The pressure of technology entrepreneurs: entrepreneurial like the failure of the majority of gold

Tencent Science and technology news from Monday to Friday every 5:30 minutes, Leine Hufer (Ryan Hoover) from the San Francisco home bed, began to worry. His start-up, product Hunt, now a Silicon Valley pastry, has already launched two rounds of venture capital in less than a year. Product Hunt's web site and iphone apps provide users with excellent new technology products and applications every day. Hoover to send the best product mail every day around 7:30.

"I slept with a lot of people using product Hunt, which made me a little scared because I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen." "Hoover said. He is 27 years old, with a fluffy brown hair and a light voice, and at the age of 12 he created his first business, a joke-gathering website that eventually earned about 10 dollars.

Last year, Hoover announced the launch of product Hunt to friends by e-mail. This May, Product Hunt Company was formally established, the company's second round of financing to raise funds of 6.1 million U.S. dollars, the company value or more than 20 million U.S. dollars, nearly 20 famous scientific and technological celebrities are the company's investors. However, with the advent of new investment, the problem arises.

Hoover took out his iphone and opened the app to check the traffic on the site. "I probably shouldn't check the site traffic so frequently," he says. He looked at his cell screen and said, "See?" It makes me stressed because our traffic has dropped by 10% since last week. "Currently, the Product Hunt site has more than 15,000 visitors." Hoover is thinking about what he should do to deal with the upcoming Christmas holiday if the site's traffic declines again. Theoretically, he knew he shouldn't worry about it, but he couldn't. And now, with capital inflows, "keeping web traffic growing is becoming more important." ”

The global technology industry is booming, especially in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Whether it's an open office in the San Francisco Bay Area or a suburban corporate park, engineers and business executives are inventing the future. Many of them are casting a fortune worth billions of of dollars. But many more have ended up living beyond their means.

"That's the gold rush." Software programmer Patesi Plesse (Patsy Price) said. The technology industry is attracting people from all walks of life. At Harvard Business School, the proportion of graduate students in the financial services industry fell from 42% in 2006 to 2013 years, while the proportion of graduates who joined the technology industry doubled, from 7% to 18%.

Similar trends have been seen in the employment sectors of other top schools, the best-known of which is Stanford, which has been seen as a "direct school" for Silicon Valley. Last year, Goldman Sachs encouraged young bankers to take more breaks on weekends, a novelty on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs hopes to keep its young forces fresh as many are ready to switch to the western United States.

But Silicon Valley does not always shine. Most start-ups in the San Francisco Bay Area may end up failing. Many companies end up with far less profit margins than investors expect. Skell Gausch Shikhar Ghosh, a Harvard Business School professor, predicts that nearly 40% of start-ups will end up with asset change, and nearly 80% of start-ups will not be able to meet their expected return on investment. The chances of successful startups like Google and Facebook are slim, and venture capitalists call them "unicorns" for successful start-ups such as Google and Facebook.

Paul Graham, a famous start-up investor, says that even those companies that are successful in Paul Greheum often experience "painful troughs". During this time, the excitement of entrepreneurship was replaced by a slowing growth and a strong sense of scepticism about the viability of risk. The pattern of software distribution to customers has also changed and can now be downloaded from the cloud immediately, instead of using CDs, which also means that today's technology industry is growing faster and heavier than the last technology boom.

Two years ago, Dock Coruz (Toke Kruse) and his co-founder took their suitcases from Denmark to San Francisco and set up the accounting software start-up, Billy ' s billing. It works in a rented apartment in a newly-founded San Francisco Soma region. " His apartment was poorly decorated except for a glass coffee table and a huge teddy bear on the couch. He has no salary and lives on the proceeds of savings and other projects. He said there was no guarantee of life in San Francisco for two years, "especially for a person as outgoing as me." ”

Billy ' s billing is not the first start-up in Luz. He has had several experiences in Denmark, although there are successful examples, but most of them fail. In 2005, for example, he created a picture-sharing business, saying the failure was due to timing, because smartphones were not common at the time.

This is the benchmark, say the founders of technology companies. "In fact, there is an abbreviation (meaning entrepreneurship fails)," said Chaan Pouly Shaan Puri, CEO of the Monkey Inferno, a start-up incubator. That's wfio, we're done, it's over (we ' re f***ed, it's over). At that time, each member of the team is really honest, you can not perfunctory yourself, your team or your investors, you have to really understand what happened. ”

After taking a course in the university called "Getting Rich", Pulitzer decided to plunge into Silicon Valley. He says the course's professors let entrepreneurs tell them about the real business experience. Pulitzer had planned to go to medical school, but this course gave him the time to give up his previous efforts to get medical school, to quit becoming a doctor and to become an entrepreneur. The Monkey inferno is funded by British entrepreneur Michael Pochi Michael Birch and Theo Porky (Xochi Birch). In 2008, the two men sold the social networking site Bebo to AOL and benefited hundreds of millions of of dollars.

