I have heard horrific startup stories. I am hearing more of them since I decided to work on a problem close to my heart. Communities.
I have heard stories about founder depression, stress issues and overall fear of failure. I started only a couple of months ago but there are some strategies that I developed to pre-emptively protect myself from being pessimistic and worried.
Here is how I am training myself to think about doing a startup in general.
- Your idea is the beautiful painting that you want paint, technology and systems are the brush and colours, the targetted market acts as a canvas. You use brushes and colours to draw a desirable (if not beautiful) painting on the canvas and the idea can change as you start painting. But there is always an ideal painting that you always biased towards. Everything else besides the idea of the ideal painting, brush and colours and the canvas are important but not necessary.
- Handling the ups and downs involved in a startup seems to be a source of major stress for founders. When I meet founders/CEOs aside from being great executioners they come across great servants of the market they work in. Their knowledge about the market and the agents in it is always more than the knowledge that takes to build a useful product. Some great market servants, go on to become masters of those markets. They become powerful influencers who shape markets themselves, upto a point where it is just unfair. (think Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Kalidasa, Plato(?)).
- So if you are an early stage founder and are running a startup, it almost is a news of great fortune that you would be observing that market closely for years on end. You will be totally immersed in the knowledge of how agents act, and how actions of those agents affects transactions in those markets and so on. What more, you can take an idea in your head and build actors/platforms/systems that can alter how these markets work for the better. What fun.
- One fear is that year on year, you are not creating great products/services (beautiful painting) for the market, you do not earn any money. Your engineer and sales friends keep on getting top bucks each year and you start looking stupid to the world. That fear is a fear only when you really care about what situation others are in compared to your own.* If you do not really compare yourself to anybody, it does not matter. This is a very weak thought, but I do not have anything else. *(Though they have a greater budget to buy books every month as a consequence of their greater pay.)
- The chance that you will meet crazy, ambitious and smart people while building a startup is always greater. That is a great leveller.
- You can literally spend a Wednesday afternoons reading your favourite novel or catching up with a movie and compensate by working the whole night. This pleasure and luxury does not come with a paid job. The availbility of freedom and felixibility are radically underrated in a startup life.