An experiment: Can desperation drive success?

http://vutran.me/blog/desperation.html

by tylermenezes • 14 years ago

89 65 14 years ago

vutran.me

vu0tran7• 14 years ago

Wow, didn't think anyone would post my own blog post here before me. I guess I now have no choice now.

lessnonymous• 14 years ago

Are you accepting Angel Funding? I'll send you a WHOLE BOX of Ramen for 10% equity.

K2h• 14 years ago

i might send money to appear ona credits page, just for fun.

maybe he should open an auction on equity in the unknown project. that could be fun too.

perlpimp• 14 years ago

Desperation is a forward going vector. I think it is only 50% of the equation. The other 50% is getting out of your own way - that is in terms of velocity. Things like never feeling sorry for yourself - that can manifest in a variety of ways. That is oft mentioned loss aversion/feeling sorry for yourself at present or in the future. If you got both parts solved you can forage forward pretty fast.

That is IMHO - at least what I gathered from years of introspection on what works and doesn't.

keeptrying2• 14 years ago

Thats a really great point.

Though I think if you put yourself in desperation mode for a while and you observe the pain and suffering that happens to others in life then you will most likely stop feeling sorry for yourself.

But you're right - creating an environment is only 50% of the problem (maybe less). Changing one's own internal structure is the crux of the problem.

peacemaker2• 14 years ago

How do your co-founders feel about you working on another project at the same time?

tylermenezes• 14 years ago

We're all in agreement with Vu's thoughts in the "Before We Begin" section.

There's a nice benefit to it besides personal happiness; every side-project we've worked on so far has ended up getting worked back into our product in some way.

peacemaker2• 14 years ago

That's good to hear. I'm trying to convince my current boss that promoting side-projects (via hack days etc.) will be beneficial to the company but so far no luck!

vu0tran7• 14 years ago

When I need to unwind from coding, I code. Some play games, some watch movies, I just like building things, learning about them and sharing the knowledge. So just like anything else we do on the side to keep ourselves sane, as long as it doesn't hinder our performance, we don't mind.

We actually try to encourage each other to try new things. It keeps us sharp. We usually end up open sourcing it and integrating it into TapIn.tv anyways. I'll probably end up learning a lot about efficient time management, managing customer relationship, and machine learning I can bring back to my team through this experiment.

Who knows, maybe if this works out, we'll try to be more desperate at TapIn.

psc• 14 years ago

We all do a ton of projects in our spare time. And not just web stuff. tylermenezes installed a power outlet into his car. I built an XMPP chat bot that learns. vu0tran made a "search engine." And we're all okay with this because it really adds to the environment we're in. We all feel best when we're building a lot. It keeps us learning and thinking. It feels productive, and as long as everything gets done at work, why not?

Also, it's really entertaining watching each other try to make things. I can't wait to see what happens when Vu doesn't get his company-paid lunch this weekend, and he has no money.

freeslave• 14 years ago

this is called starting a business.

SatvikBeri• 14 years ago

To bring some statistics in: The Talent Code cites a study that shows that people who were famous enough to appear in the Encylopedia Brittanica in 1970 were disproportionately likely to have lost a parent at a young age.[1]

So there appears to be a correlation between losing a parent at an early age and extreme success. (That doesn't mean that your expected value is higher-it's more that the variance is greater.)

[1] http://dheart.tumblr.com/post/305580832/orphans-rule-the-wor... (excerpt) or check The Talent Code chapter 5

keeptrying2• 14 years ago

Love "The Talent Code". Its a must read for people wanting to get great at something.

It will also turn your life upside down based on the actions you will take after you read this. (This is not necessarily a good thing :)

sliverstorm3• 14 years ago

And, of course, who could forget Bruce Wayne? :)

gerts• 14 years ago

Eisenstadt went on a bit of extended speculation there. Having parents tends to create a secure environment that leads to middling experience. Losing that doesn't make you work harder, it just takes away a "normal" life and leads you to find your way elsewhere -- either up or down (as SatvikVeri correctly observes.)

felipemnoa• 14 years ago

Sounds too much like confirmation bias [1]. I would be surprised if most businesses that failed did not become desperate at some point.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

steve89182• 14 years ago

I think another term that is appropriate is "Survivorship bias". That is, you always hear about the success stories, but you never hear about the failures, so you think that the chance of success is higher than it really is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

steve89182• 14 years ago

Personally I would spend all this excess emotional energy and put it into either your startup, or a relationship with a significant other. Or exercise.

