Paul Graham asked a number of founders what surprised them about starting a startup and came away with this advice to potential founders:
- Be Careful with Cofounders
- Startups Take Over Your Life
- It’s an Emotional Roller-coaster
- It Can Be Fun
- Persistence Is the Key
- Think Long-Term
- Lots of Little Things
- Start with Something Minimal
- Engage Users
- Change Your Idea
- Don’t Worry about Competitors
- It’s Hard to Get Users
- Expect the Worst with Deals
- Investors Are Clueless
- You May Have to Play Games
- Luck Is a Big Factor
- The Value of Community
- You Get No Respect
- Things Change as You Grow
The key insight is the super-pattern, the pattern of patterns:
These are supposed to be the surprises, the things I didn’t tell people. What do they all have in common? They’re all things I tell people. If I wrote a new essay with the same outline as this that wasn’t summarizing the founders’ responses, everyone would say I’d run out of ideas and was just repeating myself.What is going on here?
When I look at the responses, the common theme is that starting a startup was like I said, but way more so. People just don’t seem to get how different it is till they do it.