I met Nikki while I lived at a Hacker House in Mountain View for a few weeks in January 2012, having recently moved to the Bay Area. I remember being impressed at the time by her intensity, and by the fact that she actually had a real product with real users that solved a real problem.
An audible "oh no" came out of my lips when I clicked this link and realized I was reading about someone I had shared a few dinners with.
It's important for little pieces of history such as this one to be recorded. For the founders, to whom it gives a sense of closure, and for the community. So that we don't forget our comrades who didn't make it to the other side, but still have insightful lessons to share.
The press likes to glorify the AirBnBs, the Googles, the Facebooks - but as founders, I think it's important for us to be realize that this is only a tiny visible part of the iceberg, and that at the end of the day, there are so many factors at play that it would be foolish for us to focus solely on the "how many millions did they make". Human stories are never boring, and experience is one of the most precious thing others can share.
Thanks for taking the time and effort to write this, Nikki. We're with you.
---
"Investing money, creating new products, and all the other things we do are wonderful games and can be a lot of fun, but it's important to remember that it's all just a game. What's most important is that we are good too each other, and ourselves."(http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2012/03/eight-years-today.h...)
It struck me when she glossed over how/why her two co-founders left. There's got to be a deeper story to why two "co-founders" would leave right when 1.2M is secured.
She said they decided to tell me they were leaving the company without even a hint of warning - my guess is there was no agreement in the first place or a lot of unnoticed warnings. To conclude she's just too trustful is almost certainly a flawed conclusion.
I'm sure she learned a lot from this experience, but she seems to write off the deserters as flaky. I'd be asking myself what I did or what lies I was telling myself that made me think I had co-founders when I really did not. That sort of character judgment is as important as product judgment.
Hey Andrew, I actually glossed over that out of respect for the 2 guys. My purpose was not to bitch about them, and many people who will read this post in my network will know who I'm talking about. There were mistakes made on both sides, but in the end I bent over backwards to accomodate them and as soon as YC was over and they could say they were YC founders they bailed. I'm not saying its entirely their fault - I should have picked up on the warning signs but I was off fundraising for 2 months and didn't notice. But I did consider them my friends, and they didn't care what position I was left in if they were to leave. Anyway, I'm sure we both learned a lot from the experience.
It's glossed over because it requires more than a single party to represent the "story" in a fair light and it would unprofessional for her to write about her biased emotional experience.
I think she is 100% in the clear for glossing over it and I personally would have left out bits like "backstabbing" &c... They may or may not have but describing her personal emotional experience while leaving out the hairy and sticky co-founder dynamics is a great way to share an experience of the "dark underbelly" [that is startups].
But can you reliably judge the character of people who are incentivized to deceive you?
In my experience, most people are happy to keep their options open, and most people discount volatility pretty hard when forced to make their life choices path-dependent. Not just to start a company, but when it comes time to commit resources to something, you find that even those who you believed would carry through, whether thanks to their track record or particularly convincing talk, will drop out.
I think of it as them having a high discount rate. The NPV of choosing a riskier path with later reward is thus lower than the stable, short term higher returns of stability, and the cost of "flaking" (the likelihood of you choosing not to do business with them ever again if you get to a position of such success that you can afford it) very low, especially if you are not currently in a position of success. Plus, you'll "understand", right?
I've gotten better over time at spotting those who'd drop out, but still have a 30-40% failure rate. I chalk it up to flakers being good at convincing other people - too good for me to spot them - and factor that in as a cost of doing business with good people which pays off in the long term. If you have a reliable way to spot flakers early, I'd love to read about it.
(FWIW on the original subject - Noam Wasserman's data show the highest rate of failure for "family/friends who become co-founders", followed by "fresh hired co-founders" with "people who worked together before as co-founders" being a significant predictor for co-founding success.)
I'd be interested in that too. I am a research scientist, and the experience of trying to get some decent innovative science done appears to be similar in terms of emotional stress as running a start-up. Will it work? What do I need, who will give it to me, etc, etc.