Sure, there are plenty of stories about people who were desperate and became successes. You never hear about the hundreds of thousands of people who were desperate and became abject failures. There are also people who are successful who were born with silver spoons in their mouths. So I would not make any type of correlation between some extreme emotional state and being successful. If anything, it might make you squirrely and detract from your obligations at your startup.

vu0tran7• 14 years ago

Yeah, you may be right. I wrote up the blog post and considered withdrawing it before anyone read it but it somehow managed to get its way here anyways because my co-founder thought it'd be funny to post.

If it cuts into my ability to work at my startup, I'll stop immediately as that's my #1 priority. You'll be surprised though that even putting in 60 hrs a week into a startup, exercising and having a significant other, if you work efficiently you still have time left. (168 hrs in a week - 60 - 8 hrs a day for sleep = 62 free hrs left. 1 hr a day for exercising and 2 hrs a day for an SO leaves 41 hrs left. )

But really though, I don't know. This might turn into a lesson about how distracting side projects can be while running a startup. Or how to optimize your time more efficiently. Or even how to run a bad experiment. If this turns out to be a really bad idea, I'll learn from it, share it with you guys and move on.

Thanks for watching out for me though. I appreciate your concern.

ph0rque• 14 years ago

Hopefully your SO knows that they only have 2 hours per day of your time...

rizzom5000• 14 years ago

Might want to check that math: mine is 168 - 60 - (7x8) = 52 hours left. And 52 - 7 - 14 = 31. Between eating, shopping, commuting and other errands, that leaves me about an hour (two if I'm lucky) a day to catch up on reading/'other research' etc.

In any case, your post is really focused on 'good ideas', which is all well and good if you have one -- but had you taken that stats class in college, I think you'd find a preponderance of evidence to support the notion that successful execution of the the idea is a more important factor than having the idea. Neither Pinterest nor AirBnB are unique or exciting ideas - and where the rubber meets the road, it's also extremely unlikely that either are worth anywhere near 1B. Have you seen the Facebook/Zynga/etc. stock prices lately?

sliverstorm3• 14 years ago

The experiment seems flawed. It seems, at least to me, that desperation would tie in to success through simple things like the ol', "I've got nothing to lose". Someone who is desperate is, basically by definition, someone who will do just about anything to secure X.

It doesn't seem like you can produce these behaviors in yourself with a few self-imposed "ground rules". Heck, "self-imposed rules" and "desperate" are almost mutually exclusive.

outworlder• 14 years ago

I was going to post basically the same thing.

Desperation doesn't mean being unable to hang out with friends and share beers. It means paying for gas to return home with pocket change - because you have no money and no credit anymore. And considering selling said car - which wouldn't even be enough to offset the debts. And not being sure if you will even have food in a month without having to borrow money from friends.

And even after the money starts flowing again, you don't hang out with friends until the debt is paid for.

However, this is a partial experiment and might provide the necessary incentive to launch something. But it is an experiment, not the real thing. Might be useful as a vocational exercise.

krapp2• 14 years ago

Looking around your apartment for something to pawn for food money.

nostrademons• 14 years ago

Yeah, the definition of desperation seems a little odd to me. When I was doing my startup, having money to hang out with friends was a non-issue, because I had no friends.

(FWIW, I've done an experiment on myself similar to this but more extreme: I forbid myself from having a social or romantic life while working on my startup, so that I was doing basically nothing except working and reading startup blogs. My results were that I made myself hella insecure, nearly drove myself crazy, and my startup failed anyway. But I did learn a lot about myself and what I wanted, did some cool side projects, and improved my programming chops enough to get into Google, so it wasn't a total loss.

Even that I wouldn't really equate with being "desperate", which I usually equate with not knowing whether you'll have food or a roof over your head at the end of the week.)

vu0tran7• 14 years ago

I agree. I admit that the experiment is completely flawed and any sort of data will be completely subjective. Also, I want to be on record that there are a lot of people out there who are living truly desperate lives and I don't mean to undercut them in any way.

