I had a friend in college (I'll call Rob) who would shoot hoops, play golf, or play table tennis with anyone at any time. But he would never play anything else. He wouldn't play touch football, softball, bridge, or even shoot a game of pool. I could never understand it until I finally figured it out: he wouldn't play anything unless he knew that he would win. How sad, I thought.
I just realized (to my horror) that years later, I am just like him. I don't push boundaries like I used to. I don't call on that extra customer, volunteer for that project, or apply to programs like yc if I think there is any chance I won't win. There's always a reason: the software is missing too much, the demo sucks, there are 14 other things that have to be done first,... You get the picture.
I never thought of this as "fear of failure". I just got so used to succeeding in everything I did that I didn't want to do anything else where I didn't succeed. I became Rob without even realizing it.
I've got to change this stinkin' thinkin'. A good failure would probably do me good. Or maybe I should just try something I would have never imagined a month ago.
In my experience it is often the opposite trait that is a problem. Hackers don't want to do something they have already figured out -- they crave the novel.
Solving a problem a second time is much more profitable. A big part of business is focusing on your strengths, rather than your weaknesses. Find out what you do best and market the hell out of it. No product is perfect.
Solving a problem a second time is much more profitable
This is compatible with the OP's point - hackers often look for novel solutions, not necessarily novel problems.
But the terminology here is very uncertain - problems and solutions interact in very complex ways: the "assembly line" solution solved the "horse shit all over the roads" problem. Google Wave might end up solving the problems which ORM's and databases are solving - that of storing and synchronizing data structures across machines.
The generalization of Rob's avoidance of new sports and Slava's startup into the category of "new things" doesn't fit. The OP's post was about the effects of social pressure on his choosing to start a company before and after his decision, and the role YC played. The example of Rob only doing things he was good at relates because Rob was influenced by a similar model of success, failure, and social expectations.
Wow, that really puts things into perspective. I think I've fallen into this same trap, and given any number of names to the fear, but I've never thought of it that way.
I just failed an interview process out of the Valley. I won't name any names, but it was a relatively well known shop. This is probably the first time since I started my career wherein I just fell flat on my face. I learned quite a bit from the process, but I won't say it felt wonderful.
This post makes it just that much easier to get back up on the horse.
I started up an Internet idea(1st time) with the intention of getting something out of it. Initial goal was to learn how to code websites and work around like minded individuals; was answering customer svc calls at Comcast/Verizon.
I started almost three years ago and never imagined the journey it would lead me on; being in publications, getting investment & other cool things. It was a great journey and amongst mentioned accomplishments, I also learned how to code & now am doing that for a living; making a lot more money!
Overall it was better then going to college, as there was a chance of becoming wealthy or creating the latest whatever amongst gaining invaluable skills.
I think it's OK to continue doing the "same old" if you're good at it (and/or love it), and you continue to improve at it. It's also good to go out and try new things to change things up on occasion.
If you always stick to the "same old", you'll miss unique knowledge and experiences. If you're always jumping from one thing to the next and never staying focused, one never really gets "good" at any one thing.
It's a balancing act, really. IMHO a good way to measure if you're succeeding or not is with your overall state of happiness.
It just goes back and forth for me. When I really cared about my grades in school, I would stick to classes that I'd do good in. Then when I started sucking and school and grades quit meaning much, I started taking classes for how interesting they were instead of ease.
It doesn't seem surprising to me. Doing anything really hard is as much about mastering oneself as about domain knowledge. You'd hear similar things from a lot of top athletes, for example.
And while "entrepreneurship" in general is not necessarily hard, the path Slava has chosen is. It's not easy to start a new database company.
I think it makes sense when viewed another way. Only a select few, about 3% of this country are wealthy, even though one can create their own wealth here. I think the reason is two-fold. First, it's remarkably rare for a person to actually act on their ambitions. Next, when you consider that the default for startups is failure (as PG wrote), and that even smart people fail, it seems to indicate there is something more the people with self-made success have. If all were not born with these valuable qualities, some likely gained them through conscious self-improvement.
