A friend just sent me this article and asked for my thoughts.

https://www.techinasia.com/startup-lie

Here’s my quick take:

1) We’re terrible at turning the inputs of time, energy and money into outputs. 90+% of startups fail and the Venture Capital Asset class is also terrible on the whole.

The market demand for what tech startups create is so high that startups can have multi-billionaire outcomes despite terrible mismanagement. The status quo is that low and the market potential so high that there is this crazy strange attractor that creates enormous wealth despite our industry wide incompetency. While saddening, it also offers a tremendous opportunity for improvement. And there’s a ton of low hanging fruit in the Pareto Principle range.

2) Honestly, entrepreneurs and investors really have no systemic, holistic idea of what they’re doing. They’ve got their gut intuition, their overconfidence and collection of napkin frameworks that generally get applied out of context to poor results.

3) Re: The taxing lifestyle of running a startup. Long hours are probably necessary for a startup to succeed in the early days, but it doesn’t have to kill you. Holistic health and taking great care of oneself is the way of the future. We need to become more like professional athletes. Push extremely hard, but also have extremely sophisticated training and recovery methods. I will be outlining a series of frameworks and set of practices for how self-care is aligned with high performance.

4) Yes, it’s important to clarify being a Unicorn isn’t the only option. Ultimately it’s about a Founder knowing their options, knowing what they want to create in the world, what lifestyle they want to live and attracting the relevant stakeholders and processes aligned with that vision for themselves and the world. This is as true for a Unicorn as a Mom & Pop shop and everything on the business scalability spectrum in between.