Ask HN: What if nothing works out?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1600337

by sz • 16 years ago

58 52 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

The success and temporary "failure" stories are informative and sometimes inspiring, but what about the permanent "failure" stories? I don't mean your startup tanked and you're starting a new one; I mean by all indications this stuff just wasn't for you and you dropped out of entrepreneurship for good. What happened afterward and how was your career affected?

EasyCompany2• 16 years ago

Reading this question, a scene from the movie Greenberg popped into my mind. They turned down a recording deal when in college and both amounted too nothing and they pushing forty, the scene after the house party, he has an argument with his friend and his friend tells him......that the biggest hurdle he has overcome is accepting the life that he didn't plan for. I can't remember correctly but that was the just of it.

Look, for every 100 people that venture into entrepreneurship, less than 10 make it, that is why there is so much money to be made. You should be proud of your effort, the only time you should be pissed at yourself is if you didn't commit 100%, in the long run we are all dead!

Tichy2• 16 years ago

Sometimes I wonder who decides on the morals that Hollywood movies transport, though. Like the obvious "sacrifice yourself for society" - I picture fattened movie studio bosses laughing their asses of watching the perils of the common people. So maybe this "accept your boring life" falls into the same category - a meme beneficial to the ruling class. (I haven't seen the movie)

mikeegg• 16 years ago

The movie scene I thought of is in Clerks 2 where Randal and Dante are in jail and Randal is going off on Dante about how Dante complains about his life.

mattmanser• 16 years ago

Where did you get the 10% success rate from? This sounds very low compared to figures from US census figures, for example, which reckons 50% ae still going after 5 years, without even accounting for the difference of being bought out, stopping while the going's good or going bust.

EasyCompany2• 16 years ago

A business just surviving and a business that is successful is two totally different scenarios. You can be surviving for 5yrs, marginally profitable for 5 yrs but still find yourself in huge debt, paying off your credit cards and other loans. Many people quit at this point even though the business is not bankrupt but it is just not what they envisioned and then realize 5yrs have gone by. If the US census calculated those people in business for 5yrs or more making over a certain amount of money, then u would get a clearer picture. There is a lot of grey in that 50% number. You also find some entrepreneurs struggling to make that leap from being just profitable or break even to being really successful, they just hover around that barely profitable point for yrs unable to make the leap, then realize yrs down the line that they could have been in a much better position in a 9 to 5 job.

In the trading industry, they say that only 5% of traders are successful and of that 5% only 1% make enough to call themselves wealthy.....that is why George Soros can make $500mill a year or $1bill in the 1992 British pound trade, or Ken Griffith buying a $60mill dollar painting and giving it to a museum. Many traders will say that number is higher but you find many traders who hover around that break even point unable to make the leap.

Look at the sporting industry, how many kids want to be star athletes and how many make it, then when u look at those that make it to college level, more drop off unable to make the leap. Then of those that go pro, there will only be a handful that will be stars, like Kobe.

So i guess its not about just making it, its about making the leap from borderline success to real success that separates the men from the boys. Since if u are just borderline you will never be happy and you will eventually burn out.

jmathai• 16 years ago

Try as hard as you can to find something else that satisfies what entrepreneurship satisfied. It would be hard but I don't know that any of us ever give up really. I thought my last attempt was my final one. Now I have a 7 week old baby and I'm doing it all over again.

Sure some things change. I can't be as reckless or risky now as I was when I was 20. Perhaps this IS my last attempt, but I doubt it. If it is I hope I can find just as much joy in something equally as productive as entrepreneurship.

shin_lao• 16 years ago

Work harder.

sz7• 16 years ago

You missed the point. I'll just clarify the intent the question here for everyone else who does:

I'm just starting my second year of college, and trying to figure out where I want my life to go. I think I was born to do startups but need to know what I can fall back to. There's a very low success rate but because of statistical bias we hear mostly from those who succeed. I want to hear the other side of the story to find out what it's really like.

benwerd3• 16 years ago

The backup plan is everyone else's primary plan. It can only help you - if you don't do anything stupid. (For example, don't take on any personal debt, and avoid non-competes / restrictive covenants.) Starting your own venture is a showcase for creativity, skill, wit and hard work; all things that will help you in a future career.

The one problem I've had is that some jobs are literally beneath you once you've started a company - people can be afraid to hire you. But that's not really an obstacle as much as a platform.

