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Atlas Winced: Starting A Company is Harder Than You Think

blog.southparkcommons.com · 1,327 words · saved by 1 readers

Pain is inevitable as a founder. Learning how to deal with it can be the difference between success and failure. Starting a company is harder than you think. It’s rewarding too, especially for the obsessively driven founders who tend to survive and succeed. But it’s absurdly hard. Most first-time founders are unprepared for the deeply personal nature of the startup struggle, and many current founders don’t know how to read the pain signals those struggles produce. You may aspire to be Atlas, but even titans suffer. I have experienced these tribulations from every angle—as an early employee at a breakout company, as a founder of my own, and as an investor/advisor to hundreds more. Below are key tactics for surviving the early–stage startup gauntlet. The single hardest question for a founder at the pre-seed and seed stage is whether to persist with the current product or move on to the next idea. So much of the mythology of Silicon Valley valorizes persistence and grit—while at the same

Starting a company is harder than you think. It’s rewarding too, especially for the obsessively driven founders who tend to survive and succeed. But it’s absurdly hard. Most first-time founders are unprepared for the deeply personal nature of the startup struggle, and many current founders don’t know how to read the pain signals those struggles produce. You may aspire to be Atlas, but even titans suffer. I have experienced these tribulations from every angle—as an early employee at a breakout company, as a founder of my own, and as an investor/advisor to hundreds more. Below are key tactics…

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