导致创业失败的18个原因［附原文］

微信公众号：毛丫看时事

原文来源： paulgraham

译者：抽水，发表于 雷锋网 

作者简介：Paul Graham，硅谷创业公司孵化器Y Combinator的联合创始人，被美国互联网界视为如日中天的教父级人物。文章写于2006年，至今仍有借鉴价值。

在最近的一场演讲中，有人问我如何避免创业失败，当时的我意识到这是一个很难回答的问题。不过从另一个角度来说，其实可以这样回答：“如果你的公司避免了所有可能导致失败的错误，你的公司自然会成功。”

记住不该做的事，远比记住别人的成功经历有意义得多。如果你列了一份“错误清单”，并在运营公司的过程中成功的避免了那些错误，从某个角度来说你就得到了一份成功处方。总的来说，导致创业失败的原因只有一个：你所做的东西并不是消费者所需要的东西。如果真的是这样的话，你就等死吧，这是改变不了的事实。实际上，导致创业公司的产品无法满足用户的因素有哪些呢？以下的清单列出了常见的18个致命伤，所有创业公司的失败基本上都能归结到上面来。

1 孤军奋斗

不知道你是否注意到，极少成功的创业公司是由一个人创办的。单一创始人说明了什么呢？至少暗示着了解你的人都不认同你的想法。就算他们是错的，但是你也需要伙伴来集思广益，避免犯下愚蠢的行为。另外，伙伴能给你带来信念上的支持，而单一创始人往往因此而缺乏动力。

2 选址不对

并不是所有的地方都适合创业，选址很重要。为什么创业公司都会集中出现在某个城市呢？因为那里聚集了大量专业人士，他们容易对你所做的东西产生共鸣，让你更容易聘请到人才。另外，那里周边工业也相对发达一些，你也有更多的机会碰上同行，为你的事业找到很好的指导方向。

3 领域太偏

在向Y Combinator申请风投的团队里，大部分都犯了一个致命错误：选择的领域太过冷僻。也许这是避开竞争的很好方法，但是一旦他们获得成功后，自然会有竞争者加入。很多人虽然有很大的构想，但是最后却选择了稳妥的方案。和这种想法不同的是，选择生冷领域的创业者更多的是潜意识的拒绝大的构想。解决这个问题的最好办法就是把自己想象成为别人策划干事，而不是自己。

4 缺乏创新

优秀的创业公司不是靠模仿别人而起家的，现有的公司的确能给你提供一些想法，但是一定不是最好的。所以不要一味的模仿别的公司，你更应该在别的方向上挖掘灵感。在这方面，你应该去寻找尚未解决的问题，并设想什么样的公司能解决这个问题。你还需要弄清楚的是，消费者在抱怨什么，又在期待什么。

5 冥顽不灵

在创业的路上，你大部分时间应该坚持自己的想法，但你更应该遵循自然规律，避免主观臆断。其实很多创业公司最终打造出来的成品并不是当初的想法。在创业的过程中，你应该接受更好的主意，甚至放弃原有的想法。当然，频繁更改方向也是不可能获得成功的，其中一个很好的判断标准就是新的想法是否代表某种进展。如果你能用上之前所做过的东西，那是进步的表现。如果你要重头开始的话，你得慎重。

6 有眼无珠

创业公司最怕的就是雇错人，因为这些差员工并不能达到相应的水准。一旦陷入这种困境后，自己的公司就像老牛拉破车一样缓缓移动，而自己的竞争对手却像坐了火箭一样快速前进。怎么才能挑选好员工呢？其实你可以寻找行业高手来解决问题，但是请不请得动又是另一回事。

7 平台选择

开发平台的选取是个需要慎重对待的问题。在经济泡沫时期，很多创业公司因为选择Windows平台服务器而深陷泥潭，而Hotmail被微软收购若干年后依然使用FreeBSD服务器。你不得不慎重选择平台，有些平台表面上似乎很好，一旦选用上后无异于自掘坟墓。Javaapplets曾经被认为是发布应用的新途径，结果选择它的100个创业公司都死翘翘了。

