When we talk and hear about start-ups, mostly it’s about all the Big Amazing Things companies are doing or going to do. How we’re going to Revolutionize X or Transform Y or Reimagine Z.
But for all the talk about the big things we all set out to do, most of daily startup life, especially at the early stage, is about one thing:
Not dying.
The true daily grind of startups is about evading the thousands of ways you can die - either through your own naivity and stupidity or because of a hostile market or external conditions.
The truth is, that the vast majority of start-ups die because:
co-founder conflict and differences in vision/direction/action
ran out of money (eg. hired too fast, spent too much)
ran out of conviction
And then yes, start-ups do die because the world really didn’t want or need the thing you were making.
But the thing is: time and time again there have been examples that that is a survivable problem.
That if you figure out fast enough that no one wants what you’re making, iterate fast enough based on what the people do want, and keep making progress, that you can evade death.
But all that takes time. And you buy that time by…. not dying.
The founders who can stay motivated, stay lean, stay close to their users and the market, most importantly: stay alive, are the ones that often figure it out. In big ways.
There are countless examples but the stories of Notion and Figma and Slack and Twitch are legendary in how they survived their way to something more.
Simple and rational in the abstract, but this takes brutal actions on the part of the founders. Brutal honesty when things aren’t working. Letting go of incredible early teams. Waking up just to throw yourself into the gruelling grind again. Starting over and over from scratch - deliberately putting yourself back at the beginning and wiping out any hard earned gains. Scraping and crawling and humbly existing until you can do and be more. Until you can earn the right to rehire and rebuild.
It’s a more subtle advantage for founders who can raise more early money. It gives more runway, more time, to figure things out. But it can be a disadvantage. A feeling of a comfortable cushion that never pushes the team to do the necessary until it might be too late.
One of the hardest parts of being a founder is knowing when to call it. And when not to. I can speak with excruciating intimacy on the topic because some days it feels like I have been living on this razor’s edge for the better part of 8 years.
And all I have to say on this topic is: if there is the smallest part of you that wants to keep going, then:
Don’t die.
Refuse to die.
Find every way to stay alive.
Even if it means firing friends and taking a break and starting from scratch.
Give yourself every chance to figure it out.
Because if you want to, I’m certain you can and you will.