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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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).