Episode Details

What I learned from reading  The Pmarca Blog Archive Ebook by Marc Andreessen.

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[0:01] In this series of posts I will walk through some of my accumulated knowledge and experience in building high-tech startups.  

[3:15] Great things about doing a startups: 

Most fundamentally, the opportunity to be in control of your own destiny — you get to succeed or fail on your own, and you don’t have some bozo telling you what to do. For a certain kind of personality, this alone is reason enough to do a startup.

The opportunity to create something new — the proverbial blank sheet of paper. You have the ability — actually, the obligation— to imagine a product that does not yet exist and bring it into existence, without any of the constraints normally faced by larger companies.

The opportunity to have an impact on the world — to give people a new way to communicate, a new way to share information, a new way to work  together, or anything else you can think of that would make the world a better place. 

The ability to create your ideal culture and work with a dream team of people you get to assemble yourself. Want your culture to be based on people who have fun every day and enjoy working together? Or, are hyper-competitive both in work and play? Or, are super-focused on creating innovative new rocket science.

And finally, money —startups done right can of course be highly lucrative. This is not just an issue of personal greed — when things go right, your team and employees will themselves do very well and will be able to support their families, send their kids to college, and realize their dreams, and that’s really cool. And if you’re really lucky, you as the entrepreneur can ultimately make profound philanthropic gifts that change society for the better.  

[5:15] However, there are many more reasons to not do a startup. 

[5:28] First, and most importantly, realize that a startup puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced. You will flip rapidly from a day in which you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again.Over and over and over. 

[6:04] Some days things will go really well and some things will go really poorly. And the level of stress that you’re under generally will magnify those transient data points into incredible highs and unbelievable lows at whiplash speed and huge magnitude.  

[6:42] The best thing about startups: you only ever experience two emotions, euphoria and terror, and I find that a lack of sleep enhances them both. 

[7:09] In a startup, absolutely nothing happens unless you make it happen. 

[8:19] As a founder of a startup trying to hire your team, you’ll run into this again and again: When Jim Clark decided to start a new company in 1994, I was one of about a dozen people at various Silicon Valley companies he was talking to about joining him in what became Netscape. I was the only one who went all the way to saying “yes” (largely because I was 22 and had no reason not to do it). The rest flinched and didn’t do it. And this was Jim Clark, a legend in the industry who was coming off of the most successful company in Silicon Valley in 1994 —Silicon Graphics Inc. How easy do you think it’s going to be for you?  

[10:50] The fact is that startups are incredibly intense experiences and take a lot out of people in the best of circumstances. 

[14:03]  And so you start to wonder—what correlates the most to success— team, product, or market? Or, more bluntly, what causes success? And, for those of us who are students of startup failure—what’s most d