from Hacker News

How Not to Die (2007)

by sellingwebsite on 11/11/19, 2:03 PM with 130 comments

  • by andygcook on 11/11/19, 4:49 PM

    For us the main indication of impending doom is when we don't hear from you. When we haven't heard from, or about, a startup for a couple months, that's a bad sign. If we send them an email asking what's up, and they don't reply, that's a really bad sign. So far that is a 100% accurate predictor of death.

    Can someone at YC comment on if this is still a good proxy for startup failure?

    From a personal perspective, we've sent out an investor update every single month [1] for our startup over the last four years. We also almost ran out of money at the end of 2017. The updates around that time were the hardest ones send out, but I can confirm they did help keep the company alive by forcing me to create and articulate a survival plan to our investors to get to profitability, which we pulled off [2] and are still going strong today.

    --

    [1] The template we use for investor updates if you're curious: https://app.tettra.co/teams/tettra/pages/investor-update-tem... [2] The story about how we almost ran out of money but survived: https://tettra.co/blog/navigating-the-depths-of-nearly-faili...

  • by randall on 11/11/19, 4:02 PM

    My version of this story:

    I almost quit a year ago, exactly today, then my company got acquired. A story (with pictures! only on Twitter though, link at the bottom.)

    This is what I looked like last March 27. [horrible pic] One month prior... My dad passed away. I wasn't having a good month. But that wasn't what happened on March 27. I took a photo on March 27 because it was probably the worst I had felt in the last 5 years. Even worse than my dad's death. (We had a complicated relationship).

    So yeah. We were dead. Like dead dead. I got my cofounders together on Monday, March 26 (today) for our team meeting. I laid out our situation and that I was going to fire myself.

    [journal entry photo explaining the situation]

    I woke up a lot of days and worked as hard as I could. But honestly it didn't matter. My fate had actually been set in motion five to ten years prior.

    I didn't give up, and I didn't sit on my laurels. Ironically, I started reading a book called "Performing Under Pressure", and the entire premise of the book is basically: Act like you're not under pressure and you'll do your best work.

    https://www.amazon.com/Performing-Under-Pressure-Science-Mat...

    See, this idea that I had been working on? I started working on the seeds for it in roughly 2008. It's the same idea I'm working on now. Here's me giving a talk about the idea in 2011, roughly 3 years before founding Vidpresso.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vYJ0w3UuM0

    As @justinkan and now my coworkers at Facebook know, I'm tenacious AF about this idea, and I know it's gonna happen.

    But last year, it didn't seem like it was going to happen. Not only that, it seemed like the entire last 7 years were about to unwind, and I was going to start back from scratch.

    Lots of entries like this one in my @dayoneapp. [Dead tired journal image.]

    And some like this one unfortunately. #openup #mentalhealth #suicide

    [suicidal journal image]

    But then, one week later. This entry hits my journal.

    [Wow, yesterday was insane. journal entry]

    Then my journal kind of goes silent because I got really busy for a while.

    But then this really cool thing happened.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/13/facebook-vidpresso/

    This isn't some sort of rags to riches story: I knew my idea was solid and I can have people vouch for me, I'm tenacious AF, don't give up, and really the issue with me was that my idea was / is too early (still!)

    But the other lesson is that for a certain subset of people: You'll probably always be happiest working on the problem you find most interesting, with your best friends, at a company who cares about your interests. Find that, and hold on to it.

    It took me a long time to get those things together, but I think I have all of them now. It's very, very surprising, but I've learned a lot and I'm very grateful.

    I now want to try to help others. If you're in your founder journey, feel free to DM! I'll try to help! It takes a long time though... it took me well over 10 years, and I'm still just getting started. Don't be in a hurry.

    Also an addendum: The timing is really what worked out. We happened to have the right tech at the right time with the right partners. I'm in love with my job at FB, mostly because I had been derisking it for years.

    When we joined FB, Interactivity had just become very important to FB. So it really was all about timing and persistence. We were in the game long enough for it to work out.

    ---

    It doesn't work out for everyone, but it did for me. :)

    thread: https://twitter.com/randallb/status/1110669172487286784

  • by diego on 11/11/19, 4:42 PM

    I don't think "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich" has proven true. I've invested in startups (including YC ones) that followed this to a tee. They never found product-market fit, they could have been going forever, investors forgot about them. Some are still going, some managed to get acquired, some closed shop.

    It's really a false dichotomy, only a small fraction of the companies that avoid dying manage to explode. You just don't hear about the rest.

  • by maxlamb on 11/11/19, 5:58 PM

    I think this essay was valid for the year it was written (2007) where much fewer people were doing startups, lots of good ideas had not been executed yet, mobile was about to take off. Just like the belief in 2007 that "real estate prices can never go down" lead to the real estate bubble/crash that eventually invalidated that statement, if everyone starts beleiving if they start a company and never give up they will become rich even if their idea is bad, will end up invalidating that very belief.

  • by jessmartin on 11/11/19, 3:41 PM

    I read this post so many times when I was working on my startup (https://first.io). I particularly love this quote: "Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!"

