-90s startup back. This sort of emotional pollution can be obvious or it can be subtle. I think most people get affected by some amount of it over their careers-- usually the more subtle kind. Loopy, style-over-substance business environments where clowns are made kings are ripe grounds to take in emotional pollution, and it's harder to resist that than people think.
Maybe starting a new business now, in the face of almost certain total and abject failure, is just what the doctor ordered
Right now, the issue isn't that there isn't money to be made in startups. There is. But the environment is congested and therefore noisy rather than meritocratic and that tends to teach people the wrong lessons.
In times of congestion, social connections win. What this means is that 90% of what is being funded is raising money because of who the founders know, not what their ideas are. If you try to imitiate their ideas, you're learning the wrong lessons. If you want to be a startup founder, you're better off figuring out what you need to do to have more VC connections in 5 years, and that may or may not be starting your own company.
As I said, learning the wrong thing is more dangerous than sitting a bubble out and doing something else, and emotional pollution is a cause of the former experience. The late-bubble danger isn't an "everyone loses" abject failure; it's that you might watch unqualified people win, while losing, and start (possibly subconsciously) picking up the attitudes and approaches of those winners, which might not suit you later when substance becomes king again.