Rejection by potential customers or investors is not the hard part. Folks who can't face that don't typically try and start something new. Here are some things that are much more difficult to face: laying off employees (not firing poor performers, letting good ones go because you can't pay them), shutting the business down and negotiating with creditors, and getting fired by your investors (or co-founders). These are not uncommon outcomes that get much less press, conference time, and blog posts. I don't say these to discourage anyone from an entrepreneurial career, I mention them because many founders seem less mindful of the real possibilities of failure: most of the really painful mistakes are made after initial success.
Agreed--from experience. It hurt when our startup failed(after initial success), and really hurt for a few months. Laying people off (mainly ourselves), shutting down the business....it's very deflating. You hear statistics like "90%" of startups fail--but you don't hear much else about failure. Rarely are the gory details revealed. On the other hand, every success is well documented and the intricate detailed are talked about ad nauseam. It's very rare to talk about failure with anyone at these Startup Events, IME.
One thing I can say about failure: being young definitely helps. We had a lot less to lose than older people and plenty of opportunities to do different things when that didn't work out. It wasn't easy to fail but I've bounced back and am happy working in the non-startup world(though I've still been working on side projects still, mostly for fun).
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Rejection by potential customers or investors is not the hard part. Folks who can't face that don't typically try and start something new. Here are some things that are much more difficult to face: laying off employees (not firing poor performers, letting good ones go because you can't pay them), shutting the business down and negotiating with creditors, and getting fired by your investors (or co-founders). These are not uncommon outcomes that get much less press, conference time, and blog posts. I don't say these to discourage anyone from an entrepreneurial career, I mention them because many founders seem less mindful of the real possibilities of failure: most of the really painful mistakes are made after initial success.
Agreed--from experience. It hurt when our startup failed(after initial success), and really hurt for a few months. Laying people off (mainly ourselves), shutting down the business....it's very deflating. You hear statistics like "90%" of startups fail--but you don't hear much else about failure. Rarely are the gory details revealed. On the other hand, every success is well documented and the intricate detailed are talked about ad nauseam. It's very rare to talk about failure with anyone at these Startup Events, IME.
One thing I can say about failure: being young definitely helps. We had a lot less to lose than older people and plenty of opportunities to do different things when that didn't work out. It wasn't easy to fail but I've bounced back and am happy working in the non-startup world(though I've still been working on side projects still, mostly for fun).