The 'something more' might just be luck. Imagining that there's some Nietzschean superhero quality you can cultivate in order to succeed where many people just like you have failed is a kind of magical thinking.
When you drive to work and hit all green lights, do you search deep within yourself for the elusive quality that set you apart from the red-light-stopping masses?
My response to that, and I got this from some movie I can't remember, is that I prefer to think I create my own luck. Let's hypothesize that opportune situations arise for all people at various times. All things being equal, only a select few people, like Bill Gates, or Mark Cuban, become significantly wealthy. I feel this may appear to many to be luck on the surface, but that there was actually a lot of unseen maneuvering and positioning (i.e. hard work) going on behind the scenes possibly for years which allows such individuals to capitalize on their lucky opportunity when it presents itself.
i.e. that the wealthy are only relatively so, and as such are defined as the rightward long tail of the income distribution, and thus are few (by definition).
Also, a tautology is a statement that is necessarily true. However, 3% doesn't necessarily mean a diminished value. For example, if your local bank had a promotion which guaranteed a 3% daily interest savings return that would be considered quite a lot.
Yes, I agree that fearlessness and inspiration sound like ridiculously simple qualities to have. My point was that people are made up of various strengths and weaknesses, and it's rare for anyone to have the requisite full toolbox for self-made success. In that case, self-improvement type advice doesn't seem so weird.
I learned a long time ago to simply not care what my family and friends think, or how they judge me. After all, none them are entrepreneurs, have studied business, are programmers or hackers, or even understand anything about the startup culture in any sense. So why subject myself to the criticism of a bunch of amateurs? I’m looking to be critiqued by pros like Paul Graham and the YC team. I’m looking to be subject to criticism from those whom have been there, know what they are doing, and can offer me constructive feedback to improve my idea. It would be like going to my barber because I’m having chest pains. Not a bright move. Since all my barber could do, would be to shape me up and make me look good for my next doctor's appointment.
Thanks for sharing your experiences. I also really enjoyed your early postings on Lisp and functional programming; at the time, they helped me stay the course towards learning Lisp.
If I get the essence of it right YC offers personal counseling to overcome the fear of failure, and if you don't get in you'll have to overcome that fear somehow on your own ?
If this is in response to an earlier discussion on HN what it is exactly that an incubator does for the entrepreneurs that sign up with them then I hope that this is not typical.
An entrepreneur that does not fear failure still has to be born I think, almost all successful people are at some level worried about not succeeding.
You transcend that fear by becoming excellent at what you do and by giving it your 100%. And if you fail, you try again, this time with more experience. Rinse, repeat until you get it right. Almost everybody fails a couple of times before they get it right, the exceptions merely confirm the rule.
And you should get a team of advisors around you, people that you can trust completely, before you start negotiating with any VC or incubator.
After all, you are emotionally involved, you may not see things too clearly and outside advisors can keep your feet on the ground. You will make a better deal that way.
The VC is on the other side of the table during the negotiations phase.
Your point escapes me. All the OP is saying is that getting into YC made it easier to override his initial fear of failure, after which the process took on a life of its own. The subject of the sentence you quoted is not "The YC partners personally" but "The experience of YC" (cf. the title of the post).
It never occurred to me that this might be a language problem, but I do find it somehow hilarious to imagine a Dutch person saying that (assuming you've translated the sentence literally). This makes me wonder how, shall we say, zany we must generally appear to the Dutch. It also makes me wonder how many other such misunderstandings are lurking under the surface with continental Europeans who appear (damn you) to have native-speaker-level command of English.
Zany just means wacky. It's an older word (deriving, I just learned, from commedia dell'arte). I was looking (jokingly) for a euphemism to approximate your implicit category of this-person-is-either-crazy-or-smoking-something.
gruseom was using "zany" as an adjective, rather than as a noun. If I am the person in definition #3, then I am acting like a buffoon and I am very "zany".
