Why Your Startup Will Fail

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-your-startup-will-fail.html

by tortilla • 18 years ago

58 53 18 years ago

gilesbowkett.blogspot.com

pj2• 17 years ago

Do what you love and the money will follow.

If the money doesn't follow, you'll still be doing what you love and that's worth more than money. People like being around people who are doing what they love.

But not a lot of people like being around people with a lot of money. Who cares about the money. I give most of mine away because my life is better without it.

If you have a lot of money, people wonder who you screwed to get it. There's a real bias against people with money in the world. They're greedy. They cause the collapse of the world economy. They force the people to enact laws that limit their own freedoms.

People who are motivated by money aren't that fun to be around.

People who want to succeed or accomplish something or make the world a better place or have a grand vision and work hard to implement it -- those are the people /I/ want to be around.

I know a lot of people with a lot of money and a lot of them are pretty boring. They hate their jobs. They complain a lot. They're actually kind of lazy to be honest. You don't have to work hard to make $70k a year and $70k a year is a /lot/ of money, don't scoff. There are people in many parts of America who don't know where their next meal is coming from. They could do a lot with $70k/yr.

Those motivated by new experiences and love of life. Those people are happy, because well.. they love their lives. They make people smile. They laugh. They make the world better.

One of my favorite VP superiors told me a story once, her mother-in-law was born without a dollar to her name and died without a dollar to her name and /still/ has a library named after her.

Do what you love. Forget the money, you'll have more of it than you'll know what to do with. If you love what you do, you won't have time to spend it anyway...

dan_sim• 17 years ago

You said, "Do what you love and the money will follow."

What if you do what you love and money never follows? Will you stop doing it? Will you stop loving it?

I think money should never be part of the equation. This citation needs be to rewritten to "Do what you love and something will follow". You'll never know what will follow and that's the interesting part of the adventure.

rw• 17 years ago

Laissez-faire capitalism is not capable of consistently rewarding people for doing what they love. It does not care about self-actualization.

The fact that you do care about that is refreshing.

jerf3• 17 years ago

s/Lassez-faire capitalism/Reality/.

No current economic system can sustain it on a large scale either, because reality itself is against it. Maybe someday, but we need still more productivity first.

helveticaman• 17 years ago

I don't know how fun I am to be around [hmmm...bad indicator] but I actually do what I love...and that's capitalism. And honestly, I'd do it for free. I follow the stock market even though I'm not invested in it. Trading is fun. Working is fun. Learning is fun.

But I agree with you, I can't stand the people that want money for the status or what have you...such philistines.

lallysingh• 17 years ago

Small edit: do what you love, and do it with a decent business plan.

Then, your love will lead to enough hard work to make the business plan succeed.

c1sc0• 17 years ago

Funny you find $70K a lot of money. I know a lot of people who'd find that too little. I completely agree though; it's more than enough to live a comfortable life. It's easy to be pushed into jobs you don't really like just to 'keep up with the Joneses'.

davidw• 17 years ago

> Do what you love and the money will follow.

Actually there are plenty of jobs that, no matter how much you love them, just aren't going to make you wealthy. To pick a simple example, "elementary school teacher". Important to society, probably rewarding for many people, but not something that will make you rich.

> you'll still be doing what you love and that's worth more than money.

Yeah, but money helps too.

corentin• 17 years ago

What I love is living in a very comfortable house in front of the sea, with nobody else around me for miles. What I love is sitting in a hot bath and reading a book. What I love is travelling and being entertained. So far, nobody has offered to pay me to do what I love. It's a shame.

So I have to work for money like the greedy bastard I am, to make the world a better place for me.

Let me quote one of Ireland's most successful businessman, Michael O'Leary, CEO of Ryanair, on "doing what you love":

"I am not a cloud bunny. I am not an aerosexual. I don't like aeroplanes. I never wanted to be a pilot like those other goons who populate the air industry"

pj2• 17 years ago

There's a philosophical undertone here that I can't quite put my finger on. "Do what you love" is just a saying. It implies a lot of things. One of those things is that you have do what you love for money. Get a job doing what you love. There are lots of things you love, one of them is worth money to someone else. Find /that/ thing and do it a lot and get good at it and do it for other people and then train other people how to do it for other people and voila, successful business. It's not as hard as it seems.

