Startup Culture has Changed

Being an intelligent, ambitious, rebellious, and socially inept twenty-something is an exciting and confusing time. The world is simultaneously filled with unbearable ignorance and astounding success stories. You strike out on your own, begin your career, and feel your world-view colliding with reality.

Many of us became accustomed to a predictable life path. Work hard, be smart, and success will come to you. Good grades lead to good jobs, good jobs lead to good opportunities, good opportunities lead to untold happiness and success. But at some point, that path collapses.

Maybe it’s during college when you start questioning why you’re wasting your time taking irrelevant classes. Maybe it’s in your career when you feel that you are smarter and more dedicated than your managers, and yet can’t advance your career like they can. Maybe it’s after the nth time implementing some new technology that you hoped would solve all of your problems, only to find that it too is lacking.

You begin to see that if you do what everyone else is doing, you’ll end up just like them. Uninterested, uninspired, and unhappy.

You drop out. You quit. You start building. And you find a new path. The dream of being a founder. You read Paul Graham’s essays and convince yourself that this is it. This is what you’ve been missing all along. This is what you are built for.

At least, that’s the path I took. 60 hour work weeks from ages 20-27. Numbing myself with work, video games, and marijuana. No social life to speak of. Just grinding it out with unrealistic expectations of oversized rewards.

I became obsessed with a superficial vision of what it took to build a billion dollar startup. I poured myself into crafting the perfect pitch deck. I researched hundreds of companies, created a compelling TAM analysis, crafted the perfect mission statement, mapped out our funding roadmap, built org charts, and highlighted why me and my co-founder were the ideal team. I led myself to believe I had what it took to get funded. And was completely ignored. More than that:

• I burned out
• I was hard on myself
  • For not being smarter
  • For not working harder
  • For not having enough resources
• I embarrassed myself by presenting underdeveloped ideas
• I lost sleep worrying about the wrong things
• I lost money paying for services I didn't need
• I developed the product with a frantic energy
• I misguided my co-founder
• I achieved little real progress

What went wrong?

At the end of the day, I have no one to blame but myself. I was caught in the trap of comparing myself to others. Seeing young founders gaining funding led to me copying what they were doing on the surface, without looking deeper into what investors really look for.

What nobody tells you is this. Your vision, your background, your brand, and your pitch deck are nothing. You need users, connections, and the guarantee of revenue.

The reality of building a 0.001% company is that you need to be a 0.001% founder. Seems obvious but it's hard to accept as an ambitious person. Realize, it's not just intelligence and discipline. It's resources, connections, charisma, resilience, and luck. That takes time to build and is never guaranteed.

Which is why building a billion dollar company in your 20s is the intersection of many profoundly rare events. Supportive, wealthy parents. Being born intelligent. Growing up in the right area. Going to the right school. Having the right early career experiences. Having the right idea at the right time. And so much more that goes into creating the Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerbergs, and Steve Jobs of the world.

The average founder is 42. It takes time.

Brilliant people and brilliant ideas have come from startups. Paul Graham's essays stand out among them. So does Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. And Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing about Hard Things. Certainly there are good investors and VC firms out there. And certainly there are exceptional founders who have overcome incredible challenges.

And certainly, there are misleading firms and investors. Startups are driven by hype cycles and power laws. Everyone is on the hunt for the next 100x product, and often this leads to optimizing for the wrong signals. Being a hype man and marketing genius often gets over selected for, setting the wrong example.

This is a real problem. This has degraded our trust in tech. XR, the metaverse, crypto, coworking, and video games have all delivered overhyped, disappointing products and businesses. This is how you get the Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Frieds, and Adam Neumanns of the world.

How startup culture has degraded

Tech is getting old. Google is 26 years old. Apple is 48! The field has become saturated. It's much harder for a college kid to disrupt the world with a good idea. Not impossible, but magnitudes more difficult. It's harder to raise money, earn attention, and sell your product. People have lost their glossy eyed view of technology, capital isn’t free anymore, and the days of 78% click throughs are far behind us.

And yet there is money to be made! The VC model is predicated on early investments in precocious companies. The wheels must keep turning. Old ideas are rehashed, emerging technologies are oversold, and new hype cycles are created. Disruption has shifted towards creating attention rather than creating technology. If you can cut through the noise, you're a winner! At the cost of your consumers. cts describes this brilliantly.

Does startup culture ever work?

Yes, of course. Great products are produced through startups. We use them every day, you’re likely using several right now.

The distinction is summed up well in Zero to One. Truly disruptive technology is not an incremental improvement, but something brand new. It’s not a 2x step forward but a 10x leap into the future. At the perfect time. With the perfect team.

Building a product of this nature requires a very specific skill set, far beyond brilliance and vision. And it starts with you. Take your time. Improve your skills. Grow yourself every day. And build at your pace.

Now I concern myself with building a great product and great business that will earn my income. Engineering is a craft. Like any craft, mastery can only be achieved through discipline and practice. I focus on showing up every day.

Approaching life this way has sharpened my skills, given me experience, increased my knowledge, and contributed to a codebase that can serve as the foundation for future products.

I am crafting my masterpiece. And transforming my personal life.

I'm healthy, I'm happy, and I'm balanced. I have great friends, I'm dating, I’m a part of my community, and I have strong relationships with my family. I travel, hike, read, write, and code. I feel incredibly grateful to be who I am and where I am in life. For someone who used to see themselves as an outcast, this is a huge personal achievement. It is a snowball that keeps growing.

Most businesses take 5-10 years to mature. Most people take 25 years. The best businesses and people never stop. Look at Warren Buffett.

My journey has just begun.

The goal is greatness

The further I continue down this path, the more I redefine success. My true goal is to live a good life and do great work. Personal wealth has become a smaller part of the puzzle.

Success is your health, your friends, your family, your work, your character, your capability, your spirituality, your freedom. It's the ability to wake up and live your ideal day, every day. It's to have the love, peace, and resilience to gracefully navigate the suffering and joy of life. It's to meaningfully improve the world for the next generation.

History is full of great people. Follow in their footsteps. Their wisdom extends back thousands of years, far deeper and truer than anything we have found in the last 40 years of startup culture.

Through this I am finding a path that is much more authentic, and complete, for me. Personal growth, balance, doing good work for good people, and the possibility of raising a family are far more valuable to me than building a billion dollar company.

The landscape is always shifting

Today's world has very different needs from when Google or Apple were founded. The most obvious opportunities have been swallowed up. And yet, it’s never been easier to be a developer. My productivity, with the libraries and tools I have access to, is far beyond what someone could have achieved in the 90s. What I can do alone may have taken a team of 100 in the past.

There has never been a better time to be a small business. And now they might be busting these massive monopolies. At least Google certainly will be broken up. Use this to your advantage.

Get close to the edge of a problem, gain a deep understanding of a specific field and develop useful skills in it. Help people solve difficult problems and learn to work well with anyone. Don't get your ideas from other people. Listen deeply, but think for yourself. Learn about the world, learn how it works, where it struggles, and how people find success, in every way.

Find the path you want to take, and take it.