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by vnorby 5127 days ago
The reason that post has so many upvotes is because what he is describing is real, mental suffering and fatigue that most (not all, I guess) startup founders accrue. The end result of doing a startup is personal learning, growth, having had the opportunity to work with smart people, etc., but during the process you will forget those things because there are other things on your mind - at least I do.

I don't think any founder would take their role for granted or change their position with anyone else - but when you are in the hot seat and you feel the weight of so many people on your shoulders to do well by them and for them, there are days where you wonder if you should just go work for someone else and let them make the decisions for you.

I would venture that the worst feeling in the world is one of being trapped and not knowing what to do. When you are a startup founder, you are trapped all the time, and constantly between rocks and hard places. You need to learn everything but you don't know what exactly. You need to improve growth, improve product, improve retention, improve revenue, improve profitability, but you don't know how sometimes and you don't know who to ask, and a lot of the time you don't even know how to measure success when it does happen until well after the fact. Being a founder is not like anything else in the world, because it's the one societal role where up until you actually accomplish and build something of value and sustain it for a long period of time, there's nobody but your parents to say how proud they are of you.

1 comments

"... The reason that post has so many upvotes is because what ^he^ is describing is real, mental suffering and fatigue that most (not all, I guess) startup founders accrue. ..."

He is a she, Deena Varshavskaya ~ https://twitter.com/#!/siberianfruit

The "he" is the guy who answered the Quora question that Deena's responding to: http://www.quora.com/Startups/What-does-it-feel-like-to-be-t...
"... The "he" is the guy who answered the Quora question that Deena's responding ..."

excellent, thanks for the correction.