If a business out there is willing to pay 10 people to sit in a cube and do something all day, and it isn't all day, most of the time, cubers are getting coffee or chatting with coworkers and not really working and they get paid /bank/ to do it. If someone will pay you to sit in a cube and do something -- and you are /really/ good at it, then 10 other companies will pay you just as much to do it for them and you'll make a lot of money. Don't be lazy!

How about "Work /hard/ doing what you /love/ and the money will come." The focus here is on working hard at doing what you love, forget about the money. Just forget that money exists. If you're paying the rent or you can pay the rent for a year, quit your job and figure out what you love. Then get another job doing that thing. Why are you arguing with me when you know I'm right? It's not even I who am right, lots of people smarter than I am have been saying the same thing for many years. It's true and it works. Don't be a hater!

You said, "to make the world a better place for me."

I know. I know. Look, here's the deal. You can make the world a better place for you by making the world a better place for everyone. I mean, if the world is better for everyone and you are in that world and you are a subset of everyone, then the world is better for you too.

I'm not being naive, this rational.

I'm not saying you have to love your job every day. I love my job /almost/ every day, but sometimes a lazy customer calls and wants me to do /their/ job for them like I don't have my own work to do and I do it anyway to make the customer happy and I think to myself, "Man... why do I do that crap?" and I beat myself up and then I find a silver lining like, "Okay, if it was hard for that customer it is hard for other customers, so I'm going to make it easier!" And then I do and I have a better product and the world gets better for everyone, including myself.

That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. If the product I build is better for /me/ then it's better for a lot of other people too. If I make it better for /them/ then it gets better for /me/ too!

Man, I hope my tone doesn't scare people off. It sounds like i haven't really thought this stuff out, but I have. I've gone though all the arguments against it and I still believe it. I /believe/ it.

You don't have to believe it a lot of people don't believe it. A lot of people do things they hate their whole entire lives and then get fired, laid off, their pension plans get sucked away by some greedy bastard like you (jk, i'm playin, i'm playin, you seem like a nice guy) or cancer and die and they regret it. I don't want to be like that.

If I do what I love every day and it's honorable and honest and good, then I'll die a happy person and people will look at me like, "That guy never made a dime but he was always smiling and happy, except when he was exhausted from working so hard." Like Boxer in Animal Farm, except smarter and hopefully the bad guys won't turn me into glue for some booze.

Anyway, it'd be a nice life until the dead part. I'd like to live that life. Work hard. Love life. Die happy.

I've had lots of money and I've had no money and right now I have almost no money and I'm so happy. I'm working harder than when I had lots of money. I'm spending that money on my company and it's fun and I love what I do and I don't know, I don't think I'm special or different. I'm just like everyone else and if it can work for me, it can work for other people and if it does and they get happy, i'll be happier too!

In 15 years, if all this is a total failure, it is possible that I could look back and think, "Wow, I was so dumb, I shouldn't have listened to myself." That very well may happen, but I don't think it will. I don't believe it will. It's in the future, so by definition it is an opinion and it could be wrong, but I'm listening to myself right now, myself right now is saying, keep typing, keep telling the world the TRUTH and keep saying it!

There's an endlessly looping voice in my head saying, "There are going to be naysayers, don't listen to them. Those people need excuses for their misery. They need justification for not going for it, for not taking a risk, for not trying, for not working hard. They're lazy!"

Don't be lazy! Don't make excuses. WORK HARD. It's sooo much easier to work hard if you love what you are doing.

