To paraphrase Richard Pryor, I support anyone trying to do anything at anytime. It’s so, so easy to be a passive consumer, a critic. It is so much more dangerous and vulnerable to put yourself out there and make something - anything - beyond simply doing what you are told. Whether it’s making art or making businesses.
If you start businesses, you will fail. Fact of life. Happened to me many times. You know what investors like to back? Second and third time founders - “serial entrepreneurs”. Backing a 20 year old college dropout with a few million bucks is a down payment on the future because they will inevitably fuck it up, but 10 years from now if they are still in the game and failed a couple times they will take your check and the odds of failure have gone down significantly.
With the market the way it is right now, many entrepreneurs (and their employees) reading are likely staring down the barrel of failure. Bite the bullet and move on because no one wants your zombie company with a too-high valuation that’s going to putter along for 2 more years and collapse anyway or get acquihired. Just restart with a clean cap table and a more cost efficient idea.
We had some negative customer feedback come in last night and a contract was canceled because of it. I wish this customer had responded to my emails asking for feedback over the last three months but they didn't. Now it's over and done with and some of the most damning feedback we've ever received.
It breaks my heart, I'm in a low place today. But as you say, business is hard. Being a passive consumer-critic is easy. I will say that once you start a business and get your hands dirty, I think you can never go back. You see how hard it is to make the sausage and you gain a lot of respect for the process, even as you have random anons telling you to commit suicide on Twitter, how the men making a quarter million dollars at Google in SF are so oppressed because their rent is high, etc.
Are you taking the occasion to reconsider strategy of approach, to get feedback?
Sorry, just an aside. Nonetheless, on the known line to translate "failures" into "lessons".
--
Update: I must leave the console now, but I hope the sniper passing by posts some argument. Hopefully different from "Insensitive", here where the exact point is (1) treating events as something preventable given some wisdom, to be built, and (2) treating events as something to be analyzed, instead of borne - to neutralize them.
I'm going to guess that they got a lower or more competitive bid from another vendor which is why you lost the contract and it is less about you more about them. You know just like dating. If they actually wanted to work with you they would have given continuous feedback since responsiveness to their concerns is usually part of the deal.
I'm no expert, but have been around start ups to large companies for a long time in many roles. Business/capitalism is a full contact sport. Getting someone to give you money, whether it's a $1 or $1M dollars is fucking hard. With billions of people in the world, you think it would be easier to find 10k of them to give you $10 - nope. When selling something, the vast vast majority say no.
I remember at a prior company we had our biggest customer drop us. Similar situation, we worked with them for months to get usage up, but they ignored/blocked our efforts. Then one day, no renewal. It hurt, it was scary, but the way business works. It also led to a pivot and later acquisition.
You should just watch the live set, but I can’t seem to find this specific set on YouTube for a link. It seems to have hardcore copyright from Netflix and they ban any videos from it https://www.netflix.com/title/907090
You can search on the linked page for “The only thing about it, I don’t like to hear when white people would be saying, he dumb, ain’t he?” regarding the boxer Leon Spinks. Much funnier in the live set.
It feels like I have failed in every way that is possible.
I have lost my wife, my child, my parents, my grandparents, my friends, my house burned down with all of my possessions. I lost my ability to code due to burnout and had to spend several years doing nothing.
During my burnout experience I was basically forced to confront the roaring void of existence. I spent time at a monastery and contemplated the futility of it all.
And yet at the end of all of this, I considered what else is there to do with life but to begin anew? And now that I have lost everything, I am no longer naive. I know what is possible to have, and what is possible to lose, and I can act with understanding from past experience. I feel far more capable of success now that I know what it is to fail in the hardest ways I can imagine.
Sorry to hear you have suffered, happy to hear you've found peace with how life has treated you. I wouldn't say I'm a deeply spiritual person in any way, but I've seen many people around me find solace in spirituality when going through hardships. What did your path to spirituality or religion or however you'd like to call it look like? How do you look at the world now, or how would you describe what you practice?
Perhaps the most important event of my life was discovering I have autism at age 33. Many things that didn't make sense suddenly did. I pointed my hyperfocus inward to my own mind, at first because I had lost the ability to code and make a living, and wanted to heal my "coding injuries" as I had called them. I had become an atheist at age 20 and primarily had used psychology to try and figure out what was happening.
