Building a company is fucking hard(nvdk.co) |
Building a company is fucking hard(nvdk.co) |
I,d say enjoy being 22, don’t take yourself to seriously and reflection will come with age.
I realize the guy is young and hope he is just using hyperbole and does not honestly believe what he is saying.
I'm willing to bet the guys that queue outside of places like Lowes and Home Depot hoping to just get some day labor to feed their families experience quite a bit of hardship. Probably same for the guys that sneak over the border to get jobs working on farms to send money back to their families, or the person that works for a company for 20 years and is laid off. The author willingly dropped out of college to start a business.
I never really understood professional stress until I got to the point where I realized my kids eating depended on me bringing home an income. Whenever I get stressed about work it helps to realize that the problem is probably solvable and that I have it no where near as bad as these guys doing back breaking physical labor to do the same thing I am trying to do, feed people they care about.
I wish the author nothing but success but he is being a tad dramatic.
i applaud the guy for his entrepreneurship, especially from his roots in small-town india.
Eyeballing: average age seems to be mid 30's.
EDIT: 35.4, you can run in your console on that thread:
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return ages.reduce((x,y) => x + y, 0) / ages.length
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averageAge()So, if you don't go to harder goals and projects, like having children, life can get easier. But it's always your conscious decision to move on to a harder difficulty level.
Now I am a managing partner in 3 companies and have all the issues above. Work is ok, manageable, but the personal issues are REALLY hard to cope with, specially the irreversible ones related to aging and health.
It the past, resilience was a key attitude to me. Nowadays I see acceptance as being more important.
I am starting to understand this, too. Very well said.
Perhaps at 22 you don't have the full perspective of what life can be. I certainly didn't at that age (now I'm 41 and I guess I have a better perspective for sure).
It's hard to believe that one has the full perspective at any age.
somewhere around midlife your perspectives will shift again. i imagine when you hit your later senior years (retirement age), yet again.
Perhaps? It goes without saying that until you hit retirement you don't have a full perspective of what life can be. Until say 10 years after life starts to degrade for you (age-related health), you will not have a full perspective.
22. lol.
Ah, that explains the unnecessary and distracting showing off by swearing in the title.
The rest I could take, but middle-aged? Truly hell.
It's amazing how entrepreneurship is so textbook nowdays. Quit job ->. start company->. be minimalist ->. Get funding ->. post tech blog ->. blog on founder struggle. ->. Blog on failure ->. Travel ->. Become a one-bagger. All of this in few months
Working really hard can take a serious toll on you. Not quite in the same way that common midlife stressors can pull you in 20 different directions (kids, aging parents, etc). But in the moment, the stressors are very real to the individual.
He's from India too.
Also, I agree that raising kids may be something that is more difficult that you additionally have to do (all the other things have no correlation with age), but some of the replies here come off to me like that one jacked dude in the gym giving the newbies stick for being weak. At their current musculature, they are doing the best they can. Difficulty levels are relative.
The author picked the fight. People are dismissing what he's saying because writing that makes him come across as self-aggrandising. As a result, people are making a judgement call that the guy probably doesn't have much to offer.
To continue with your gym analogy, it's like some weedy guy walking into a gym and telling all the jacked guys that they're exercising wrong and he can teach them better form. That may in fact be true - being able to teach form doesn't require you to be jacked, and vice versa. But more than likely this person is talking out their ass.
I'm 23 and when I read that sentence it totally turned me off the article, the author seemed like a tool, and I completely agree with all the 30-40 yr olds in this thread saying the same thing.
Being 22 is harder if you pass on opportunities to get perspective...
It's certainly very difficult to start a business from scratch, and to grow it.
A trick is if you can spin off a job into a contract, into a larger contract, etc, with the same customer(s), ideally people who may move to larger companies, and carry the relationship with them.
Similar story for me. I had what I thought of as a temp job Client #1. The CTO of Client #1 liked the work I was doing & introduced me to the CEO of Client #2. I was like, "hey, am I allowed to work for 2 companies at once", and they were like "sure!". And that's how my brain flipped from temping to consulting.
Lol, hearing that from a 22 year old.
Spouses/partners can understand and support - but (most) haven't been through it, and there's just a different conversation that can be had with others who have. That's not a negative, it's a reminder that it really does take all types.
You will need friends
You will need mentors
This is 100% true, so I have a question. How do you find those when you're already spending all of your time on your startup and new to town without a support network in place?
Ah, the folly of youth. Of course you are more special than everyone else. Of course you are smarter than everyone else. Of course you have experienced more than everyone else.
I certainly was as well at 22.
”When I was seventeen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-five, I was astonished at how much he had learned in eight years.”
oh please. how embarrassing
These always come off as ego pieces to me justifying why they're worth money or why they should be hired. How about you just let your work represent you?
As far as I remember the reason most companies were dying (from a YC survey, I believe?) was product-market fit. This is not something that can be "easily avoided", and certainly not by simply having a mentor.
