Why not to do a startup
Marc Andreessen on why you shouldn't launch a startup.
This piece is inspired by Marc Andreessen’s blog, pmarca, particularly his blog post on "Why not to do a startup".
While there’s plenty of talk about the excitement of starting a company - the freedom, the perks, the money, and the fun office environments with ping-pong tables - there’s much less discussion about the challenges of starting it.
Marc Andreessen provides a clear perspective on the latter.
Marc Andreessen is the cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
He co-founded three companies:
Netscape, sold to AOL for $4.2 billion;
Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), a public software company with an approximately $1 billion market cap;
Ning, a private consumer Internet company.
He has also been involved in 40-50 startups as a board member, as an angel investor, as an advisor, as a friend of various founders, and as a participant in various venture capital funds.
It is certainly true that there are a lot of great things about doing a startup. Some of these great things are:
🏆 Control your destiny: Opportunity to succeed or fail on your own terms.
✨ Creation: Ability to create something new without the constraints faced in larger companies.
🌍 Impact on the world: Chance to influence the world and create change.
🏢 Create your culture: Ability to build an ideal work culture and team.
💰 Money: Potential for high financial gains and philanthropic contributions.
However, there are many more reasons to not do a startup:
🎢 Emotional rollercoaster: Very intense highs and similarly intense lows due to constant uncertainty and risk.
▶️ Nothing happens unless you make it happen: Founders (and early employees) must initiate everything, otherwise nothing happens.
❌Embrace rejections: You’ll be told “no” a lot, over, and over, and over, from potential employees, investors, customers, partners, etc.🧗 Difficult Hiring: Many people hesitate to leave stable jobs for startups; besides, there is a high risk of hiring the wrong people, who you will need to fire later.
⛰️ Executive Hiring: In a startup, hiring employees is difficult. Hiring the best employees is hard. Hiring senior executives is very hard.
⏰ Long Hours: Startups are incredibly intense experiences and take a lot out of people. Work/life balance, especially for founders, cannot exist when you are very close to running out of cash, or when you don’t know if you’ll ship the product on time.
⚠️ Culture can go sideways: High stress and no work/life balance can affect company culture, leading to distress, bad morale and self-reinforcing bitterness.
🎲 Uncontrollable x-factors: Stock market crashes, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, a competitor launching an amazing product can happen, and you can do nothing about it.
After all these challenges and hurdles, you know what is the best part?
These obstacles don’t even cover deciding what product to create, how to build it, bringing it to market, or differentiating it from competitors - all core activities when building a startup.
So, do you still think you’re up for the challenge?
See you next Sunday 🗓️
Thanks for reading,
Giacomo
Good read
For every reward we seek, we tend to forget the risk associated with it. As the old maxim goes: "Greater the risk, greater the reward."