Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

It's not how you celebrate the successes, it's how you overcome the adversity and the hardship that determines how the business succeeds.

Experience will come when you face certain problems and live through them. And the best way to do that is to put yourself squarely in the path of those problems.

I'd say do it. There's kind of a backwards logic that says: when you are young, you should learn from people who are experienced, so later on, if you want to do a startup, you can take the risk. And that's a myth that was created from school. You need to learn to get to the next level.

I carried the CEO title because I was the one running around talking to people. What is the CEO of a two-person company where the two people are equal shareholders? What does that mean? It just means that we had to call someone a CEO.

Almost all of our marketing and sales was educational. We just thought, "We'll teach people stuff, and some tiny fraction of those people will become our customers." It seemed to work just as well as running ads, which were a hard sell and kind of empty and a waste of people's time.

I kind of like uncertainty to some extent, because it's a little bit of suspense and excitement and adventure, almost, right? And you can learn a lot even if things don't work out. But not everyone likes adventure. A lot of people seem to be against uncertainty, actually. In all areas of life.

People have a narrow concept of what's possible, and we're limited more by our own ideas about what's possible than what really is possible. So they just get uncomfortable, and they kind of tend to attack it for whatever reason.

thinking all up front: why am I getting in, when do I leave, if I leave then why am I doing it, what gets me up in the morning, what could happen that could make me stop getting up in the morning?

Before I joined, I knew where the line was, when I would quit, at what point, and so when I was in the game, it never crossed my mind. I also knew why I was involved, what motivated me, and I didn't spend a lot of time perseverating on that stuff.