If you draw out this line of thinking, pretty much all tragedy is whining. Shakespeare would go like this:

  ROMEO: That Juliet chick is hot!
  BENVOLIO: Dude, she's Capulet.  Find some other ho, plenty of fish in the sea.
  ROMEO: Good point.
  FIN.

This story is well-written narrative. It's something many of us have experienced to various degrees, and a cautionary tale for those still in the euphoric stage. Take it for what it is -- a reminder that not every startup story is a fairy tale.

Now get back to work.

One could similarly make the argument that a factory worker in the midwest should get some perspective and see how bad the kids with swollen stomachs and vultures overhead have it. Obviously that's not fair.

This is a person who committed a couple of years, a good chunk of capital, and a good relationship for an idea. And on top of that, they gambled their pride - to try so hard and still fail is a defeating feeling. Especially when people around you are succeeding at the same game.

Admittedly this is all presumptuous, but that's the point. For all we know this could be a work of fiction. Or the author might have struggled through all of this and then some. It seems similarly presumptuous too to conclude that the author has a privileged perspective.

Please understand, though: it's not that someone is worse-off than this startup founder. There's always someone worse off. The unemployed factory worker is in a far better position than an impoverished rural Chinese farmer. It's that most people are worse-off than the startup founder. Even most Americans.

Is it fair to expect someone in his position to have perspective?

I think if you ask him about the failure six months or a year later, a resilient person would be able to put it in perspective, but not while it's happening.

It is exactly clear to me how unhappy this sentiment makes startup people on HN, and that's fine. I take no offense.

Where do you draw the line and why there and not elsewhere? What's "proper pain"?

To be honest, I'm somewhat on your side and tend to take the "shut up and grow up already" mentality regarding people whining (suffering) about painful life events, but that view does not answer the above question reasonably, it just ends up denouncing whatever you personally cannot withstand or are annoyed with.

I personally don't get worked up about that kind of self commiserating sentences.

Trying to paint degrees of hopelessness on people and saying the privileged shouldn't complain is wrong. You are always the privileged to someone else.

Being happy is what everyone aspires to - and for many, it means success and doing stuff - as in creating, or as in having a job (much more important that having a salary at least to some people such as Ghandi)

The 48 yo unqualified factory worker right to happiness is just as important as your and mine - we haven't find a good way to say which persons happiness are to be prioritized.

Also, the right to happiness doesn't and shouldn't mean forced equality for everyone - some will fail, some will succeed.

But IMHO you're very wrong in your rant. You shouldn't say that what you consider "priviledged" should shut up - it almost read as if they should engage in some shadefreude, finding happiness while watching other people barely making a living. That's even worse.

You should celebrate instead that he had a chance, and wish him and every other human being to succeed in their endeavours - whatever they are.

Whatever that means.

It's hard for me to unpack my comment more than that. I wrote what I thought after I read the post. I make no claim to that comment being unassailable; in fact, I made the opposite claim in the comment!

Maybe it's the question that's most important to me. Take a swipe at it? What's so bad about a tech startup failing in 2012?

Thanks for listening to me, though. I obviously managed to lose you completely with my original comment. I'll think about how I managed to do that. I probably won't actually learn from it, but I'll take a shot. :)

Spoken like a true data security professional.

If you're Thomas Ptacek the security person, I wonder if you realize that people are jealous of you, too. (Yes, even though you earned what you have.)

This will be a very difficult Thanksgiving for me, while I try to keep my startup alive.

I sympathize with the guy who just lost more money than I'm likely ever to have. Even though I have it worse than he does. I don't actually want someone telling him to keep it quiet on my behalf.

Maybe the next time you're on a down streak, you'll remember sympathy.

It's easy to forget that even with privilege, failure hurts and is scary.

I daresay my problems are somewhat worse than those of the OP's CEO. He isn't in a divorce, doesn't have kids, does he? And yeah, even if my problems are worse, they're still distinctly First World. It isn't as if I have trouble finding potable water for my kids, or have to worry about teenager "soldiers" raping my daughter. So maybe I too am Entitled. And perhaps I too should just Shut Up.