Evbn2• 14 years ago

A better experiment would be to kill someone's family and steal all their money. It is hard to self experiment with desperation. I guess you could shoot some meth and let that snowball...

georgemcbay• 14 years ago

Virtually all business go through an early life-cycle with the oft-talked about "trough of sorrow", AKA "desperation". Some make it past this stage and succeed, most fail miserably. Why would anyone think desperation is something that they have to (or even could) introduce themselves? Or that it would be a success factor, when it is something virtually every business experiences at some point naturally (and the vast majority fail anyway)?

Also, this is a very first world definition of "desperation".

ojbyrne• 14 years ago

I remember a quote about entrepreneurship which I would paraphrase as "It's not hope for success that provides the best motivation, it's fear of failure."

albemuth• 14 years ago

Title made me think of my dating, made me chuckle.

juanbyrge• 14 years ago

When you fail and the depression knocks , make sure you have enough to see a psychiatrist

noonespecial• 14 years ago

That's deprivation, not desperation. You have to be afraid you'll be homelss next week if you don't find a way to make some money this week. That's the only desperation thats likely to really work.

sivers• 14 years ago

Richard Branson's autobiography is filled with many examples of self-created desperation.

See http://sivers.org/desperate

and http://sivers.org/desperate2

Noxchi• 14 years ago

>It's actually something that makes a lot of sense. A really good idea is pretty much a shitty idea that no one knew could be good. It's kind of like if you hid a diamond that may or may not be inside a huge pool of poop. You ask most people and they'll be like, "Hell naw. I'm not jumping in that big pool of poop".

Your reasoning of good ideas and their implementations are wrong like most people.

If something is a good idea, it DOES NOT mean "everyone would be doing it".

You see, there is a thing called "barrier of entry" to ideas.

If someone has an idea for, say an app, there are a million things to do to proceed with that idea.

They need to learn how to

* design apps

* code apps

* market apps

Or if they want to hire people to do all that, they need to

* have experience hiring people

* have a lot of money, or a lot of experience getting funding (crowdfunding won't work if they have no experience)

* actually, forget this list - if you don't know anything you will die.

There are years of knowledge required to execute an idea, so you really limit yourself to only a handful of people who have the ability to, and thought of the same idea as you. And most of those people will probably not follow through either, so to execute an idea you really need to believe in it.

Now for your challenge, I would suggest you do something a little bit different. Instead of coming up with an idea and going the whole 9 yards with it, you can just leverage other peoples idea, and just make money marketing it. This is known as affiliate marketing.

There are networks (called CPA [Cost Per Action] Networks) where startups or companies plug in their various sales pages for things they offer, and you as an affiliate get people to complete those offers. The most common way to do this is buying ads to those offers.

By doing this, you eliminate all but the marketing work of running a startup. Marketing is almost always what determines if a startup fails or succeeds. You gain experience in marketing, and you can do a lot with the inventions you code.

vu0tran7• 14 years ago

Yeah, I wrote that part as a half joke. The point I was trying convey though is better explained by Peter Thiel:

http://www.businessinsider.com/this-venn-diagram-shows-why-s...

Thanks for the suggestion on affiliate marketing. Funny thing is the idea I'm going to pursue is sort of like affiliate marketing. (I've also worked at an affiliate marketing SaaS in the past)

derefr• 14 years ago

> You see, there is a thing called "barrier of entry" to ideas.

Just to give people a strong, striking example of this, before they try to argue the concept away wholesale:

Banks. Starting a bank is a good idea. Everyone would be doing it... if they knew how, and had the connections, and the starting capital, and etc. etc. for a huge list of qualifications.

vu0tran7• 14 years ago

"Experiment #2: Can I start a bank?"

willholloway3• 14 years ago

This is a good suggestion. Affiliate marketing worked out really well for me. I did a ton of it back in 2009. I got a $100 fb ad coupon and before I was done with it I discovered a profitable facebook ad campaign. I then scaled that basic concept across the English, Spanish and French speaking worlds. It was long before anyone would pay me as a consultant, and it financed a cross country adventure.

bravoyankee• 14 years ago

Can desperation drive success?

I don't know, but I'll find out soon!

fleitz• 14 years ago

Desperation does not drive success. Everyone can smell desperation and no one likes that smell.

What drives success is generally concerted effort over a long period of time. Startups can take on massive risk because they are minimally capitalized. Taking a chance of some Obama-Os is a smart play because the risk is minimal (some photoshop time) and the pay off decent ($25K). Obama-Os aren't desperation, it's smart business. If they printed $10K of boxes before testing the market then it would just be stupid.