Here's one more quote and I'll finish with it:

Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life

jonas_b• 17 years ago

Mr O'Leary is an interesting case when it comes to finding what you love. I would argue, from what I've seen his company do, and from interviews with him that what he <i>loves</i> is to be the maverick. -To play with the EU bureaucrats i Brussels -Mock Nicolas Sarkozy with adverts -Get small cities to actually pay Ryanair to get routes to their airports -Bypass the unions by having cabin crews from Eastern Europe. I think O'Leary could have done the same with another industry if he wanted to. Doing what you love doesn't necessarily have to mean that you love the trade, but the feeling and excitement you get from doing it.

help• 17 years ago

I don't know what this forum is and feel a bit like I'm intruding, but as you were exchanging banter on the philosophies of capitalism, my weary eyes fixed on the figure of 70k along with the word (somewhere) "teacher". I have been a teacher for 22 years, currently am going through a divorce from an abusive man who has only a fourth of the education I have but makes double what I'll ever hope to see. In addition, he is wiping me clean of the little bit I do make and every bit of retirement I've had. He's also giving me all of his debts - 30K - that were borrowed in MY name because he couldn't keep a job and we were going to lose our home. I am scared, alone, and utterly broke after giving 22 years of my life to teaching inner-city students. If you all have the time and money to chat about... well, time and money, then please help me. A co-worker in similar circumstances gave up and hanged herself last year. I have been considering the same. How can our society allow someone who has valued education and given everything to helping others live in a state of despair over where the next meal is coming from or where she is going to live? I don't qualify for Section 8 housing because I earn just a little too much, but they don't factor in even the MINIMUM payments on the 30K credit card debts that I must pay since I was foolish enough to put them in MY name to pay OUR bills during HIS unemployment. How about if you all talk about this kind of thing? I am not the only one going through something like this. I am intelligent, hard working, have 3 degrees, 2 little girls to feed, and have been completely wrecked and hung out to dry financially and live in a country with a legal system that so far has allowed it (because he can afford a better attorney). Could any of this useless chatter be applied toward helping someone like me who still has so much to offer as a middle school teacher but can't afford housing or food????? I have a huge sense of humor, but this is not a joke at all... I am desperate and don't even know any more where to turn for help. I've exhausted every resource. lllllll778899@yahoo.com

staunch• 17 years ago

> With a lot less effort, you can get a kickass job earning two hundred grand a year.

This is exactly why you can succeed. Instead of making someone else a lot of money and them giving you a $200k cut you can do their job as well and collect all the money generated by your effort.

Being the next Zuckerberg might be a lot like being the next Bruce Willis, but creating a small web software business with the ambition of making a few million over the course of years is not. And the big payout for most small businesses is when they sell to someone who already has money but wants a proven business (to add to their existing business usually).

time_management3• 17 years ago

Being the next Zuckerberg might be a lot like being the next Bruce Willis

I don't imagine having to worry about this any time soon, but if anyone described me as "the next Zuckerberg", I'd need three or four strong people on hand to restrain me from getting in a fight.

ryanwaggoner• 17 years ago

Ummm...can you elaborate on why you'd be willing to visit violence upon someone for merely comparing you to Zuckerberg?

larryfreeman• 17 years ago

It is a very well written commentary. In my view, each of us has a decision: quality vs. reward. You won't get to quality by constantly thinking about the reward.

I disagree that you can't get to the reward if that's all you want. Sales is all about the reward as is investment.

I agree on the article's main point: Entrepeneurship (as opposed to sales or investing) should be about the quality of the business. The employees, the customers, and the talented investors all know that the surest path to success is well-targeted quality.

time_management3• 17 years ago

The startup world requires intensity and focus. With a lot less effort, you can get a kickass job earning two hundred grand a year. Your startup will fail because millions of dollars might be different from hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they just aren't different enough to justify that much effort.

I'm in a startup. Admittedly, I'm doing it, in part, for the material benefits... but I'm taking the long view, knowing that my short-term fortune is highly uncertain. I realize that I might never see a dime from this particular startup, but I figure that what I'm gaining from the experience, because I'm learning 5x more per unit time than I ever did in a corporate job, will benefit me in the long run. I might never be a millionaire, or even see the "kickass job earning two hundred grand a year" (although I've had average-ish jobs close to that) but I feel like I'll be employable in more interesting roles on account of the knowledge I'm gaining here.

nanijoe• 17 years ago

The times in my life when I have made the most money, has been when I set out to make money. So, thanks for the commentary, I think I'll take my chances.

yesimahuman• 17 years ago

So sick of hearing all of this.

If it fails, it fails, just go for it!

I hate pessimistic people.

seiji• 17 years ago

An overabundance of false optimism can be just as strange.

tom_rath• 17 years ago

...but it wasn't pessimism, the post was addressing motivation.

