| > So, if you've had a failed startup, how did you know? When I was getting serious about it, rather than just hacking in my free time, I made the decision as to how I would know I'd lost before I started the company. I said I'd pay myself as an employee, and that as an employee if the company couldn't/wasn't going to be able to pay my wages, or if my savings went as low as £25,000, that was it - I wouldn't work for my company any more. I knew it had finished because I shot it in the head and called it finished. > Did you run out of money and call it quits? Sort of, I ran out of the money I was prepared to lose in the gamble. It's easy to hang on to hope, comforted by the image of the gambler coming in for the big win after sticking to their guns. But, if you're going to do that, you'd best have a really good reason (not faith in the product or hard work or anything nebulous like that, something you can plug into Kelly Criterion) or it's no smarter than all those people losing money in Vegas. Of course, if you'd only ever spoken to the people who'd won big in Vegas, then you would think that was a smart thing to do. What you're buying with money is time. More throws of the dice. Well, chances are if you didn't make it in the first £500,000, or £1,000,000 or whatever your initial kitty is, the time that some piddling amount (compared to the budget of a company) buys you isn't going to make an appreciable difference. > I'm 25, I feel like I'm losing at life already. It was okay to be broke earlier, because it's expected. It's not anymore, when almost none of your peers are. Also, I'm not in a developed country, where being broke means living on ~$1k a month. I've been living on ~$200 a month. Gamblers lose from time to time, it happens. But the nice dis-analogy with gambling is that in life, as long as you're breathing and not in jail or something like that, there's a chance to make something of yourself. You shouldn't spend those chances on foolish things, but they're there. A start-up is not your life. Five years down the line you could be just as rich as the age-adjusted median wealth for your category would suggest. |