Startups Are Hard

I respect anyone who starts from zero and tries to turn it into a business. On a scale from 1 to 10, the difficulty is an 11. That’s not a joke; it’s the daily reality of choosing uncertainty over a ready-made track and then waking up to do it again. I warn anyone who wants to start a company: it will likely be the hardest thing you try in your life.

I’m still drawn to it because the feedback is honest. You either move the needle or you don’t. There’s nowhere to hide, which makes growth or stagnation uncomfortably visible to everyone outside and most importantly, to yourself. That’s what keeps me coming back. You are responsible for what happens. Not your peers, not your boss, just you. Put one foot in front of the other and, one day, you’ll look up and realize how far you’ve gone.

Compression

A startup feels like condensing your life into a tighter loop. You trade forty years of gentle slope for four years of sharp gradients. Days blur into all-nighters and cold coffee that eventually becomes energy drinks, shipping at 2 a.m. while the career fair whispers “safe” every year.

Friends post weekend photos. You stop going out because this path feels more important because the work won’t do itself and because absence now is cheaper than regret later. The timeline tightens, stakes rise, and priorities sort themselves without a committee meeting.

The real cost isn’t just time; it’s cognitive bandwidth. You live in sprints while everyone else lives in semesters and summer holidays. Plans get lighter, attention gets heavier, and working memory becomes a scarce resource you manage like cash. I forget names and ignore drama not because I don’t care, but because my brain is leased to the system in front of me.

None of this is glamour. It’s a steady diet of ambiguity, rejection, and the next attempt. Yet—quietly—every cycle gets a bit better. The code fights less. The pitch lands cleaner. Customers ghost less. Progress arrives in millimeters until, suddenly, it shows up in meters.

Operating Under Load

How intense is the work? My WHOOP claims I’m 26.6 years old, about 3.6 years older than I should be. That’s the receipt. I’ve burned out more than once at every company I’ve tried to build. Pilots don’t land themselves. Revenue doesn’t arrive because you deserve it. The fix is boring: adjust workload, shorten feedback loops, say no more often, and treat “almost burnout” as an alarm, not an identity.

Fear and nerves never leave. They become telemetry. When my heart rate spikes, I convert it to a task list: What exactly am I afraid of, what’s the cheapest experiment to price it, what’s the kill switch if I’m wrong? I’ve started multiple companies across countries and constraints. The only constant is that uncertainty never leaves; you just get better at instrumenting it. Humility is policy, not branding. There’s always a next goal, next iteration, next failure to study. It doesn’t stop. You just get better at not breaking—better at holding morale steady while changing your mind quickly.

Risk, Reward, and Why Keep Going

Risk is how you grow. Life isn’t an exam you pass or fail; it’s terrain you explore by doing. You learn by testing edges, not by standing back. Yet risk shouldn’t be worn like a costume. Bigger stakes bring harder falls, sometimes irreversible. We should reward the smart, instrumented experiment: small bets with capped downside, clear goals, and quick feedback, where learning compounds whether the bet pays off or not. Park the one-way doors until proof arrives. Reject the reckless version of risk that hides legal exposure, integrity shortcuts, or existential burn rates behind a mask of courage. True boldness pairs ambition with discipline and prizes both outcome and process.

Why keep going? Because the curve moves. Not fast, not clean, but it moves. The first “maybe” becomes a “yes.” The flaky pipeline hardens. The first invoice turns into repeatable revenue. And there’s sovereignty: the loop from idea → shipped thing → user outcome → corrected plan is yours to run. That control is addictive in the best way. Money is the side effect; mastery is the point. It won’t get easy. It will get better. And that’s enough to come back tomorrow, calmer, sharper, and a little more dangerous in the ways that count.

A sensible culture makes experimenting cheap. Open tooling, affordable compute, simpler incorporation, and permissionless APIs lower the cost of trying something new. Celebrate not just the wins, but also transparent attempts—even the misses—as long as they come with clear reasoning and honest postmortems. By doing so, failure shifts from stigma to useful data. Paul Graham’s point holds true: building startups has reliably created wealth; society’s role is to remove friction from that process, helping more people test their ideas responsibly and quickly.

The Long Game

Startups amplify both wealth and knowledge, provided you measure success by real growth, actual outcomes, and staying truthful rather than chasing spectacle. True success isn’t quick money or early exits; it’s consistently showing up, keeping morale stable, adapting rapidly, and shipping meaningful results. The next technological frontier, agentic software that independently navigates complex tasks, is already emerging. Building for that future isn’t daunting—it’s clarifying. The process won’t get easier, but you’ll get better. That’s reason enough to return tomorrow, more capable, clearer-minded, and ready for whatever comes next.