    In fact, I even had it as a banner on my desktop for a while: "JUST KEEP TYPING!"

  • by pascalxus on 11/11/19, 10:47 PM

    Paul Graham usually writes some really good stuff, but this is highly misleading: "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich." There are soo many projects that can continue in obscurity on a shoe string budget, never to amount to anything. You could continue to invest in those businesses great effort and money all for nothing. ProductHunt is filled to brim with failed projects. Even, Google one of the world's most successful companies, has countless projects that didn't work out. Were they supposed to keep pouring 100s of millions of dollars in projects that could never succeed?

    Furthermore, it's misleading because it implies that things are within your control. That, all you have to do is the right thing and you'll be successful. Nothing could be further from the truth. When you have a bad idea that didn't work out because of lack of consumer demand (the #1 reason why software startups die), then, after you've tried everything, there's not much else to do. It's better to shut down or pivot to something where there is demand.

  • by gfodor on 11/11/19, 8:09 PM

    You can def be typing while your startup dies. Maybe it's the exception not the rule though.

    My last startup was firing on all cylinders, with addicted early adopters, and our team literally shipped features the last day we could pay them because they loved the project and team so much. It didn't matter much to the VCs who declined to invest further. If you can't pay your people, they can't eat, and they can't work on the startup any further. So if you're not profitable, you're always subject to investor sentiment and calculus to survive, and that can often be a totally separate question of if you still have the drive to push further and continue to reply to emails.

    In those scenarios where you have investors, you can't just go into 'hibernation mode' and get the founders back on the ramen lifestyle to keep going if you are hitting the trough, because on the way down you will be forced to sell or liquidate all the existing IP and other assets to help existing investors and debtholders recoup their losses. So you're left with nothing but the idea, and insofar as you want to continue to pursue similar ideas you run the risk of getting sued since you've sold the IP.

    So, its certainly possible for the market to 'correct' you out of existence, even if you have the deepest will to keep going and are willing to sacrifice almost anything to do so. The best thing you can do at this point is to move on and try to leverage what you've learned or the networks you've built into something you're similarly interested in.

  • by dang on 11/11/19, 7:04 PM

  • by JesseAldridge on 11/11/19, 8:12 PM

    It should be stated that the flip side of not giving up is incurring the massive opportunity cost of years of lost compensation. That can easily be over a million dollars for a good software engineer.

    If you're a genius, then sure, not giving up makes a lot of sense. But if you're just pretty smart, you better think two, three, or four times before committing to do a startup. It's really easy to end up over thirty and broke.

  • by MetalGuru on 11/11/19, 5:00 PM

    The biggest issue with the article is clearly correlation vs. causation. He admits to it. I think this advice can be dangerous for someone sacrificing a great deal for a startup that has a extremely low probability of success because “PG says I’ll be a millionaire as long as I just don’t let my startup die”

  • by throwaway35784 on 11/11/19, 5:23 PM

    > If you can just avoid dying, you get rich.

    Or end up a zombie startup. I'm not buying this stuff. It sounds more like an exploration of what works than a recommendation. Signs of success rather than suggestions for how to succeed.

    > keep typing

    Telling you about our progress leads to success? I believe you have your cause and effect out of order.

    > 90% of those who get into Newsweek would survive.

    Source? I see no evidence to support this is the survival factor. Why did those who got into Newsweek get there? It's comorbidity at best.

  • by jpincheira on 11/11/19, 3:58 PM

    I love this. I have read it a few times in the last years. This and Never Quit If [1] from Jason Lemkin have been essential for me to keep pursuing and never stop building my startup [2].

    [1] https://www.saastr.com/never-quit-if/

    [2] https://standups.io

  • by excalibur on 11/11/19, 6:07 PM

    > When we were visiting Yahoo to talk about being acquired, we had to interrupt everything and borrow one of their conference rooms to talk down an investor who was about to back out of a new funding round we needed to stay alive. So even in the middle of getting rich we were fighting off the grim reaper.

    This sounds like it was pulled directly from an episode of Silicon Valley.

  • by Bostonian on 11/11/19, 3:54 PM

    'Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with "but we're going to keep working on the startup," you are in big trouble.'

    Since many start-up ideas are bad ones, it often will be rational for start-up founders to quit and do other things.

  • by pixelmonkey on 11/11/19, 4:34 PM

    I wrote a 2012 reflection on this post, "Why Startups Die", that I think still holds up:

    https://amontalenti.com/2012/10/03/why-startups-die

  • by nexuist on 11/11/19, 4:59 PM

    >A variant is to stay in touch with other YC-funded startups. There is now a whole neighborhood of them in San Francisco. If you move there, the peer pressure that made you work harder all summer will continue to operate.

    Funny how much that single sentence changed what life was like on the West Coast. Now we are witnessing mini-Valleys springing up in other cities desperate to replicate what San Francisco did for startups.

  • by mschuster91 on 11/11/19, 4:44 PM

    From the part about Octopart:

    > The distributors want to prevent the transparency that comes from having prices online.

