[diN0bot]

re: walking after a year:

this is curious to me. on the one hand, success can spring from numerous failures, the numerous implying fast! imagine the inventor always inventing, multiple projects at once! a new one every week!

on the other hand, success can spring from committment and dedication. stay focused, don't give up.

i'm not refuting your points--in the end, one has to be smart, strategic. go all out in the right way.

[mcav]

You're an airplane pilot trying to get your bird off the ground. You have to attain a certain velocity to succeed. If your runway is short, you'd better open the throttle wide -- and if it isn't working, you have to decide pretty quickly to give up and try again.

But if the runway is longer, you have more time: continue building speed until you have enough force to lift off.

You just want to avoid giving up when you had plenty of runway.

[9oliYQjP]

Much more succinctly put than I could have put it, but spot on! The problem I'm seeing is a greater number of pilots that think they're flying Harrier jump jets when they're really piloting Cessnas :)

[9oliYQjP]

Sure. I suppose what motivated me to write the original post in this thread is that I'm beginning to see a lot of people jump into startups with a great amount of wishful thinking and a complete misconception of what they are getting into. It's really the computer geek equivalent of a jock joining the military after high school because the ads are cool and he enjoys fighting.

I'm not a huge fan of the strategy to keep on trying until you succeed. There are some things in life that I will simply not be good at. No matter how much I try, there is no way I will be an Olympic swimmer. That ship sailed well over half a lifetime ago. Some people just aren't cut out for running a business. Hell, even some successful business people are tormented by the idea that they were simply lucky, and spend the remainder of their time failing at future business endeavours.

All I'm suggesting is that you need to go into a startup with a reasonable sense of commitment. For most businesses, I think a reasonable time frame to dedicate to it is 3 years. There isn't a fixed gestation period for a successful business the way there is for creating a baby. But 3 years is long enough for you to have seen some highs and lows, to have performed several iterative improvements to the product/service, and (again, hopefully) witnessed the market's initial reaction and longer term assessment of the product/service. It's enough to have executed a few strategical paths and many more tactical manoeuvres. In effect, it's long enough to provide an adequate number of data points (for you) to make the decision to continue or not if the market hasn't made that decision for you already.

For those of you wanting to go into a startup, think of being able to put in a 3 year commitment and now let your mind explore that idea vs the idea of simply putting in a year's worth of effort. You'll come up with a vastly different sense of obstacles that you will face (e.g., cash flow is a problem for a 3 year commitment for most people but not so for a 1 year commitment). The problem is, most people discount these obstacles and then face them anyway because they aren't successful within that first year. Their strategies don't take them into account and are rendered ineffective as a result. Basically, treat a startup as if you're emigrating to a foreign country for a few years as opposed to just visiting one for vacation. All the same sort of obstacles still apply.