The hard part of juggling startup risks feels more of the reverse of what Ben's remembering.
It's not that you need to spot a ball is about to drop and catch it. Founders are up at 2am and every e-staff & advice meeting thinking about them & then acting on them. However, running at all of them will give you a heart attack, burn out your team, and derail your mission.
Instead, you have to accept that a ton of balls are dropping, and somehow get good at guiding which & how. Now that's a chapter I'd like to read :)
Re:Which Way Do You Run?
by Judgmentality on Thursday October 17, 2019 @09:18PM
(#21287835)
As someone who started a company and had it fail years ago, I still consider that a defining moment in ruining my life today. The knock-on effects are not so simple unless you have the benefit of tens of millions of dollars of exceedingly wealthy investors' money to play with. Relationships destroyed, people's finances ruined, people that had nothing to do with my company losing their jobs. I was often told my biggest mistake as a founder was that I cared about people rather than money.
This post reeks of the privilege of a VC who sells self-help books.
To put it kindly, I disagree.
In the context that Ben is writing this post (founding a startup), basically the worst thing that can happen to you is that your company goes bankrupt and you have to look for a job. It feels a lot scarier than that because your ego gets wrapped up in the startup and all sorts of negative events can be existential threats to the startup, but there are basically no physical threats to your person other than yourself. If a tiger comes running at you or someone points a gun at you, by all means, be afraid and run away, but if you're signing a $30M lease, be afraid and then face that fear and rationally analyze the risks.