What It's Like To Be A Startup CEO - The Backstory

I remember all this. The highlight for me was working past hours in our first customer's warehouse (yeah, enterprise) room and being locked in because the guards forgot about us.<p>Or not getting back to the hotel until 4 AM and realizing you had to wake up at 6 to finish a feature to present to the customer at 9AM, and not sleeping anyway because of it.<p>Or the months when you couldn't pay yourself, barely scraped by on rent. The miracle of becoming "ramen profitable" and being able to eat again. Disagreements with the business partner about bootstrapping or funding and heated arguments... been there.<p>And all the friends who were there for you, even the ones you lost in the turmoil.<p>Guys: I know this, I've been through this, and I just want to say: it gets better. And not necessarily when you're magically successful (because that always happens, right?)—it just gets better in time. You can't stay unbalanced forever, and at some point your project will pull itself together, or it won't, and that's okay. You'll move on to another project, or maybe a decent living somewhere, and then you'll get an idea for a second new thing to create.<p>And you'll do it better the second time. You will. I will. Because it doesn't have to be like this. It might be a true story, but it's still not right.<p>Good luck.

<i>The most challenging thing is that the people you’d normally share your challenges or fears with don’t understand the concept of “I’m gonna create something huge with nothing and I don’t care if I die trying.”</i><p>This strikes me as the saddest part of this article, but also a bit of a failure on the part of the author. Part of being a founder is surely inspiring others to believe that you're on to something; that you’re adding value and ultimately making the world better. If you believe in something, strongly enough to make you sleep in a truck, but can't communicate that to the people closest to you (who should be predisposed to listening to your point of view) then surely there's a problem.<p>When I say 'communicate' I don't even mean getting them to sign up to your service, I just mean making it clear to them why you are sleeping in a truck and why that's a rational behaviour from your point of view.<p>If, for example, you were sleeping in your truck to raise awareness of homelessness or as some kind of performance art; your friends and family might not agree that that was the best way forward, but they'd probably still be bringing you hot food at night. Why is your proposition so hard to explain that you're lying about where you sleep? Is it actually quite a shallow mission (e.g. I just want to make lots of money and haven't really got a vision of how to make the world better) or is it that you're not able to communicate your vision well, even to those close to you? Either way, alarm bells are ringing in my head.

While there are no kids that ask their mom "where's daddy?" - meaning you - there is little to worry about.<p>I totally wasted several years of my youth and that was the best time ever. And this guy was creating something, so +1 for that.

Very insightful. Best quote from the article: "There’s people that will read this and find it completely ridiculous. "