Under Pulitzer's leadership, the start-up incubator company has a luxurious office with chefs, massages and bars, a six-week new product development schedule, and a 1.5-month-old idea into a prototype. Most of the products fail, and some, in his words, are "small victories". But the Monkey inferno only wants a big win, and the others are just the things that make them. They want their next product, the new Bebo interesting information application, to make a big victory come true.

He says the Monkey inferno is built around the idea of a few of the most popular products that can be developed. All members of their team are employees and are fully funded by Porky, so they are able to get together and learn lessons internally, rather than let the team not share other new product development.

This unusual arrangement also says that, compared to other VCs who are self-employed, the pressure on the individual is smaller and the support is greater. Meg Hoeschberg (Meg Hirshberg), who teaches entrepreneurship courses at the Kauffman Foundation (Kauffman Foundation), says most entrepreneurs find that they are the only "advance object" when errors occur. "Entrepreneurs feel like they can't pull themselves out of the company. The reality is that there is no real balance of work and life at all. ”

Hoeschberg says that in a male-dominated industry, entrepreneurs are not willing to discuss the pressures they face, which is not machismo. Entrepreneurs have reason to worry that employees, investors and customers will leave because they feel the company may be having problems.

Sam Altman, president of start-up incubator Y Combinator, recently wrote a blog post, Sam Altmann "The frustration of entrepreneurs (founder Depression)". The article is widely read, and Altman encourages entrepreneurs working with Y Combinator to talk about the problems they encounter rather than bear it alone. On Hacker News, the relevant online forum for Y Combinator, the article received thousands of comments, more than 1000 times forwarded. Altman wrote, "No matter what you think, you're not alone." You shouldn't be ashamed. ”

In addition to Altman, Moz founder of the marketing software company, Lande Fishkin Rand Fishkin, also published a blog about the frustration of the latest product release to his resignation as CEO of the company. Credit card debt 500,000 dollars, financial crisis, etc. these are not the reason for his wavering, on the contrary, "poor" new product development and the company needs a change he can not bring, these responsibilities and ideas to shake him.

Fishkin's blog post was posted on hacker News and received a lot of responses. "Most of the emails I received were, ' I've had this feeling before, and I'm very conflicted," he says. Fishkin said that while his investors and board of directors were more "considerate" than most of the others, the pressure that accompanied the venture was part of the challenge he faced.

Winning VCs is often seen as a success, but it also means that companies will have to bear the pressure of success, and if a beautiful victory, but also to achieve unprecedented growth. "Growth is more than expectation, it must be done, and high growth is the expectation." "Fishkin said.

Moz sold a 17% stake in a 18 million dollar venture. Standard investors want to see up to 10 times times the return on investment. "That means we have to find a way in just a few years to get the company to achieve billions of dollars in value, which is astronomical," says Fishkin. ”

Dana Seviersen (Dana Severson) has been crying for a whole week because of the failure of Wahooly, a public-paid start-up. He came to San Francisco from Minnesota to try his luck by launching Wahooly from a start-up incubator created by a former Google employee, but it didn't find a developer until one months before the product was released, resulting in a miscarriage of his plan.

However, these tears are not white flow. After this, Seviersen founded Startups Anonymous, and achieved a good response, he said, startups Anonymous now become a popular site for entrepreneurs to cry anonymously, vent and mention all kinds of stupid questions. Since January this year, the site has collected more than 700 confessions, questions and Stories. Seviersen said the site was funded by a profit-making project of his own.

Since the launch of Startups Anonymous, Seviersen realised that he was not the only one who had been under a lot of pressure but was not alone, and that he did not even know what he deserved, such as the debts of a failed start-up. "There is a lot of burden syndrome attached to it." Now there are a lot of young entrepreneurs, which is probably the first time they've been in a professional field. They have no recruiting experience, no management experience, they have to learn to walk before they can run, of course, before you really do it, you have to pretend you all will. ”

Dean Shepherd, a professor at Indiana University Business School, says that when risk arises, the Dien Sheffield of the job will exacerbate the pessimistic thinking of the founders. Big-business executives are also under a lot of pressure, but their pressure is not long and they may be fired, but they are not using their own savings to create a company and their company will not completely disappear.

Shffield says entrepreneurs often push themselves too tightly. "If you only study successful entrepreneurs, you will often fall into a mindset where they are overly optimistic, overly confident, and then more likely to succeed, and what you don't see is the entrepreneurial experience of those who have lost their jobs." ”

So far, entrepreneurs say, the idea does not resonate in Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley, there is a well-known motto, "Fast Failure", that is, quickly admit to failure, and then start again. Stubborn executives who have carried all sorts of frustrations have been faithful to this maxim. Failure may be the default setting for startups, but no one wants this setting to exist in their own start-up. (Shing)