The Real Silicon Valley

Bah Humbug (please excuse me, it's just a seasonal expression). While I can feel your pain, this story has nothing to do with SV - it's the story of an entrepreneur. The same story exists in every state in the U.S. and every major city (and most small ones) in the world. Entrepreneurship is very hard.<p>I'm 41 y/o and bootstrapped my first internet company at 24. I owned a nice home, a beautiful vacation (lake) home, a big office building, 2 Mercedes Benz (wife's SUV, my car) &#38; an awesome FICO score before I was 29. It all went away (except for my primary home) by the time I was 35.<p>As entrepreneurs we believe that the charts will always go up and to the right (we can't help it) - but they don't.<p>This year, after TEN (10) F'ING YEARS of working on what everyone in SV would label a little "life style business," we hit $1M+ in revenue. I am confident we will hit $2M+ next year and $100M eventually. Our company is debt free and my co-founder (and best friend since kindergarten) own 100% of the company.<p>My point: It's not easy. We have been working very, very hard for TEN (10) F'ING YEARS on this thing. I lost almost everything along the way...but I never, ever stopped believing in what we were building. When you hear those billionaires claim that "perseverance" is the key to success - listen to them, they are telling you the truth.

Jesse,<p>I completely feel your pain. I moved up to San Francisco the previous June with the grand vision of building out my team, raising a round of investment and building my PaaS for hosting node.js apps (NodeSocket) to something really special. I left a cushy director level job in San Diego and left a core group of good friends as well. I simply packed up everything in my car and made the drive up. The first couple of months I stayed on friends couches and did AirBnB, essentially living out of my suitcase, and hacking all day and night.<p>The trough of sorrow is deep, with extreme peaks and valleys. One day I was talking with Sequoia Capital and first tier angel investors flying high and optimistic, the next day, they are all passing, and I realized that I have burned through my entire savings.<p>The thing about startups is they are born easy, but die a very long and drawn-out death. I recently just came to terms, and announced that NodeSocket is shutting down (<a href="http://blog.nodesocket.com/shutting-down" rel="nofollow">http://blog.nodesocket.com/shutting-down</a>) to pursue a new opportunity Commando.io (<a href="http://commando.io" rel="nofollow">http://commando.io</a>).<p>Keep with it, take some time off from startups and entrepreneurship. Doing a startup is the hardest thing most people will ever do.

If you're buying into the Silicon Valley hype, and then get disappointed, you're doing it wrong. Silicon Valley is not a place that's amazing a first, and then awful once you fail. It's simply a place that happens to have the highest concentration and best resources for building tech companies.<p>Ultimately, though, surviving Silicon Valley comes down to one simple rule: don't build stupid shit. Work on a <i>business</i>, get revenues from the start, and don't fall into the trap of trying to build an Instagram.<p>Frankly, most of the stuff everybody here is working on is idiotic. The business models &#38; grand vision plans people come up are ridiculous. With a little more care for building things that are actually useful and that people will pay for, we'd have much less "blew my life savings trying to make a social network for pets and am now homeless and girlfriend-less" stories.

Why be depressed? If you are young and a programmer making 100K at 25, party with your hipster friends and sock away 40K in savings every year. You'll end up with 200K by 30, not a cool billion dollar but with 6% muni-bonds, you suddenly have tax-free interest income of equivalent of $1.2 million at regular 1% CD rate.<p>Work on interesting projects that you want to work on. Do some traveling. Go back to grad school for fun. Learn a new language, sport or talk to girls. Go to your favorite startup or software company website and click on the mugshot of the guy who's in 40's in blue dres-shirt, is that who you want to be when you want to be?<p>If no, don't get on the VC rat-race; it's just as soul-crushing as the investment banker's rat-race except less lucrative.

Hey Jesse, great post though I'm sorry to hear about your startup. If you need a place to crash, I have a spare room for friends who are starting companies, folding companies or just passing through the Valley. Feel free to get in touch anytime.<p>In the meantime, thought you might like this quote from a piece Michael Arrington wrote a while back:<p>"Some of the richest people I know aren’t really entrepreneurs. They worked at HP and then moved to Netscape when it got hot. They made a fortune and then jumped to Google and made another fortune. And now they’re jumping to Facebook.<p>They may be very good engineers, or sales people, or marketing, or execs. But they ain’t entrepreneurs. They’re just resume gardening and they’re really no different from everyone else.<p>I don’t care if you’re a billionaire. If you haven’t started a company, really gambled your resume and your money and maybe even your marriage to just go crazy and try something on your own, you’re no pirate and you aren’t in the club."<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/31/are-you-a-pirate/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/31/are-you-a-pirate/</a>