8 发布缓慢

有一句经典的名言是这样说的，软件的完成度永远停留在85%左右。创业公司总是找各种借口来推迟发布产品，其实这也反应了一些问题：工作节奏太慢，没有搞清楚用户真正需求，过于追求完美等。其实要解决这些问题很简单，将产品尽快发布就可以了：只有通过用户反馈，你才明白自己要做什么。

9 发布过早

对于产品的发布，最低的要求是什么呢？其核心就是产品本身对于消费者来说是可用的，而且还能作为功能扩展的一个完整基础项目。其实早期的产品试用者一般都是很宽容的，他们只要求产品有点用处。如果你所做的产品过早发布的话，就毁掉的不仅仅是你的产品，还有公司的名誉，甚至用户一去不复还。

10 目标用户不明确

如果你试图解决一个连自己都不懂的问题，这无异于往自己的脖子套绳索。很多创始人都假定自己的产品会存在用户，但是具体是谁连自己都不是很清楚。其实这是很危险的，创业者更应该遵守“从实践中来”的原则，任何主观猜测都是不允许的，他们必须去接触用户并观察他们的反应。如果你的产品找不到特定的用户，那注定是失败的。

11 资金太少

太少的钱意味着你不能争取足够的时间让自己的公司走向成功。如果你是从投资人那获得资金的话，那数量应该至少能撑到下一个阶段。另外你要对下一阶段是什么以及花费是多少都要有所控制。我建议创业公司在刚开始的时候应该把这两项指标调低一点：尽量少花钱，并将初期目标设为打造一个坚实原型。

12 花销过度

如果你筹集了500万还不够用，那么原因很有可能就是花销过度。雇佣大批职工是最经典的烧钱方式。对于招人我有三大建议：（a） 可免则免；（b） 用股份代替工资；（C）只招做产品或者拉客户这两类。

13  筹资太多

筹资太少固然不行，但是筹资过多也会出现大问题。钱多后，你想换办公环境，招更多的人，但是并不代表公司一定会朝着有利的方向发展，因为你员工并不像自己那样投入，甚至还会玩起猫腻。

另外争取大笔投资是一个很耗时间的过程，要从风投那筹集一笔相当规模的资金所花的时间也许比你创业的时间还要长。当你的竞争者在争分夺秒研发产品的时候，我相信你不愿意把时间浪费在投资人身上。所以，如果遇到合适的协议，就签吧。

14 管理投资者

作为公司创始人，你应该处理好公司与投资者的关系。你不能忽视他们，因为他们有可能提供有见地的看法，但你也不能把公司交给他们运作。管理投资者所花的功夫取决与你从他们那得到了多少钱。就算是非常成功的公司，也曾被投资者糊弄过，比如说1985年的乔布斯被董事会赶出苹果。即使是Google，他们早期跟投资者也有很不愉快的经历。

15 为潜在利益牺牲用户

做出消费者所需要的产品远比赚钱困难得多，所以创业者更应该稍后考虑商业模式问题。总有一些人认为不从一开始就考虑商业模式是不负责的行为。我想说的是，最后能成功的公司都是用户至上的公司，以Google为例，他们都是先做好搜索引擎，再考虑赚钱。如果不考虑商业模式是不负责的举措，那么不考虑产品本身简直就是罪恶。

16 想捡钱，先弯腰

在我们资助的第一批创业公司里，绝大部分的创始人都是埋头编写程序，他们似乎都不愿意处理商业上与钱有关的事。只有一个创始人花了一半时间跟去手机公司的高层会谈，最后获得了一大笔订单。如果你要创办公司的话，你必须要面对一个事实：你们不可能都坐在办公室写程序，需要有人去处理商业上的事情，其他行业也亦然。