One gains money as a side-effect of being successful at something in demand. You don't become successful by becoming a millionaire.

If becoming a millionaire is the goal of your software startup, you're facing some pretty big problems right off.

blader• 17 years ago

  All the millionaires were in porn in 2000; all the people 
  who started startups did it for a different reason.

Two things.

1. The people who started startups wanted to make money just as badly, they just didn't want to tell mom that they were in the porn business.

2. I'm really lucky I love porn.

moe• 17 years ago

He lost me on this blanket statement, too. First off it's simply not true (there were millionaires outside of porn) and he makes it sound as if starting a porn biz would be the surefire way to become rich.

I wonder how that's supposed to work because I'd imagine if there's one example for a "saturated market" then it would be porn? You're not only competing against a whole set of major players in each imaginable segment, you're also competing against bittorrent, porntube and the like. I somewhat doubt that one could get a foot down there without some serious warchest.

fallentimes• 17 years ago

Some Reasons Why Your Startup Could Succeed

-You understand the numbers are against you and realize even if you fail it's worth trying again; you believe it's better to go for 0 for 50 than 0 for 0.

-You provide a utility that is good enough for someone to pay for.

-Your startup saves someone time or make someone's life easier.

-Your costs are so low you're virtually impossible to kill.

-You don't care about material possessions.

-Your startup makes others money.

-You treasure not (or rarely) having meetings.

-You love working for yourself.

-There's very little wasted time and red tape. Your team is lean, mean and aggressive.

-You're patient. Twitter, Kayak, Plenty of Fish and Facebook have been around longer than you think. And two of them aren't even profitable.

-You know IPOs or acquisitions aren't required to make a good living..

-You do instead of talking about doing.

-You realize, in the very early stages, that the worst thing that could happen is you lose a few hundred or thousand dollars and learn something. What do you have to lose?

-When you get lucky or catch a break you're ready for it.

-You believe that success is the amount of your life you control.

-You love what you do. Or at the very least, love your situation.

-You avoid blanket statements like this: All the millionaires were in porn in 2000 and realize that not every "startup rule" or any rule applies. Businesses can be very different from each other.

-You understand that your odds of having an enjoyable job paying 200k are roughly the same as owning a profitable small business.

pg2• 17 years ago

His mistake is not to distinguish between the average and the median case. Being an actor is an inefficient way to make money in both the average and median case. Starting a startup also doesn't pay in the median case, but it does a lot of better in the average case. In the average case it is probably the optimal way to make a lot of money. And if you are young enough to stand the risk, you can afford to care about the average case.

Startups and acting both have great variability, but acting also has demand working against it. Being an actor effectively pays you in other ways than money, because it's considered a cool thing to do. So demand pushes up the price in foregone income.

eru3• 17 years ago

Last time I checked, startups were cool, too. Does that alter your argument?

pg2• 17 years ago

Not cool like being an actor. Perhaps the reason startups seem cool to you is that you're thinking of famous consumer startups like Google or Facebook or Twitter. But the median startup does some boring infrastructure thing, like software for making online stores. You've never heard of the founders of these companies.

Even founders of consumer startups are way less cool per dollar than actors. I'd guess Larry & Sergey are about as famous to the general public as actors whose net worth is 1000x smaller.

giles_bowkett3• 17 years ago

dammit OK this is the third comment. after this I'm closing the window. however that is a good strong argument.

actually, it appears to be a good strong argument. I can't say for sure. it's not totally clear to me as I don't know a damn thing about statistics and as far as I remember a median was a type of average. iirc median represents absolute middle; by average you probably mean mean average.

I really have no idea what you're saying, so I have no answer. unless you're making an argument for becoming a serial entrepreneur, since you'll probably have a startup which succeeds sooner or later, if you start young enough. that must be what you're saying, five fails in a row won't matter if number six is a win, and on average, it probably will be.

that's easy to shoot down, though. first of all you might need a lot more than six to beat the averages. second and more importantly: this post was a response to a specific person and that specific person is very probably still in college. I believe he has not created any startups yet. I could be wrong but I am very confident in this particular hunch. his next startup will very probably be his first, so the chance that it will fail remains very very high, since the averages are currently against him.