One thing I have learnt, though, is the people are harder than science; if you don't have your working relationships aligned all hell can be created.
I was in the same YC batch as Nikki. The thing I remember most about her was her enthusiasm. I also remember that her presentation on Demo Day got the loudest applause and most interest. Sad to hear 99dresses didn't make it, but I'm sure Nikki will have a bright future. Few young women her age will have gained the experience and insight that comes from founding a company and seeing it fail. As Michael Jordan said "I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
What I like most about that MJ quote is that all the stats link up. If he has made those 26 game winning shots he would have had not lost "almost 300 games" and he would have missed fewer than the "more than 9000" shots that he missed. Man, he was awesome.
Well written. One thing I always find funny about the startup world is the idea that hardship is good. Hardship isn't good. Hardship sucks. Sometimes hardship is something you need to survive to accomplish your goals, but not always. While there are a lot of successful startups that went through a lot of hardship, there are a lot of them that didn't. It seems that based on a lot of factors that were outside of your control you were playing the startup game on "hard mode" and you gave it a pretty good run anyways.
Also a pretty good lesson that having a good job and comfortable life maybe isn't so bad after all (a very un-silicon valley lesson).
Hardship at a lot of startups is the result of entrepreneurs not respecting the old adage, "It takes money to make money." A lot of entrepreneurs don't really know how much money they need, and young ones often start their companies before they know where it's going to come from.
The good news is that now is a great time to be selling equity in a tech startup. The bad news is that even if you're successful in trading your company's equity for capital, there's no guarantee you'll get enough capital, or that you'll be able to get more of it when you run out.
Gotta agree, startup is not some glorified zero sum game. Losing two co-founders nearly threw me into "depression". A special hell I created around myself of self-doubt and why-me.
Personally taking time off startup helped and made mentally more stronger. I can't even imagine what she went through with so many big ups and downs.
I disagree. I think hardship is a valuable experience that everyone should endure.
1) You only really get to know yourself when you find yourself eating rice for the hundredth time in a row, and live on the floor of an abandoned building.
2) "never again" is one hell of a motivator
3) you gain the knowledge that all these things, all this crap we fill our lives with, is totally unnecessary
4) empathy. Live below the bottom rung for a while and you'll understand far more keenly what poverty is like. The idea of being in that situation and not having the skills, knowledge or gumption to not bootstrap out, or not having the vision to realise you already have, is terrifying.
Hardship in itself is crap. Hardship that leads somewhere might kinda be good in retrospect, maybe. The startup world seems intent on getting people to buy into the idea that all hardship is that sort of hardship.
Or as Lefty Gomez artfully pointed out, "I'd rather be lucky than good." The more time I spend working on my startup, the more I appreciate the wisdom of this quote.
The point is a bit more subtle. There is the russian roulette aspect of probability, and then there is failure from lack of character. Unfortunately, outsiders can't see or relate to the important distinctions. This makes dealling with use a bit more cognitive overhead--and that's what sucks. Explaining things to folks on the outside who don't have the inclination or understanding to care. That's a different kind of hardship vs. waking up everyday and doing difficult (but tractable) things like problem solving be it in math or marketing. But my guess is those are problems many will never have the privledge of having, for good or bad, one way or the other.
One thing Nikki has going for her is that she's young. At 22 and already having the experience she's had, she has a great opportunity to learn from those lessons, tap into the network she's built, and ultimately do something great.
I love the aggressiveness and the spunk she clearly has. Looking back on my own life (I'm one of the "older crowd" in HN terms), I wish I'd been that ambitious at that age. Or, maybe ambitious isn't the word, maybe "focused" would be better. In either case, I wound up waiting until my late 30's to found a startup and now I'll be 41 in about a month, and we're still looking for the mystical, mythical "traction". :-)
The downside is, being this old, I feel a certain sense of "this is my last shot". If I fail with Fogbeam Labs, I doubt I'll have the energy, passion, drive, and mojo to try again. So if there's a lesson in my experience, that I'd try to share with the younger crowd, it would be "Be more like Nikki, and less like Phil". :-)
So I see another startup failed story. Thinking I'll read it later after getting something done. an hour later, I start reading...