YC isn't in the business of offering personal counseling :) It's much simpler than that. When you get into YC, it's very easy to tell everyone you're "all in". After that, you can't weasel your way out of failure. You can't go back and say "yeah, I sort of wanted to try this thing, I never really wanted to anyway". Any failure will be absolutely apparent. So you'll fight like hell not to fail. That's all there's to it. I'm still a coward, I still can't bear going back and saying I failed, and that's why I work so hard. YC just helps you say "I'm all in" to the world.
It's like the prettiest woman walking up to you and admitting her insecurities about her looks.
Trust me, every entrepreneur has these fears. And the ones that tell you they don't are lying through their teeth.
We're all up here working our asses off to prove that we can do better. We're all cowards in one form or another. Afraid that our next venture will be a failure. Afraid that we're past our prime. Afraid that someone will outdo us. And so on.
But we've overlaid that fear with concrete and self-discipline (except of course, for procrastinating).
It's fine if YC gives you the power to overcome your fears, but make no mistake, you had that power all along, you are the one doing the work.
The fact that someone watches you seems to make a huge difference to you, and it is great that they can provide you with that assistance but on the whole I figure that is but a small part of your accomplishment. And I doubt anybody at YC would disagree with that.
The real fight is with yourself. To judge your competence accurately and your failings ditto. No need to go overboard and to think that you could not have made it any other way.
I'm 100% convinced that you would have. It might have taken longer, you might have followed a different path.
"It's fine if YC gives you the power to overcome your fears, but make no mistake, you had that power all along, you are the one doing the work."
That was exactly my point. YC is a shortcut, but ultimately it's all you. If you're determined enough, you don't need YC to succeed. But it sure helps.
Yes I read the text. Why the assumption that I had not ?
Transforming, overcoming, it's just a game of words here.
If you start out your career as an entrepreneur fearing failure then by acting you will accumulate experience which will over time give you the ability to deal with this fear and make it work for you.
Whether you want to call that transforming or overcoming is nitpicking.
If a marathon runner is afraid of losing and because of that finds the energy in himself to go a little bit faster thereby winning the race you could say that he has 'transformed his fear'.
But that's just wordplay.
There is a great deal of stuff written in ways that use words like 'transforming' to indicate something magical takes place.
In the end it is all just gruntwork and applied smarts.
If your fears push you to strive a little harder and maybe even make you succeed then you've just turned your basic insecurity (transformed if you wish) in to an asset. Others would simply say you've overcome your fears.
I believe that is a pretty normal process for any entrepreneur to go through, the ones that do not master their fears end up working for big corp. Or they try again in a couple of years.
Transforming vs overcoming is NOT just a game of words. When you overcome fear you do something despite your fear. Transformation can make you do something because of your fear.
In this case the act of having told people the course he was on transformed his fear from being a barrier pushing for giving up right away to a motivation to work hard and succeed. Instead of being something that saps motivation, it provides more motivation. And this switch tends to be quite rapid.
For a contrasting case of overcoming fear, a firefighter rushing into a burning building has to overcome fear of the danger from the fire. Even after the firefighter is in the building the fear still pushes for leaving the building. The lessons of experience may help with managing the fear rationally, but the fear will always push the firefighter to leave.
The part I liked was how he pitched to 12 people and then fixed his product to overcome all these objections. But it sort of goes against how Steve Blank prescribes the process of Customer Development.. oh well.
I just realized (to my horror) that years later, I am just like him. I don't push boundaries like I used to. I don't call on that extra customer, volunteer for that project, or apply to programs like yc if I think there is any chance I won't win. There's always a reason: the software is missing too much, the demo sucks, there are 14 other things that have to be done first,... You get the picture.
I never thought of this as "fear of failure". I just got so used to succeeding in everything I did that I didn't want to do anything else where I didn't succeed. I became Rob without even realizing it.
I've got to change this stinkin' thinkin'. A good failure would probably do me good. Or maybe I should just try something I would have never imagined a month ago.
Thanks OP, for the perspective.