Ardit20• 16 years ago

Then Maybe you should have asked: How have you managed failure, or something like that.

donaq• 16 years ago

If you're at all like me, you might end up being very discontented at every job you go to, especially when you see things that are obviously being done wrong, and you do not have the power to change them.

stretchwithme2• 16 years ago

I will do a double blind experiment where I do startups in one version of my life and don't do them in another. Then I'll know whether doing a startup damaged my career.

Ok, just kidding.

I knew it was the right move when I realized I was learning 5 times as much in the startup.

Nothing matters more to your career than the development of your brain.

And if you're not excited by what you're learning, if its become stale and dreary, make a change.

fbnt• 16 years ago

Just one note from myself. I don't think your career depends on your 'brain development' or self taught mad skills. It all comes down to gaining experiences imho. What I'm trying to say is that you shouldn't endeavour in a startup just because you like coding, and you like learning new languages and whatnot. Being a great technical person most of the times doesn't suffice.

stretchwithme2• 16 years ago

I think you're brain is developing when you have experiences.

Not all learning is technical. I didn't even mention that specifically. You can learn marketing, sales, leadership skills, project management, customer relations and qualities like tenacity and creativity at startups.

ahoyhere3• 16 years ago

Your mistake is thinking that "works out" is an external thing that happens, or doesn't. You're going to have a hard time being satisfied with anything else if that's your belief. That belief will also screw with any employed career you might have.

todayiamme2• 16 years ago

Exactly.

I've failed at majority of the things I've done, but I can always try again. The biggest problem with me was that I took problems as problems to be dealt with, but in fact they were teachers to be learned from. It's something really, really clichéd but the subtle meaning in it is something that takes frustratingly long to grasp. I think that it derives directly from the fact that I cannot change my environment, but I can always change myself.

sz7• 16 years ago

I meant it as a more tactful way of saying "you didn't work hard enough/ideas weren't good enough/didn't develop fast enough/weren't emotionally strong enough" or something just happened and you had to reintegrate with normal society :)

todayiamme2• 16 years ago

>>>you didn't work hard enough/ideas weren't good enough/didn't develop fast enough/weren't emotionally strong enough<<<

No one ever is, but you can always make a choice.

ahoyhere3• 16 years ago

I once got conned out of 2 mos' work, then had my car stolen in a way that was unrecoverable/uninsurable, had a tiny nervous breakdown, came down with mono, couldn't work, lost all my other clients, one of whom threatened to sue me, and eventually ran out of credit to live off of.

But after I put in a couple years as an employee -- where I learned a lot and paid off my debt -- I quit again. Cuz life's too short to make crap, which is inevitably what happens if you work for somebody else.

How about that?

What do you think you will learn from hearing stories of people who gave up?

petercooper• 16 years ago

A problem is that people who experience failure in an area of life and totally drop out of it.. aren't hanging around the same community to tell their stories.

Most of the people I knew in the late 90s "new media" sphere are no longer involved in Web development or Internet media at all.. and certainly wouldn't be hanging around forums for those kinds of people. Their stories are stuck with them in their new roles as bank managers, fashion journalists, and mechanics (the founders of Boo.com, for example, are now a fashion designer and an investment advisor).

I doubt the strongest "failed and never got back on the saddle" stories would come from asking on HN. People who died in the entrepreneurial space are most likely not here.

Update: An idea, perhaps, would be to find people from famous Internet companies or "up and coming" lists and track down where they ended up.

ajb• 16 years ago

During WWII, the RAF had to decide where on their planes to put the armour plating. They could not plate everywhere due to weight considerations. They were going to put it on places where returning aircraft were damaged, but Patrick Blackett (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Blackett,_Baron_Blacket...) pointed out that this was a biased sample. His recommendation was to put the plating were returning aircraft were not damaged, as this is probably where the aircraft which did not return were hit.

PaulJoslin• 16 years ago

If you don't try you never know. I'd prefer to be old looking back thinking 'at least I gave it a shot', than constantly sitting in my office cubicle thinking to myself 'what if'.

martey• 16 years ago

I think a corollary to this question is whether HR people and others in charge of hiring attach a negative stigma to working on a failed startup.

jey• 16 years ago

It's highly culture-dependent. In Silicon Valley it's generally not considered a negative.

sz7• 16 years ago

Precisely. My dad is a typical executive at a big company and the consensus still seems to be that startups are not as "legitimate" as, say, working at Morgan Stanley. We argue about it a lot.

c1sc02• 16 years ago

This attitude increases exponentially the further removed from Silicon Valley you are & is pretty much the status quo in Europe.

c1sc02• 16 years ago

Would you even want to work for a company for whom a failed startup is a negative?

keyle• 16 years ago

When I get really depressed about commercially viable ideas, which happens, I turn myself to open source development. At least there, there is no agenda and nothing really known as failure. Then I get back up and refocus.

harscoat• 16 years ago

Intrinsic (vs extrinsic) motivation, +1

neeleshs• 16 years ago

I have been in and out of failures, without any success so far. I have ping-ponged between working on my own and working for the corporates. Does not exactly match your question, but very near.