17 窝里斗

对于公司来说，创始人之间的斗争是常见的事，而具备关键技术的合伙人退出可能会带来麻烦。如果能在选择创业伙伴这方面更加谨慎的话，那么大多数的争吵是可以避免的。因此在选择合伙人的时候，不要害怕同一条船的人疏远你而拉其他人入伙，更不能因为某人拥有技术而不顾一切的结伴开公司。对于创业公司来说，最重要的因素是人，所以不应该在这方面有太多的迁就。

18 没尽全力

从统计上来看，绝大部分失败的创业公司，其创始人都有着另一份收入不错的工作；而那些成功的创业公司，其创始人几乎把全副身家都押上了。那些创业公司之所以会失败，是因为他们做不出用户所需要的东西，而做不出来的原因就是他们还没尽全力。换句话说，创业和做其他事一样，你最容易犯的错就是没尽全力。

以下是英文原文：

In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed—if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed—and that's too big a question to answer on the fly.

Afterwards I realized it could be helpful to look at the problem from this direction. If you have a list of all the things you shouldn't do, you can turn that into a recipe for succeeding just by negating. And this form of list may be more useful in practice. It's easier to catch yourself doing something you shouldn't than always to remember to do something you should. [1]

In a sense there's just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. If you make something users want, you'll probably be fine, whatever else you do or don't do. And if you don't make something users want, then you're dead, whatever else you do or don't do. So really this is a list of 18 things that cause startups not to make something users want. Nearly all failure funnels through that.

1. Single Founder

Have you ever noticed how few successful startups were founded by just one person? Even companies you think of as having one founder, like Oracle, usually turn out to have more. It seems unlikely this is a coincidence.

What's wrong with having one founder? To start with, it's a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn't talk any of his friends into starting the company with him. That's pretty alarming, because his friends are the ones who know him best.

But even if the founder's friends were all wrong and the company is a good bet, he's still at a disadvantage. Starting a startup is too hard for one person. Even if you could do all the work yourself, you need colleagues to brainstorm with, to talk you out of stupid decisions, and to cheer you up when things go wrong.

The last one might be the most important. The low points in a startup are so low that few could bear them alone. When you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in a way that seems to violate conservation laws. Each thinks "I can't let my friends down." This is one of the most powerful forces in human nature, and it's missing when there's just one founder.

2. Bad Location

Startups prosper in some places and not others. Silicon Valley dominates, then Boston, then Seattle, Austin, Denver, and New York. After that there's not much. Even in New York the number of startups per capita is probably a 20th of what it is in Silicon Valley. In towns like Houston and Chicago and Detroit it's too small to measure.

Why is the falloff so sharp? Probably for the same reason it is in other industries. What's the sixth largest fashion center in the US? The sixth largest center for oil, or finance, or publishing? Whatever they are they're probably so far from the top that it would be misleading even to call them centers.

It's an interesting question why cities become startup hubs, but the reason startups prosper in them is probably the same as it is for any industry: that's where the experts are. Standards are higher; people are more sympathetic to what you're doing; the kind of people you want to hire want to live there; supporting industries are there; the people you run into in chance meetings are in the same business. Who knows exactly how these factors combine to boost startups in Silicon Valley and squish them in Detroit, but it's clear they do from the number of startups per capita in each.

3. Marginal Niche

Most of the groups that apply to Y Combinator suffer from a common problem: choosing a small, obscure niche in the hope of avoiding competition.

If you watch little kids playing sports, you notice that below a certain age they're afraid of the ball. When the ball comes near them their instinct is to avoid it. I didn't make a lot of catches as an eight year old outfielder, because whenever a fly ball came my way, I used to close my eyes and hold my glove up more for protection than in the hope of catching it.

Choosing a marginal project is the startup equivalent of my eight year old strategy for dealing with fly balls. If you make anything good, you're going to have competitors, so you may as well face that. You can only avoid competition by avoiding good ideas.