I quit my TI job, lost my beautiful fiancee, lost my friends and came back to live with my parents, and all of this after thirty.. Im pretty sociable guy.. and had a very rich and good social life before all this..<p>Im living in Brazil, without access to this garden of VC funds you guys have in the Valley..<p>But i live in front of a beautiful beach, where i go out everyday to run, and let some stress behind me..<p>Im still here.. working.. penyless.. and you know what keep me moving?<p>is not the money i can make.. (i dont even know if this dream im pursuing will make me any rich).. but the simple fact to be able to live working on my dream.. have the possibility to not only change my life, but also the life of many others for better.. make me go everyday.. believe, work hard..<p>i dont know if i will succed.. but i know that the most important thing in life is to try.. to make diference.. to make this place better.. im sure theres no payment better than this..<p>You see, the right amount of money that we all really need, is enough to give us freedom to do what we thing we should..<p>So i think you need to get another sort of payment, while you are (dollar) broke.. you must be payed by your own dreams.. this may look stupid.. but when we are in the edge of our lifes, because we believe in something.. we have the ultimate freedom.. a freedom that not only can change our lifes.. but make a wave of new unthinkable possibilities become reality<p>Im sure that when all this im passing now has gone.. i will remember this time with joy..<p>Try to imagine your future you, talking with your present you.. the future you are happy? what he got to tell you..<p>Im here man, im a warrior and i wont give up...<p>If you think you have made a mistake then, go on .. and maybe latter you will try again something else.. and succed tremendously.. but deep inside we all know if we are in the right path.. Your heart will tell you this everyday.. and if thats is the case.. go on man! the world are made by the hands of the ones who didnt give up. The ones who dare to dream..<p>Life for game changers are hard.. and they only succed because they are harder.<p>Its a wonderful time for you to discover your real you, and what you capable of.. you will probably surprise yourself.. No better payment than this :)<p>Good luck in your path!

And nobody will ever advise you that the large cost and huge risk might not be worth it because then they would have to admit the same thing to themselves.<p>Have you ever met anybody that works on the weekend, even when the startup doesn't need them to, just because they don't know what else to do?<p>There are incredibly amazing things happening in Silicon Valley. And also lots of people burning their lives away for little reason or return. Keep your eyes open to both sides of the ledger is the best advice I can give. Be sure that what you are doing is something you truly love, and not just something you want to love or want to portray that you love for the benefit of others. And it's okay to give up and/or take a break.

It'd be great if the author wrote about something <i>specific</i>. This article contains little detail about anything that actually happened.

<i>The real Silicon Valley will never be televised.</i><p>I feel this way as well but I am curious as to why. My reasoning is that the incentives for entrepreneurs to swap dirty laundry for publicity isn't a worthwhile exchange for most entrepreneurs. I hear about how startups are extremely boring but I think people overestimate how much "fun" other professions are and how television works. It doesn't matter if 90% of a start-up is writing code like a robot; what matters is the other 10% and I think we have plenty of true, crazy stories to go around if founders had much of an incentive to play them out on air. I sure don't. I don't want my B2B customers nor investors to judge me <i>only</i> from the 10% dramatic part of my life.

Sometimes Silicon Valley looks from the outside like Las Vegas but for programmers. Make a billion dollars with an idea you have no clue about how to monetize in the first place.

If this is what the "real Silicon Valley" is like, this explains why I've never had the burning desire to move there and build a company there instead of Chicago.<p>That and the realization that there's more to life.

I advice everyone on HN to view this video:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nif01WZ9aI" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nif01WZ9aI</a><p>Maybe this won't change anything, but there's more in life than just getting funded with millions of dollars. I feel pretty bad for people who get depressed or worse because they didin't made it in SV...that's so superficial about life and things in general. Do we all really need millions of dollars and IPO to be happy and be considered "successful" ? What does that even mean ?<p>Do what you love, that's my advice. My girlfriend is a nurse and when people are in their dead bed, she said that the thing most people regret is not doing what they loved, spend time with their families, going on trip around the world. And that hospital is used mostly by high class people, with lots of money.

Narcissism (Delusions of grandeur) is a psychological affliction, not a drug.

Don't ever gamble more than you can afford to lose. That applies to a lot more than just money.

&#62; Technically I am now homeless and unemployed.<p>But if you can code, you could be in a 100k job with a 10k signing by Monday. That's hardly "homeless".

I get the impression from your post that balls to wall burnout effort isn't the key to success, so why do you do it that way?

Entrepreneurship truly is a roller coaster. You constantly swing from ecstasy to depression, sometimes on a day by day basis. The underlying truth is that over time this cycle does not cease; it will continue in full force. However, over time things get better. I may be an optimist, but I believe that in the long run things always get better. One of my professors showed my class a graph that described this effect, which I have recreated. [1] In the long run, an entrepreneur's lows can be better than the rest of the world's highs. That is the future we seek.<p>[1] <a href="http://i48.tinypic.com/20hxbbt.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i48.tinypic.com/20hxbbt.jpg</a>

author appears to be an expert in start-up vernacular.

Real life is seldom like a tv show. I don't think this should be news to anyone. I bet physicians don't like Grey's Anatomy either.<p>While I'm sorry things didn't work out for you, I don't see this as anything to do with this area. Your story is one that is playing out all over America in this economy.

I read countless horror stories before launching my own startup, without hesitation. If your goal is to do what you love, and hopefully earn a living from it, you have my sympathy; if your goal is to get rich quick, well, that's always been a fool's game.

Sorry for off-topic but why specifically Silicon Valley? While it has many historical technological centers and is often hyped, it's not the only possible place to open a technological startup.

So is there anywhere people outside the US could watch this silicon valley show? I'm curious but can't find a source that doesn't block those outside the US.

The race to the "American Dream" is not a one lane road. Keep pushing. Someday your tenacity and passion will be rewarded.

You need to update the photo before you speak about SV..SV !== San Francisco

I really wish there was a way to: (a) have the autonomy and interesting work of a startup tech founder (while a full-time technologist, not a manager) but (b) without the extreme income variance. If your job requires you to take personal loans, there's something wrong. I also think there are a lot of people who have the talent but not the ability to afford the risk.<p>The extreme income variance is a bug, not a feature, in my opinion. I'd be willing to sell all upside past $100 million (which would have median value of zero, but reasonable expectancy given the autonomy I'd have) in exchange for downside insurance, because I can't possibly imagine why I'd even want $10 billion.