Perseverance is an awesome trait, and real tenacity is a rarity in this instant gratification world. I deeply admire those who just keep at it despite incredible hardship. However, there are at least a couple of things I can think of that people need to be cautious about.

1) Not every venture has the possibility of a profitiable outcome. There is real wisdom in knowing when and how to get out and do something else. Often you can change the gameplan on the same venture, but sometimes it isn't possible. It is possible to waste your time trying to ride a dead horse.

2) Entrepeneurs often don't like to hear it, but there is more to life than work. It is possible to spend too much time and energy on your business. There is a long line of middle-aged (and older) men and women with kids that won't talk to them, spouses who divorced them, friends who wonder whatever happened to them (and even worse situations that I won't enumerate) all because they were so focused on never giving up on their business that they sacrificed their personal lives to try to "make it happen". Be tenacious, be determined, but be in control of your business life -- don't let it control you.

The problem is that success has many different definitions, and to succeed at one of them, you often have to fail at several others.

For example, say that an entrepreneur has this burning idea for a revolutionary new MMORPG, one based around social interaction instead of hack 'n slash. They find out that very few people care, but in the course of building it, they end up building an easy way to share photos online. Should they keep pushing through with their original idea and refuse to fail? Or should they admit that their original idea was kinda useless and go with what people actually want?

This happens over and over again. The podcasting company that realizes their product is lame and invents a way to broadcast 140-character messages by SMS. The server-side JavaScript framework that nobody uses who decides to build a collaborative editing app on top of it. The guys who wanted to put art galleries online, then discover that art galleries don't want to be online and so branch out into general online stores. The HotOrNot clone that compares Harvard students with barnyard animals, then gets busted by the administration and becomes a social network instead.

Problem is that it's not usually possible to tell, a priori, which ideas deserve to fail and which ones will succeed given a bit more effort. Imagine if someone had told Larry Page that his idea to crawl the web and look at the link structure was stupid, and he'd be much better off with a web portal. And that's why entrepreneurship is hard.

I agree with everything you say, but I didn't get the sense that the original article was about iteration.

It wasn't. It was just about being able to accept that whatever idea you started out with either is going to fizzle or "evolve" so much that you can't be thinking that one idea will somehow get you through. Instead be prepared to have several ideas, perhaps in many different fields.

People like telling the story of the team who started going one way and ended up somewhere else, successfully, because it conforms to their idea that some kind of attribute must be a discriminating factor (in this case the team is that factor). But I simply don't know if that's a true statement or not. I'd bet that many times it's just a dice roll whether team X can handle as many pivots that are necessary to make it all in one go. That's from my observations of lots of teams, but it's just a guess.

GP hit the nail on the head: good entrepreneurship means knowing when to hang on and when to iterate. And there are no books for that one.

I think that because our brains love order, and because we're always trying to put order on everything we see even if it's not there, we take lots of cognitive leaps to build some kind of mental model on "what it takes to succeed". With the "great teams succeed" model, the brain has a field day because selection bias and circular reasoning is in full-force. Whatever your model is, however, it should include the role of chance or you're likely to be really disappointed. And life is too short to get so distraught over the part that chance takes in getting started.

I agree. Every rational person realizes failure is possible. The most motivated acknowledge that at the outset, when setting up partner terms and agreements, and never consider it an option again until failure is real.

That said, I also think there is an important differentiation between focusing on failure and realizing when its time to cut away from a bad project/idea/concept and adapt. Adapting from incremental failures is critical to success.

> Adapting from incremental failures is critical to success.

That's an absolute gem. Because that is exactly how it goes. My luck was to be involved in two companies that simply paid me a wage, they had a reasonably good idea at the time, they were good enough in their execution, one was 10 years ahead of its time (the idea has since been adopted and is now common practice), the other failed because of terrible planning and marketing.

My gain was as much or more looking from the position of a salaried employee and to learn as much as if it was my own company that failed.

If it hadn't been for those two projects I wouldn't have stood a chance in hell with my own business, even today I benefit from that experience.

