Startups: If you can avoid death you will get rich!
February 28, 2008
Thomas Ahn, founder and CEO of Mad Ventures, reached out to me today and as I Googled him I found an interview he did with Yaron Bazaz. Thomas suggested that anyone looking for first round investments should read Paul Graham’s post titled, “How Not to Die“. I recall reading the post back in 2007 when it first went up, but I reread it this evening. What a powerful post ~ you need to read it, twice.
Paul suggests that in a typical startup, if you can avoid dying you will get rich (rich being relative). He explains his own near death experience at Viaweb, “When we were visiting Yahoo to talk about being acquired, we had to interrupt everything and borrow one of their conference rooms to talk down an investor who was about to back out of a new funding round we needed to stay alive. So even in the middle of getting rich we were fighting off the grim reaper.”
Paul concludes his post with the following advice:
So I’ll tell you now: bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup. The odds of getting from launch to liquidity without some kind of disaster happening are one in a thousand. So don’t get demoralized. When the disaster strikes, just say to yourself, ok, this was what Paul was talking about. What did he say to do? Oh, yeah. Don’t give up.