    Some manufacturers are worse, they don't publish datasheets (looking at you, Intel VDSL chipset department, laptop keyboard manufacturers, Broadcom). It's almost as if there are companies that want to lock out anyone not a multi-million company to tinker with their products...

  • by SandroG on 11/11/19, 4:06 PM

    How prophetic. This was written just before the Great Recession of 2008.

  • by consultutah on 11/11/19, 3:50 PM

    So did the Octopart guys ever become billionaires?

  • by mcguire on 11/11/19, 8:59 PM

    "Don't take advice from the successful; they might just be lucky."

      -- anon

  • by tabtab on 11/13/19, 12:49 AM

    I can build a flowchart out of this article, but realized it has no end: it's an infinite loop. There has to be a point where you give up after get-user-feedback-tweak-and-try-again happens too many times. It's almost like a genetic algorithm where somebody forgot to put an upper limit on the regeneration loop count.

    Sure, tweak-and-try-again can keep going on until you eventually stumble on the right formula, since you'll eventually exhaust all possible related ideas, but it may be 2 years or 2 centuries until you hit it.

    Somebody may have to put a time limit on how long they'll try. For example, "I'll try for 4 years, and if nothing looks viable after 4 years, I'll get a real job or go to grad school."

  • by elmar on 11/11/19, 6:30 PM

    Personally I Think Paul Graham is very under appreciated, his legacy on the Startup ecosystem and zeitgeist will probably only be recognised many years on the future. It's a great pity that he doesn't write these wonderful essays for some time now.

  • by azinman2 on 11/11/19, 5:33 PM

    > “In fact, it's kind of weird when you think about it, because our definition of success is that the founders get rich.“

    Does this not appear to be really terrible to others? That the metric of success is just founders getting rich? At minimum, what about employees? But really, shouldn’t we be aiming higher where the companies are creating useful impact on the world and improving it?

    I understand he’s saying this as a contrast to the investors getting rich, but this train of thought and the people chasing it is what has caused SF to lose its soul IMHO.

  • by JoeMayoBot on 11/12/19, 3:54 AM

    Sounds more inspirational than literal. He sets the scene as the last Y Combinator dinner of the Summer. Folks are probably taking the evening to relax and something too serious wouldn't fit the mood. Just reading this, I can see the humor, yet appreciate good advice cleverly mixed in to share a few meaningful tips.

  • by mapcars on 11/12/19, 8:10 AM

    >founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars

    Oh that's not the best factor to look for, as one can go beyond the fear of failure and this won't work anymore.

  • by sdoken123 on 11/11/19, 6:16 PM

    This article seems to contradict the advice given in the other too trending hacker news article right now which says: “Makers, don’t let yourself be forced into the ‘Manager Schedule’“ no?

  • by haskellandchill on 11/11/19, 8:16 PM

    Hm I was looking for some more practical advice on avoiding death.

  • by pragmatic on 11/12/19, 1:24 AM

    Why did they add the terrible "read more" garbage?

    Et tu PG?

  • by ncmncm on 11/13/19, 4:08 AM

    Graham essays are, as a rule, good. But for each mention of Lisp, they are half as good. Half as good can still be pretty good, but one mentioned Lisp more than two dozen times. There was very little good left.

    This one doesn't mention Lisp at all. It's pretty good.

  • by agumonkey on 11/11/19, 7:29 PM

    fascinated by how much of this is emotional :

    - don't invent excuses

    - don't lose faith

    - talk to others a lot

    - keep making them happy

  • by IGotThroughIt on 11/11/19, 6:26 PM

    Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!

    My most important takeaway.

  • by streetcat1 on 11/11/19, 5:04 PM

    The logical rule is quite simple:

    1. Bootstrap 2. Reach cash flow positive asap.

  • by lamubanao on 11/12/19, 1:06 AM

    that depends on your luck to be honest, although I think it's not true in any way but you can always think like that and you will have a better life

  • by perfunctory on 11/11/19, 4:41 PM

    > One of the most interesting things we've discovered from working on Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating.

    Oh, boy. Why can't we have a world where I can pursue my interests without the fear of loosing something. I guess if people read Bertrand Russell [0] instead of Paul Graham, the world would be a better place.

    [0] http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

  • by ronilan on 11/11/19, 5:38 PM

    Everybody dies, Sally. The thing is, to die well.

  • by Etheryte on 11/11/19, 3:36 PM

    Could use a (2007) in the title. Previous discussion with the most comments:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=769163

  • by briffle on 11/11/19, 5:34 PM

    I know Paul Graham's legendary status, but someone needs to sit with him for 30 min, and get letsencrypt deployed to his webiste.

  • by uptownfunk on 11/11/19, 4:32 PM

    Epic post, love it.

  • by cyborgx7 on 11/11/19, 5:44 PM

    >because our definition of success is that the founders get rich

    The entire start-up industry is a get-rich-quick scheme and a cancer on society.

  • by markstos on 11/11/19, 5:26 PM

    Since Paul Graham is a vegetarian, I presumed the title was referring to a review of the book "How Not to Die". https://nutritionfacts.org/book/