* "Lack of conviction" reads like a moral judgement on the rational business decision to leave a startup that isn't working.

* "Fear" is an emotional word that (to me) implies irrationality; "concern" or "wariness" might be more appropriate, especially because you don't give much context. What are they "afraid" of? A company with no revenue and a 3 month runway?

* In a three-person startup, the "half developer half CEO" probably shouldn't be picking out the ex Goldman developer as good-but-not-excellent for not turning out a feed reader fast enough; why didn't you get it done then? And especially...

* ... when the CEO of that pre-revenue pre-product decides to have the company pay to fly him to SXSW during that dev crisis.

I mean, look, you can do everything right and fail, and everything wrong and still win; startups are a huge risk, keep trying, etc etc --- but you wrote this to get feedback from people, and mine is:

* I wouldn't want you as a cofounder (hey --- my cofounders probably don't want me --- I work my ass off to mitigate that!)

* You seem more engaged with the "lifestyle" of a startup --- lawyers, "networking", advisors, incorporation, "voting" --- than with the reality, which is a mindbending daily grind of work and fear and effort hopefully aimed at getting to cash flow neutral as soon as possible, but most likely aimed right off a cliff.

You're obviously going to do this again; all knocks aside, you read like this stuff is in your blood. Better luck next time.

[edit: toned down very slightly].

To paraphrase, when a lot of people are panicking it's the ideal time to find some fucking spine and not panic.

What is panicking going to accomplish? What will being afraid gain you? NOT A DAMN THING! What does not panicking get you? Ask the people who aren't. It gets you lots of money and opportunity. Many people have already made hundreds of thousands of dollars by shorting pretty much any stock possible. Many companies are waiting for their competition to start laying off tons of staff and making deep cuts to spending so they can speed ahead by making smart choices and spending money where it can put them ahead.

From: Economy is booming! Credit is free! Leverage everything! Next quarter will be awesome!

To: Economy is destroyed! Take all your money and put it under your pillow! Sell the house! Expect to be poor!

Just two different forms of compulsory reactions that have a complete lack of foresight.

The act of making good financial decisions has not changed. Minimizing both debt and overspending has always been the right thing to do. I have zero debt and as close to zero excess possessions as is possible without living in a log cabin in the woods. I'm not going to change a damn thing except possibly spend more money because stupid fear-mongering like this will create all sorts of opportunity for people who can see the forest for the trees.

Why something like a recession would inspire fear in anyone is a complete mystery to me. There's nothing you can do about it so stop being afraid and stop spreading fear as a viable option. Instead, sit down, take a deep breath, realize that this isn't the "end of the world as we know it," and move on with your life. Jesus, you people sound like a whining, crying broken fucking record. All this recession has caused me to "feel" is pissed off constantly.

This argument sounds like this, except not hilarious because you're serious: http://video.yahoo.com/watch/2184997/6808646

CEO? Why would you need a CEO when there isn't a company to run either on paper or in actuality?

We live in an unprecendented era of peace and prosperity, and this 'problem' we are observing is just a matter of numbers being pushed from one person to the other. But there is still value being produced, there is still demand for that value.

You should become afraid when you see people withdrawing their savings from the banks, and when a major hostile economic block comes up. What we're observing is just economic readjustment, it's not critical.

If in a year this situation still exists, I'll eat my hat on a webcam. You can hold me to that.

> Get the Team Right

> Be Wary of Founding With Friends

I think I remember Marc Andreesen writing that the best way to start a startup is when a pre-gelled team meets a new opportunity. Can't find the blog entry in question, but he suggested that any other founding scenario has drastically lower odds of success.

I thought I had a fairly strong team, with 4 other guys that I'd known (and been fairly close to) in college. Over the year we worked, they all dropped away, one by one. They just had better opportunities come up, and when it comes to the actual daily grind, startups...kinda suck. I'm lucky; I escaped with all the relationships intact, probably stronger than they were before, and one of them just sent me a job offer last month to come work with him (hmm, I wonder if that still stands, in light of the recent financial crisis ;-)). A lot of that came from deliberately taking the short end of the stick on many occasions, eg. I put in the lions share of work and did not take a leadership position. Many others aren't so lucky, and lose their friends in addition to their startup.

I'd also add that it's really important to have worked with people on a project, not just in social settings, and for them all to be on the same page regarding what they want with their life. A lot of people really want to be an employee: they can't deal with the uncertainty and random bad luck that comes with being in a startup. It's a losing strategy to try and force them into a startup; it's not good either for them or for your startup.

> Connect With People to Thrive

I was a little skeptical of this: when I wrote up my postmortem, one of my lessons was "If you're doing anything other than building your product or getting users, you're wasting your time." But there's always the possibility that I'm the one who's wrong: after all, we both killed our startups. ;-)

I think, in hindsight, that I'd look at it this way: Don't expect to get anything out of networking if you don't have a kickass product. However, don't expect to get anything out of networking anyway. If you do it without any expectations whatsoever, just taking an interest in the people around you, you might build some useful connections.

The other thing that struck me: it seems like your startup dissolved before it got to the daily grind of actually trying to build something people want. And that's the part that's really depressing. I never thought that emotional stability would be the limiting factor in startups, but ultimately, that's what killed mine. I remember talking to a coworker who'd previously done a few startups, before starting one, and he told me "Make sure you come out with your sanity intact." I quit because I felt like that was slipping away, and I was becoming someone I didn't really want to be.

Second, I just want to share one thing I've learned. There's a lot of pyschology mumbo jumbo in your analysis but all that really matters is the numbers. How many pageviews/users/sales/conversions did you have? Etc.