If you meant corporate life by 'career', my startup experience landed me in better and better jobs.

maxklein• 16 years ago

Well, statistically, there has to be someone who will just not succeed. I believe that there are many paths to success - working in a big company and rising up in the ranks would be as satisfing to me as any other thing I wanted. It's just about how you define success, and if the thing you do is going to give you success.

If you define your success by something that you have been unsuccessful at for years, it seems to me you will get depressed sooner or later.

DirtyAndy2• 16 years ago

I think that for a lot of entrepreneurs there is probably never a point where they truly give up (and this is probably a bad thing, not everyone is made for it). To me part of being an entrepreneur is a bit like being an inventor, a tinkerer - there is always something you want to fine tune or an idea worth exploring. I can easily see myself following that path until old age, without necessarily ever making amazing money.

Saying that, most careers are dead. Obviously in some areas there will always be a direct path of experience where a true career will exist, but the days where you went from junior to intermediate to senior to manager to vp etc are dying fast, especially with companies people who frequent HN are likely to want to work with. Do you want to take a job where they say you didn't do two years as senior developer or marketing assistant etc so you can't have the job?

More and more companies are starting to recognize the experience gained in the field and it is easier than ever to move between fields and jump "stages". Not all companies are like that yet, in fact maybe most aren't yet, but as they lose good candidates to companies that are then they will change.

So I wouldn't worry about what happens if everything fails, if you're willing to try the life of an entrepreneur then survival post that is going to be easy.

sz7• 16 years ago

Is entrepreneur life sustainable? That's something I'm trying to figure out right now.

DirtyAndy2• 16 years ago

Most of the entrepreneurs that I've met are dreamers and optimists. I'm sure that most get into it wishing to make it rich (I'm betting most of the ones that want to make the world a better place also hope to get a little rich along the way). Most don't succeed.

But that life is definitely sustainable. You might not have the biggest house and nicest car, but you should definitely be able to live an OK life. It gets more difficult as you have dependants, but some things will work, some things wont, and overall you just kind of hope it works out in the long run. There are no guarantees, but I don't know many people who pursue that life and end up on the street.

I wouldn't say I live a truly cutting edge entrepreneurial life but in 20 years of "adulthood" I have never had a "real job", I've gotten married, two kids, nice house in a leafy part of London. I drive a Mazda rather than a Ferrari so I'm definitely not where I'd like to be, but life is pretty good.

Don't worry about the future too much and just go for it, things will work out.

brianmckenzie• 16 years ago

You ask a really good question.

I have failed w/two different startups, one very recent. The first time it was great for my career in monetary terms. The second - I don't know what will happen, but I don't regret doing it.

Working on a failed startup is draining. Your whole life is tied up in it, and if the company fails it seems like a phantom limb for awhile.

To directly answer your question - past entrepreneurship should be a big plus to any company worth working for.

You know you want to try something else, why not another startup?

benwerd3• 16 years ago

It affects what you do next, and the way you tackle everything from jobs to relationships, probably for the rest of your life.

When I left the company I started, I intended to start another one almost immediately. But then I didn't. Partially this was because of assorted conceptual and administrative issues, but partially it was because I realized how burned out I was. I'd been living this thing for five years, breathing life into it as part of a very small team, starting with literally no budget. Business is hard, and it was often soul-destroying - I discovered that other people were considerably more cut-throat than I was willing to be, and consistently underestimated how low people could go. And on top of the business itself, I was up to my eyeballs in code most of the time. Over time, I lost perspective. Within a space of a couple of months, though, two immediate family members were told they were seriously ill, and my sister became long-term disabled, and I was snapped back to reality.

It wasn't that entrepreneurship wasn't for me, as such, I don't think. It was that the specific kind of entrepreneurship I was living didn't fit my hopes or goals, and was eclipsing everything else in my life in a very negative way. I didn't think I could fit the care-giving that would potentially be required with the demands of the job. They're still going strong, but I wanted to live a different kind of life, closer to what Tony Stubblebine writes about on his blog. (Tony's the smartest guy I know on the topic.) That was always my intention, but we diverged.