Right in the first sentence I see "99dresses". I have to admit, it took me a minute to process what's going on. She has been receiving significant coverage in mainstream Australian media. As someone, who is running startup from Sydney (there aren't so many of us), this felt like someone in your family has passed away even though I've never even met Nikki.
I'm not even sure what I'm writing here... I just feel sad.
I will admit to being slightly jealous because she did get a lot of attention due to what I thought was solely being a tall attractive female that dresses well. However having read this seeing and seeing how this played into her impostor syndrome has made me re-evaluate my thinking. The attention might be useful, but I can totally understand questioning if its because its who you are or what you are doing. Since everything in the start up world is about what you are doing I can see this attention leaving you with self doubt.
She certainly has done more then I have, and at a far younger age.
Sorry for the bad thoughts Nikki. I had been following 99dresses loosely over the years and I had hoped you would succeed as there are so few start-up stories that come out of Sydney. Wishing you the best of luck with whatever you chose to do in the future.
You're a good person for acknowledging this and offering her such kind words. Everyone's got biases and resentment, but you just discharged yours with genuine dignity. Please take care.
Sometimes I wonder how non-technical founders can sleep at night with all the stress. It elevates cofounder risk to a single point of failure for the entire company.
Seeing through "developer bullshitting" is a dark art that is hard to master without spending a bit of time as a developer.
Indeed. As a former non-technical founder (now semi-technical), the worst part of the fear of failure is that your "job" is keeping companies alive. If your company dies, not only is your company a failure, but your only "skill set" is called into question. Knowing that fact and simultaneously being unable to contribute directly to the product, wondering how hard you can push your technical co-founder/team (or how far is right?) is enough to drive one insane.
It was easier (and more beneficial) for me to learn how to program. I'm not the most technical one on the team, but at least I can pitch in and work instead of wonder.
Sometimes I wonder how technical founders can sleep at night with all the stress. After all, the number of technical founders who can effectively sell is small, so most of them have a single point of failure too, just on the other side of the business.
The harsh truth is that lot of non-technical founders set themselves up for failure precisely because they're limited to the pool of developers who will consider a co-founder relationship. If you're a solid developer with a proven track record of shipping, there's very little incentive to join a venture run by somebody you don't know very well for less than market pay, and in some cases little to no pay.
You typically get what you pay for, which is why more entrepreneurs should skip the technical co-founder nonsense and hire an experienced contractor or shop with a solid portfolio and references. If you don't have the money to do this, it's worth rethinking whether you're in a position to start a business in the first place.
When you start learning the difference between "poor" and "broke" the stress usually goes away.
For anyone that doesn't understand - being poor means you have nothing, being broke means you are still accumulate wealth, it just means you don't have cash, but more intelligence. I suspect Nikki has banked loads of intellectual wealth from her journey.
> Sometimes I wonder how non-technical founders can sleep at night with all the stress. It elevates cofounder risk to a single point of failure for the entire company.
This is not exclusive to non-technical founders.
> Seeing through "developer bullshitting" is a dark art that is hard to master without spending a bit of time as a developer.
Within a group of people striving for the same success, the idea of "bullshit" is often coined by those not wanting to take the time to understand the perspective of others. There is a communication and priority disconnect in most companies between the technical and non-technical; with both sides to blame.
It's sad to read stories like this. But I have to wonder... if the concept is profitable what keeps it from being executed without 2 million dollars in investor money? So maybe you stay smaller... who cares? For you, it is about what you are making, not how big the company is. How much does it really cost to set up a database driven website? Hmmm?
