The United States was built on the back of small business. Big companies only get big after they’ve been small. In fact, much of North America’s world dominance can be traced back to entrepreneurism and the innovation that sprouted from it. Why then, is there such a strong undercurrent of pessimism against small business and startups? Every day I read tweets or blog posts from a startup founder or CEO complaining about how “hard” it is to run a startup. The long hours, the late nights, the endless work. Two of the more notable personalities in the startup world (Paul Graham and Marc Andreessen) say it too. But why? You’ll also hear the common refrain of how difficult it is to be successful with a startup and how the failure rate is so high (which I debunked in v2 of this blog back in 2005).
Startups are hard in what sense? Sure, long days can contribute to fatigue and make things physically and emotionally harder. When I worked in a sock factory during high school, those were some long days. Hot too. Working with guys that went behind the building during lunch to pound a 40. They wanted to arm-wrestle me for money (while they were half drunk). Then there was the summer I installed insulation in new homes. You’re supposed to wear masks when handling that stuff, but the guys I worked with didn’t care about that. They breathed it in and had raspy coughs to go with it. It was as hot as an oven during summers wearing the masks and it wasn’t fun crawling around with snakes underneath homes. To me, that was “hard”.
But Robbie, when they say “hard”, they are talking about mentally hard, not physically hard. Ok, what I think of as mentally hard is waking up every day to a corporate job that makes me want to jump off a building because the policies and projects are so mundane and uninteresting that you spend half your time surfing the web just to stave off boredom. How about trying to get motivated to do a big presentation on a topic you don’t really care about to a group of people that don’t really care about it either only to find out at the end of it that your project is #11 on the list so in 5-6 years you may get some resources to work on it.
Sorry, but I don’t find the life of a startup “hard”. And if you think it is “hard”, maybe the startup life isn’t for you. If you find it hard, you’ll likely never make it anyway. I believe the #1 controllable success factor for smart people succeeding with a startup is just to stick with it. If you aren’t passionate about the thing you are working on, you likely won’t stay in the game long enough to be successful. When I read posts about startups being so hard, I think those people are close to the end of their rope just like I knew I was at the end of mine when I started complaining about how hard it was at a big company.
Coming in to an office every day that I picked out with a group of guys I hired on projects I designed feels like heaven to me. Yes, there are parts to running a company that aren’t fun and I don’t enjoy as much, but in the grand scheme that’s the cost of doing business and far from the days of arm-wrestling drunk guys for money.
