Quote the author “To continue advancing my career, I’d need projects that were even larger in scope and involved collaboration with more partner teams. But that just meant the project could fail due to even more factors outside my control, wasting months or years of my life.”
I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works!
>I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works!
After six years of running bootstrapped businesses, I actually more strongly believe the opposite.
It might be true at a high-growth VC-backed startup that you need many stars to align to succeed.
In bootstrapped businesses, you basically just need one thing to succeed: product market fit. If you create a product that people want, you'll probably succeed even if you make a lot of other mistakes.
With TinyPilot, I didn't know anything about hardware or selling a physical product at the beginning, so I did a million things wrong. But I landed on a product people were willing to pay for, and I found a good way of getting it in front of customers, so the company worked. I did some things right, but for the first year, I mostly felt like revenue was growing on its own and I was trying to keep up.
You still need luck to find product market fit because lots of reasonable-sounding ideas end up flopping, but you really just need to get lucky once rather than wait for a whole set of things to get lucky at the same time.
Well, to be honest, I have never heard any of many FAANG turned startup founder friends told me that the want to build a life style business from the beginning. Every one wants to build a vc-backed startup with a home run idea. Many of them ended up building life style business because the markets of their ideas were actually much smaller.
If you do the math, climbing the corporate ladder at FAANG might have better ROI than running life style business. Of course, money is not the only consideration in life.
I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works!