Doing things
Hi Sarah. I like you :)
"I thought I had a shortcut to the big time, but I didn't... "
I came to the realization earlier this year that, in general, we are privileged enough to do essentially anything we want. The catch is that we have to do it - actually implement it. This is hard, not in the sense that you have to work a hundred hours a week, but in the sense that you have to leave the path and find your own way through the bushes and it is easy to get lost. There are shortcuts to money, there are shortcuts to status, but there are no shortcuts to doing.
I had this idea before Paul Graham did, and he mangles it a bit, but he's a better writer than me so I'll go ahead and quote him:
"It's not surprising that after being trained for their whole lives to play such games, young founders' first impulse on starting a startup is to try to figure out the tricks for winning at this new game. Since fundraising appears to be the measure of success for startups (another classic noob mistake), they always want to know what the tricks are for convincing investors. We tell them the best way to convince investors is to make a startup that's actually doing well, meaning growing fast, and then simply tell investors so. Then they want to know what the tricks are for growing fast. And we have to tell them the best way to do that is simply to make something people want.
So many of the conversations YC partners have with young founders begin with the founder asking "How do we..." and the partner replying "Just..."
Why do the founders always make things so complicated? The reason, I realized, is that they're looking for the trick.
So this is the third counterintuitive thing to remember about startups: starting a startup is where gaming the system stops working. Gaming the system may continue to work if you go to work for a big company. Depending on how broken the company is, you can succeed by sucking up to the right people, giving the impression of productivity, and so on. [2] But that doesn't work with startups. There is no boss to trick, only users, and all users care about is whether your product does what they want. Startups are as impersonal as physics. You have to make something people want, and you prosper only to the extent you do.
The dangerous thing is, faking does work to some degree on investors. If you're super good at sounding like you know what you're talking about, you can fool investors for at least one and perhaps even two rounds of funding. But it's not in your interest to. The company is ultimately doomed. All you're doing is wasting your own time riding it down.
So stop looking for the trick. There are tricks in startups, as there are in any domain, but they are an order of magnitude less important than solving the real problem. A founder who knows nothing about fundraising but has made something users love will have an easier time raising money than one who knows every trick in the book but has a flat usage graph. And more importantly, the founder who has made something users love is the one who will go on to succeed after raising the money."