But I don't think so. I can tell you for an absolutely fucking fact that my problems have hurt like hell. And I am pretty goddam sure that those of this guy hurt pretty damn hard too. This guy put his ass out there on the line, everything he had, and came up LOSER. That's going to sting for any one with an ounce of pride. Yes, yes, yes, he'll land some VP Biz Dev job and he'll be All Right but the dream of being his own man has kind of taken a turn for the worse, hasn't it? I daresay that he and I both would drop our crying towels and head for the recruiters' office if the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor tomorrow, and our current problems would seem pretty fucking silly when viewed atop some modern day Iwo Jima. Nevertheless we don't at this exact moment have the benefit of all that perspective and holy shit, this hurts.

I have SEEN with my own two eyes people with whom I would not trade places for a single second. I have seen the people with the serious wrist scars, the verticals-along-the-veins of the suicides who mean business. I have talked with men so schizophrenic I almost cried to see a human mind so shattered before me. I have slept with a woman for no other purpose than to hear her rise "to go to the bathroom" so I could follow her and ensure she wasn't going to the kitchen to do the serious wrist thing. I have heard a mother wailing at the death of her only child.

So I know what Pain looks like and I know I am damn sight removed from how fucking Bad It Can Get. Okay? And I still know that were I have been hurt like hell, and it made no sense to me. And the last goddam thing I needed was some asshole sneering about how much worse it could be. I mean, no shit, Sherlock.

See thing about perspective is, it's _rational_. It's detached from a moment and a circumstance. The thing about pain is, it is _not_ rational. It is emotional and is about you and your moment. And no one who ever cared enough about anything to accomplish something did it without emotion.

Someone put their ass out on the line. They Failed. It hurts. First World problem? Absolutely. Guess what, here in the first world, we're people too, and we hurt too. We will get over it, we will move on, we will acquire the perspective you so generously commend to us.

But hopefully we'll retain enough knowledge of the pain to have a little sympathy for those going through it.

It's that most Americans are worse off than this person.

This is startup exceptionalism. It is the intersection between nerd exceptionalism and the myth of the heroic entrepreneur, both of which are virulent memes in our culture right now. And how I think I know that is, I imagine the kinds of comments that would be on HN if we were writing about an investment banker's dashed dreams. They'd start with "fuck you", too, but they'd be aimed at the author of the article.

I'm sorry that the way I articulated this perspective offends you. I probably wrote it carelessly and offensively. But it is the right perspective.

You're being surprisingly sensitive and insensitive at the same time. It doesn't matter that most Americans are worse off than the guy, he didn't write a report for the Census Bureau.

He saw something, had an idea, for him this idea was as good as real, and then it died. Along with everything he had invested in it which wasn't just money but probably also a good part of his self-image, reputation and ego.

The fear of failure is so powerful that most people never even try. And he had all their worst fears come true.

You know how people are terrified of public speaking? When you did that the first time, did "hey, it's no biggie" helped and assuaged your fears?

I do not think less of actual startup founders who are unhappy when their companies fail. I just do not care for this particular fictitious character and would like to push back against the veneration of his fictitious feelings, which are (fictitiously) unreasonable.

No. It isn't.

Please don't confuse your ennui with other people's need to actually communicate their pain when they're in pain.

Even if they're people you're jealous of.

It does not matter if other people are better or worse off. This isn't a race.

Nobody is helped by your foot-stomping here. This is ego salvation.

Your perspective -that the presence of pain you perceive to be "greater" invalidates what pain you perceive to be "lesser"- is warped beyond decency. Some might even define it as evil; I would not go that far, but such casual dismissal of pain as you demonstrate is Not OK.

Interesting that you offer a subjective moral value judgement, in the language of a universal truth.

Hacker News fosters a prominent startup community. Of course we're going to commiserate with this guy - we can identify with him. It's like posting an article about some dude going through a divorce on a marriage forum. People will commiserate with him. You wouldn't post about an investment banker there. If you posted about an investment banker on an investment banking forum however, I'm sure they would commiserate with him just as we are with this guy.

But that's another point entirely, because the investment banker's sorrow for his situation is just as valid as this failed entrepreneur's. Hell, I bet Hitler felt sorry for himself after losing WWII and killing millions of people, and that was just as valid. It is fully understandable for them to feel great pain at their condition, as they poured their hearts and lives into one thing or another, no matter how great or how small, how right or how wrong - they led their lives as they thought best, and it ended in failure or catastrophe - no matter how fleeting. You don't tell a grieving mother who just lost their child that it gets better, that they can just have a new one and really it's not as bad as it could have been, some poor mother just lost all three of her kids! And even though you're right - it does get better, and it could be worse, just as it is in this case, that mother will still grieve the loss of her child and this entrepreneur will still mourn the failure of his company. And deep down inside, I'm sure they know logically that it will get better, that it's not as bad as it could have been - but emotionally, right now, it still feels like the end of the world.