Now, I realize this doesn't apply if the end game is a high dollar exit, but if you can make a decent living with your application/web site ("startup" and "founder" are overused terms in my opinion) who cares?
If you can't make a profit long term, then maybe you your idea doesn't deserve to live. Simply passing the bomb on to the next set of suckers be they the public at IPO's, or acquires, or VC investors hardly seems like the right thing to do (although no doubt it is done all the time... sometimes with incredible profits).
There is life outside the VC world. If it's a good idea and profitable and you love it....stick with it. If you are looking for a billion dollar exit... that's another thing entirely and it's time to move on to the next idea.
At 21 I was on a plane headed home from another country. I cried in the office. I cried on the plane home. We'd Burned almost half a million dollars, a couple of years of work, let go a team - and had nothing to show for it. With no degree, no more money and no job I moved back in with parents.
So I suppose this article resonates, and in the most literal sense - I've been there.
I think the hardest thing for me at that moment in time was I didn't really have a handle on just how young I was and how much more I had coming. It was all I'd really done with my life up to that point.
It's taken me quite a few years to gain that perspective, and it's a difficult thing to communicate. The world is inconceivably vast and expansive and you have the next half century to build within it. Yourself, your ideas, your creations.
At that age and on that scale it's only a failure in the moment. Then, as time passes it becomes just another step along the way. It imparted knowledge upon you, and opened doors you don't even know about yet. All of the parts that hurt fade away and you're just left with the experience gained.
The fast-paced echo-chamber of the technology startup world is a particularly hard environment to step back and get a real sense of perspective in, which makes it a particularly hard environment to fail in, especially as you'll always be reading about someone else magically killing it.
I've failed since then, and I've succeeded since then. But as the years roll by, I've come to realise that the winning and losing don't even matter, because the journey just keeps on going regardless. If I saw myself now, when I was on that plane at 21, I'd have thought I was looking at someone who had mythically 'made it'. But you know what? I haven't. It's exactly the same: I've got another 40-odd-years of succeeding and failing ahead of me, in both my personal life and my professional life.
Thanks for posting this! It sounds like it was incredibly difficult at times. Hard to imagine, but thanks for making it vivid.
I would love to hear more about the following (not holding my breath):
"After hiring a few people and finding an office in NYC we were ready to launch. We solved the chicken-and-egg problem using techniques that we promised never to speak of again because they squarely sat on the grey/black spectrum of naughtiness. If there was a line, we definitely crossed it. We had to. These hacks were harmless to others, so I figured it was only a problem if we got caught."
Your story is mostly about you not getting a VISA, getting back-stabbed by people, spending 2 months fund-raising, media coverage, personal issues, your age, your gender. There is hardly anything about why the startup failed.
But maybe the article isn't about the startup - it's about the emotional ride. Maybe that's why a lot of startups fail - they get so involved with other things, it's not about the startup anymore.
I really appreciated this article. I'm on year 5 of my "startup" which has struggled and kicked and clawed and just barely hit profitability at the end of last year. I have to admit that it feels totally uncool that we have hung on all this time instead of just quitting after spending somebody's millions of dollars in 6 months. (We never had millions to spend, but anyway). There are so many times when you feel like things are just not going to work. Working hard and persevering are ideas that don't always jive with the "fail fast" strategy.
Even after all this time and things beginning to look positive, I still worry constantly that we will backslide or somebody will come along and take our marketshare or any number of other things. I wish that 99dresses had a different outcome, but still it is an encouraging story. No doubt with this kind of attitude and experience Miss Durkin is going to find success. I think it is extremely important to know that not every venture has to take off within six months to be successful. It's a long haul for most of us.
There's some very old entrepreneurial wisdom that says if your business can make it past year 4, it has staying power. I thought that was bullshit until I made it past year 4 and right about that time we discovered efficiencies, lucrative markets, a kick-ass business model and what we are really good at.
And yeah, not having money is really really awful, especially when it goes on for years with no certainty that it will ever change. But as entrepreneurs, that's how we do.