I studied Buddhism under a mentor and realized that many of the principles applied regardless of your beliefs about cosmology. The idea that all problems humans face can be summarized as "greed, ignorance, and aversion" was a useful frame. These helped me triangulate the ultimate source of my burnout to unmet family expectations that I had for many years tried to live up to but could not. Confronting my family about these expectations and taking responsibility for my own life was absolutely key in my healing.
These days I don't exactly have a set practice but I still live with my mentors. They started a syncretic monastery that welcomes all traditions, and observing the similarities and differences between worldviews has been quite eye opening. The most valuable practice I take from all this is a honed awareness of the root causes of suffering, and I've found that once the root cause is identified, it becomes possible to release it.
I am pretty open about my past failures with others but I definitely understand why people aren't. There is a stigma associated with failure that society still hasn't accepted. My last job I held the title of VP of Engineering. It was a small company and during my time there I recognized that the title was outsized for what I actually did. I was actually more of an Engineering Manager. All of my direct reports were ICs not other managers.
I ended up leaving that job because politically at that company I had no voice, and people above me lacked basic leadership skills and continually failed to recognize it. Additionally whenever I would call out issues, it always would somehow manifest into a problem with me. So I ended up leaving, and not on great terms.
Once I took a long break, I started looking for jobs again. The title I carried on my resume was bullshit, and trying to interview for Senior Engineering positions proved difficult. When I made the interview I made it clear what I did at that company. I told them that the title didn't represent my duties. I feel like some saw this as a blight. I finally accepted a job as a Software Engineer and now am slowly fixing my career.
The lesson I learned was to never accept a worthless title. Somehow people still misunderstand my directness about this job in my history. It carries a strange weight, but hopefully with time I can correct it.
Was there a strong reason why you never just… changed the title on your résumé? I would assume the position you ended up in is a function of many different things, but if people embellish their accomplishments on their résumés by making them seem “bigger”, i see no reason why it’s not worth changing it to seem smaller.
Yup. Change your title to Senior Manager and be done with it. I don’t know why you would stick with VP of Engineering when everyone including yourself knew it was BS. There’s no shame in correcting the title.
I did, but doesn't this basically go against what this article is saying? Plus if they ever called to confirm my position at the prior company, how would the old company react?
>There is a stigma associated with failure that society still hasn't accepted.
I don't think that the stigma is only associated with failure, but also with lacking talent/gift. Founders, developers, etc. simply want to look pristine, flawless, gifted. The mythical unicorn who "everything who touches turns to success" and any setback or effort is downplayed.
In the company I previously worked for as a junior developer I had 2 colleagues. Let's call them Tom and Bob. I once made the mistake of asking for feedback on how to improve from Tom. And the mistake I made was thinking that his feedback would focus on maximizing constructiveness aka. inform me with ways that would be actionable for me. When I asked him how to "become as good as you are" what he instead gave me as an answer was "my brain simply works differently".
We can argue over whether I asked the right or wrong question and I will agree with you that perhaps if the question was posed differently the answer may have been more constructive. However, I don't think that this detracts anything from my original point: When communicating, especially in career/business contexts, we have multiple goals in mind. And one of the goals that we have is to ensure that we don't show to others how hard we had to work, or how many times we failed until we understood a concept.
And this need will never ever go away, because impressions and perceptions are important. It's also the reason why companies will insist on keeping in their job openings "call for talents", "seeking talented developers", etc. I've even seen Linkedin job posts with 200+ applicants and at first was impressed, but then found out that some companies just reopen the same job ad to avoid resetting the counter because apparently having "200+ applicants" is giving the impression that lots of developers out there who would do anything to join them.
You'll always have people or/and companies that prettify or up-sell something they did because (especially in career contexts) perception and impression is important, and it's not just about being constructive/educational to other founders/developers etc. but to also look great while doing it.
I agree with the thrust of your post, but sometimes people simply can't give advice on certain matters because they don't face the same challenges that you do.
I had a brilliant professor once, aware of the fact that he didn't really actually need to try, he was just incredibly gifted as a mathematician and for him undergrad was a walk in the park. He knew that he could teach us, but dealing with "the struggle" wasn't something he could empathise with.