I think this shrinking from big problems is mostly unconscious. It's not that people think of grand ideas but decide to pursue smaller ones because they seem safer. Your unconscious won't even let you think of grand ideas. So the solution may be to think about ideas without involving yourself. What would be a great idea for someone else to do as a startup?

4. Derivative Idea

Many of the applications we get are imitations of some existing company. That's one source of ideas, but not the best. If you look at the origins of successful startups, few were started in imitation of some other startup. Where did they get their ideas? Usually from some specific, unsolved problem the founders identified.

Our startup made software for making online stores. When we started it, there wasn't any; the few sites you could order from were hand-made at great expense by web consultants. We knew that if online shopping ever took off, these sites would have to be generated by software, so we wrote some. Pretty straightforward.

It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer, Google because Larry and Sergey couldn't find stuff online, Hotmail because Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith couldn't exchange email at work.

So instead of copying the Facebook, with some variation that the Facebook rightly ignored, look for ideas from the other direction. Instead of starting from companies and working back to the problems they solved, look for problems and imagine the company that might solve them. [2] What do people complain about? What do you wish there was?

5. Obstinacy

In some fields the way to succeed is to have a vision of what you want to achieve, and to hold true to it no matter what setbacks you encounter. Starting startups is not one of them. The stick-to-your-vision approach works for something like winning an Olympic gold medal, where the problem is well-defined. Startups are more like science, where you need to follow the trail wherever it leads.

So don't get too attached to your original plan, because it's probably wrong. Most successful startups end up doing something different than they originally intended—often so different that it doesn't even seem like the same company. You have to be prepared to see the better idea when it arrives. And the hardest part of that is often discarding your old idea.

But openness to new ideas has to be tuned just right. Switching to a new idea every week will be equally fatal. Is there some kind of external test you can use? One is to ask whether the ideas represent some kind of progression. If in each new idea you're able to re-use most of what you built for the previous ones, then you're probably in a process that converges. Whereas if you keep restarting from scratch, that's a bad sign.

Fortunately there's someone you can ask for advice: your users. If you're thinking about turning in some new direction and your users seem excited about it, it's probably a good bet.

6. Hiring Bad Programmers

I forgot to include this in the early versions of the list, because nearly all the founders I know are programmers. This is not a serious problem for them. They might accidentally hire someone bad, but it's not going to kill the company. In a pinch they can do whatever's required themselves.

But when I think about what killed most of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired programmers to implement it. That's actually much harder than it sounds—almost impossibly hard in fact—because business guys can't tell which are the good programmers. They don't even get a shot at the best ones, because no one really good wants a job implementing the vision of a business guy.

In practice what happens is that the business guys choose people they think are good programmers (it says here on his resume that he's a Microsoft Certified Developer) but who aren't. Then they're mystified to find that their startup lumbers along like a World War II bomber while their competitors scream past like jet fighters. This kind of startup is in the same position as a big company, but without the advantages.

So how do you pick good programmers if you're not a programmer? I don't think there's an answer. I was about to say you'd have to find a good programmer to help you hire people. But if you can't recognize good programmers, how would you even do that?

7. Choosing the Wrong Platform

A related problem (since it tends to be done by bad programmers) is choosing the wrong platform. For example, I think a lot of startups during the Bubble killed themselves by deciding to build server-based applications on Windows. Hotmail was still running on FreeBSD for years after Microsoft bought it, presumably because Windows couldn't handle the load. If Hotmail's founders had chosen to use Windows, they would have been swamped.

PayPal only just dodged this bullet. After they merged with X.com, the new CEO wanted to switch to Windows—even after PayPal cofounder Max Levchin showed that their software scaled only 1% as well on Windows as Unix. Fortunately for PayPal they switched CEOs instead.

Platform is a vague word. It could mean an operating system, or a programming language, or a "framework" built on top of a programming language. It implies something that both supports and limits, like the foundation of a house.

The scary thing about platforms is that there are always some that seem to outsiders to be fine, responsible choices and yet, like Windows in the 90s, will destroy you if you choose them. Java applets were probably the most spectacular example. This was supposed to be the new way of delivering applications. Presumably it killed just about 100% of the startups who believed that.

