What keeps people from starting startups is the fear of having so much responsibility.
I'm not convinced about this. I think if anything it's the exact opposite -- many people avoid starting startups because they're afraid of seeming irresponsible.
I'm sure I'm not the only person here who has been asked the question "when are you going to get a real job?" -- as PG's essay points out a paragraph earlier, a company which isn't making any money yet tends to feel rather theoretical. At an age where the perception of being responsible is largely tied to making the transition from education to employment, it can be difficult to explain working at a not-yet-profitable startup to people -- especially in computing, where the default expectation is often that students will graduate and walk into high-paying jobs with Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft/Cisco/etc.
What keeps people from starting startups is the fear of having so much responsibility.
I'd use Occam to narrow that statement down even further: "What keeps people from starting startups is fear".
I think Paul might have a bit of a selection bias because of Y Combinator. He spends a lot of time with founders that are weighed down with all the responsibility of running the company. And, after you start, that's a big problem, but you don't realize how big of a problem the sense of responsibility is until you've already jumped off the cliff of founding a startup.
I spend a lot of time at Hackers and Founders meetups, talking with people who are very nervous about jumping off the corporate bandwagon and founding a startup. One of the biggest reasons that they don't is fear. Fear of being irresponsible. Fear of seeming irresponsible to people around you. Fear of going broke. Fear of failure. Fear of being inadequate to the task. Fear of not having the support of your spouse (which is generally the spouses version of fear of being broke, I suppose).
But, in all our Hackers and Founders meetups, I've never heard anyone say, "I want to start a startup, but I'm scared of having so much responsibility".
We're arguing a very small point of the essay at large. Over all, it was a great piece of work. Keep em coming, Paul.
We're talking about two difference senses of responsibility. You mean responsibility in the sense of prudence; e.g. "He made a responsible choice." I mean responsibility in the sense of something you have to worry about; e.g. "He was weighed down by responsibilities."
For anyone who cares, the reason both concepts have the same name is that they share the property that you have to be able to respond to someone. The difference is that in the first case you're responding to people who are judging or depending on your choice (e.g. your parents, friends, or dependents) and in the second to people you've undertaken to do something for (e.g. customers, employees, or investors).
Yes, they are related, but not in a way that makes your comment true.
When your parents think you're being irresponsible by starting a startup instead of getting a job, they're thinking about the affect on your own career, not the amount of work you're undertaking to do for other people.
When your parents think you're being irresponsible by starting a startup instead of getting a job, they're thinking about the affect on your own career, not the amount of work you're undertaking to do for other people.
I'm not convinced that is generally true. Note that I'm talking about perceptions, not reality. I don't think many people avoid startups because they're afraid of being irresponsible -- I think they avoid startups because they're afraid of seeming irresponsible -- and I think a lot of this is based on the perception that a startup which hasn't reached profitability yet (especially if it doesn't have any paying customers yet) isn't a real company.
By my little experience, both of you are right. I´m facing both problems right now, today, this morning. I got a lot of friends with a lot of skills and desire to win building theirs own business, but they are not going to do that ... For example, i have two friends that with me invest on Forex Market. We used to work like slaves, to get our objective, build a profitable forex system (odds of win here are even worse than in the startups world, it´s about 5%). Two straight years of work ... but ... one of my friends get a girlfriend. Now he have to take more responsability because she lives in another city and if he wants to stick with her, he must get a job (some girlfriends are expensive!). Indeed he get one ... but ... he had to quite our little venture, he made a choice of take responsability for his new life (a job and a girlfriend), he could not hold on with the responsability of running behind this "fancy" dream ...
In another way, my parents wants me to quit from my dreams (build an forex system and a web based software startup) until my 18. They want me working for the government. Here at Brazil, work for Microsoft and Google are similar to work for the Government. Their point is that i have to be like everybody from my age, get a safe job, be independent, earn my own money and leave home (22 years old now). This kind of responsability is far more hard for me to take than the other. I can quite a (expensive)girlfriend and the status quo of having a job, but i cant ignore what my parents say and stay focused ! I wake up and sleep with this in my mind every day ! It´s like if a man must take a job to be a man, if not, you are just a kiddo. And being a kiddo on your 22 is being a loser. Being a loser is very hard to take.
Thanks both of you for pointing this types of responsability. And sorry for my bad english.
I haven't read the article as yet, but I experience the fear of being weighed down by responsibilities.
I believe my creativity would propel me to success. But the process that creates my creativity also often leaves me intellectually flighty.
And should I take on staff, customers and debt I'd worry that such flightiness (if I were unable to turn it off) would leave me unable to continue with the project--failing my staff, customers and my ability to repay the debt.
It sounds like you need some co-founders to get your project off the ground, preferably at least one that has prior experience with a successful startup and exit.
I believe the solution to my problem is to either find someone who can keep me on the straight and narrow, or to develop enough self-control and motivation to stop such flightiness when innappropriate.
