I find this story extremely tragic -- not because this man's company, his dreams, failed so tremendously, but that he allowed two fundamental aspects of his adult life to fail with it.
Is it the prevailing opinion in the startup community these days that building up personal debt and letting your relationships fail are worthwhile parts of starting a company, or is this, as I suspect, just a sad story about misaligned priorities?
I don't mean to attack any premise of the story; I'm honestly curious what startup founders think of this article. I personally have no goals of huge buy-outs nor IPOs, but I would like to start my own business some day. I can't imagine being willing to give up my significant other to focus on the business, and I would hope that about the time I start thinking about using personal credit cards to finance the company I also stop and realize that the company is dead already.
I sincerely don't know what I'm suppose to take from this article, but I have the feeling based on some of the comments in this thread that the parts I find important are not the same parts that others find important.
>Is it the prevailing opinion in the startup community these days that building up personal debt and letting your relationships fail are worthwhile parts of starting a company, or is this, as I suspect, just a sad story about misaligned priorities?
Ultimately, whether or not it was "worth it" will always be decided based on the final outcome of the company coupled with a large dose of hindsight bias. A startup founder who sacrificed relationships to build a successful company will be recognized as having made the correct decision amidst the company of those who couldn't understand his/her vision.
A startup founder who fails having sacrificed relationships and friendships will be recognized as foolish and overly ambitious.
If you want a story that aspiring founders responded positively to: "How credit card arbitrage funded my first company."[1] fared pretty well on Reddit/HN when it was first written. From the comfort of success it's easy to judge one's decisions as the correct decisions. It's just as easy to condemn the same decisions made by a failed founder.
They are, they are also different for different people. There is no right answer to whether sacrificing person relationships for company success is worth it.
There is a right answer. As some other commenters are saying, there is an objective right and wrong. If someone trusts and commits to you as fully as they do when they marry you (or common law marry by prolonged cohabitation), there is absolutely no excuse to damage that trust and that love for a selfish satisfaction of running a successful startup.
When you enter that type of relationship with someone, you commit, at the very least implicitly, to make your SO the primary priority in your life. If you want to run a startup, you have to work it around your relationship and not vice-versa. The amount of pain that's inflicted on many different people when a relationship that has all the trappings of permanence, lacking only the discipline of the participants to enforce that permanence, is extreme, and far worse and farther reaching than having a company fail or losing a bunch of investor money.
I understand that over the last several decades, individual "fulfillment" (aka undisciplined selfishness) has become the primary attainment for people, regardless of any social structure or moral definition. Marriage has been nullified and diminished to the point where most youth don't even see a point in it anymore. People have been taught, essentially, to worship themselves -- to put temporary individual interests above permanent social cohesion and the good of the whole, and really, the long-term interests of the individual as well. But that doesn't make this correct, and it definitely doesn't make a valid excuse to betray the trust of those closest to you -- triple especially if children are involved. True familial love is worth more than all the money in the world could purchase, including the money your startup may or may not generate, and this is an objective reality.
That's somewhat dependent on the scope of the 'relationship' and the 'success'. Lose a good marriage with kids for a 5 million exit and plenty of people will say you made the wrong choice. Lose a girlfriend in the same situation and you may be the only one to regret it.
For me personal debt came simply because I wanted the startup to succeed. Doing whatever it takes was simply taken for granted (by me). Oh, money is needed? Sure, I'll just take out a loan I'm betting my life on this startup, what could possibly go wrong if I bet a tiny bit more?
The personal relatinoship part ... what personal relationship part? I had a serious girlfriend that I got to see one hour a week or less. And even then I was so distracted by the mountain of worry and stress from the startup that I barely even noticed she was there.
It took a year or two to properly bounce back from all that. But I think all in all I'm a better bloke for it. Much more able to make sure things happen in such a way they don't cause too much stress.