How do you pick the right platforms? The usual way is to hire good programmers and let them choose. But there is a trick you could use if you're not a programmer: visit a top computer science department and see what they use in research projects.

8. Slowness in Launching

Companies of all sizes have a hard time getting software done. It's intrinsic to the medium; software is always 85% done. It takes an effort of will to push through this and get something released to users. [3]

Startups make all kinds of excuses for delaying their launch. Most are equivalent to the ones people use for procrastinating in everyday life. There's something that needs to happen first. Maybe. But if the software were 100% finished and ready to launch at the push of a button, would they still be waiting?

One reason to launch quickly is that it forces you to actually finishsome quantum of work. Nothing is truly finished till it's released; you can see that from the rush of work that's always involved in releasing anything, no matter how finished you thought it was. The other reason you need to launch is that it's only by bouncing your idea off users that you fully understand it.

Several distinct problems manifest themselves as delays in launching: working too slowly; not truly understanding the problem; fear of having to deal with users; fear of being judged; working on too many different things; excessive perfectionism. Fortunately you can combat all of them by the simple expedient of forcing yourself to launch something fairly quickly.

9. Launching Too Early

Launching too slowly has probably killed a hundred times more startups than launching too fast, but it is possible to launch too fast. The danger here is that you ruin your reputation. You launch something, the early adopters try it out, and if it's no good they may never come back.

So what's the minimum you need to launch? We suggest startups think about what they plan to do, identify a core that's both (a) useful on its own and (b) something that can be incrementally expanded into the whole project, and then get that done as soon as possible.

This is the same approach I (and many other programmers) use for writing software. Think about the overall goal, then start by writing the smallest subset of it that does anything useful. If it's a subset, you'll have to write it anyway, so in the worst case you won't be wasting your time. But more likely you'll find that implementing a working subset is both good for morale and helps you see more clearly what the rest should do.

The early adopters you need to impress are fairly tolerant. They don't expect a newly launched product to do everything; it just has to do something.

10. Having No Specific User in Mind

You can't build things users like without understanding them. I mentioned earlier that the most successful startups seem to have begun by trying to solve a problem their founders had. Perhaps there's a rule here: perhaps you create wealth in proportion to how well you understand the problem you're solving, and the problems you understand best are your own. [4]

That's just a theory. What's not a theory is the converse: if you're trying to solve problems you don't understand, you're hosed.

And yet a surprising number of founders seem willing to assume that someone, they're not sure exactly who, will want what they're building. Do the founders want it? No, they're not the target market. Who is? Teenagers. People interested in local events (that one is a perennial tarpit). Or "business" users. What business users? Gas stations? Movie studios? Defense contractors?

You can of course build something for users other than yourself. We did. But you should realize you're stepping into dangerous territory. You're flying on instruments, in effect, so you should (a) consciously shift gears, instead of assuming you can rely on your intuitions as you ordinarily would, and (b) look at the instruments.

In this case the instruments are the users. When designing for other people you have to be empirical. You can no longer guess what will work; you have to find users and measure their responses. So if you're going to make something for teenagers or "business" users or some other group that doesn't include you, you have to be able to talk some specific ones into using what you're making. If you can't, you're on the wrong track.

11. Raising Too Little Money

Most successful startups take funding at some point. Like having more than one founder, it seems a good bet statistically. How much should you take, though?

Startup funding is measured in time. Every startup that isn't profitable (meaning nearly all of them, initially) has a certain amount of time left before the money runs out and they have to stop. This is sometimes referred to as runway, as in "How much runway do you have left?" It's a good metaphor because it reminds you that when the money runs out you're going to be airborne or dead.

Too little money means not enough to get airborne. What airborne means depends on the situation. Usually you have to advance to a visibly higher level: if all you have is an idea, a working prototype; if you have a prototype, launching; if you're launched, significant growth. It depends on investors, because until you're profitable that's who you have to convince.

