This may sound weird but this was a very interesting read for me as a father of 2 small kids.

A somewhat common (yet often not followed (because it's hard)) piece of parenting advice is to not praise kids too much. Especially character judgements like "you're so smart" or "you're so creative". Reason being it makes them do things that seem smart or seem creative just to get the praise. Then it comes crashing down when they're faced with a challenge that contests the idea that they're "a smart kid".

It kind of looks like this is happening to the author. He became a founder, and started doing things that seem like what a founder would do, then got hit hard when he was unable to fulfill the "founder" role (i.e. didn't grow fast enough).

I'm not totally sure what to conclude here. I guess humans are susceptible to this kind of thing regardless of age.

> It's much more comfortable to be the person that "could be X" than to be the person that tries to actually do it.

Brilliant insight.

Reminds of me this, from Theodore Roosevelt's Citizenship in a Republic:

> It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Good luck, and go get 'em.

Expectations that we hold inside of ourselves can be a really difficult echo of identities we tried fantasizing about when growing up and as an adult. We want to do well, we want the approval, we want the validation.

The anxiety over expectations can kill you. It’s self abuse - people (investors, bosses, spouses) don’t invest in you for your anxiety driven productivity, they do it because of who you are outside of that worry. It’s hard to replace it if you consider it your motor. Let the desire to do well and good stay, but let the fear of others disappointment go, and the fantasy that we can control those outcomes by squeezing every last drop out of ourselves.

> Then you look around and see "startup X gets to $1M ARR a month after launch" and shit like that and I'm feeling terrible about how we're barely growing.

Comparison is the thief of joy. I fall into this trap almost weekly. Success stories are incredibly rare and we only see the splash, not the iceberg of failure just beneath the surface.

I think about my current business constantly even though on paper we are making enough to keep this thing going forever but it never feels enough.

I felt this post and appreciate the honesty.

When doing my own startup in the past, the biggest pain were: loneliness and inexplicable paranoia. Which then lead to anxiety.

This, when unchecked, can lead to self inflicted, unnecessary pressure on myself. And failure to meet the impossible deadlines, created downward spiral.

I think this is normal, everyone went through the same thing. That’s why some VCs filter for megalomaniacs, zealots, or people who have no idea what pain is, because the journey is insane arduous.

The pain magnifies if the startup is located in VHCOL. Every month a whale appears and eat a big chunk of your runway. Who wouldn’t have anxiety?

Some feedback from me (not a likely user though):

- It was easier to find a link to where you worked at than your repo (https://github.com/skaldlabs/skald?tab=readme-ov-file), you should have linked it visibly

- I had no idea what / why I should use it so I looked at the demo video and it didn't seem to solve any particular use case for any particular problem, it was more a ,,config'' video instead of a demo video

- From reading the (quite interesting) article it seemed like you are focusing on pivoting instead of iteration speed. Have you tried for example to just query an LLM to build the whole project that you have done? How much time would be to vibe code it?

I know that HN is mostly against vibe coding, but if the project could have been created in 1-3 days and you took 3 month, that's a bigger issue than growth itself. In that case the metric that should be looked at is iteration speed instead of just growth (both are super important though!)

> The thing is: it's a lot easier to live your life thinking you could have done X if you wanted to, than to "disappoint" these people that believed in you by trying and failing. You can always lean on this idea in your head of what you could have been, and how everyone believed in you so it must be true, but you just chose not to follow that path.

sometimes the best decision is the one you don't take.

There is a space between man’s imagination and man’s attainment that may only be traversed by his longing.

-- Kahlil Gibran

Without trying to be glib about it, this post sounds like a description of second-system syndrome, applied to entrepreneurship. It happens to all of us.

Loved it, understanding and working through your vulnerabilities is super hard but ultra rewarding. Bold but very altruistic move to publish this

I think this is why I unconciously hold back from ever asking money for any of the stuff I build. Much more comfortable.

I used to have problems like this and then I almost died a couple of times. I no longer have problems like this.

Thank-you! It is great to read a honest and self-aware journal covering this.

As someone who fantasizes about running my own thing, working for a few start-ups have made me very stringent on what my requirements are for starting something (co-founders, investment, location, market). And also that these requirements have become so very risk-averse that I probably am not the personality profile to run a business! Nevermind the endless imposter syndrome.

I think everyone would seriously benefit from learning poker. I used to play professionally and the idea of looking at things as probabilistic bets, and in terms of expected value is so deeply rooted in my mind

Investments are bets. Most sane investors aren't putting it all on one thing

Startups are bets

Applying for jobs. Sales. Dating. Health. Basically everything

You risk $X money and time for a payoff of $Y that comes Z%

You can make the best decision and have a bad outcome because there are so many unknowns. This isn't chess

You can play everything wrong and still hit it out of the park

I mean this is one of the range of outcomes that could've happened. You can't declare yourself a success or failure from one project

Just keep making good decisions and don't risk it all, and you'll more than likely end up fine

Well written. One interesting pattern in founders I've been thinking about recently is how early you encounter major blockers, and how that shapes your self worth.

Having a strong product and being unable to raise feels like shit, early users may validate you're solving a problem but it may not make sense to investors.

Having an early raise is a very positive signal, I can only imagine you're perceived trajectory coming out of that. Being unable to settle on a problem also sucks in a different way.

Regardless of what camp you're in I feel the take-away is you need to focus on reflecting inwards. Be better than you were yesterday, not better than someone's projections on LinkedIn.

Finding the right psychologist/coach/founder to chat this over with will probably do you and the company wonders.

This is exactly why I've avoided raising so far. Not because VC money is bad - obviously it enables things that wouldn't otherwise be possible - but because I know myself well enough to recognise I'd react exactly like this.

The author nails it: "I started to actually operate in a way that is counterproductive for my startup, while thinking I was actually doing what was best." That's the dangerous part. The pressure doesn't announce itself as pressure. It masquerades as ambition, urgency, drive.

Bootstrapping has its own version of this though. Instead of investor expectations, you've got the slow burn of "am I wasting years of my life on something that needs capital to work?" The grass is always greener. At least with VC money, you can move fast and find out if you're wrong. With bootstrapping, you can spend 3 years proving out something that would have taken 6 months with proper funding.

Neither path is inherently better. But knowing which one will fuck with your head less is worth figuring out before you're in the middle of it.

I really liked this, thank you

I have a few 1099 MBA advisors that I call Chief of Staff. I check my questions against what they think. When you get 3 MBAs with engineering, finance, or CS degrees agreeing independently, it bumps up confidence.

I think this is a case where this helps considerably. Its essentially the 'consulting' thing for small businesses.

Dont worry pal for the investors you are a bet. They have many bets and they expect most to lose and one to win big. It is wrong to think that not turning $1m into $100m or $1bn is letting someone down.

Be the bet. Do your thing and you might be right. They dont need you to make a sale tomorrow.

Imagine betting on someone and xe writes this ...