I take complete responsibility for this failure. Were other people involved in 99dresses? Of course. Was any of this their fault? Absolutely not.
I understand what you're going for here (and it's nice), but it's fair to let your team share responsibility for the defeat. Otherwise it never really feels like they were part of the successes.
>> You rarely hear the raw stories of startups that persevered but ultimately failed — the emotional roller coaster of the founders, and why their startups didn’t work out.
I feel like I've read this sentence, or a version of it, so many times that it self-refutes. You hear plenty about people who failed. Not as often as the next big thing (since no one puts in the effort to send out press releases about how their failure happened - although that actually might be an interesting strategy for figuring out a next step if the post-mortem is honest enough), but it feels like once a week or so a post like this hits the front of HN.
There are only 23 million people in Australia, and its a small population spread over a huge area. That means shipping is expensive, which isn't great for trading low value second hand fast fashion items. An item that can get shipped for $2.80 in the US would cost $7 at least in Australia.
Also, Australia Post doesn't have any APIs to automate shipping. Girls had to physically go to the post office to ship items, and there wasn't tracking either. This meant a lot of customer service headaches.
[+] [-] GuiA|11 years ago|reply
An audible "oh no" came out of my lips when I clicked this link and realized I was reading about someone I had shared a few dinners with.
It's important for little pieces of history such as this one to be recorded. For the founders, to whom it gives a sense of closure, and for the community. So that we don't forget our comrades who didn't make it to the other side, but still have insightful lessons to share.
The press likes to glorify the AirBnBs, the Googles, the Facebooks - but as founders, I think it's important for us to be realize that this is only a tiny visible part of the iceberg, and that at the end of the day, there are so many factors at play that it would be foolish for us to focus solely on the "how many millions did they make". Human stories are never boring, and experience is one of the most precious thing others can share.
Thanks for taking the time and effort to write this, Nikki. We're with you.
---
"Investing money, creating new products, and all the other things we do are wonderful games and can be a lot of fun, but it's important to remember that it's all just a game. What's most important is that we are good too each other, and ourselves."(http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2012/03/eight-years-today.h...)
[+] [-] andrewljohnson|11 years ago|reply
She said they decided to tell me they were leaving the company without even a hint of warning - my guess is there was no agreement in the first place or a lot of unnoticed warnings. To conclude she's just too trustful is almost certainly a flawed conclusion.
I'm sure she learned a lot from this experience, but she seems to write off the deserters as flaky. I'd be asking myself what I did or what lies I was telling myself that made me think I had co-founders when I really did not. That sort of character judgment is as important as product judgment.
[+] [-] nikkidurkin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ixmatus|11 years ago|reply
I think she is 100% in the clear for glossing over it and I personally would have left out bits like "backstabbing" &c... They may or may not have but describing her personal emotional experience while leaving out the hairy and sticky co-founder dynamics is a great way to share an experience of the "dark underbelly" [that is startups].
[+] [-] crdb|11 years ago|reply
In my experience, most people are happy to keep their options open, and most people discount volatility pretty hard when forced to make their life choices path-dependent. Not just to start a company, but when it comes time to commit resources to something, you find that even those who you believed would carry through, whether thanks to their track record or particularly convincing talk, will drop out.
I think of it as them having a high discount rate. The NPV of choosing a riskier path with later reward is thus lower than the stable, short term higher returns of stability, and the cost of "flaking" (the likelihood of you choosing not to do business with them ever again if you get to a position of such success that you can afford it) very low, especially if you are not currently in a position of success. Plus, you'll "understand", right?
I've gotten better over time at spotting those who'd drop out, but still have a 30-40% failure rate. I chalk it up to flakers being good at convincing other people - too good for me to spot them - and factor that in as a cost of doing business with good people which pays off in the long term. If you have a reliable way to spot flakers early, I'd love to read about it.
