The conversation

Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

I'm in my third startup

I'm in my third startup. My first one (founded 2013) was acquired by the second one after a year. That one failed around 2018. The first one was a small technology company where my co-founder and I (both techies) made the classical "build it and they'll come" mistake. They didn't come and just as we were running low on savings, we met the CEO of startup #2 who was a classical business founder and had already secured a huge seed round (~3M euro). He had the ideas and the money, we had the tech. So we joined forces. The next few years we tried lots of things and pivoted a few times. But in the end product market fit remained elusive and the 3M was gone. I went off and did a bit of consulting, freelancing, etc. And five years ago, I helped out a friend who was working on a bootstrapped company that I liked. And we kind of had complementary skills (not repeating my first mistake). It was the beginning of the lockdowns. I had nothing better to do having just come out of a lucrative project that got cancelled because of the lockdowns (and probably because it was doomed anyway). …

Original discussionThe profitable startup89 source comments · at import
2

Community replies 0

No community replies yet. Add your perspective.

Replies from the source 2

Direct replies available in this import. Original-language excerpts.

PO

I hope you succeed. But I think it’s all down to luck; of course some work is required but I don’t think that hard work necessarily matters. Or any of the stuff you mentioned. In my experience you can do all the “mistakes” you mentioned and still come out on top. And not to piss in your cereal but having leads for $bigcorp means nothing until a deal is inked. Ps: and I’m very pessimistic; the scary thing is it’s all random as shit

Full original
CA

> The lesson I took from the second startup is that investor money makes you lazy Marc Andreessen has made statements that align with the idea that abundant capital can lead to poor decision-making or a lack of discipline among founders. The core of his perspective emphasizes the importance of resourcefulness, persistence, and an intense focus on building the business over optimizing for fundraising. "Too much capital breeds sloppy execution": While this specific quote might be from another source, it reflects a sentiment consistent with Andreessen's philosophy, which values the discipline forced by resource constraints (bootstrapping) in the early stages of a startup. Wasn't there a whole movement of Lean startups? What happened to that?

Full original
Continue on Hacker News

Respect different perspectives. Share concrete experiences.

Sign in to post, reply, repost, and quote.