This story could easily end one of three ways that I see presently - one, he kills himself now in the height of his emotional sorrow, two, he gets back on the hill and starts another company that either succeeds or fails (in which case, repeat these three cases), or three, he takes a steady job giving a steady income for a stable life but never achieves the great dreams he hoped to (or he starts another company at a later date in which case repeat scenario 2).

However, regardless of which path he takes, his pain in the present moment is valid. It is not made any less valid by the fact that he is better off than most people in one of his resultant possible scenarios.

Moreover, is it valid for him to want more than his peers? What if he's really not satisfied by leading a stable life with a stable income? Is that okay? Or should we slap him in the face and tell him he's fucking lucky to be where he is and he needs to stop acting so privileged and ungrateful? And if the answer is no, it's not valid for him to want more, then it's equally invalid for us to want anything as well. Where do you draw the line? Are we ungrateful and overly privileged for wanting more than some bland minimally nutritious food and a roof over our heads? Are we ungrateful and overly privileged to want basic plumbing, a nice hot shower, a family that loves us, to be valued in our society and to be able to contribute to our society, anything at all? How is it up to us to judge what others want to accomplish with their lives and consequently impugn their sorrow and pain at failing to achieve what they had hoped to?

Another thought - are you going to slap a suicidal middle-class teenager in the face and tell them to grow the fuck up and realize how privileged they are, how most Americans and in fact almost all teenagers in the world are worse off than them? Why not?

It's because their pain is valid. Our emotions normalize to our situation - always, no matter how high or low we get in life, and they're just as valid regardless of where they're normalized to. Just because this guy isn't going to be broke for the rest of his life and have his family made homeless doesn't mean he doesn't feel pain, and that pain isn't valid. He poured his heart and soul into something, and it died on him - because of him.

The author isn't expressing implicit approval of this entrepreneur's reaction to that text - he's telling a story in its full color, as it so often plays out. This is a universally common response to some sort of suffering. It could easily have been written about a mother who's kid just died of cancer:

"She heard the ping of her phone, someone late hearing the news sending a text to offer their condolences. She knew they meant well, but their encouraging platitudes filled her with contempt. What did they know of her pain?"

It has nothing to do with his perceived privilege, him being better off than others, etc. If you accept his pain as valid, this is a valid response to that pain.

And if you don't accept his pain as valid, then none of us should ever have valid pains - or joys, for that matter, since our joy clearly cannot match the joy of a man given a morsel of bread after having starved for weeks on end, or any other emotion that someone else has experienced as a consequence of a more extreme causative factor.

So do we have a link to a Downfall parody for HN startups?

And also, that would be hilarious. Why hasn't that been done yet?

There's this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-mviqUn95s

So, to summarize what I've learned from this thread:

Next time I sleep with a schizophrenic woman who brought a pocketknife to her failed startup, when I hear her go to the bathroom at night I'll be like "Hey baby, no need to get all slashy-slashy doing the serious wrist thing, I mean, just look at Hitler, he had problems too."

Does it mean that if something hurt us we can't tell it, share it or complain about it ? It's not an easy question.

My impression is that saying that something hurts you provides some relief, especially if the people around you have some empathy or offer help. On the other hand, if the people you say it to, suffer as much or more, than it will hurt them. This is the short term effect.

On the long term, the real benefit of sharing such types of feeling is that other people get prepared for the hurting feeling in a similar situation. This generates an inhibition effect which is today best transmitted by films. This is not entertainment. We learn from it and get prepared and accustomed to it.

This doesn't address the question if the hurting situation is unfair, could be avoided and how. There are very hurting situations we can't avoid like cancer or an invalidating accident. But there are hurting situations we could have avoided and so sharing the experience has an education effect. You might not benefit from it, but there will always be one that will profit from the education effect.

Laughter in the face of evil is perhaps civilization's last, best strike against it. It's a shame the butthurt commenters didn't understand that. All they have to do is put themselves in Hitler's shoes and imagine his fury at these parodies... but that requires stepping outside their own worldview for a moment, and setting aside the indignation they've earned by being a vicarious victim.

I'm glad the submitter didn't actually take the video down a year ago, despite saying he was going to, and despite the fact that it evidently cost him some karma points among people he respected.

Why should anyone care more about Americans than people accidentally born somewhere else?

Or are you going to be saying Jesus Christ this fucking hurts? How effective an anesthetic will Perspective be?

You can be right and Wrong at the same time. Figure it out.

Posting while drunk is one thing. Posting angry while drunk is one thing. Veering near someone's personal space while drunk and angry, probably not such a good idea. I apologize for any alarm I caused.

But many readers either didn't read it that way or thought it unhelpful to the tone of the board. And I think concerns about that are more than fair. Any "humor" touching on violence really must be clearly humor. This wasn't, at leas to the wider audience, and I'm sorry about that.

How can a perspective, or a feeling for that matter, be 'right' or 'wrong'?

I know: I'll buy theonlypersonintheworldallowedtofeelpaintoday.org and you set up the hosting. Deal?

By its nature each person will have a different perspective because from where they are, it occurs differently.

It is the right perspective for you, but may not be for others. That is a moral side of the debate which is a different story

It sucks, and it's not that bad.

I have a deadline and more important stuff to do right now, but seeing your answer and presuming (possibly wrong) that the parent has gone through some sort of "depression", I have to say that these "get over yourself" and "it's all in your head"-type of answers are mightily infuriating. They don't solve anything, they make it worse.

Otherwise, yes, this is a "first world problem".

He did something, it failed. It is normal to be sad about that for a while. No special intervention might be necessary.

Both emotions and specifically pain can absolutely be rational. There's no inherent separation between the rational and the emotional.

Crying when your loved ones die is, for one example, a very rational thing for a person to do; that is a rational emotional response to pain.

Thank you, Thomas, for saving me writing a much less eloquent comment along the same lines. As a startup founder way out in the wilderness, I'm often equally amused and saddened by SV tales of woe. We must all keep reminding ourselves of the '48-year-old employee of a midwest factory being shut down', and try to keep a proper perspective on values.

Startups are being promoted to every one all over the world as the way to create wealth after mentioning minimally that 90 to 95% startups will fail. If i am 48 year old guy working in a Manufacturing Factory in the US, i can definitely see from far off that i may loose my job. When i can predict my outcome, i can start taking evasive action and i am prepared for any eventuality and this lessens the pain even though it does not eliminate the pain.

Life itself is hard, but managing your expectations ensures that your journey is less pain full or may have more chances of joy.

You can do a small experiment to find the pain or pleasure created, Just promise somebody that you will do anything on a particular date and don't it or do it and you will find their pain is proportional to the expectation which they had on your ability to do the task.

At heart every one knows their limitations and every one tries to hope that they can acquire more than their capability allows them to achieve naturally

Expectation is not the same as desire, every one can have unreasonable desire, but expectation is more subtle. If the guy has been groomed from the earliest school days based on his/her performance that he/she can easily go into Harvard by the community, teachers, parents, friends etc and because of some ill health, he flunks a exam which makes him not achieve it, it may even destroy his whole life, because he may feel he has disappointed his teachers, parents etc.

The startup world creates enormous expectations using desire as the fuel. Imagine the number of people thinking just getting selected by YC leads to success of their idea or the number of people who get funding assume they have already succeeded. These are starting points and mid points in their pursuit to success. These creates unreasonable expectations which increases the pain. Where as if you pursued these are part of your desire the pain will be less.

Expectation is assuming you have got it and latter found you have not really not got it, where as desire is aspiring for higher things perfectly knowing you may not get it.

Creating Unreasonable Expectations causes more pain than creating Unreasonable desires. It is the difference between applying for a lottery and finding the lottery ticket is a forgery.

Next year, he needs to start all over again. It is at this point, where he sees his friends already start college and slowly feels excluded from the 'college social circle'. We, of course know it's all in the head. But does he?

While I totally agree with your "failing as a startup founder hurts, but it's not the end of the world" stance, comparing this to not getting into university is not correct. Someone's life changes for worse dramatically and almost irreversibly when this happens. After a failed startup you just move on.

anyway, one of your key points i think others on this thread are missing is that this guy has (even in failure) a huge amount of real-world experience that will land him 100k+ salaries if he chooses go to a corporate job.

Many times founders can be left with astronomical debt pretty much guaranteeing bankruptcy being the only way out. Additionally its not unheard for business loans to have a house on the line as collateral. This doesn't mean this is always the situation but is not as rare of a story as one may think.

I've had failed startups too. For my first one I ended up paying out of my own pocket, to tidy things up in an orderly fashion, and I and my cofounders all took up a (reasonably small) loan to pay back some other debts. It sucked. It hurt. I've certainly at times have felt like nobody could know my pain too.

But then the following week we went to work at our new employer, found for us by our original investors lawyer, at a salary 3 times what we'd been able to afford to pay ourselves at our startup.

Was my pain not real despite the obvious privilege of being in a position where I could call on people to find me a job making substantially above the national average before we'd even wound down, at the age of 22? Of course not.

But there's a vast difference between feeling like that for a bit vs descending into self pity and whining when one is in a situation where even a moments reflection about the position one is in would show that you're in a position vastly better than most, and that indeed there probably are billions out there that have known pain just as bad or worse.

I don't understand why so many reacts so strongly to this perspective.

You make many assumptions here. Can you count them? What if you've got only half of them wrong?

No matter how good we have it, failure will disappoint us. I don't see a problem with that. Even if that failure is good for the universe, it will disappoint us in the moment. I think that's just human nature, no?

I don't understand it when someone tells me, "Don't feel so bad." Fuck you; I feel bad right now. Just because you wouldn't feel the same amount and kind of bad doesn't mean that I have to stop. If you want to judge me, feel free, then fuck off.

Stories like this highlight a particular application of Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everyone is crap.

Nobody cares about startups themselves, because they are not people. This story is about a person who failed, not a intangible corporate entity. Have some empathy for a kindred spirit, at a bad point in their (fictional) life.

The word "privilege" is one of those politically correct Newspeak words that always stops me dead in my tracks. It's a shibboleth of a whole bunch of broken thinking, and worse than that, it's a term that tries to bake in conclusions to the assumptions of an argument, so that once one engages with the argument, unaware of the land mine that's been laid there, there's no way to win.

privilege - n - a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor

When someone uses the word "privilege" we're supposed to immediately agree that "They" - the great unspecified "they" - gave one person special keys to the system (and we're usually supposed to believe that these keys were handed over because someone lucked into the right skin color or gender).

So tptacek is baking into his argument the default assumption that someone HANDED chernevik the unearned right and power to start a company - a right and power that was denied to the vast majority of other people - because of the family he was born into or the color of his skin or something.

I find this argument deeply arrogant and condescending. ANYONE can start a company, whether their skin is white, brown, blue or green, and whether their genitals are male, female, mixed or missing, and whether their ancestry and culture is European, Indian, Zulu or Russian.

The deconstructionist / academic / relativist / social justice world view that travels with the word "privileged" wants us to believe that we should care less about any one individual who comes from the "privileged class", because this person was already "given" so much by dint of accident of birth.

Every heart break is unique. I care about the poor bastard unionized welder who made $70/hr for something that a robot now does. And I care about the entrepreneur who shuts down his business and loses his house. They're both human beings.

The word "privilege" and the world-view that generates the term is snark and arrogant and status posturing. If a white sorority girl breaks a nail and is upset, then the social critic who points and yells the p-word reveals himself to be so much BETTER. HE is the one who REALLY cares, who REALLY appreciates the moral subtley of the universe and has the deep vision to see the TRUE VICTIMS.

> Shit that is too boring to be the topic of a news story at the top of HN.

And yet, the actual inhabitants of HN thought quite a lot of it and voted it to the top position. So you're opinions are out of touch with what the people here think.

> Shit that happens to people who aren't lucky enough to be in the middle of the startup economy, and that happens approximately all the time.

Do you think you're the only one here who appreciates that it sucks to be born into a slum in South America, or to lose your house in a hurricane, or to be laid off from a manufacturing job at age 59?

We all get it.

Don't arrogate to yourself the belief that you're the only one here who has compassion - that we're all autistics.

> Please: I'm not saying that startup people are so lucky that they're not allowed to be unhappy when their companies fail. I am saying something else that is more subtle than that.

I'm not convinced of that.