(FWIW on the original subject - Noam Wasserman's data show the highest rate of failure for "family/friends who become co-founders", followed by "fresh hired co-founders" with "people who worked together before as co-founders" being a significant predictor for co-founding success.)
[+] [-] pcrh|11 years ago|reply
One thing I have learnt, though, is the people are harder than science; if you don't have your working relationships aligned all hell can be created.
[+] [-] jakejake|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vijayboyapati|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dopamean|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aagha|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] birken|11 years ago|reply
Also a pretty good lesson that having a good job and comfortable life maybe isn't so bad after all (a very un-silicon valley lesson).
[+] [-] 7Figures2Commas|11 years ago|reply
The good news is that now is a great time to be selling equity in a tech startup. The bad news is that even if you're successful in trading your company's equity for capital, there's no guarantee you'll get enough capital, or that you'll be able to get more of it when you run out.
[+] [-] shankysingh|11 years ago|reply
Personally taking time off startup helped and made mentally more stronger. I can't even imagine what she went through with so many big ups and downs.
[+] [-] madaxe_again|11 years ago|reply
1) You only really get to know yourself when you find yourself eating rice for the hundredth time in a row, and live on the floor of an abandoned building.
2) "never again" is one hell of a motivator
3) you gain the knowledge that all these things, all this crap we fill our lives with, is totally unnecessary
4) empathy. Live below the bottom rung for a while and you'll understand far more keenly what poverty is like. The idea of being in that situation and not having the skills, knowledge or gumption to not bootstrap out, or not having the vision to realise you already have, is terrifying.
[+] [-] ehurrell|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coffeemug|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 001sky|11 years ago|reply
The point is a bit more subtle. There is the russian roulette aspect of probability, and then there is failure from lack of character. Unfortunately, outsiders can't see or relate to the important distinctions. This makes dealling with use a bit more cognitive overhead--and that's what sucks. Explaining things to folks on the outside who don't have the inclination or understanding to care. That's a different kind of hardship vs. waking up everyday and doing difficult (but tractable) things like problem solving be it in math or marketing. But my guess is those are problems many will never have the privledge of having, for good or bad, one way or the other.
[+] [-] samstave|11 years ago|reply
Isn't that why we have a name for it?
[+] [-] mindcrime|11 years ago|reply
I love the aggressiveness and the spunk she clearly has. Looking back on my own life (I'm one of the "older crowd" in HN terms), I wish I'd been that ambitious at that age. Or, maybe ambitious isn't the word, maybe "focused" would be better. In either case, I wound up waiting until my late 30's to found a startup and now I'll be 41 in about a month, and we're still looking for the mystical, mythical "traction". :-)
The downside is, being this old, I feel a certain sense of "this is my last shot". If I fail with Fogbeam Labs, I doubt I'll have the energy, passion, drive, and mojo to try again. So if there's a lesson in my experience, that I'd try to share with the younger crowd, it would be "Be more like Nikki, and less like Phil". :-)
[+] [-] gclaramunt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balls187|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lubos|11 years ago|reply
Right in the first sentence I see "99dresses". I have to admit, it took me a minute to process what's going on. She has been receiving significant coverage in mainstream Australian media. As someone, who is running startup from Sydney (there aren't so many of us), this felt like someone in your family has passed away even though I've never even met Nikki.
I'm not even sure what I'm writing here... I just feel sad.
[+] [-] boyter|11 years ago|reply
I will admit to being slightly jealous because she did get a lot of attention due to what I thought was solely being a tall attractive female that dresses well. However having read this seeing and seeing how this played into her impostor syndrome has made me re-evaluate my thinking. The attention might be useful, but I can totally understand questioning if its because its who you are or what you are doing. Since everything in the start up world is about what you are doing I can see this attention leaving you with self doubt.
She certainly has done more then I have, and at a far younger age.
Sorry for the bad thoughts Nikki. I had been following 99dresses loosely over the years and I had hoped you would succeed as there are so few start-up stories that come out of Sydney. Wishing you the best of luck with whatever you chose to do in the future.
