Hard Startups
It would be nice if part of the ecosystem was structured more in terms of supporting founders who want to take on hard problems via way of dedicating their life to it. I&#x27;ll provide my own perspective here in case anyone finds it interesting:<p>I&#x27;ve been working on my startup for 7 years now, and the damage it&#x27;s done to my personal life and well-being has pretty much ground progress to a halt, with the exception of advances in thinking in certain areas, which has been nothing short of mind-blowing recently.<p>Of course, a large part of this is my own failure to plan instrumentally. Admittedly it&#x27;s quite backwards to spend years planning the mid and high-levels first, then not have a solid plan to get from 0 to 1. Ending up there by accident is easier than you&#x27;d think.<p>Fortunately I now have a fully tractable, instrumental plan that goes from 0 to ripping the guts out of a couple FAANG-scale companies:<p>1. Get a well-paying engineering job I&#x27;ll probably hate, because money, quality of life, and sanity all have instrumental value. Hopefully keep the fire alive during this period.<p>2. Work it for about two years, then raise a pre-seed round (at year 9!) to support myself for the next couple of years, while I embark on a formal pre-production phase, and possibly develop an up-to-date prototype&#x2F;PoC.<p>3. Potentially a seed round totaling a few million. Hire a few key people and put together a refined prototype&#x2F;pitch over the course of a year, for a Series A that no high-caliber VC with sufficient funds could refuse.<p>4. At year 12, raise a 100M+ Series A, with the caveat it&#x27;s going to take about a decade to do properly, with further funding rounds along the way.<p>5. Complete the journey, or at least achieve the intended objectives, a decade later at year 22.<p>---<p>I&#x27;m well aware that sounds insane, mostly was just a writing exercise to underscore the timescales involved. The funding requirements are high because it&#x27;s basically a blueprint for something that will become an indispensable part of people&#x27;s every day life, and it consists of multiple verticals all woven together, sharing a common technology. Thinking about how to do this precisely was not trivial and took years.<p>End of the day I&#x27;d rather be skipping to step two, but I&#x27;m ironically out of time at this point. Job it is.<p>In retrospect, a proper plan would have been this:<p>a) Work a job until financially comfortable.<p>b) Do a smaller-scale startup or two.<p>c) Then dream big.<p>Hindsight is of course 20&#x2F;20, and I suspect isolation, desperation, being depressed, being uncomfortable—all those things breed a level of ideation you might otherwise not encounter. It ain&#x27;t recommended, though at least perhaps there&#x27;s a silver lining.<p>---<p>For the most part, the tractability of the plan has only increased with time, not decreased, and I don&#x27;t view competition or someone else figuring it out as a threat.<p>The biggest threat I face actually, is some of my talent pool may be aging out. Of the 50 or so people I&#x27;ve kept an eye on for years and basically dream of hiring on a daily basis, a few key people are in or approaching their 60s.<p>On the bright side, if anyone ever doubts how committed I am in the long-term, it should be easy enough to simply respond that I&#x27;m moving so slow the people I want to hire may end up retiring before I can hire them!