Would you like to be on Forbes 30 U 30? It will give maybe 3% chance of having a real company, a 35% chance of failing completely, and a 65% chance of being behind bars for being a white collared sneaky bastard.
Lumbfao, the stat I just stated is worded backwards; It's of the people that are pushing for the big B, we have the roll of the dice larping frauds. What's new?
There is a lot of delusion surrounding the narrative of startups. A lot of people make fun of people who believe in astrology, tarot cards, and pseudo-science, yet romanticize the idea of lighting cash on fire under American capitalism. That’s not fair…
Literally, how does that make any sense? Young founders defending their narrative so hard(beautifully shit thesis), yet they haven’t accomplished anything ? I know some people make lying online their entire personality, but can you at least get better at lying? girl ...
You want people to at least pretend like your thesis makes sense.
Young people are extremely susceptible to this. They don’t know shit, they were raised off the internet, they romanticize the wrong things(there is nothing romantic or sexy about bringing something to market), are performative, call shots as if they’re the Golden State coach(you were born yesterday), and the worst would be not admitting the truth.
Even being an "influencer" / internet fraud and going viral isn't easy...
its brain damage to keep begging the world for attention like your life depends on it...
Where is the humility?
If every trial you invoke 1/k of the market giving a shit, all across n attempts, you probabilistically do not increase your chances of success, hello? I know startup people like gambling, but there's a threshold okay?
New POV: you live in SF where millions are flying around for sake of capitalism, greed, and the American Dream, (someone may or may not have made a mistake gambling on you). You raise seed, maybe series A, so what? you get some likes from your friends on the internet, sooooo when are we going to solve a problem in the market? Ohhhh right, you were too busy validating your thoughts(worth nothing) and not validating customers.
This isn’t even a harsh take, whole lotta (2,7) action going on in modern company thesis’. Which is okay in the grand scheme of things--nobody expects young people to actually know anything meaningful, but they do expect a sense of relentlessness. I do not personally believe that grit is as common as people claim it to be. It’s not about working hard or not, it's the character of starving/hunger--Like some uncomfortable personal/emotional reason in the problem space they are trying to help.
How about a new riddle: Are you young, ambitious, a self-proclaimed engineer looking to build your own startup?
Here are a list of places of where you may fail:
1. You will fail--However you define that. You will eat loads of shit trying to bring anything to market.
2. Engineering validation is nearly disjoint with market validation. Which is prolly why the market for devs selling to devs is gargantuous because for the most part devs clobber with talking to other devs on sub forums. Good engineering practices scale w/ systems that exist and need to be maintained. But if you're an early startup...not only do you literally not exist whatsoever, but have weak customer feedback-loop to keep you alive. focus on customer and product-criticism (listen to customer).
3. Bridging the gap between technical implications and a particular market segment has an insurmountable amount of grey area—much of which you may not even know if its a dev or a business related problem. Especially when it comes to judgement calls—the vast majority of young people have not lived long enough to have any “judgement” that is worth anything. You will be wrong often--you're dealing with the ambiguous nature of how the future will react to your ill-attempts at pentrating the market. You are NOT an Oracle capable of forecasting society. You're a gambler at best, Hello magic black box believer ...
4. You don’t know your audience, you never met with them— you can’t paint a strong customer profile. Knowing customers only on a surface level, never uncovers the emotional reasons why people are sold.
Like do you think Brad from NYU Stern whos rocking double-double zynzs pouches thinks the same way as SF, codeforces since the womb, dark mode toggled–hates the sunlight. They not even from the same planet. (silly example for comedy)
5. Common sense alert: being ill-connected keeps you disadvantaged. Lacking domain expertise keeps you blind or self-validating rather than receiving real signal.
6. You evidently, and obviously failed the “Mom Test”. Essentially, you talk about what you are building(in which nobody cares)–rather than digging deep into your customers problems. If your problem space can’t be equated with a dollar figure, or if you are ill-equipped to help, or any reason that disconnects the product from the problem itself, what is your purpose in building ?
If you are not ten-feet balls deep, equally frustrated about the problem as your customer, you are doing something wrong by instead painting make up and lip gloss on mark-down, css files. Yes pretty things catch moth eyes, but are you solving problems for people and how can you prove it? (don't lie in your head).
7. The idea has planned for the better, and not for the worst. Where is the point in your TAM/SAM/SOM—it’s like trivia knowledge sprinkled ontop of the fact that your chances of capturing anything is worse than Las Vegas slot machine EV. Plans are only ever alive on paper, and when you start with the best-case for the future you are setting up your oracle for dissapointment.
8. You don’t have it in you. If your expected value for any return is so low, what is keeping you building? Forget escaping the corporate matrix, the matrix is a lot nicer than being an “influencer” second guessing if the next contract will ever come.
9. Short-term thinking–Lack of purpose/long-term mission. A hustler is not for everyone. You are a victim to selection-bias phenomenon–you only see the handful with traction, but not the hundreds of thousands in debt, lost, miserable, etc. For every thirst-trapper, there exists hundred thousand equally qualified, and posting similar content without the monetization.
For every small business that can afford to open a new store, thousands or an entire street are filling for bankruptcy, have overdue invoices, haven’t been cash flow positive since the 2000s, and their families are in literal shambles.
entrepreneurship is simply not for the vast majority of people. Most people don't care, or wish to care about a problem space. Worse of all, if there is so little to gain after pouring so much for the problem space, you shouldn't pretend to actually care... founders are fundementally people who are mission or purpose driven. They are not people who are driven by cash grab money...if the word startup make you think of: "whats the size of my next exit going to be", I sure pray to god you don't go onto raise or hire !
[To be continued] [unfinished]
If you enjoy reading this style of writing, give a like! I try to keep up with writing once in a while as good reminder than homosapiens are still capable of expression complete trains of thoughts without monkey prompting.
Maybe one day if I become someone—I too will have a podcast where I quarter-cross my legs in dark-blue cashmere speaking into a microphone pretending as if what I’m saying is useful.
Then you will presumptively buy my course as the deterministic next step!