by apgwoz | 2025-07-03 20:22:20+00:00
> I don't understand this "startup lottery" stuff.

What’s not to understand? There’s a whole class of people that start a startup hoping for it to be the next big thing and they get their golden ticket to billionairedom. There’s also a whole class of non-founders that will join early stage companies at their riskiest stage hoping for the lottery payout. I’m not sure what there is to misunderstand about this?

> I'm just saying: there's no romance or great reward to working in a failing startup. If you have a clear signal that your startup is failing, you've been given a gift from the heavens: the ability to see into the future, see yourself wasting years, and then navigate around those years.

I don’t think I’ve said anything that negates this statement? If after 6 months you have absolutely no customers and you’ve tried everything, then clearly you don’t stick around for 5 years trying. I’ve never said that. This is way different than “we’ve found some success and after 5 years, hired people, just never figured out how to take it to the next level and so we’re shutting down.”

But you can’t make a general statement that there’s no “romance or reward” because people have a whole lot of reasons for doing what they’re doing. That’s been my big disagreement here. As always the answer is “it depends.” You’ve not cited some study that says differently… so… shrug.

> (I have no idea how old you are, but "how did your startup fail in 2001" is an odd question).

I _guess_ I asked that question, but not really. I asked what your startup was, and made an assumption that the amount of “free money” available may have doomed it from the start. Maybe VCs bet on something that obviously (in retrospect) couldn’t succeed … like Pets.com, or the wide variety of “we’ll just burn all this cash paying people to drive a pack of gum from the upper east side to wall st… in the middle of rush hour… and hope we figure out a way to scale it later!!!!!” startups that existed.

> Were you a founder …

I’m not sure why this actually matters? There are plenty of founders who start a company… almost accidentally… because a project they built became bigger than side-project, who aren’t necessarily motivated by a potential unicorn status. The people who benefit most from “try something for 3mo and hope it fails fast!!!” are (I’m going to make a guess because I doubt there’s a citable study out there!) the people most likely looking to win the startup lottery. In that case, the more chances to “scratch off the ticket” the better.

But, I still maintain that it’d be better for those people to have the experience of being a longer term founder for 5 years to gain more experience, see and adapt to more problems… etc, than to start and kill, start and kill, over and over again. In a fast cycles, you can test one or two hypotheses against a very targetted customer base. But you could totally be looking for a great white shark in a lake, which makes absolutely no sense.

> Finally: if you try to factor money out of entrepreneurship discussions, you get to very funny places.

Funny, when I brought money into it before:

> Yeah, you're missing my point. Given most startups fail, the question isn't "at the end of the day do you still get a paycheck for your failed startup", it's "how much of your life did you burn on that failed startup".

This will be my last reply. We don’t agree, and that’s fine. :)