[fatbird]

The thing I wonder about is how the knowledgeable and experienced can write articles like this, explicitly recognizing that an adrenaline/stress high is a necessary component, and not think that we need to find a better way to encourage entrepreneurship than the current "ten set out and nine don't make it" method.

[tinco]

How would you envision this? 9 out of 10 ideas are just bad, or 9 out of 10 executions are just bad, and you can't know which ones are good or bad ahead of time.

The amount of stress comes from the fact that you constantly need to reassure yourself and your stakeholders that your startup is a 10%er and not a 90%er.

I'm not a VC so I don't have all the data, but from my point of view I see no way out of this system.

[fatbird]

I don't have a replacement model, because I'm not a VC, just a guy with one startup experience under my belt. My intuition and meagre experience tell me that a less competitive, more guided atmosphere would be better, with more emphasis on slow growth businesses rather than "the next ..." Even PG has said that the whole business is structured to find the one out of hundred that brings thousandfold returns, in order to finance all the gambling with the other 99. What about a system that funded more broadly, looking for more modest returns and with clearer goals for the entrepeneurs?

There's a strong "death or glory" ethic that pervades startup culture, that I think chases out more modest businesses, to all our detriment. Look at the back-and-forth here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4799163. Ryan Carson writes about going it alone, and PG pushes back with data from the pressure cooker side that co-founders are empirically necessary; Carson, though, was writing just about how a more modest business plan can be successfully executed by a single founder.