Failure is the most stressful part of a startup

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

Most startups fail. And failure is stressful. Defeat can sink a person into a deep depression. Some very good comments on Hacker New about this:

The founders of Diaspora were in a really unenviable position. They started off with a wave of national press as well as solid financial support from grassroot users. As time went on, it became increasingly clear that they would not be able to accomplish the goal they originally set out to do. They had failed. Publicly. This can be very devastating psychologically to someone who has always ‘succeeded’ in life.

I’m not saying this was the case for Ilya, or had any part in his death, but I know for me it would have been hard to swallow. There are many silent founders out there that gave up everything for an unrealized dream in the path to startup success and it has a real toll on psyches.
Best wishes to his family & friends.

EDIT: This appears to be a very controversial comment. The vote count seems to be oscillating up and down very rapidly. I don’t want to make this out to be a discussion about Diaspora, so I won’t comment further on that point. But the mental health of founders is a real issue and rarely discussed. Maybe there should be a more open discussion about this issue.

and:

It’s the psychological risk of knowing you really, really tried — and still failed. That is the hard part, because everyone goes in with Dilbert/mass media notions of how easy it is to be a CEO or (just as bad) Social Network illusions of how easy it is to grow meteorically while fighting off lawsuits.

The truth is that it’s not easy, that it takes a special and lucky person. If you fail it’s really hard to realize you aren’t that special. The possibly healthier (?) way of dealing is to convince yourself that it was bad luck, or the other guy cheated. Then it’s not as much of a hit to the ego, to the sense of your own capabilities. But it’s hard.

and:

It doesn’t take a special person, so much as it’s simply the case that no matter who you are, your startup is likely to fail.

When I was much younger and starting my first (fundably doomed) startup, one of my cofounders liked to say, “yeah, most businesses fail, but those statistics include companies trying to sell soft drinks to Eskimos and combination Chinese food/pizza restaurants”. Then we’d all chuckle, knowing that the statistics most certainly didn’t capture dynamic new technology firms like ours.

No. Most companies fail. Look at the list of dead YC companies. Those were screened by a team that has specialized in doing nothing but screening founding teams and then attempting to give them every advantage their considerable and growing infrastructure and connections can give them. And they still fail.

Because that is what startups do. They fail.

The best, most talented, most experienced founders in the world would presumably be among the first to tell you that you can’t read anything about your self from the simple fact that your company failed. Learn what you can, but don’t ever let it grind on you.

(Some people just shouldn’t be in this game, for whatever it’s worth, like Matt Damon said about the no-limit players in Rounders; not because they can’t, but because it’s not healthy for them.)

Just because you lose a game of Russian Roulette doesn’t mean you lacked talent. Only luck.