I think its the same sense of the word. You can only be irresponsible if you have a lot of responsibilities and aren't meeting them. People aren't afraid of that others will think them carefree with and without any troubles which is really more sans responsibilities rather than irresponsible.
Founders are worried about the responsibility of having to create something of worth from nothing. The people who surround them are afraid they won't succeed and so are they.
Moral weight of risk can get heavy. A recent rubric I came up with to decide if a startup is right for you:
1. You like to build things
2. You like to get rewarded for what you build
3. You can tolerate a high risk of getting no reward
Yeah watch out if your company doesn't have office space and you're working from home. There is this assumption that you just aren't doing anything all day so can run errands and do all sorts of crap for your friends and wife - in other words, you don't have a "real job."
This was my experience as well. People always assume you are available if you don't have a conventional job. This can make time management a challenge.
If you do it from home and have a family (unlike a couple of startup roomates working towards ramen mode), you absolutely need a separate room with a door that means "i am at work" and everyone needs to understand that.
My answer to always being available is that in a startup, i work all the time, and you are probably distracting me.
"many people avoid starting startups because they're afraid of seeming irresponsible."
That's a great point and I think supports another one. Getting older is generally incompatible with founding a startup. Not always, mind you.
Point #1: Ramen profitability is a higher number the older you get. People generally accumulate obligations faster than they can get rid of them (loans, kids, wives, elder parents, houses, etc)
Point #2: Yours. It doesn't look irresponsible for most 20 year olds to punt normal life and build something crazy. "It's a phase, he'll learn a lot, and then grow out of it". A 40 year old will get a lot more flak for setting aside a cushy $200k/yr job for some wild idea.
Of course, older folk who manage to live lean and don't give a crap about what people think/say will do just fine... :-)
Point #2: Yours. It doesn't look irresponsible for most 20 year olds to punt normal life and build something crazy. "It's a phase, he'll learn a lot, and then grow out of it". A 40 year old will get a lot more flak for setting aside a cushy $200k/yr job for some wild idea.
I agree, but I'd s/40/25/. This is probably why so many successful startups were founded by college dropouts -- if you haven't graduated yet, people are likely to see whatever you do as a learning experience, but as soon as you graduate, there is an expectation that you will "start being responsible".
There're a bunch of counterexamples to that, eg. Blogger (Evan Williams was 28), ViaWeb (Paul Graham was 31), Zenter (founders were in their early 30s), RescueTime (founders are in their 30s), Flickr (founders were about 10 years out of college), Del.icio.us (Joshua Schacter was 29), etc.
I'd say the real cutoff is whenever you have kids. Even that's not a hard cutoff (one of the Zenters had a kid right before they were accepted to YC), but it makes it a lot harder.
Having a kid makes life more regimented (good for startups), a bit less flexible if you're on a "managers schedule", and more expensive.
Risk tolerance is much lower with kids. That's probably the biggest reason more people don't start companies. In those cases, I'd recommend becoming ramen profitable in a side project to a real job, and then swapping them out.
Sadly true. I'm (almost) 42 and am trying to build a startup. Unfortunately it's still far from being profitable, and I live in a place with no angel investors or VCs available, so I need to keep a day job while coding my app late at night when everyone else (wife and two kids) fall asleep.
In my case, to be "ramen profitable" means that the monthly profit is equal to my monthly salary, which is currently at about 4000 USD.
Yea, joining a real company may seem to be responsible to the outside world, but starting a startup entails more responsibility than joining an already successful company. And PG here is talking about the actual responsibility which comes with starting a startup which discourages people from starting one, rather than the perceived responsibility of the society.
The problem is that a well-mowed lawn and a flag in front of a house is 'responsible', but the overgrown lawn of a teacher who volunteers her free time is 'irresponsible'.
A pizza profitable startup founder can manage nine employees, but that doesn't mean anything for 'responsibility'. A BigBoxCo manager can manage eight employees and be 'responsible'; if he weren't responsible, why would BigBoxCo pay him a salary?
The trouble is that few people "measure" responsibility, they just look at the signals that have become associated with responsibility.
I've always been so oddball and beyond the norm that I basically decided to embrace it, so the fear of seeming abnormal or irresponsible hasn't ever factored into it, at least for me.
The most successful startups are disruptive. How can someone be disruptive when they're worried about keeping up appearances? To my mind, worrying about what others think of you starting a company might just mean you shouldn't do it at all.
Obviously there's a big difference between whether you are perceived as responsible and whether you really are.
I'm not convinced about this. I think if anything it's the exact opposite -- many people avoid starting startups because they're afraid of seeming irresponsible.
I'm sure I'm not the only person here who has been asked the question "when are you going to get a real job?" -- as PG's essay points out a paragraph earlier, a company which isn't making any money yet tends to feel rather theoretical. At an age where the perception of being responsible is largely tied to making the transition from education to employment, it can be difficult to explain working at a not-yet-profitable startup to people -- especially in computing, where the default expectation is often that students will graduate and walk into high-paying jobs with Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft/Cisco/etc.