What the OP is doing is what every business book does, take a bunch of winners, find somethings in common and attribute those things to success.

To me it sounds like the OP has decided to go down the MVP path by eating what he kills. It's not desperation, it's a good way to get on track to making money because you have to abandon VC fundable ideas early.

Caesar feared the hungry man, not the desperate man.

xiaoma• 14 years ago

As long as we're quoting platitudes, I'd say that the flip sides are that "desperate times call for desperate measures", or as Titus Livius said, "In difficult and desperate cases, the boldest counsels are the safest".

Desperation changes the entire game theory. Yes, in many cases people will give the desperate a wide berth. Sometimes, that is just the opening they need.

During John Elway's heyday, I saw the Denver Broncos reach the Super Bowl three times. He was an unbelievable talent. I saw "the drive" of NFL lore from my living room and I saw the Broncos lose in the Super Bowl to larger city teams all three times. And then, years later when both he and the team had been in decline, I saw the most desperate thing.

After his career should have been over, when he was pushing 40, Elway and the Broncos made it back to the Super Bowl. He played the game of his life. And I'll be damned if there wasn't a steely look of desperation in him. At long last, they won. And the next year, they did it again. In his final game, with the clock of not only the game, but of his life ticking down, he did something insane. As a comparatively fragile quarterback hellbent on securing his legacy, he ran it in for a touchdown against heavily muscled men who had a 100 pounds in him. And it was just desperate enough that they didn't see it coming until it was too late to stop him.

That's something that younger, less desperate quarterbacks just wouldn't do. In many cases, the result is ruin. But sometimes desperate actions prevail. It's called a Hail Mary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzzfbflCGwg&t=4m25s

jcampbell1• 14 years ago

I don't disagree with the philosophy here, but the examples given are deeply flawed.

Ben Silbermann kept working on Pinterest because he didn't want to admit to failing. His parents are both specialist doctors who could certainly afford to pass him $50k/year to make sure he was "okay". There was no desperation, just the fact that he kept perpetuating the lie that everything was okay with his business, thus by telling this lie, quitting would make him feel like a dishonest person (I have told the same lie as well. Thank god it worked out.).

The AirBnB founders sold cereal because they are hustlers, not because they were desperate. I'd be willing to be it was more of a drunken idea backed by "fuck it, let's do it", more than desperation.

If there is startup lesson to be learned from these two examples, it is that never giving up, and "fuck it, why not" are beneficial. Desperation may be helpful, but I think the author needs to find better examples.

orangethirty• 14 years ago

If there is startup lesson to be learned from these two examples, it is that never giving up, and "fuck it, why not" are beneficial.

Well put. In terms of never giving up, I think its necessary to explain that it does not mean sticking to one idea per se. But to the goal of growing one succesful business (whatever it may end up being). One can iterate over many ideas, failure after failure, and not need to give up in the grand scheme of things. Sure, it is a bit demoralizing, but some of us manage to get back on the horse and keep going.

The fuck it let's do it attitude is very important. Nothing happens until you make it happen. Nobody is going to serve you your startup on a silver platter. Nobody.

Desperation may be helpful, but I think the author needs to find better examples.

Desperation is helpful, but in my experience it is not a good driving force. It clouds judgement and is usually aimed at short term success.

graeme• 14 years ago

Highly anecdotal, but desperation helped me succeed. I left law school and cut ties with my previous path. To go back to it would have been humiliating, and dispiriting, because I didn't want to do it.

So it was succeed, or go back to something that I didn't want to do.

That drove me onwards for a good nine months. I wrote a book which freed up time to focus on long term projects rather than short term cashflow.

Looking back, it's the most boring thing I've ever done. I constantly thank my past self for letting me live a more relaxed life now, doing things I want to do.

I don't think I could have done it without my poor alternate options. But purposefully forcing yourself into desperate circumstances is risky.

bootload• 14 years ago

"... I wonder... is there a correlation between being desperate and great success? ..."

No. Desperation implies stress and stress inhibits good decision making.

   "When business and life is anything 
    but usual, we do not rise to the 
    occasion. We sink to the level of 
    our preparation." Adam O’Donnell [0]

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv_rHrVQTh4&feature=youtu...

001sky• 14 years ago

Rephrase: can hunger drive success? yes.