So no, I don't think that is my mistake at all. I think the mistake would be on the part of anybody attempting to over-generalize, from my specific answer to a specific person, to learn broader lessons for the startup and aspiring-startup communities. but I didn't post this here. that might have been a mistake, but it wasn't mine.

the specific person I'm responding to, OK - he can say "but my other startup might succeed." he'd have me there, maybe. but my reasons for believing his startup will fail, I think it's fair to assume that means his next startup, which will be his first, and could be his only. so yeah, my logic holds.

boo yah.

I appreciate having to work for that, though.

jmtame• 17 years ago

I already disproved (have disproven?) this theory. Google "theory disproven money motivation" || see mark cuban

noonespecial2• 17 years ago

Your Starup will fail.

Don't give up, try it again.

One win is enough.

likpok• 17 years ago

This reminds me of a rule about relationships.

Every (startup|relationship) you start ever will fail.

Until one doesn't.

noonespecial2• 17 years ago

True that. I actually just wanted to disagree with the author in Haiku form after tiring of the traditional long form way of explaining that in startups, you're supposed to try more than once, not fail and give up; but thanks for the reply anyway. :)

point• 17 years ago

He's right in that if your motivation is to make a million bucks, you will give up very quickly, because the road there is too long.

If you are just some poor ass person who is tired of being poor, you will also fail.

The only crowd that will be successful are those who don't have any choice but to strike out on your own. If you really hate working for people, if everyone you know is doing business, etc, then your business is the only path.

All the people who just want to be rich will not be rich. Wanting to be rich is not a skill and it's not a talent.

apsec112• 17 years ago

Even if you are a mercenary type, and you're motivated entirely by money, how can you do better than starting a startup? Getting a job making $200K/year is hard; most entry-level investment bankers are smart and work ninety hours a week, and they still fell short of $200K even before the crash. And $200K/year is still much less than you'd expect to get out of a successful startup.

davidalln• 17 years ago

I dunno, this article seems a bit too similar to smashLAB's article 3 weeks prior.

http://www.ideasonideas.com/2009/01/startup_fail/

zmimon• 17 years ago

He doesn't define failure. It seems to mean any outcome other than making millions of dollars. I consider my startup a wild success if it just manages to break even while supporting a liveable income and giving me something useful and interesting to do with my life.

mattmaroon• 17 years ago

That has to be the first time in history anyone has name dropped Edward James Olmos.

webwright• 17 years ago

Yeah, the guy who started Salesforce.com just LOVES CRM software.

daveungerer• 17 years ago

Maybe he loves helping others get their jobs done through software that doesn't suck?

cool-RR• 17 years ago

Statistically, the author of this article cheated on his wife.

giles_bowkett3• 17 years ago

Dammit! OK I was re-reading my post because I always check to see if I've written something I can stand by or not. And the answer is kinda, there are some problems with it, but anyway, I was doing that, this was right below it, I saw it. My self-control is not formidable. Having seen, I gotta respond.

So: I've never been married. And I think your statistics are wrong, especially if you only posted this here and not anywhere else.

giles_bowkett3• 17 years ago

So I saw this is on here. I'm going to skip reading the comments because I know from experience that some of you are idiots and I'll end up swearing at you. I'll just save time. If you disagree with me, you need to either re-read the post or study chess.

Every time, that's all it ever comes down to. Every one of you who ever disagrees with me. You either don't understand how to use what I'm saying, or you don't understand what I'm saying itself in the first place. Sorry to skip it, but it's boring as hell.

Anyway, here's the one thing I wanted to add: PLENTY OF MOTHERFUCKING FISH. In 2000 the millionaires were in porn and the crazy fuckers who do shit that doesn't work were in startups. Some of you remember this. Others of you will have to just trust that we old-timers remember what happened and are not in fact hallucinating or making things up.

In 2009, it's not about porn. Today if you want to be a millionaire, you still don't get in a car and drive down Sandhell Road. But you don't hire a bunch of emo girls from Hawaii to take their clothes off, either. You study strategy constantly, you spend less than four hours working per week, and you put cash in the bank by the truckload.

Boom. You're done.

