McKay Thomas | Blog

The Difficulties Behind Startups

I wanted to write something of the hardship at a startup, because I think that no one is really discussing accurately why startups are so hard.

I read an article by Mike Arrington a couple days ago that talked about never sleeping and working till you collapse and he wrote another post emphasizing his point to be that startups are hard. The reasons that startups are hard, I think, has nothing or nearly nothing to do with the hours worked. I know this because my average day doesn’t start till 8:45 and I leave around 7:00. That’s 10 hours and 15 minutes. And although that might be more than some, basically every doctor, lawyer, and consultant is working at least that long and likely much, much longer.

So, if the hours are longer elsewhere, either everyone launching a startup is a whiner (maybe) or there is something less obvious than mere hours at a screen that makes a startup the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

I’ve briefly gone through some of the hardest moments at my current, very young, eight-week-launched startup Baby.com.br and they fall generally in to two categories. Extreme emotion being one, and extreme pressure being the other.

Emotion

I think if startups weren’t composed of humans, they would generally go much smoother. Humans can be self-centered, brash, insulting, inconsiderate, narrow, and generally unpleasant. And that might be a good day for someone of our species. And it takes a lot of these humans working together for months and months to get a product ready for the public.

To shape a product, particularly an ecommerce product like Baby.com.br, you need to make decisions about thousands of things from warehousing, to product assortment, web design, platforms, software, hiring, office space, and even less tangible things like work ethic, and culture. And when a bunch of emotional, opinionated co-founders get together to hash these things out, the job difficulty escalates.

On top of all that, the earliest people in are usually the most vision-driven. The first few employees believe in something that is nothing more than an idea. They have watched really talented, even slightly famous and regarded people arrive for interviews and walk away. This has an effect on people. An emotional effect.

There is so much risk associated with startups and there are so many horror stories that everyone carries around a shadow within them. Maybe it’s hidden from view or maybe it’s on your shoulder, either way it changes how you work. And when you’re at a startup, particularly a young one, that shadow never leaves you. It’s with you at the office and it’s with you at home. It’s with you even when you sleep. The shadow has an emotional weight to it and it weathers you.

Pressure

At a startup, there is a built in pressure to be moving faster than is realistically possible. Whether it’s an expectation that a news organization inaccurately set, a communication with a peer that escalated by the time it found its way to an investor, a next round of financing, or even just the plain jane dissatisfaction that comes from not having enough wind in your hair, “faster” is a common mantra at startups.

This “faster” mantra makes people do crazy things and consider crazy ideas. Nothing is ever enough. And raising the next round of financing is constantly burning at the back of many of the decisions that are made. How can we grow faster than any commerce startup ever? That seems like the only way to survive. That may be complete crap, but I’m not sure it is. We didn’t get together, move to Brazil with our families, raise money, and slave away to have anything but the number one startup ever founded.

There is also an enormous amount of pressure from co-founders (Their blogs here and here). Everyone feels an ownership over their areas of the business and when something isn’t inline with our goals, there is disappointment, and usually a little banishment. When nothing in an entire company will move forward unless you do it yourself, there is a pressure that mounts and weighs and wears. And it doesn’t bring out the best interpersonal communication practices with those involved.

I’ve written before about hardship and how it yields the greatest experiences of life. However, the concept I’m attempting to articulate is that it is very hard at a startup and not for the mere time I happen to be clicking at a screen.