So if you take money from investors, you have to take enough to get to the next step, whatever that is. [5] Fortunately you have some control over both how much you spend and what the next step is. We advise startups to set both low, initially: spend practically nothing, and make your initial goal simply to build a solid prototype. This gives you maximum flexibility.

12. Spending Too Much

It's hard to distinguish spending too much from raising too little. If you run out of money, you could say either was the cause. The only way to decide which to call it is by comparison with other startups. If you raised five million and ran out of money, you probably spent too much.

Burning through too much money is not as common as it used to be. Founders seem to have learned that lesson. Plus it keeps getting cheaper to start a startup. So as of this writing few startups spend too much. None of the ones we've funded have. (And not just because we make small investments; many have gone on to raise further rounds.)

The classic way to burn through cash is by hiring a lot of people. This bites you twice: in addition to increasing your costs, it slows you down—so money that's getting consumed faster has to last longer. Most hackers understand why that happens; Fred Brooks explained it in The Mythical Man-Month.

We have three general suggestions about hiring: (a) don't do it if you can avoid it, (b) pay people with equity rather than salary, not just to save money, but because you want the kind of people who are committed enough to prefer that, and (c) only hire people who are either going to write code or go out and get users, because those are the only things you need at first.

13. Raising Too Much Money

It's obvious how too little money could kill you, but is there such a thing as having too much?

Yes and no. The problem is not so much the money itself as what comes with it. As one VC who spoke at Y Combinator said, "Once you take several million dollars of my money, the clock is ticking." If VCs fund you, they're not going to let you just put the money in the bank and keep operating as two guys living on ramen. They want that money to go to work. [6] At the very least you'll move into proper office space and hire more people. That will change the atmosphere, and not entirely for the better. Now most of your people will be employees rather than founders. They won't be as committed; they'll need to be told what to do; they'll start to engage in office politics.

When you raise a lot of money, your company moves to the suburbs and has kids.

Perhaps more dangerously, once you take a lot of money it gets harder to change direction. Suppose your initial plan was to sell something to companies. After taking VC money you hire a sales force to do that. What happens now if you realize you should be making this for consumers instead of businesses? That's a completely different kind of selling. What happens, in practice, is that you don't realize that. The more people you have, the more you stay pointed in the same direction.

Another drawback of large investments is the time they take. The time required to raise money grows with the amount. [7] When the amount rises into the millions, investors get very cautious. VCs never quite say yes or no; they just engage you in an apparently endless conversation. Raising VC scale investments is thus a huge time sink—more work, probably, than the startup itself. And you don't want to be spending all your time talking to investors while your competitors are spending theirs building things.

We advise founders who go on to seek VC money to take the first reasonable deal they get. If you get an offer from a reputable firm at a reasonable valuation with no unusually onerous terms, just take it and get on with building the company. [8] Who cares if you could get a 30% better deal elsewhere? Economically, startups are an all-or-nothing game. Bargain-hunting among investors is a waste of time.

14. Poor Investor Management

As a founder, you have to manage your investors. You shouldn't ignore them, because they may have useful insights. But neither should you let them run the company. That's supposed to be your job. If investors had sufficient vision to run the companies they fund, why didn't they start them?

Pissing off investors by ignoring them is probably less dangerous than caving in to them. In our startup, we erred on the ignoring side. A lot of our energy got drained away in disputes with investors instead of going into the product. But this was less costly than giving in, which would probably have destroyed the company. If the founders know what they're doing, it's better to have half their attention focused on the product than the full attention of investors who don't.

How hard you have to work on managing investors usually depends on how much money you've taken. When you raise VC-scale money, the investors get a great deal of control. If they have a board majority, they're literally your bosses. In the more common case, where founders and investors are equally represented and the deciding vote is cast by neutral outside directors, all the investors have to do is convince the outside directors and they control the company.