It's certainly positively affected my career. Since leaving, I've spoken at Harvard, been published by IBM and have worked in a bunch of really interesting situations, with fantastic people, on a consultancy basis. Before the startup, I was a ground-level developer, so that's a win. But I'll certainly start a company again, at some point, if only because I'm the kind of person who loves to make things, and to do things on my own terms.

I'd ask yourself carefully if it's entrepreneurship that's not for you, or the situations you've been in.

(By the way, my family's health situation is vastly improved - but I think the thought experiment of what would happen if you needed to be a care-giver is a good one.)

benwerd3• 16 years ago

... Also, I'd venture that most successful entrepreneurs have experienced a run of failure. That's how they learned to do it well.

petervandijck• 16 years ago

I did a semi startup (code in my free time, consult for actual money) a few years ago. It was hip, but after 2 years I realized it wasn't working out and I sold it. After that, I've been doing consulting and actual jobs for a few years. No real effects on my career, as far as I can tell. I am thinking I'll probably start another one soon, with many lessons learnt.

One thing it did for me is that for a while, I was hesitant just jumping into any idea, because I know now how much it can take out of you (years of work before you know it).

protomyth• 16 years ago

are you dead? no, then good.

Go find something you enjoy doing, and then find people willing to pay for it. Enjoy your life. Don't go searching for the next big thing.

Then, when you least expect it, you will have an itch that needs scratching, that might be of value to other people, and you will be rested and ready to try again.

inodeman• 16 years ago

You only fail if you don't learn from it. You can always start again, you might need to learn a few tricks, but starting over is always an option. Might need a little time.

It will all work out if your are persistent.

prat2• 16 years ago

I saw this award winning Russian animation short sometime back - Its called GAGARIN. After watching it,I felt it spoke of those who tried before their time and failed. Not sure how relevant it is to this post, but I try not end up like Gagarin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA7RKwhrOT0

Tichy2• 16 years ago

Great animation, but still: how do you know when is before your time?

prat2• 16 years ago

Wish I had an answer for you and for myself :) If you look at the crazy people who made it and sane people who got burnt out, you'd stop asking this question. The lesson I took away from this was that when you think you have recovered, with time you have grown wings (or whatever you need to accomplish what you started out for), make sure to clear up the history and restart as a curious kid.

PS: To me, Gagarin did not restart - was central idea of the animation.

akshayubhat• 16 years ago

Our judgment is always clouded by survivorship bias, the emergence of self help social media, has only magnified it. Its one of the the main point in books by Nassim Taleb. One of the strategies he suggests is to to pursue a dual strategy where you invest 20 - 30 % of resources ( effort, time or money) in High Risk - High Reward strategy while keeping rest 70 - 80% in low risk.

Personally I pay a lot of attention to stories on HN when they mention failure (complete and not just cosmetic how we failed and then won type stories).

AmitinLA• 16 years ago

The problem with this strategy is that it is impossible to engage in a high-risk/high-reward strategy like entrepreneurship where your effort has to be 100% committed to the business, especially in the first couple years and especially if you are venture backed.

There are a couple solutions to this:

1) Invest more of your wages in low risk investments to offset the monetary risk of a startup.

2) Work full-time or as a contractor whilst also working 20% of the time on your own startup to try to gain traction which would lower the risk. Though if that succeeds, you should be then reinvesting your time in another startup. It's a vicious cycle :)

throwaway1618• 16 years ago

I usually post under another name. I consider myself a startup casualty. I've worked for 3 startups as one of the first 5 employees. None of them panned out, in any definition of the word. I consider it mostly a waste of time, and if I could do it all again, I wouldn't. I decided to work at an investment bank for 3 years so that I would have at least some money and investments for retirement. The only useful part of my startup experience is that it made it possible to get a dead end, but high paying job at an investment bank. I don't think I would have been hired otherwise. I've got about a year left and then I'm going to move to the beach area of Oaxaca and hang out until I think of something else to do with my life.

sz7• 16 years ago

Thanks for the honest answer. Best of luck to you.

If you don't mind me asking, what would you have done instead?

