Part of the magic of a startup is the fear of death. You have only so much money in the bank, and if you don't get to the right milestone before you run out, then the company goes under - it's over.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The life of a startup is full of ups and downs, an emotional roller coaster ride that you can't quite imagine if you've spent your whole career in a corporation.
Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money. Therefore startups trade off certainty for speed, adopting 'good enough decision making' and iterating and pivoting as they fail, learn, and discover their business model.
There's a lot of glorification of startups and being a founder. People brush the failures under the rug, but that's the worst thing you can do. You kind of have to face it head on.
Because most startups are lean and scrappy organizations consisting of a limited number of people and supported by an even smaller number of resources, startups cannot afford to have any slackers on board. When you fail, you cause an 'epic failure,' and when you win, everyone in the company knows about it.
The thing about startups is you can make it, and if it's wrong you can remake it, and you can build a team that you want to have, a product that you want to have. You're utterly focused on your users or your customers and their needs, and trying to figure out how to meet those needs.
Too many startups get in the habit of continually raising more and more money, which has the deleterious effect of both pushing out profitability and limiting your exit options. The less rounds of capital you need to raise, the more of your company you get to own.
For a lot of people, one of the reasons they don't like to work for founders of startups is that they can be sensitive and protective around what they've built. You have an emotional attachment to the early marketing and technology materials, and you don't want to hear that anything's wrong with them.
Working on a startup is a balancing act: being crazy enough to believe your idea can take off but not crazy enough to miss the signs when it's clearly not going to.
It's rare for a startup to make money immediately, so you need to make sure that you have enough saved or that you have another income stream that can support you.
As an entrepreneur, the pressures of a startup can be enormous, but it's rarely life or death.
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