If things go well, this shouldn't matter. So long as you seem to be advancing rapidly, most investors will leave you alone. But things don't always go smoothly in startups. Investors have made trouble even for the most successful companies. One of the most famous examples is Apple, whose board made a nearly fatal blunder in firing Steve Jobs. Apparently even Google got a lot of grief from their investors early on.

15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit

When I said at the beginning that if you make something users want, you'll be fine, you may have noticed I didn't mention anything about having the right business model. That's not because making money is unimportant. I'm not suggesting that founders start companies with no chance of making money in the hope of unloading them before they tank. The reason we tell founders not to worry about the business model initially is that making something people want is so much harder.

I don't know why it's so hard to make something people want. It seems like it should be straightforward. But you can tell it must be hard by how few startups do it.

Because making something people want is so much harder than making money from it, you should leave business models for later, just as you'd leave some trivial but messy feature for version 2. In version 1, solve the core problem. And the core problem in a startup is how to create wealth (= how much people want something x the number who want it), not how to convert that wealth into money.

The companies that win are the ones that put users first. Google, for example. They made search work, then worried about how to make money from it. And yet some startup founders still think it's irresponsible not to focus on the business model from the beginning. They're often encouraged in this by investors whose experience comes from less malleable industries.

It is irresponsible not to think about business models. It's just ten times more irresponsible not to think about the product.

16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty

Nearly all programmers would rather spend their time writing code and have someone else handle the messy business of extracting money from it. And not just the lazy ones. Larry and Sergey apparently felt this way too at first. After developing their new search algorithm, the first thing they tried was to get some other company to buy it.

Start a company? Yech. Most hackers would rather just have ideas. But as Larry and Sergey found, there's not much of a market for ideas. No one trusts an idea till you embody it in a product and use that to grow a user base. Then they'll pay big time.

Maybe this will change, but I doubt it will change much. There's nothing like users for convincing acquirers. It's not just that the risk is decreased. The acquirers are human, and they have a hard time paying a bunch of young guys millions of dollars just for being clever. When the idea is embodied in a company with a lot of users, they can tell themselves they're buying the users rather than the cleverness, and this is easier for them to swallow. [9]

If you're going to attract users, you'll probably have to get up from your computer and go find some. It's unpleasant work, but if you can make yourself do it you have a much greater chance of succeeding. In the first batch of startups we funded, in the summer of 2005, most of the founders spent all their time building their applications. But there was one who was away half the time talking to executives at cell phone companies, trying to arrange deals. Can you imagine anything more painful for a hacker? [10] But it paid off, because this startup seems the most successful of that group by an order of magnitude.

If you want to start a startup, you have to face the fact that you can't just hack. At least one hacker will have to spend some of the time doing business stuff.

17. Fights Between Founders

Fights between founders are surprisingly common. About 20% of the startups we've funded have had a founder leave. It happens so often that we've reversed our attitude to vesting. We still don't require it, but now we advise founders to vest so there will be an orderly way for people to quit.

A founder leaving doesn't necessarily kill a startup, though. Plenty of successful startups have had that happen. [11] Fortunately it's usually the least committed founder who leaves. If there are three founders and one who was lukewarm leaves, big deal. If you have two and one leaves, or a guy with critical technical skills leaves, that's more of a problem. But even that is survivable. Blogger got down to one person, and they bounced back.

Most of the disputes I've seen between founders could have been avoided if they'd been more careful about who they started a company with. Most disputes are not due to the situation but the people. Which means they're inevitable. And most founders who've been burned by such disputes probably had misgivings, which they suppressed, when they started the company. Don't suppress misgivings. It's much easier to fix problems before the company is started than after. So don't include your housemate in your startup because he'd feel left out otherwise. Don't start a company with someone you dislike because they have some skill you need and you worry you won't find anyone else. The people are the most important ingredient in a startup, so don't compromise there.