People often ask me how I had the motivation/discipline or drive to achieve certain long term goals and my honest answer is that they just didn't seem optional to me, like how one might brush their teeth without thinking. I couldn't give actionable advice to someone who, for example, "wants to get in shape" beyond what are essentially tautologies like just eat less and exercise more.
> When I asked him how to "become as good as you are"
This is an almost insulting question. What are you expecting, some magic trick? Go spend years studying, working hard, and focusing on improving yourself.
I wish I could be more honest with my failures, but people have abused my trust so many times I have lost count. at some point you just have to cut your losses and keep it to yourself, or to a few select few.
Right here with you. At my last company, I tried to get the team comfortable “I don’t know,” “that didn’t pan out,” etc. I couldn’t get the lead on the other team to catch on. He’d bullshit an answer over a few minutes in a meeting, and Product and Management would eat that shit up.
That team was no better/worse at failure than anyone else, but apparently non-engineers can’t be bothered with the truth of humans: we’re failure machines looking for the right answers because we just can’t know everything.
Entirely agree. I’ve had trouble distilling this attribute or whatever into a specific quality. Maybe probabilistic thinking? But the bar for acknowledging when u don’t kno something should be pretty low.
> we’re failure machines looking for the right answers because we just can’t know everything.
Yea this is a real problem. I wish stats and probability were more emphasized in high school. And it really doesn’t matter if people understand the math, the primary goal should be to get students at least familiar, and hopefully comfortable, with the concepts of chance and randomness. And having students internalize the concept of a confidence interval could help form a mental model of how to go about making assertions and the danger of overstating things.
The overstating things part is definitely ingrained in the American culture at least but I feel that this could really chip away at that
Any typical group of humans is still a young grub of an organism compared to the individual in those ways. So what you described can be a very hard ask for basically all of humanity, as seen through a team lens, at this point in history.
Sometimes it can help to continually plan and provide gentle interventions that expose the team to individual examples of what you are looking for. As long as that doesn't too severely overlap with what amounts to activities or embarrassing admissions that could torpedo a team member's career later on when you're gone. A very hard ask overall.
Probably the hardest part: If you can do it yourself, as an individual, congrats you get to feel like you could inspire people. But that's you as an individual. The group-organism experiences growth prompts as stress just like individuals do, but with far worse tools for coping. And one of the worst counter-pressures is the ever-present possibility of faking it for a bit and then just changing jobs to escape the awkward stuff, maybe getting a raise in the process.
If they are there to watch you burn it's because they fear failing so bad they want to reinforce their world view or control their surroundings such that no one around them attempts anything they can fail at.
Unironically they are failing at those things because they don't work. Now get this, if you go off and do something right... They have failed again.
99% of people want you to suffer and fail at everything you do. The trick is realizing they don't matter whatsoever no matter who they are.
That seems detached from reality and a dangerous, more than productive, idea. They are more probably uninterested or superficial (which is in a way the same). You do not need to feign enemies to get detached.
I feel this. I have been burned over and over again as well. I desire to trust deeply and build real intimacy with friends and colleagues and lovers, and for many years I was very naive. I trusted anyone who told me they were trustworthy.
For me personally, it turned out I have autism (which I didn't realize until age 33), and understanding this helped me understand perhaps why I was being deceived so often.
Generally, I appreciated this article by Malcolm Ocean about his idea of a "Non-Naive Trust Dance". https://malcolmocean.com/2021/09/non-naive-trust-dance-why-t... He suggests that the optimal strategy for trust building is a slow building over time that acknowledges the distrust inherent to both parties rather than naively accepting people at face value.
The best writing I’ve found on the experience of failure and how painful it can be, is “Eating Glass” by Mark D Jacobsen. A lot of sample chapters can be read here: https://markdjacobsen.com/eating-glass/
I highly, highly recommend this book. I have no connection to Mark but I did find his book through a comment of his on HN.
Wow, this aligns with my experiences starting a solo tech start up and then getting acquired as I ran out of cash.
The company that acquired my company then went through internal struggles and the result was that I left after a few years, unable to add value any more.
It feels like a failure, but equally it feels like a good lesson, but a painful one.
It's 2 years after I left and I still think about it.
If I could say something to my past self, I would say that "You're about to learn a hard life lesson" and not change anything.
I'm careful now to try and shine a balanced light on my work there, it wasn't awesome, and it wasn't horrid.