Actually, the biggest lesson was that working too much produces more extra work than it solves. These days I take plenty of breaks. I also make sure I stop working the moment I don't feel at 100% anymore ... people aren't paying me to work when I'm tired.
"Whatever it takes" is an pernicious phrase. I shuddered when I saw the trailer/commercial for that silicon valley startup contest show and it was sprinkled liberally throughout, sometimes shouted at a group of people.
At Startup Weekend events in LA it's popular to show Alec Baldwin's performance of the "Coffee is for Closers" speech from "Glengarry Glen Ross."
The intent is to try and rally the troops and build excitement. Really this is something I find sad and another example of missaligned priorities given the actual content of the movie and the plot that is actually unfolding.
Instead of seeing a sociopath that is driving people to commit fraud and crime, people see Jack Donaghy delivering the "truth" to some losers before heading outside to make love to Liz Lemon.
More to my point, there is this thread of unhealthy romanticized ideas about startups and perhaps work in general that some people, organizations, and publications like to promote. This is just another example. There isn't anything that says "don't be like this." It's a big fish story about the one that got away.
All the business credit card applications I've seen have joint and several liability between the company and the individuals personally. Maybe there's a point at which a company can get credit cards that nobody is individually, personally responsible for, but AFAICT it's not at a startup.
At the startup I was at, we were unable to get a card even by putting up in cash the limit for which we were asking. In other words, even by securing $1,000 with the bank, we couldn't get a $1,000 limit card.
For the people start a startup then it has to be worth it, because you're putting everything on the line. To him the relationship obviously wasn't as important as the startup's success. And if it got in the way? It had to go. With startups, there are only binary outcomes: wild success or abysmal failure. If you're betting everything on wild success, then sometimes you have to make those choices.
(I'm using startup in the sense of "high-growth new business")
>> Is it the prevailing opinion in the startup community these days that building up personal debt and letting your relationships fail are worthwhile parts of starting a company, or is this, as I suspect, just a sad story about misaligned priorities?
I know someone whose startup didn't work, lost his GF and was in lot of debt. He was well aware of these risks. Someone who runs a startups gives his/her everything to make it work (if determined). Startup founders are optimistic by nature and they are always hopeful that things will work out if they don't give up and work hard. Unfortunately, the trade-off is personal life!
The trade off is only personal life if you let it be. I see a lot of wannabe founders around here (Auckland) who are trying to follow the work-all-the-time, sacrifice relationships thing. This works for a couple, but those people who it works for normally tend to exhibit sociopathic tendencies anyway and would most likely be horrible people to work for once they have employees.
It's up to the individual of course, but as most of us are trying to start businesses that scale, remember that part of having a business that scales is being involved with other people who don't share your work ethic by half.
While it isn't me now -- I learned this lesson while I was still working in other people's startups, before actually building my own -- this kind of heads-down, work is life, look up at the end and realize "wow, what was I thinking" is very familiar. I suspect a lot of people here have gone through the period of compulsive overwork that comes after learning skills but before gaining perspective.
It's quite easy to wind up putting personal finances into a company. The feeling is of being "right on the verge" and just needing enough cash to make it until that big deal goes through. It could even be as simple as founders not taking a salary and burning through their own savings on living expenses.
As far as abandoning all of your other relationships, though, I think that is entirely avoidable.
Is it the prevailing opinion in the startup community these days that building up personal debt and letting your relationships fail are worthwhile parts of starting a company, or is this, as I suspect, just a sad story about misaligned priorities?
I don't mean to attack any premise of the story; I'm honestly curious what startup founders think of this article. I personally have no goals of huge buy-outs nor IPOs, but I would like to start my own business some day. I can't imagine being willing to give up my significant other to focus on the business, and I would hope that about the time I start thinking about using personal credit cards to finance the company I also stop and realize that the company is dead already.
I sincerely don't know what I'm suppose to take from this article, but I have the feeling based on some of the comments in this thread that the parts I find important are not the same parts that others find important.