This is how academics and think-tanks and pundits operate.
Of course, what you'll find is that ideas are a dime a dozen and yours likely aren't novel. Execution is the best vehicle does changing the world, and it doesn't matter whose ideas you execute on; what matters is that you like executing.
The more I look at my business as “just work” and not some egotistical search for meaning the better I am at it.
Now I have a therapist, a coach, a private freelancer community, three mastermind groups, an in-person entrepreneur meetup, three Slack groups, and a mailing list I write to and get feedback from.
The difference between now and two years ago is massive.
Something else that helps is not having a runway. After taking a year off and spending all of my money without much to show for it, I'm all in on the strategy of spending 50% of my time on freelance and 50% on building a business. Infinite runway and way less stress. YMMV.
Why aren’t we talking about creating ethical companies and how to make it easier for companies to not seek to be corrupt, or set up barriers to corruption that are more verifiably not manipulable by those already with wealth or power?
I can’t see how any other angle of discussion about creating companies can be worth anyone’s time until that is better sorted.
People differ regarding their personal ethics, ambitions, interests, and abilities.
If you make a compelling argument that your concerns are objectively the highest priority for discussion, even then only a fraction of the community will care to engage on the topic.
For your explanation to be adequate, there would have to be such extreme indiosyncratic variation in the most common of human ethical standards relating to murder, sexual assault, gross scale bribery, child exploitation and many other issues that, from a cultural anthropology point of view, seem to yield a very highly correlated set of ethical norms across almost all of the developed world.
It just seems implausible compared with alternative explanations, like intentional large scale paychological manipulation.
One reason to subscribre to /r/getmotivated I guess :)
Source: started a company and learned many things the hard way.
Building financially and ethically sustainable business that employs people that are truly happy to work there IS hard.
Conducting a successful career is also very hard. Let alone a successful marriage! Or getting fit, loosing weight.
You want to build a company? Just do it. It's not harder than other things in life.
Edit: some words.
Most businesses "don't even go there" - hence we are surrounded by the world we live in.
Truly experienced people who properly seen-it-all get a proper dose of humility about themselves, the world and the others. You can really feel it from them. Unlike this kiddo.
"The rational part of a teen’s brain isn’t fully developed and won’t be until age 25 or so"
https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con...
"We all deserve love,
it's the very best part of being alive
And I would know
I just turned 25"
https://genius.com/Bo-burnham-lower-your-expectations-if-you...
Just on of the points would be how different the world looked like 60 years ago.
I'm still 'young', my wife and I are late 20s, early 30s. And I have given up the idea on 'figuring it out'.
Everyone's got problems.
Mathematically minded nerds tend to forget that not everything in life can be turned into set theory :)
" He was born András Gróf into a not religious Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, which was ruled by a military dictator whose government persecuted Jews. That Gróf was not a Jewish surname may have helped his family avoid some of the worst of the persecution. As a small child, Grove had scarlet fever, which not only nearly killed him but also rendered him partly deaf. With the advent of World War II and Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, Hungary abandoned its official neutrality and joined the Germans. In 1944, when the war went badly for Germany, the Nazis overthrew the Hungarian government, fearing that the Hungarians were about to make peace with the Soviets. The rounding up of Jews for death camps and slave labor soon began. Grove's father was forced to serve in the German army at the Eastern Front, where he endured appalling tortures for the amusement of German soldiers. Grove and his mother hid under false names with a Christian family; almost every day was a close call, as soldiers snatched Jews off the streets and out of their homes. Then the Soviets fought their way into Budapest, bringing with them more persecution (and the rape of Grove's mother).
Grove wanted to be a journalist, but he discovered that journalistic success depended on the whims of political correctness, and he decided to enter a field where subjectivity would not affect judgments about his work; he chose to study chemistry. In 1956 Hungarians tried to replace their Communist government with a democracy, and the Soviet Union in vaded their nation. There was fighting in Budapest's streets as young people tried to repel soldiers and tanks with small weapons and bottles filled with gasoline. Soviet troops began snatching young men and imprisoning, torturing, or killing them. Grove and his best friend, Janos Lanyi, fled to Austria, dodging Soviet troops, crawling in mud, afraid all the way. He had lived 20 years under murderous oppression, surviving by always remaining alert to the possibility that even a simple attempt to purchase a loaf of bread could cause him to disappear along with many other young Hungarians."
-- https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/biography/F-L/Grove-And...
That being said, having rich parents is the #1 way to raise capital. VCs fund people they know socially first.
> I find goals that excite me, and I dedicate every molecule in my body towards achieving this goal.
I did this for many things. And I finally connected the dots.
Or, you know, riches come to riches, which amount to the same thing.
People born in slums don't have as many changes to "surround themselves with success". For one, they wouldn't be welcome by most successful people.
I don't have any friends that pushed themselves to start an IT company and being successful. I only know people who claimed to do the best but failed miserably within the first year of their start-up.