There are more people out there with similar life stories of hard lessons learnt than you might expect, and it's good for both of you to connect with them.
“We were a tech-enabled therapy platform for children with autism. I recently decided to stop working on it, we sold part of the company, and I shut the rest down. It was a wild ride: we were sued, we raised millions of dollars, hired over 130 people, and I made tons of mistakes.”
I’m going to be equally honest. How does it make sense on a base-of-system level? What were 130 people doing? What could the technology possibly have been to enable therapy for autistic children? What mistakes could you have made in such a situation, with what possible consequences? For who, the children or the technology?
My wife works in special ed and it's pretty straightforward for me to imagine how this could be beneficial. Briefly, there's a lot of time, effort, resources and people involved in treating this. The money is certainly there, being spent all the time - by parents, schools, etc. Not just in treating, but also testing (which seems computer friendly). So the question would be tapping into that, and making it useful. Of course I don't know the details of this particular story, but in a general sense, it's easy to understand why you might build such a business.
Don't know the product, but anything that acts as a force multiplier for education / healthcare without that value being 100% captured by already rich people, or quality being reduced, is a miracle.
You should be proud of yourself for just having tried to do it.
A glance at recent ycombinator edtech investments seem to put a lot of emphasis on classroom-replacement/supplementation rather than tools for improving instruction.
This is probably just a sign of the (post-)Covid era, but I do find it interesting when compared to the broader SAAS world that obsesses about “improving [professional’s] ability to do [job]” at increasingly granular levels.
> Surprisingly, my new friends don’t focus on our failures. They are simply curious about the details of the adventure.
That's too bad.
Here's as an actual core life skill when it comes to failure: you want to stack as many failures into as few attempts as you possibly can. Save yourself the trouble and the time. Even if someone tells you about how they failed, and you listen, you are still at high risk of making the same failures, because you truly don't know any better.
I'm sure there is lots he learned in the four years but this post doesn't really talk about that, so I'm not sure if he quite confronted it yet, nor developed it as a core life skill.
Readit News
If you start businesses, you will fail. Fact of life. Happened to me many times. You know what investors like to back? Second and third time founders - “serial entrepreneurs”. Backing a 20 year old college dropout with a few million bucks is a down payment on the future because they will inevitably fuck it up, but 10 years from now if they are still in the game and failed a couple times they will take your check and the odds of failure have gone down significantly.
With the market the way it is right now, many entrepreneurs (and their employees) reading are likely staring down the barrel of failure. Bite the bullet and move on because no one wants your zombie company with a too-high valuation that’s going to putter along for 2 more years and collapse anyway or get acquihired. Just restart with a clean cap table and a more cost efficient idea.
We had some negative customer feedback come in last night and a contract was canceled because of it. I wish this customer had responded to my emails asking for feedback over the last three months but they didn't. Now it's over and done with and some of the most damning feedback we've ever received.
It breaks my heart, I'm in a low place today. But as you say, business is hard. Being a passive consumer-critic is easy. I will say that once you start a business and get your hands dirty, I think you can never go back. You see how hard it is to make the sausage and you gain a lot of respect for the process, even as you have random anons telling you to commit suicide on Twitter, how the men making a quarter million dollars at Google in SF are so oppressed because their rent is high, etc.
Are you taking the occasion to reconsider strategy of approach, to get feedback?
Sorry, just an aside. Nonetheless, on the known line to translate "failures" into "lessons".
--
Update: I must leave the console now, but I hope the sniper passing by posts some argument. Hopefully different from "Insensitive", here where the exact point is (1) treating events as something preventable given some wisdom, to be built, and (2) treating events as something to be analyzed, instead of borne - to neutralize them.
In the meantime, remember there's more to life than work, and you have more to offer the world than just the products you produce.
Take the opportunity to learn, when the time is right to revisit things.
Take some time away if you can. Try not to linger on it. It gets easier with each day.
Oh, and get the hell away from Twitter :)
Deleted Comment
I remember at a prior company we had our biggest customer drop us. Similar situation, we worked with them for months to get usage up, but they ignored/blocked our efforts. Then one day, no renewal. It hurt, it was scary, but the way business works. It also led to a pivot and later acquisition.
What were they upset about
Can it be rectifyied?
