Founders Need Rock Hard Abs

http://jordancooper.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/founders-need-rock-hard-abs/

by jordancooper • 17 years ago

46 24 17 years ago

jordancooper.wordpress.com

swombat• 17 years ago

After two months of product development, business planning, and strong forward momentum, my friends just got their first real “punch to the stomach.”

Being rejected by YC is far from a "real punch to the stomach". The point of the article is absolutely right. You need a quasi-inexhaustible supply of rock-hard abs to run a start-up. Sometimes, things go very wrong. As the comments on http://danieltenner.com/posts/0005-starting-up-with-a-friend... showed, it can oh-so-easily happen that you find yourself losing your best friends over your start-up.

After I launched my first start-up, my father's advice was: "Are you prepared for the possibility that it might all fall apart in complete disaster in 6 months?" I didn't know how right he was, but having that in my mind certainly helped prepare me.

I'll close with a quote from the ever-insightful "If" poem by Kipling:

  If you can make one heap of all your winnings 
  And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
  And lose, and start again at your beginnings
  And never breathe a word about your loss;
  If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
  To serve your turn long after they are gone,
  And so hold on when there is nothing in you
  Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

  ...

  Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
  And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Psyonic• 17 years ago

Hell of a poem there by Kipling. Thanks for the link above as well... that would certainly be a tough blow

vsingh• 17 years ago

"If" is one of my favorite inspiring poems. Here's a great video version of it:

http://www.vimeo.com/1305608

martincmartin• 17 years ago

What's worse? Having it all fall apart in complete disaster in 6 months? Or having it require continual Herculean effort to keep it limping along for years?

gloob• 17 years ago

Or having it require continual Herculean effort to keep it limping along for years?

Perhaps "Sisyphean" would be a more evocative adjective, in that particular situation.

efsavage2• 17 years ago

"p.s. i don’t use spell check - deal with it"

Advice from someone who can't be bothered with the most basic details and easiest remedies? I'll pass.

edw519• 17 years ago

Advice from someone who can't be bothered with the most basic details and easiest remedies?

This is actually excellent feedback.

It reminds me of the time I took 4 enterprise vice presidents from New Jersey to visit a software vendor in Silicon Valley. They had great (multi-million dollar) software and it was perfect for this customer.

Our first meeting was at 9 a.m., and there was no coffee! The Vice President of Sales actually found the coffee and filters and brewed the first pot himself in the vendor's conference room. (Probably the first time he made coffee in 20 years.) Then he said, "Why should I trust them to handle my customer orders when they can't even do the basics right?"

A subtle but very important point. When engineering people sell to business people, we have the extra burden of showing that we know how to conduct business at their level. The easiest way to get started is with precise attention to details. And faux pas destroy trust much quicker with web technology.

I didn't even notice OP's quote. Thanks for pointing this out, efsavage.

jgrahamc• 17 years ago

Years ago I met the CEO of a company that wanted to hire me at SFO. He had bought himself a coffee and didn't offer me one. I bought my own and he didn't seem to notice.

Said everything I needed to know about the guy.

Andys• 17 years ago

Really good point. I usually find it difficult because I don't even drink coffee and don't know how to make it.

Yet culturally, I need to learn this in order to close some deals.

nbroyal• 17 years ago

This type of comment has always bothered me. I'll admit it, I don't really understand what the guy has against spell check. However, is it really THAT big of a deal that this guy's work may contain some misspellings? Furthermore, neither his lack of a willingness to use spell check nor the mistakes contained within the message (as long as it is still coherent) says anything about the quality of the actual content. It just seems dismissive for the most trivial of reasons.

EDIT: With all that said, I'm not vouching for the quality of the post one way or another. I'm just saying, judge the content by the content and nothing else.

lmkg• 17 years ago

What's more off-putting is the up-front refusal to use a spellcheck. It means that he's aware he has a problem and refuses to fix it.

If there were more of an explanation, it might endear me to the guy. If he dug into some of the haphazard history of English spelling conventions and refused to adhere to illogical paradigms, I'd give him credit. If he mentioned something from communications theory, I'd give him a pass. But the explicit statement that "my idiosyncrasies are higher priority than your user experience" is not a good statement to make. It's a significantly worse impression than a simple typo, and a stronger one because it's intentional instead of an oversight.

efsavage2• 17 years ago

There is a bit of ad hominem attack in my comment, I won't deny that, because it's intentional. He's not reporting facts or offering analysis, he's offering advice and opinion, in which case the person offering it is an important part of evaluating the quality of the content.

nkurz• 17 years ago

I agree that it isn't that typos and misspellings aren't that big of a deal, but I think they correlate significantly with clarity of thought. Making judgments based on superficial characteristics isn't necessarily a bad thing; the key is to make sure that one is choosing the right surfaces to look at.

For me, the disclaimer is a red flag, but the quality of the text countered it quite well. Should I presume his logic is positively correlated with his strength of sentence structure? Usually I do.

But for me, this was overridden by the attempt to cite fiction as an authority. Good fiction is good because it appeals to our sense of authenticity, not because it actually is authentic. Thus using fiction as an example is usually just arguing that something 'sounds right'.

I just watched a very good documentary on steriod use (Bigger Stronger Faster) that pointed out that the real Stallone's physique as depicted in the movie relied fairly heavily on steroids. Sure, there were lots of crunches, but heavy drugs as well. Is the real message of this article that deception (self or otherwise) is essential to entrepreneurial success?

potatolicious• 17 years ago

"is it really THAT big of a deal that this guy's work may contain some misspellings?"

IMHO it is, especially considering how trivially easy it is to correct these misspellings. What is more bothersome is not the presence of misspellings, but his acknowledgment that he has a problem, but steadfast (and even arrogant) refusal to fix it.

To me this suggests a "good enough" work ethic, which honestly doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.

That being said, I'd probably only apply this sort of judgment if I was thinking of hiring him or buying from him - it does imply a lack of attention to detail, a rejection of things that others consider basic competency, and an arrogant attitude.

loveatlonglast• 17 years ago

I'm in agreement. Jordan Cooper's posts are thoughtful and coherent.

Fred Wilson pen's many of his posts on his blackberry and in many ways that adds to the conversational tone he tries to set on his blog.

raheemm• 17 years ago

Good point but the funny thing is that I did not find a single spelling mistake in the OP's post or his about section. Compare that to a TC post about the wakeband and its riddled with spelling errors. So maybe he is being facetious.

petercooper• 17 years ago

The secret of Tim Ferriss's success.

kwamenum86• 17 years ago

"and at some point the dude that’s throwing all the blows get’s tired"

annnnnd....that's where the analogy broke down. I thought it was a bit disjointed. All that talk of strong abs was unnecessary. But strip out the attempt at clever humor and you have an important message, I think.

philwelch• 17 years ago

Sometimes I wish these bloggers could just say what they mean without throwing in tortured analogies and pop culture references.

jordancooper• 17 years ago

discussion around spell check is interesting...it was just a funny way of saying "i suck at spelling, sorry about that." I try to catch everything, just wanted to set a disclaimer that the spelling and grammar in this blog is not going to be of a professional caliber...

Founders Need Rock Hard Abs

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