(This comment assumes you actually did stop reading.)

I'm curious about the mind-set that says "Stop reading, I didn't agree with this sentence." Do you read part of a lot of articles on HN? Since you don't know what you're missing I guess you can't answer this but do you think this is a sound strategy for learning anything?

Most don't read blogs for education. If I start reading a blog article that I think might be a lot of nonsense then I will stop reading it.

So you read blogs in order to flatter your preconceptions, then?

I read blogs for entertainment and news.

I disagree. Once you have already done it your likelihood increases that you will do it the second time around. You have more capital, experience, and connections.

You are right in the sense that before you start a business you are less likely to have multiple successes than you are to have one success.

I just think that it's a bit disrespectful to the hard work that it takes to create a successful business. It's all very blasé.

The sentence I quoted basically says I should be thinking "I'll just launch a startup and it'll be easy to sell it for $xx,000,000"

We should not be thinking like this, we should be thinking that if we are lucky enough for our little idea to actually make a bit of money then we should hold onto it with both hands!

It doesn't say that at all. I said nothing about easy. I'm saying that as an entrepreneur you have to maintain the delusion that your company is likely to be worth a shit-ton of money. After all, if you don't believe that, what's the point of building it? (Assuming you don't want a small lifestyle business)

> with one exit under my belt and a good deal of financial security, I will be in an even better position to succeed the next time around

Why is an exit defined as success? Success should be building and maintaining a business that can annually bring you in a ton of cash, keep you relatively sane, keep loads of people from your country's economy in employment and above all provide goods or services that will make someone else's life/work a little easier.

You want to make a business of selling businesses, fair enough but I disagree that that is what we should all be doing.

An exit is not universally defined as success. Success is defined by the person who builds the company.

>Success should be building and maintaining a business that can annually bring you in a ton of cash, keep you relatively sane, keep loads of people from your country's economy in employment and above all provide goods or services that will make someone else's life/work a little easier.

Selling my company allows me to do all those things (although my cash is coming in up-front, for the most part, which means I can likely grow that money a lot faster than I could have if I got it over many years).

To each his own...

Building a successful business-any successful business, bootstrapped or VC, is really, really hard. Do you really want to be working 12 hour days and losing sleep about deals falling apart or how you'll make payroll, and blowing off every social event for work, for the rest of your life? Really? Do you think it's even possible for a human being to survive 40 years of that kind of stress?

You're optimizing for the wrong things.

If your business is still doing that to you after a couple of years then you're not doing it right.

It's about building a well oiled machine and being proud of it, not just build-and-sell.

You know, if you had just finished reading that sentence, you would have seen him pointing out that entrepreneurs need to realize it probably won't happen.

That sentence stood out for me, too, but I took it to mean "It's essential for every entrepreneur to think that their company is going to be successful." It seems that your quibble is with the post's (narrow) definition of success, not with the general notion that entrepreneurs should believe in what they're doing. I think the rest of the article is still worth reading.