Now, compare the use of words.

ary• 14 years ago

So to be clear; you have a startup, so you have a company to work on that could bring financial gain, but you want another startup?

willholloway3• 14 years ago

You have a YC backed startup. That is an incredible opportunity, with intangible strategic advantage that a bootstrapped side-project can never have. Startups are war.

Two founders fight each other in battle. One has side project. The other does not. Founder without side project wins.

What you are embarking on is a distraction. I believe that you are hurting your ability to raise funding in the future. I would not want to fund a founder with this mindset.

Best advice. Recant this post. Do the right thing by your co-founders, and funders.

willholloway3• 14 years ago

I understand your ADD mindset, but keep in mind this zen saying I picked up from playing Civilization IV: 'He who chases two rabbits will catch neither.'

OldSchool• 14 years ago

Contrived desperation?? I don't think it's possible. If you're going to be genuinely desperate you can't have any choices. Desperation involves a lot more than money. You can't fake yourself into fear, hurt, depression, anger yet these drive many successful people. That's why a lot of them either a) are never satisfied or b) get even more messed up when excess money enters their lives.

Always being honest with yourself and developing continuous and methodical discipline that leads toward your goal is the best approach I can think of.

evim• 14 years ago

You are not desperate, you are playing.

lumberjack• 14 years ago

What are recipe for failure! Once you get a whiff of success your hope will increase and your desperation will gradually be tamed. What happens then? You might end up in a vicious cycle of highs and lows.

pirateking• 14 years ago

I will conduct the opposite experiment: can laziness drive success?

For what it is worth, the deep end of laziness does draw out a certain kind of contemplative, mellow desperation - an existential dilemma of sorts - which I often find helpful for doing my best creative work.

nedwin• 14 years ago

This sounds like madness - if you think this won't be a distraction then you are kidding yourself.

Coding to destress, I can understand that. So code something that's related, but non-core, to the business and that's not tied to what you're doing during the day.

Or maybe I'm totally wrong. In my experience any amount of split focus is to the detriment of both projects/startups - and you need all the help you can get.

Would be curious to see what PG thinks.

konradb• 14 years ago

As other people have said, if you really are desperate then it masks your worldview. One can tend to act differently, because the resources/outlook is limited. Sometimes this works, but more often it doesn't, because typically your desperation makes you focus on getting the next meal, the next bit of money coming in. This takes you away from giving all your focus to something great without distraction.

There are obviously counterexamples where it can be used as the fuel to do something and that works out, and those can be inspiring. But if you want to do something great you actually want to do something great, there's your fuel. So then cutting away anything that takes you away from your goal helps enormously.

realrocker• 14 years ago

Left job 3 months ago, 5k USD of debt, have no savings, to build an email client. Earning a bit by giving android classes and loaning petty cash for food and rent from my folks and friends. Pretty desperate.

Is it working? Well it's complicated.

The main problem I faced the first 4 weeks was to break out of the inertia of being given a task to perform. The second problem I faced was the daily work routine. Took 4 weeks to get that right.

Last 4 weeks have been really productive though.

Did I have a plan of what to do from the start? Yes. Written down in an excel sheet.

Did I follow the plan? No. I don't why. Just woke up every morning to find myself staring at the plan, scribbling notes and writing random code snippets. On the other hand, it also gave me a lot of extra knowledge base about the problem I am solving. Too early to say whether it was good or bad.

Did I tell anyone about my plan? No. I guess that was my mistake. Some kind of external/peer monitoring would have helped.

So what changed? How did I finally get productive? Desperation. Spent 2 months without anything solid to show for it. One nice morning, I had this ache in my heart to get something done and things just started working out.

So does desperation drive success? I don't know about success but desperation does improve productivity. But desperation also gives you a tunnel vision and you might miss important things that actually make you successful. That is also my greatest fear.

Takeaway: Do what this guy is doing. Get peer monitoring before you start. Send that excel sheet to someone who can spare a few minutes a day/week to keep you in line.

nodrama• 14 years ago

from my own experience, yes it does. The way it worked for me was that I was ready to take more risky or uncomfortable decisions.

But from reading your post I sense that you don't really want to do this (who wants to be desperate? nobody): "The experiment starts once I do a Show HN."

For me, building something that you can show should be included in the experiment. So you should start right now!

An experiment: Can desperation drive success?

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