Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47715952

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41709959

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Riding the Google roller coaster can alter the hard realities for anyone. The heat is only felt where the rubber hits the road though.

The integrated family system is one of the best things about India and its culture and is amazingly effective in improving life satisfaction levels across demographics.

For a more objective comparison of the benefits of Indian culture, which discounts the skew resulting from living in a developed economy, you probably need to compare life satisfaction levels of Indian Americans with the rest of America.

Humans crave regular 'peer' level feedback and gratification - this is an evolutionary trait and is extremely critical for your happiness which is in turn critical for optimal work performance. Almost anyone who feels otherwise is wrong.

The key point is that even if your startup is doing well and making tons of money you will still not be happy because of the lack of 'peer' level feedback. So in that sense getting a co-founder is a bigger objective than making your startup profitable.

The only other two options are:

1. Your company grows real fast and you are able to hire a couple of CXO's. This might take a long time and its not really in your control.

2. Raise funds and hire a couple of peer level CXO's - this is easier said than done as premature scaling is the number one cause of startup mortality even assuming that you can raise funding in the first place.

The good part is that if you understand this simple fact, you can start figuring out a solution which I guess you have already begin.

Put ddg inside a linux shell and let me interoperate with linux commands.

eg. ddg reviews samsung note | grep "note 2"

2. I think there is a survivor bias here. Most of the biggest companies reach scale very quickly. The scale creates an incentive for the other co-founder to stick on. There is some anecdotal evidence to believe that if scale does not come early on - most likely there won't be a 'really big' company. If the co-founder quits and the founder soldiers on - it just adds another data point to pg's co-founder theory.

2. The wrong way to look at these meetings is as an opportunity for you to pitch for money to a VC.

3. The right way to look at these meetings is as an opportunity for a VC to pitch for a startup which will make him lots of money (see Rule no.1)

4. Almost all funding decisions will get made within the first 15 minutes of your meeting - this will be apparent in hindsight but you will get better at this over time. The trick is to say 'Next' when they so 'No' without wasting too much time.

5. For the best results establish your credentials before meeting the VC - probably by having a strong reference vouch for you/your work before the meeting. (Note: Not all 'contacts' are 'references' and you will need to discriminate to make this work)

Just yesterday I have been thinking of how federation and mobile will be the cornerstones for the next leap in search and doat.com nails both perfectly.

Has my vote for the google-killer-of-the-year.

This is what I would suggest:

1. Try selling your startup. Put a time frame on it - say 2 months at the max. Research and Pitch potential buyers. Don't be too rigid on the price. Again, you need to sell so that the business (and its employees) can stretch for as much as possible, and you need to sell to save your time.

2. If the sale doesnt happen in two months, disassociate from the business. For all practical purposes assume that the business is dead. Detach and Break Free. Do not let the dead-end business take your mindspace. Plan the business contingency - you might let your employees keep running the business so that it helps pay their salaries - or you might make it clear to your employees that the business is dead end and they should jump ship. Offer them salaries till the business pays the bills and help them in whatever way they want. Whatever you do, do not engage in the business.

3. Use the now free mind space to figure out the next break out business. Do not try to adapt your existing business. Do not try to 'do something' with your business competencies. Do not 'pivot' your existing business/employees/software.

This is the hardest part about entrepreneurship and as Ben Horowitz puts it in one of his posts - no amount of pattern matching can help. These decisions can only be made from the gut - and basically need to align the entrepreneurs longer term motivations with 'his' understanding of the individual merits of the business.

"If you get a call from a VC analyst, saying "we just learned about you through...and think you fit well with our firm...would like to schedule an investor presentation..." This will go nowhere. The analyst is boning up on info, and they will suck your brain dry. They have no intentions of investing."

Before: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&...

After: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&...

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