Why Are We Surprised That Startups Are So Freaking Hard?

We think they can be hacked, but the only enduring moat is effort

 
Great online writing does two things. First, it makes you think, “Damn, that’s smart,” and second, it makes you snort green tea out your nose. This piece by Benn Stancil made me alternate between these two poles on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Benn approaches a simple yet profound question—“Why are startups hard?”—in a way that feels personal, real, and insightful. I highly recommend this piece even if you don’t currently run a startup—it connected with me on an individual level. —Evan 

In an interview this fall on the Acquired podcast, Jensen Huang—the 60-year-old founder of Nvidia, one of the most valuable companies in the world—dropped a bombshell. Inspired by Huang’s success at Nvidia, the hosts asked him what company he’d start today if he were 30 again. The 60-year-old Huang, without hesitation, said he wouldn’t start a company. The work he put into Nvidia—which, given his net worth of $36 billion, has netted him over $1 billion a year, $3 million a day, or $130,000 an hour—wasn’t worth it:

“The reason why I wouldn’t do it—and it goes back to why it’s so hard—is building a company and building Nvidia turned out to have been a million times harder than I expected it to be, than any of us expected it to be. And at that time, if we realized the pain and suffering, and just how vulnerable you’re going to feel, and the challenges that you’re going to endure, the embarrassment and the shame, and the list of all the things that go wrong, I don’t think anyone would start a company. Nobody in their right mind would do it.”

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