I made also failures in my startup as well, but we closed because we were approaching the zero budget and without having real customers.
Partners who are not in IT cannot fully understand the struggle of running an IT company.
You'll be part of a group of like-minded people from around the world. I joined Hacker Paradise some years ago and it not only gave me valuable directions but tons of people that would understand what a Trello is and you can share struggles and stories.
1. Spoken to a group of CEOs about how to solve their product management issues
2. Organized a group of 6 product managers for drinks (I had met two of them once)
3. Demonstrated credibility and a willingness to help enough that I've gotten a bunch of inbound intros to help people with their Product problems
Here's what I did:
1. Connected with people at the local startup hub. There's only one here as it's a small city (< 500k people). I've been working in tech since 2001 and have cultivated a fairly broad network. I was thus able to get an intro to the CEO of the hub here which helped immensely.
2. Share my knowledge. I've been doing Product Management for 16+ years. That's a skill that's needed here. So doing talks through the hub has enabled me to meet people and establish credibility. I put the word out that I'll meet with anybody in the local community to see if I can help with their product issues, and now people are sending me intros to others.
3. Organize people. It takes so little to organize a small group of like-minded folks. Last night I got 6 other Product Managers together here at a bar to talk shop. It was a matter of putting the word out amongst people I'd met via steps 1 and 2 with a time, date, and location.
If you lather, rinse, and repeat steps 2 and 3 you'll establish a good community because you're helping others level up.
Think about this time as an investment in your long term success. Work doesn't always look like writing code or talking to customers - having a peer group and mentors you can learn from will help with strategy, tactics, accountability, and - most importantly - your mental health.
I never had someone I'd consider a 'mentor'. And I've had friends but I don't spend a lot of time with them and they don't relate to my business at all.
At the same time, I managed to build a business earning mid-6-digits per month. Not spending time futzing about with other people allowed me to focus on the actual craft and make the product really good. Not having "friends" to distort my thinking and pull every discussion towards common thought patterns and easy-to-understand platitudes allowed me to take my business in new directions that I understood but that others were unable to see or accept.
If you really want to do something different, and seriously intense, very very few people will understand or have what it takes to participate. Put simply, 1-in-1000 people only appear once per thousand people. If you're trying to do a 1-in-1000 challenge, it's almost guaranteed that everyone around you is not up to it. (Of course it's highly likely you aren't up to it either, but you can't walk away from yourself. On the chance that you are up to it, you don't want to screw that up by averaging your results out with people who are far less capable and driven than you).
But I totally agree with the don't talk with people about difficult work stuff you are trying to do to, like it takes years and rare talent to understand something in such a way that you can do "something different, and seriously intense" and make money off it, so there might be nobody in the world that you can have a proper discussion with about your thing.
But on a personal level time spent making friends can be truly rewarding. I mean we humans are herd animals, there is no escaping it. I personally get along truly well with very few people, but I can get along with some people for a short amount of time, so visiting different groups of people from time to time gives me a lot of joy, even if I would never truly get along with those people for more than a few hours each week/month.
Its definitely hard to make friends as an adult, so why not reach back into the past and pull an old friend out of the hat?
I moved to NYC at 27 with no friends, no family, only a job offer. It took me 6 months to get settled and in an apartment that I felt comfortable with my wife moving up to. But in that 6 months, I had co-workers that turned into friends, strangers from the neighborhood that turned into friends, and old friends that I reconnected with now that I was 2000 miles away from running into them randomly at a party, funeral, or starbucks.
So if you have a job, start hanging out with those people after work. You can easily find friends and mentors in that group.
One option is to join a network like: https://nugget.one
(Disclosure: I'm founder of Nugget)
Moving to a new city and leaving your support networks behind is a big change.
Quitting your job and starting a company is a big change.
Doing them together is perhaps not the wisest course of action.
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.reduce((i,d,c, ages) => ages.reduce((x, y) => x+y) / ages.length)You absolutely have to invest in your people in a best possible way if you are interested at all in building a GREAT company.
Look... I you can't take this stuff entirely literally. Life experience isn't quantifiable. We're talking about impressions.
2 months of summer when I was 17 was packed. Romances. Feuds. New ideas, disillusionment, entirely new ways of thinking.
The people I interact with socially/romantically can't understand my work at all and are totally separate from it.
All I'm saying is, all things considered, building a business is hard regardless of what age you are.
That means that more people will face more challenges at the same time as they age. And, more importantly, any individual facing real hardship while young is unfortunately still likely to face greater hardships as they get older. That is why the OP's advice to build perspective earlier in life is useful for everyone, and does not discount the reality of hardship for the article writer or other young people.
I'm curious if elderly people with many, many kids tend to be happier due to much more frequent contact with loved ones.
Looking at the other side of the spectrum, what are the chances of an immigrant to achieve the same level of perspective after living for a year in Manhattan?
I believe it is a more productive -- and joyful -- exercise to think about the role you want to have in the context you belong to.