I haven't made it work for myself yet, but I had Warcraft characters who were living it. It's a great economics sandbox. Everybody thought my characters were twinks because they had crazy gold at low levels. No twinking, just a system. And of course Plenty Of Fish and Tim Ferriss have made it happen in reality in at least two cases. I think the millionaires are paying more attention to that than to VC.

I even see blog posts by monkey motherfuckers who say they believe that the four-hour work week works, but they want to spend more time than that working, because they're passionate about what they do. That's the stupidest goddamn thing anyone could say. The whole point of the four hour work week is it only takes four hours. Take four hours a week out of your busy schedule to do something that actually works, put the money in the bank, and get on with your day. That day, and that busy schedule, can include anything you want it to, including working your ass off on a startup.

OK, come to think of it, if you disagreed with me because of this reason - if you're that particular idiot - then you don't need to study strategy or re-read my post. You need to learn the fundamentals of logic. Discover the difference between necessary connections and incidental connections.

Come to think of it, I encounter that one all the time too, so if you're that particular idiot, sorry for missing your case in the above condescending blanket dismissal. Here's a special condescending blanket dismissal of your very own: go study logic, you idiot.

And fallentimes, it was hard to skip your post because it was at the top of the page. You would have made it a lot easier to respond to if you had numbered your reasons. However, your reasons mostly aren't worth responding to. They don't represent a cogent response to my specific argument; you're mostly just sticking your fingers in your ears and going "lalalala I'm not listening." Your response is a filibuster.

You do have a few specific responses, however, so I'll answer them.

"You understand that your odds of having an enjoyable job paying 200k are roughly the same as owning a profitable small business."

I'm fairly certain that's factually inaccurate, but I can't prove it, and I'm not going to stick around for your answer, so I'll let it go. What I can nail you on is that this is a comparison on uneven criteria: for 200K to win, you have to enjoy it; for a small business to win, it has to turn a profit. Technically a prostitute has a profitable small business, so in this uneven comparison, a prostitute pulls ahead of anyone making 200K, even if they do enjoy it, since you say their chances are equal. You need to set up even comparisons to be fair. I think we can throw out this part of your filibuster, or at least require you to come back with an even comparison.

"You know IPOs or acquisitions aren't required to make a good living.."

and

"You avoid blanket statements like this: All the millionaires were in porn in 2000 and realize that not every "startup rule" or any rule applies. Businesses can be very different from each other."

I think it's obvious I'm only talking about VC-funded startups here. You appear to be suggesting that the way your startup can succeed is by being a different type of startup than the type of startup I'm talking about. That's not refuting my argument. That's merely changing the subject. I apologize for not making it clear that we were only discussing VC-funded startups. However, since this was an answer to a specific person, and a continuation of a specific conversation, let me tell you, as it happens, that's what the conversation was about.

The blanket statement thing is a legitimate dis. You've got me there. But rephrase it: the majority of millionaires were in porn. The core of my argument remains unchallenged. There were people doing a simple thing that worked. If your goal is to be a millionaire, it makes a lot more sense to do something that many millionaires do, which often works, than to do something that few millionaires do, which often fails.

That's why I made the analogy with acting. If you're going to work very hard and the odds are against you, you need to have something which fuels that, and if the only thing that fuels it is a desire for money, that won't be enough to take you to the finish line. Actors come and go in Los Angeles all the time because they think it's going to be easy. I don't get close enough to startups to say this with the confidence of fact, but my intuition is that this is very true of startup founders as well. You need to believe in the technology, or the way you'll change the world, or the corporate culture even. If you set out to become a millionaire using a strategy that very infrequently makes anyone a millionaire, you're going to give up the minute your common sense kicks in.

"You don't care about material possessions."

Again, you're changing the subject. This is a response to a guy who was interested in VC because he wanted to become a millionaire. Obviously, if you're putting forward that somebody who cares about something more than the money might have a better chance, well yeah, that's my point.

Sorry everybody else if there was some devastating, incisive refutation somewhere else on this page. I just don't have the patience, the even-handed temper, or the time.

ph0rque• 17 years ago

> I apologize for not making it clear that we were only discussing VC-funded startups.

Ah... now your post makes sense!

Why Your Startup Will Fail

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