18. A Half-Hearted Effort

The failed startups you hear most about are the spectactular flameouts. Those are actually the elite of failures. The most common type is not the one that makes spectacular mistakes, but the one that doesn't do much of anything—the one we never even hear about, because it was some project a couple guys started on the side while working on their day jobs, but which never got anywhere and was gradually abandoned.

Statistically, if you want to avoid failure, it would seem like the most important thing is to quit your day job. Most founders of failed startups don't quit their day jobs, and most founders of successful ones do. If startup failure were a disease, the CDC would be issuing bulletins warning people to avoid day jobs.

Does that mean you should quit your day job? Not necessarily. I'm guessing here, but I'd guess that many of these would-be founders may not have the kind of determination it takes to start a company, and that in the back of their minds, they know it. The reason they don't invest more time in their startup is that they know it's a bad investment. [12]

I'd also guess there's some band of people who could have succeeded if they'd taken the leap and done it full-time, but didn't. I have no idea how wide this band is, but if the winner/borderline/hopeless progression has the sort of distribution you'd expect, the number of people who could have made it, if they'd quit their day job, is probably an order of magnitude larger than the number who do make it. [13]

If that's true, most startups that could succeed fail because the founders don't devote their whole efforts to them. That certainly accords with what I see out in the world. Most startups fail because they don't make something people want, and the reason most don't is that they don't try hard enough.

In other words, starting startups is just like everything else. The biggest mistake you can make is not to try hard enough. To the extent there's a secret to success, it's not to be in denial about that.

Notes

[1] This is not a complete list of the causes of failure, just those you can control. There are also several you can't, notably ineptitude and bad luck.

[2] Ironically, one variant of the Facebook that might work is a facebook exclusively for college students.

[3] Steve Jobs tried to motivate people by saying "Real artists ship." This is a fine sentence, but unfortunately not true. Many famous works of art are unfinished. It's true in fields that have hard deadlines, like architecture and filmmaking, but even there people tend to be tweaking stuff till it's yanked out of their hands.

[4] There's probably also a second factor: startup founders tend to be at the leading edge of technology, so problems they face are probably especially valuable.

[5] You should take more than you think you'll need, maybe 50% to 100% more, because software takes longer to write and deals longer to close than you expect.

[6] Since people sometimes call us VCs, I should add that we're not. VCs invest large amounts of other people's money. We invest small amounts of our own, like angel investors.

[7] Not linearly of course, or it would take forever to raise five million dollars. In practice it just feels like it takes forever.

Though if you include the cases where VCs don't invest, it would literally take forever in the median case. And maybe we should, because the danger of chasing large investments is not just that they take a long time. That's the best case. The real danger is that you'll expend a lot of time and get nothing.

[8] Some VCs will offer you an artificially low valuation to see if you have the balls to ask for more. It's lame that VCs play such games, but some do. If you're dealing with one of those you should push back on the valuation a bit.

[9] Suppose YouTube's founders had gone to Google in 2005 and told them "Google Video is badly designed. Give us $10 million and we'll tell you all the mistakes you made." They would have gotten the royal raspberry. Eighteen months later Google paid $1.6 billion for the same lesson, partly because they could then tell themselves that they were buying a phenomenon, or a community, or some vague thing like that.

I don't mean to be hard on Google. They did better than their competitors, who may have now missed the video boat entirely.

[10] Yes, actually: dealing with the government. But phone companies are up there.

[11] Many more than most people realize, because companies don't advertise this. Did you know Apple originally had three founders?

[12] I'm not dissing these people. I don't have the determination myself. I've twice come close to starting startups since Viaweb, and both times I bailed because I realized that without the spur of poverty I just wasn't willing to endure the stress of a startup.

[13] So how do you know whether you're in the category of people who should quit their day job, or the presumably larger one who shouldn't? I got to the point of saying that this was hard to judge for yourself and that you should seek outside advice, before realizing that that's what we do. We think of ourselves as investors, but viewed from the other direction Y Combinator is a service for advising people whether or not to quit their day job. We could be mistaken, and no doubt often are, but we do at least bet money on our conclusions.