Here to help
What's the actual source quote here? Your paraphrase is excellent in and of itself.
You should just watch the live set, but I can’t seem to find this specific set on YouTube for a link. It seems to have hardcore copyright from Netflix and they ban any videos from it https://www.netflix.com/title/907090
You can search on the linked page for “The only thing about it, I don’t like to hear when white people would be saying, he dumb, ain’t he?” regarding the boxer Leon Spinks. Much funnier in the live set.
I have lost my wife, my child, my parents, my grandparents, my friends, my house burned down with all of my possessions. I lost my ability to code due to burnout and had to spend several years doing nothing.
During my burnout experience I was basically forced to confront the roaring void of existence. I spent time at a monastery and contemplated the futility of it all.
And yet at the end of all of this, I considered what else is there to do with life but to begin anew? And now that I have lost everything, I am no longer naive. I know what is possible to have, and what is possible to lose, and I can act with understanding from past experience. I feel far more capable of success now that I know what it is to fail in the hardest ways I can imagine.
I studied Buddhism under a mentor and realized that many of the principles applied regardless of your beliefs about cosmology. The idea that all problems humans face can be summarized as "greed, ignorance, and aversion" was a useful frame. These helped me triangulate the ultimate source of my burnout to unmet family expectations that I had for many years tried to live up to but could not. Confronting my family about these expectations and taking responsibility for my own life was absolutely key in my healing.
These days I don't exactly have a set practice but I still live with my mentors. They started a syncretic monastery that welcomes all traditions, and observing the similarities and differences between worldviews has been quite eye opening. The most valuable practice I take from all this is a honed awareness of the root causes of suffering, and I've found that once the root cause is identified, it becomes possible to release it.
thank you for sharing
Dead Comment
I ended up leaving that job because politically at that company I had no voice, and people above me lacked basic leadership skills and continually failed to recognize it. Additionally whenever I would call out issues, it always would somehow manifest into a problem with me. So I ended up leaving, and not on great terms.
Once I took a long break, I started looking for jobs again. The title I carried on my resume was bullshit, and trying to interview for Senior Engineering positions proved difficult. When I made the interview I made it clear what I did at that company. I told them that the title didn't represent my duties. I feel like some saw this as a blight. I finally accepted a job as a Software Engineer and now am slowly fixing my career.
The lesson I learned was to never accept a worthless title. Somehow people still misunderstand my directness about this job in my history. It carries a strange weight, but hopefully with time I can correct it.
I don't think that the stigma is only associated with failure, but also with lacking talent/gift. Founders, developers, etc. simply want to look pristine, flawless, gifted. The mythical unicorn who "everything who touches turns to success" and any setback or effort is downplayed.
In the company I previously worked for as a junior developer I had 2 colleagues. Let's call them Tom and Bob. I once made the mistake of asking for feedback on how to improve from Tom. And the mistake I made was thinking that his feedback would focus on maximizing constructiveness aka. inform me with ways that would be actionable for me. When I asked him how to "become as good as you are" what he instead gave me as an answer was "my brain simply works differently".
We can argue over whether I asked the right or wrong question and I will agree with you that perhaps if the question was posed differently the answer may have been more constructive. However, I don't think that this detracts anything from my original point: When communicating, especially in career/business contexts, we have multiple goals in mind. And one of the goals that we have is to ensure that we don't show to others how hard we had to work, or how many times we failed until we understood a concept.
And this need will never ever go away, because impressions and perceptions are important. It's also the reason why companies will insist on keeping in their job openings "call for talents", "seeking talented developers", etc. I've even seen Linkedin job posts with 200+ applicants and at first was impressed, but then found out that some companies just reopen the same job ad to avoid resetting the counter because apparently having "200+ applicants" is giving the impression that lots of developers out there who would do anything to join them.
You'll always have people or/and companies that prettify or up-sell something they did because (especially in career contexts) perception and impression is important, and it's not just about being constructive/educational to other founders/developers etc. but to also look great while doing it.
I had a brilliant professor once, aware of the fact that he didn't really actually need to try, he was just incredibly gifted as a mathematician and for him undergrad was a walk in the park. He knew that he could teach us, but dealing with "the struggle" wasn't something he could empathise with.