The most important thing you can do if your project tanks is to really sit down and mine it for what its worth with respect to the lessons that you can learn from it. Then it's time well spent, otherwise it is wasted and you will likely make the same mistake(s) again.

Especially in a world that is moving so fast that during the lifetime of a single individual no single strategy will continue to work this is absolutely essential.

The days when you could invent a gadget and live your life long on the proceeds are pretty much gone, you are most likely not going to see many people be handed out golden watches for 50 years dedicated service to 'the company' in the future.

And that will only get worse, as product life cycles shorten and new inventions build on previous ones at an ever accelerating pace.

I call that the startup advice contradiction: http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/12/18/startup-advice-contr...

How can you both fail fast and be resilient? Isn't giving both advice the same as hedging a bet? Then you can say "I told you so", no matter what happens...

I think if you view being a successful startup as some simple set of teachable attributes, like "founders and businesses that refuse to fail eventually succeed", then you are living in a fantasy world. Let's assume for a moment that there aren't a zillion different "how to succeed in startup" books. Let's say there are a 100 things you must do to succeed.

So you do all of them. Odd are you will still fail. That is, odds are that whatever you set out to do will not be successful.

I think perhaps we are playing semantics games. If you start with a good team and pivot repeatedly, always adjusting your business model to find and target the customer, and then never giving up? Then you've done exactly what I recommend -- failing a lot repeatedly (and quickly) You probably can fail a lot better with a good team iterating quickly than you can forming a new team each time, or giving it one 4-year shot every decade or so.

If, on the other hand, you view gaining skills and pieces of knowledge as incremental rather than pivotal factors, and you understand that the odds are naturally against anybody, then it becomes a zen thing, just like sales. Just like sales, you adjust your attitude, you screw down your courage, and you go give it all you've got. Just like sales, success comes from within and not without. Just like sales, you do the best, right thing everyday but you're looking at the long haul for value.

Some folks think successful startups are just luck. They are partially right and partially wrong. Some folks think successful startups are like a science, something you can learn and perform repeatedly. They also are partially right and partially wrong.

The only real answer is that success has to come from inside of you long before it appears on a balance sheet. That you create your own value by acting in accordance with your values. From there success will naturally follow.

If that sounds too mushy I apologize. I just hear people in such pain about how screwed up it all is, and I wish somebody would sit down and explain to them some of this stuff.

I'm probably just struggling to disagree at this point. :-) On the other hand, there's already a lot of information "out there"; I spent years considering the idea of starting and running a business before doing it. Other people don't. To each their own.

If your post was intended to be about iteration, I didn't get that from it. I read "failure" -- especially since the post linked to the whole sordid affair over fundable.com, which has failed in pretty much every sense of the word -- to imply the demise of the company (and the demoralisation of the founder[s]).

For failing quickly -- and iterating, and hopefully learning from the failures -- there are numerous proverbs from Go [1] (the game, not the neophyte language). I also recall reading a very good essay recently, something along the lines of "fail as quickly as possible", but can't find it now.

So, the advice is already out there, for those that would heed it anyway.

[1]: e.g. http://senseis.xmp.net/?LoseYourFirst50GamesAsQuicklyAsPossi...

Disagreeing is good :) That's the benefit of the blog+HN approach. You can write an article and then do Q&A in a public forum. It is the best of both worlds. Hopefully by disagreeing we'll explain what we're talking about more.

I remember reading Founders At Work. One of the points that one of the founders made was "don't try to read too many business books" His point, I think, was that it was really easy to fill your head with lots of great ideas. And executing was more important than all of them.

There was a saying I heard once: work on sales and all your other problems will take care of themselves. It doesn't mean that other things aren't important, just that there are some key metrics for any business.

I've spent a lot of time reading a lot of books (and HN) about startups. I think finally it's all congealed with me -- I got it. Perhaps I am sadly disillusioned, but I don't scratch my head like I used to any more. When I read an article like the one I read today, I don't think "What kind of idiots wouldn't invest in such a cool idea?" Instead I think "Wonder why the community has failed this person such that he expects something much different than what he got?"

I'm done commenting, though. We've probably beaten this horse to death by now :-)