Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> The rest of the team kept their day jobs.

> The team was excited. Our potential investors were excited.

He didn't really have a team and he didn't really have investors. He took a personal risk and found it wasn't working. He shut it down before it got expensive for people other than himself. I applaud this.

People, especially around here, need to understand failure is the norm. This person failed fast, well. Nice work. On to the next thing.




This goes to my core belief that "failing fast" is bad for entrepreneurship. It is far more rare for an initial idea to succeed than one that morphs out of original ideas. Even Facebook started out as something other than what it is now.

I have nothing against accepting failure in an idea. My first start-up failed and I had to let it go. It was really fucking hard to do that. But I tried to pivot twice before finally letting it go and I worked at it for a number of years.

The people that want us to fail fast don't have entrepreneurs best interests at heart. They're looking for quick wins and the more starts and fails they get, the better _their_ odds of something "popping".

But there's something to be said for perseverance.

I won't argue that there shouldn't be a balance, and maybe I was too hard on the OP, but it sounded to me like he needed to step away and think about it, not just let it go.

But I guess we have to defer to his judgment since it was his idea.

I just really don't like fail fast mentality.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: