How Not to Die - Hackdot

Re:How Not to Die by geebee on Thursday August 30, 2007 @02:21PM (#48330)

50% sounds like really good odds to me, given the payout. It depends to some extent on what it means to fail, and how long it takes to succeed. But if your odds of a substantial payout are 50%, and the length of time to get to success or failure is less than 4 years, then these are phenomenal odds.

Of course, it's not just money - you "pay" in other ways. If it takes, say, 4 years to get to the success or failure point, then some people will have worked for over 12 years with grim determination and still never quite nail it. I wonder if this is a memory-less process (ie., how does a previous failure affect your future attempts?). Wisdom and exhaustion in equal parts, I'd suspect, and only one side is going to win.

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Re:How Not to Die by SwellJoe on Thursday August 30, 2007 @05:43PM (#48461)

I'm on my second startup. My first was a "failure" by some definitions of failure (it paid the bills, bought me a 350Z, and worked me nearly to death for seven years...it never really stopped being a service business despite my attempts to convince myself that I was selling products--I consider it a failure, but I learned a lot).

"Wisdom and exhaustion in equal parts, I'd suspect, and only one side is going to win."

Agreed. I'm just stubborn enough to keep trying. I'm also lucky enough to have a fantastic business partner, which I didn't have the first time around (I should have brought him on back then...he was already doing contract work for me on a regular basis).

This time around I put much tighter time constraints on myself. I'm not giving myself 7 years to figure out if I have a failure on my hands. Every 6 months I evaluate where we are, and if I don't see clearly how to get to the next level, it's time for a serious change. So far, that hasn't happened...wisdom gained from the previous startup seems to have allowed me to avoid most pitfalls.

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Re:How Not to Die by vlad on Friday August 31, 2007 @12:43AM (#48598)

Vote this guy up, he's smart. I, too, will never do a startup alone, as it's just too draining to do so.

At the same time, it's exactly what someone should do who's starting out, if they can't get funding or a team together. Try to get all three for as long as it takes.

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