[+] [-] nooron|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostromo|11 years ago|reply
Seeing through "developer bullshitting" is a dark art that is hard to master without spending a bit of time as a developer.
[+] [-] austenallred|11 years ago|reply
It was easier (and more beneficial) for me to learn how to program. I'm not the most technical one on the team, but at least I can pitch in and work instead of wonder.
[+] [-] 7Figures2Commas|11 years ago|reply
The harsh truth is that lot of non-technical founders set themselves up for failure precisely because they're limited to the pool of developers who will consider a co-founder relationship. If you're a solid developer with a proven track record of shipping, there's very little incentive to join a venture run by somebody you don't know very well for less than market pay, and in some cases little to no pay.
You typically get what you pay for, which is why more entrepreneurs should skip the technical co-founder nonsense and hire an experienced contractor or shop with a solid portfolio and references. If you don't have the money to do this, it's worth rethinking whether you're in a position to start a business in the first place.
[+] [-] balls187|11 years ago|reply
Or figure out how to get a technical co-founder you trust.
Developer Bullshit is a people problem, and if you have that problem, no amount of dark-art mastery will help your company survive.
[+] [-] mbesto|11 years ago|reply
For anyone that doesn't understand - being poor means you have nothing, being broke means you are still accumulate wealth, it just means you don't have cash, but more intelligence. I suspect Nikki has banked loads of intellectual wealth from her journey.
[+] [-] rcaught|11 years ago|reply
This is not exclusive to non-technical founders.
> Seeing through "developer bullshitting" is a dark art that is hard to master without spending a bit of time as a developer.
Within a group of people striving for the same success, the idea of "bullshit" is often coined by those not wanting to take the time to understand the perspective of others. There is a communication and priority disconnect in most companies between the technical and non-technical; with both sides to blame.
[+] [-] AndrewWarner|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aymeric|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewWarner|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dools|11 years ago|reply
I'd love to see the interview!
[+] [-] chong7|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jqm|11 years ago|reply
Now, I realize this doesn't apply if the end game is a high dollar exit, but if you can make a decent living with your application/web site ("startup" and "founder" are overused terms in my opinion) who cares?
If you can't make a profit long term, then maybe you your idea doesn't deserve to live. Simply passing the bomb on to the next set of suckers be they the public at IPO's, or acquires, or VC investors hardly seems like the right thing to do (although no doubt it is done all the time... sometimes with incredible profits).
There is life outside the VC world. If it's a good idea and profitable and you love it....stick with it. If you are looking for a billion dollar exit... that's another thing entirely and it's time to move on to the next idea.
[+] [-] iD3|11 years ago|reply
At 21 I was on a plane headed home from another country. I cried in the office. I cried on the plane home. We'd Burned almost half a million dollars, a couple of years of work, let go a team - and had nothing to show for it. With no degree, no more money and no job I moved back in with parents.
So I suppose this article resonates, and in the most literal sense - I've been there.
I think the hardest thing for me at that moment in time was I didn't really have a handle on just how young I was and how much more I had coming. It was all I'd really done with my life up to that point.
It's taken me quite a few years to gain that perspective, and it's a difficult thing to communicate. The world is inconceivably vast and expansive and you have the next half century to build within it. Yourself, your ideas, your creations.
At that age and on that scale it's only a failure in the moment. Then, as time passes it becomes just another step along the way. It imparted knowledge upon you, and opened doors you don't even know about yet. All of the parts that hurt fade away and you're just left with the experience gained.
The fast-paced echo-chamber of the technology startup world is a particularly hard environment to step back and get a real sense of perspective in, which makes it a particularly hard environment to fail in, especially as you'll always be reading about someone else magically killing it.
I've failed since then, and I've succeeded since then. But as the years roll by, I've come to realise that the winning and losing don't even matter, because the journey just keeps on going regardless. If I saw myself now, when I was on that plane at 21, I'd have thought I was looking at someone who had mythically 'made it'. But you know what? I haven't. It's exactly the same: I've got another 40-odd-years of succeeding and failing ahead of me, in both my personal life and my professional life.
