How to fail more with a lot less work.
In the old days, it used to be that if you wanted to start a company, you’d find a venture capital firm (call them VC’s: it will impress any entrepreneurship dorks you know) to give you millions and millions of dollars for rows upon rows of servers and hundreds of engineers/developers/IT guys/salespeople/etc. Then you’d rent the most extravagent building you could find, order pizza every night, and make no money. And then you’d go under.
These days 90% of the work of that work is done for you, leaving you the ability to fail entirely, but having done almost none of it for yourself. You don’t buy your own servers: you outsource to Rackspace, and cheaply. You purchase compute time or space to back everything up with AWS. Want to automate phone surveys to random customers, or create a default answering machine that allows you to avoid hiring phone operators? You used to have to buy a heap of servers and license a bunch of really difficult and tempermental software, not to mention the fact that you’d have to hire lots of people who are smart enough to install and manage it. Now it’s not problem at all, use Twilio! Want to develop an awesome web app? Build it in Rails on your home machine and, almost regardless of its size and complexity, spend literally 3 minutes deploying it with Heroku. No more configuring servers for you! Heck, no more engineering departments for you! And speaking of engineers, are you having problems collaborating? Don’t email each other (or yourself) copies of files, just use Dropbox and Github!
Yes, thanks to the successful people out there, the power to simply get funding and run your business into the ground has never been easier. It may take you about the same amount of time, but think of all the work you’ll be saving!
But before you rush off to go spend someone else’s money, remember that all this easiness has changed the process significantly. In 1998, you’d go to a hardcore VC firm and they’d give you wheelbarrows of cash. These days, your more likely to get started off with a seed investment from a firm like legendary Y Combinator. Y Combinator has bi-yearly open enrollment, where you can freely apply. Show them your prototype, and if you are one of the lucky many that get funding, it’s usually around $20,000. You then use this money to go and pull the company together before round B investments, usually from a VC that specializes in large investments. $20,000 is not much, you might say, but you’d do well to remember that they, and the companies they’ve funded, are connected like mad, and you stand a much higher chance of getting real money from a prestigious firm like Sequoia or Keiner Perkins, since, first of all, you are now friends with their friends. Also, YC have invested in a couple hundred successful companies at this point, so you are instantly a part of a great in-club, for which there are all sorts of perks. For example, most companies in the valley know not to rip off one of the YC startups, because then you piss all of them off, and then you’re screwed.
But of course, don’t let all this talk of success freak you out. Remember that just because all this stuff is now much, much easier doesn’t mean there isn’t the opportunity to fail. Fail as much as you want! You have the freedom to fail fast! Even if your Mom thinks you’ll be the biggest success ever, you can rest easy at night knowing that, if nothing else, at least I am pretty sure you’ll fail. You just have to give it time, I promise it’ll happen.