HeyLaughingBoy• 16 years ago

Nothing's "for good" until you're dead.

kochbeck• 16 years ago

This is sort of a funny question because it's one where answers arising from the brashness of youth just sound brash. The strains of, "The power is all in your hands," just don't ring as true when you actually have to sing them to someone who's trying to make life decisions. I had a recent failure, and I've crafted an exit strategy for just such occasions. Here's my pitch:

I've been an entrepreneur for most of my life. Aside from a brief stint at IBM where mostly people looked at me funny for two years, I've done ridiculously financially risky things just because I enjoy taking risks and seeing if I can make them come out. I'm like a compulsive gambler who bets the rent every month, except I place longer-term bets than the craps table, and I've beat the house more than half the time.

I published my first piece of code at 7, and it was for a TRS-80. Like most risk addicts, the #1 predictor of getting hooked is early success. Even if you're predisposed to being an adrenaline junkie, if you hurt yourself trying the first few times, you're done. Needless to say, the heroin of early success has a particularly acute effect on a 7 year old.

I tried a lot of stuff over time, some of it way out of my league, some not worth trying, some just dumb, and some a bad fit for the exigent circumstances of life and market. Those were the losers, and I've been kicked in the balls hard many times by betting on losing ideas, bad plans, lousy partners, conniving vendors, bad customers, and, more than anything, my own personal triumph of hope over cold, hard experience.

I also have just enough successes to keep me hooked. But on average, I'm not a whole lot better off financially than many of my 9-to-5er friends. My years where I turned over a lot of personal income are offset by the years when I don't, for sure. So for me, it just isn't about wealth. It's about the one place where I have the 9-to-5ers beat: that where they say, "Wouldn't it be cool if somebody..." I live my life being able to say, "Isn't it cool that I did?" But that's not the life for everybody. Most folks need the sense of security and uniform societal justification that being one more cog in the machine brings. I've never personally valued or had either.

So I totally blew a startup project I was working on for over a year. All but abandoned it a couple months ago. It was just too complex to fund, and it was a regulatory nightmare. I personally lost most of my net worth on the miscalculation. Oops. (On the bright side, I didn't lose anybody else's money, so I came out with as many friends as I went in with.)

And, of course, it flamed out at the height of the biggest recession in generations, so I was left fairly idle. I moped. I piddled. I taught myself to cook. I toyed with other backburner ideas I've let simmer for a long time. I did a fair bit of nothing and pretended it wasn't awful and painful and embarrassing and deflating and demoralizing. I'd trot out Michael Jordan's, "I've missed more than 9000 shots..." quote in my head and try to ignore that he was Michael Jordan and I wasn't.

The other day, I was talking with a recruiter friend of mine, and he said that it would be easy to get me a real job (gasp, choke). Suggested that I join his big company, do something simple, and let them pay for grad school in some subject area that I enjoy but doesn't necessarily have any commercial value. Get paid to hang with folks and just think for a few years. So I considered it. I even began the application process.

Then, I talked to a line manager at the company my recruiter friend works for (because I do my homework), and the guy related to me how much trouble they have managing the line because they have very weak procedures and no training on the line as to how they'd develop procedures.

My response was: "Well heck, I've been wanting to do some Android development, and you guys all have Android phones. I'll just build you an app to support your line management. I'll learn Android on a non-trivial project, and you'll get to know me."

The point (and I do have one) is that even my personal risk management behaviors are colored by entrepreneurial behaviors. I'm thinking of taking a 35-hour per week job to pay me to go hang out at a school and pay the rent, and I somehow manage to turn my job interview into new development and a mini-enterprise applications project. It's just who I am now.

I have a lot of respect for people who walk away from the startup game and go act like normies - I know tons of 'em, and I know that almost all of them miss the exhilaration and the sense that every time they come to work, they have a chance to move the needle. I can't seem to let myself give up that rush, and I really don't want to. I have no problem picking up high-paying work when I need it, but that's a function of having cultivated skills that have value no matter what kind of job I take - startup or secure (consulting, of course). I'm confident that if push came to shove and I needed to walk away, I could. I have a steady stream of job offers to prove it.

Churchill said that success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Of course, he won his war, so he would say that. And forums like HN are rich in first-attempt winners because there's an audience for them. So they've been as immunized to failure as a published 7-year-old. If you get into startups and totally flame out, assuming you can tolerate failure like a fully-formed adult (seriously, be sure you can), you might end up taking a pay cut if you decide to leave for higher ground. You might end up leaving for something deadly boring. But any losses you incur will probably be temporary, relatively minor, and non-fatal.

Or maybe you'll get hooked, and your life will just stay interesting. If you live by the Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times," then don't do it. If you think that's a blessing and not a curse, go for it.

Ask HN: What if nothing works out?

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