Personally I find that quite cathartic.
[+] [-] rudimental|11 years ago|reply
I would love to hear more about the following (not holding my breath):
"After hiring a few people and finding an office in NYC we were ready to launch. We solved the chicken-and-egg problem using techniques that we promised never to speak of again because they squarely sat on the grey/black spectrum of naughtiness. If there was a line, we definitely crossed it. We had to. These hacks were harmless to others, so I figured it was only a problem if we got caught."
Edit: ++empathy.
[+] [-] nish1500|11 years ago|reply
But maybe the article isn't about the startup - it's about the emotional ride. Maybe that's why a lot of startups fail - they get so involved with other things, it's not about the startup anymore.
[+] [-] jakejake|11 years ago|reply
Even after all this time and things beginning to look positive, I still worry constantly that we will backslide or somebody will come along and take our marketshare or any number of other things. I wish that 99dresses had a different outcome, but still it is an encouraging story. No doubt with this kind of attitude and experience Miss Durkin is going to find success. I think it is extremely important to know that not every venture has to take off within six months to be successful. It's a long haul for most of us.
[+] [-] UVB-76|11 years ago|reply
Although the business didn't work out, to have gained so much life experience at such a young age is incredible.
[+] [-] mmaunder|11 years ago|reply
And yeah, not having money is really really awful, especially when it goes on for years with no certainty that it will ever change. But as entrepreneurs, that's how we do.
[+] [-] dools|11 years ago|reply
http://blog.jazzychad.net/2011/05/02/startups-are-hard.html
Also here are some Mixergy.com interviews that I've enjoyed from failed entrepreneurs:
http://mixergy.com/interviews/adyin-mirzaee-fluidware-interv...
http://mixergy.com/interviews/chris-snook-no-limit-publishin...
http://mixergy.com/interviews/rene-eric-forecast-interview/
http://mixergy.com/interviews/dean-soukeras-computergiants-i...
http://mixergy.com/interviews/mark-bowness-tribewanted-inter...
http://mixergy.com/interviews/james-altucher-failseries-inte...
http://mixergy.com/interviews/eric-ingram-redtagcrazy-interv...
http://mixergy.com/interviews/sebastian-replanski-search-to-...
This is with Chad who's posted I started with:
http://mixergy.com/interviews/etzel-notifo-interview/
And, finally, if I were leaving New York, I'd listen to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t4i7frhNUs
Hope you're feeling better and looking forward to seeing you sometime 'round Fishburners :)
[+] [-] AndrewWarner|11 years ago|reply
Hiten Shah used to run a web hosting company.
http://mixergy.com/interviews/kissmetrics-hiten-shah-intervi...
[+] [-] kevinalexbrown|11 years ago|reply
I understand what you're going for here (and it's nice), but it's fair to let your team share responsibility for the defeat. Otherwise it never really feels like they were part of the successes.
[+] [-] the_watcher|11 years ago|reply
I feel like I've read this sentence, or a version of it, so many times that it self-refutes. You hear plenty about people who failed. Not as often as the next big thing (since no one puts in the effort to send out press releases about how their failure happened - although that actually might be an interesting strategy for figuring out a next step if the post-mortem is honest enough), but it feels like once a week or so a post like this hits the front of HN.
[+] [-] GuiA|11 years ago|reply
However, you won't hear about those guys in Forbes Magazine, on the evening news, or in your business school classes.
[+] [-] pbreit|11 years ago|reply
The one thing that made no sense to me was why they didn't stay in Australia and go after local market. Does the concept not work there?
[+] [-] nikkidurkin|11 years ago|reply
Also, Australia Post doesn't have any APIs to automate shipping. Girls had to physically go to the post office to ship items, and there wasn't tracking either. This meant a lot of customer service headaches.