People often ask me how I had the motivation/discipline or drive to achieve certain long term goals and my honest answer is that they just didn't seem optional to me, like how one might brush their teeth without thinking. I couldn't give actionable advice to someone who, for example, "wants to get in shape" beyond what are essentially tautologies like just eat less and exercise more.
This is an almost insulting question. What are you expecting, some magic trick? Go spend years studying, working hard, and focusing on improving yourself.
That team was no better/worse at failure than anyone else, but apparently non-engineers can’t be bothered with the truth of humans: we’re failure machines looking for the right answers because we just can’t know everything.
> we’re failure machines looking for the right answers because we just can’t know everything.
Yea this is a real problem. I wish stats and probability were more emphasized in high school. And it really doesn’t matter if people understand the math, the primary goal should be to get students at least familiar, and hopefully comfortable, with the concepts of chance and randomness. And having students internalize the concept of a confidence interval could help form a mental model of how to go about making assertions and the danger of overstating things.
The overstating things part is definitely ingrained in the American culture at least but I feel that this could really chip away at that
Sometimes it can help to continually plan and provide gentle interventions that expose the team to individual examples of what you are looking for. As long as that doesn't too severely overlap with what amounts to activities or embarrassing admissions that could torpedo a team member's career later on when you're gone. A very hard ask overall.
Probably the hardest part: If you can do it yourself, as an individual, congrats you get to feel like you could inspire people. But that's you as an individual. The group-organism experiences growth prompts as stress just like individuals do, but with far worse tools for coping. And one of the worst counter-pressures is the ever-present possibility of faking it for a bit and then just changing jobs to escape the awkward stuff, maybe getting a raise in the process.
If they are there to watch you burn it's because they fear failing so bad they want to reinforce their world view or control their surroundings such that no one around them attempts anything they can fail at.
Unironically they are failing at those things because they don't work. Now get this, if you go off and do something right... They have failed again.
99% of people want you to suffer and fail at everything you do. The trick is realizing they don't matter whatsoever no matter who they are.
That seems detached from reality and a dangerous, more than productive, idea. They are more probably uninterested or superficial (which is in a way the same). You do not need to feign enemies to get detached.
Or, you should find a better environment.
For me personally, it turned out I have autism (which I didn't realize until age 33), and understanding this helped me understand perhaps why I was being deceived so often.
Generally, I appreciated this article by Malcolm Ocean about his idea of a "Non-Naive Trust Dance". https://malcolmocean.com/2021/09/non-naive-trust-dance-why-t... He suggests that the optimal strategy for trust building is a slow building over time that acknowledges the distrust inherent to both parties rather than naively accepting people at face value.
One thing I'm learning is that it's not advisable to share these failures with potential /partners
I highly, highly recommend this book. I have no connection to Mark but I did find his book through a comment of his on HN.
The company that acquired my company then went through internal struggles and the result was that I left after a few years, unable to add value any more.
It feels like a failure, but equally it feels like a good lesson, but a painful one.
It's 2 years after I left and I still think about it.
If I could say something to my past self, I would say that "You're about to learn a hard life lesson" and not change anything.
I'm careful now to try and shine a balanced light on my work there, it wasn't awesome, and it wasn't horrid.
There are more people out there with similar life stories of hard lessons learnt than you might expect, and it's good for both of you to connect with them.
Also, as a solo founder, I found what you did comendable instead of a 'failure'
Deleted Comment
I’m going to be equally honest. How does it make sense on a base-of-system level? What were 130 people doing? What could the technology possibly have been to enable therapy for autistic children? What mistakes could you have made in such a situation, with what possible consequences? For who, the children or the technology?
You should be proud of yourself for just having tried to do it.
This is probably just a sign of the (post-)Covid era, but I do find it interesting when compared to the broader SAAS world that obsesses about “improving [professional’s] ability to do [job]” at increasingly granular levels.
> Surprisingly, my new friends don’t focus on our failures. They are simply curious about the details of the adventure.
That's too bad.
Here's as an actual core life skill when it comes to failure: you want to stack as many failures into as few attempts as you possibly can. Save yourself the trouble and the time. Even if someone tells you about how they failed, and you listen, you are still at high risk of making the same failures, because you truly don't know any better.
I'm sure there is lots he learned in the four years but this post doesn't really talk about that, so I'm not sure if he quite confronted it yet, nor developed it as a core life skill.