Comment by quantumwoke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quantumwoke | Hacker News Reader

There are many stages for a nascent startup to fail. Getting into the incubator is only the first step, and perhaps the easiest to give up at. I would encourage all people who got rejected to fail-fast and keep trying.

I have a friend who got into an incubator with a crypto idea and very positive feedback on the idea. Six months after funding, the whole thing imploded due to personal conflict. At the time, my friend had recently up with his girlfriend of five years and the venture ran out of steam. They ended up returning the money to investors. When the crypto bubble hit he was kicking himself having just missed out.

After that, he took a break to go overseas and recuperate. As I write this, my friend has just closed a $1m seed round for his next project and is well on the way to rolling it out. Last night he popped the question to his now fiance. It's important to remember that startups are a marathon, not a sprint. Roll with the punches, learn from your mistakes and keep on hustling :).

I have a few friends who fought to grow their company out over years and ended up doing very well.

Funding just means more resources to execute the idea, but doesn't ensure success at all.

> Funding just means more resources to execute the idea, but doesn't ensure success at all.

‘Nuff said.

On the flip side, the toughest thing sometimes with startups is to decide when to draw that line in the sand where you can say "okay, this isn't working, time to move on." You tend to bias yourself and your success. The YC partners are smart and have generally been right every single time when something I was working on wasn't going to work.

Your comment echos a conversation I was having with my wife the other day as she was reading me bits from Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance Book by Angela Duckworth.

As you might infer from the title the thesis is that Grit is a very powerful force. My comment in our discussion was that this whole body of social science research and life/career advice comes into conflict with other bodies of advice about cutting one's losses, the value of killing 'failing' projects early, avoiding the trap of sunk costs.

How do we personally know or offer advice to others about whether current difficulties are likely to be overcome by renewed effort and persistence and when do we say it isn't working, try something very different?

There are some examples of people plugging away on a 'failed' project for decades and eventually striking it rich.

Indeed, and that is the lure. And, when we read stories like that we get motivated to press on and never give up. But who writes the stories of someone who worked on a failed project for 20 years and never got anywhere? If we persist what are the odds that we will be the one for whom it works out?

The question of when to persist, how long to persist and how to pay the bills while you persist are very personal to me.

In 2000 I and a friend did research and the very beginnings of development on a semantic analysis technique that was notably better than anything we could find at the time including from Google and other search engines. But we couldn't find money fast enough and we both had families to support so we went our separate ways and did other things that were more commercial.

About 7 years later VCs started funding similar technologies. And, somewhere around 2010 to 2013 technology seemed to have caught up to where we were at in 2000.

So should we have persisted? It kind of seems like we should have. But, I have seen enough of life to know that sometimes a group of people have a lot going for them, winning awards, raising funding, rolling out product and still end up running into a roadblock on the way to commercial success that sinks them.

Timing sometimes matters a whole lot.

That's because the vast majority of the start-ups won't work and all YC has to do is to pick the best from a batch, not viable start-ups in a vacuum. The more background data they have the better their decisions. Classes and the alumni network are the reason YC scales the way it does.

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