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The Challenges a Repeat Founder Faces – Tikhon Bernstam of Scribd and Parse (blog.ycombinator.com)
68 points by craigcannon on Sept 8, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments



For anyone who doesn't want to listen to/read the whole thing (though you should; it's great), here's the quote to which the title alludes:

> Yes, absolutely. I actually think repeat founders are actually at a disadvantage in many ways, because you feel this pressure to come up with some genius idea, when usually the best start ups are not a genius idea. They’re not some brilliant flash in the pan. It’s just doing something that… Facebook. MySpace already existed. Friendster already existed. But Mark just really nailed it. He started with colleges, he built something awesome that people loved. I think often doing things better is not a bad strategy. But as a second time or third time founder, I feel a pressure to– it’s like the sophomore slump that Richard Feinman talks about in physics, where he wasn’t allowed to work on small ideas anymore, he had to work on some gigantic thing, but all the best discoveries in physics came from like the “That doesn’t seem right, it’s kind of odd.” Maxwell’s equations say that the speed of light’s always constant…


Here it is directly linked to hear/read that section: https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-challenges-a-repeat-founder...


Thanks folks! Yea Feynman's spinning plate story about sophomore slump in particular is such a great read




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