One thing I've learned about Internet startups is that you absolutely cannot force them. The market dictates your success plain and simple. It sounds like you guys weren't listening to the market; you were not paying enough attention to the numbers. That's really the only thing you should pay attention to. A month into my startup last year, one of the co-founders said to me and the other partner:

Him: "Guys, I've discovered a pattern in our traffic." Me: "Well, what is it?" Him: "Every week it decreases." Me: (Proceed to ignore the importance of this simple statement and pursue the idea for 5 more months, believing that because we had a good team and we thought the idea was good we could succeed, which was too bad because from month 1 the market was giving us PRICELESS advice--we should have been working on a different idea)

Every other mistake was irrelevant because the only thing that matters is the numbers.

http://mct.verisign-grs.com/conversiontool/convertServlet?in... converted it to PUNYCODE.

Your browser needs support for IDN to make this work; in Firefox it's the option network.enableIDN

The thing about our current situation is that it's not something that caught anyone who was paying any sort of attention by surprise. The Federal Government has been making/encouraging bad loans from the moment they had the power to do so. What started out as federal housing assistance during the Great Depression has become Fannie and Freddie and our current crisis. The ideas of easy money and credit extend as far back into human history as we can go; at the very least they played a hand in the economic collapse of the USSR, Germany, Russia. We even suspect they played a large role in destroying one of the only ancient empires we know much about, Rome.

All of that to say, I know the politicians are running for office and thus have to frame things within the lifetimes of their constituents, but can't we, as intelligent people, construct a slightly wider historical lens for this discussion?

I find it to be a healthy sign that people are receptive to reading and being open to opinions. I'm on a college campus, one of the highest rated entrepreneurship schools in the country, so I take for granted the massive amount of speakers we get. You hear the same message repeated and you start to see patterns.

Focus on yourself is one of those patterns that very successful people talk about.

I just listened to Jimmy John (the guy who started Jimmy John's) talk about how he doesn't read any of the "self-help crap anymore." He says he went through that stage, and he doesn't even think about it anymore. He says all he worries about is "kicking ass and that's about it." But I think that's a stage in our life that is very important where we question how we should think and behave. I think we all go through it, even Jimmy did (although doesn't like to admit it). This is coming from a guy who lost all of his earliest partners in the business and smoked weed. He obviously didn't have it all figured out from the get go.

When you're starting out, I think it's hard to be confident about which way to think. I don't think everyone has the "leadership" gene in their DNA, so they want to learn about the leadership traits, and what makes a good company founder. I've spent years reading through articles and how-to's, and while I think a majority of them are BS because some guy is trying to make a buck by writing the most appealing article, there are some that are worth reading. Ironically, you don't need to know much to be a good leader. You follow all of the basics, the simplest stuff you could think of. But then again, it may be harder for someone new to leadership and startups to know what that means.

And YC News actually does a GOOD JOB of filtering through the crap. I just read a post by Mark Cuban, with one of those small "patterns" that I keep seeing. It's the "there are no easy ways or tricks to be successful" speech, which I've heard time and time again from very successful people.

Yet, you still see contradictory advice given by people who don't know what they're talking about.

And let me tell you why I agree with this post, too. The more you think about things, the less you use your instincts. And your instincts are there to help you survive, they will guide you. After you do so much reading, you don't even think about stuff. It gets ingrained in your head, and you just do, you don't think at a certain point.

Absolutely agree that you should focus on yourself. But don't block out the really good stuff people like Mark Cuban write, saying there's no easy way. You need people to remind you that you have to work hard for what you want, and that also acts as a source of inspiration because they did it and they're doing fine.

When my grandfather (an entrepreneur himself) asked what this meant for us I said, "We keep going. What else could we do? This will hurt our competitors more than us."

I'd love to see bloated tech companies start dropping like flies. It'd leave such huge holes in the market that just beg for someone to come in and fill them with a lean startup.

Let me just jump in on a topic that I've seen a few times, and one that I think throws programmers for a loop. It's the whole "premature scalaculation" thing.

Did you know the 3 guys who built YouTube initially didn't start it out as a video site? It was a dating site! Even more, did you know they didn't even use a version control system? The philosophy was "push once a day, make some type of change that the user can see." They also were focused on building out features, not worrying too much about scalability at first.

The guy who started PayPal said that one of the most painful parts were the times where he had to delete massive amounts of his own code. He said one of the biggest flaws of engineers is to write "the perfect code." And yet, 90% of it gets destroyed shortly after it's written.

I'm not an advocate of crap code. In fact, at our startup, we write very good code and follow the API models of companies like Google and Flickr so as to have a scalable product and architecture with clean, readable, commented code. But when you're a startup, you have different priorities.

I'd say maybe the first 6 months (an arbitrary number) don't worry about scalability. You don't even have a user ;) Why not worry about how you'll get your first 100 users, or better yet, how you'll get your first 100 users happy, as Paul Buchheit puts it?

On a final note, I read someone else mention about the CEO thing. In my opinion, you don't need a CEO until you at least have user growth down. Yes, you want investors, but try to offset most of that work to PG or whoever else is investing. It's in their interest that you succeed too. You should be working day and night with your engineers, building the product. It will make the future fundraising and meetings much easier, just think about Google and Andy Bechtolsheim.

I really enjoyed reading this, and I think you're going to go far in the future. Sometimes we get dealt some bad cards, and the only thing you can do is to fold 'em and wait for the next hand. Stay persistent, stay focused, and kick ass.