Two really excellent posts that hit the nail on the head for me about startups and the ironies of success and failure. For anyone who has been there, they resonate in cringe-inducing ways. Read them:
Dharmesh Shah’s cautionary Startup Suicide: Five Ways To Kill Your Startup, Which Will You Pick?
Chris Campbell takes a more positive spin with 5 Reasons to Create Your First Startup
Nobody goes into a new venture intending to fail, but going into a startup knowing that failure is not only possible but statistically likely (especially for the first-time startup entrepreneur) should inform how you approach the experience.
I like Chris Campbell’s point: failure is common, even likely, but the lessons learned are good reasons to do your first startup. The lessons you’re going to learn can really be learned no other way. Campbell argues for taking the longer-term view. My message to young first-time entrepreneurs is to better understand the true risks and rewards and treat the experience first and foremost as the best MBA that money and foregone wages can buy, not as a ticket to the venture-capital or Google-buyout lottery.
The new attitude, particularly for small and cheap web startups, is this: Go in with eyes open. Try something small first. Learn by doing. Trial and error. Iterate quickly and be flexible. Make lots of small corrections. Know when to kill it, cut bait and move on to the next thing so you can redeploy all that new knowledge you just gained.
These posts should be required reading for a session on the topic at the upcoming StartupCampToronto. Aspiring entrepreneurs are characteristically confident (and stubborn) and resist conceiving of, or admitting to, failure. If passing on some wisdom to aspiring entrepreneurs is a good thing, we should be talking about the lessons and precautions of failure.
So let’s talk about it.
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