It's only a matter of time before this kind of thinking results in founder suicide. I've read multiple cases where investors, including Y Combinator, forced founders to pivot, which caused serious mental distress to the founders. If the idea won't work, drop it, and drop the founders too, until their next project can be properly assessed. Dropping a project doesn't mean the founders are bad founders or that they are great founders - it simply means that they realised the limitations of the project. Investors should keep the founders in mind for their next project, but giving them cash and forcing them to pivot is a sure way to disaster. Ideas need time to develop. Tim should be commended for realizing that his product would not work, and dropping it before it caused his team and the investors even more stress. I consider his post a sign of maturity and look forward to hearing about his next project.
> I've read multiple cases where investors, including Y Combinator, forced founders to pivot
I don't think you should sling this kind of thing around so lightly. It's trivial to post charges like this on the internet and have many people just believe them. But this is a serious thing to say right after you've invoked the idea of suicide, and doesn't remotely resemble anything I've observed at YC. In my observation, YC partners don't "force founders" to do anything; they couldn't anyhow, and they don't think that way in the first place.
>The last few weeks of the program are a bit of a blur. My morale plummeted, and my stress skyrocketed. I dreaded going to the weekly dinners, where I would have to talk to my cohort and confirm that no, we hadn’t found an idea yet and yes, we were still super excited about our “company.” I did little else but eat, code and sleep. I felt like everyone else was ready to raise millions, while we were desperately trying to find a product.
>Postponing Demo Day was a no-brainer. We didn’t have an idea we believed in, and although we could have cobbled one together and raised some seed funding, we didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to do that, in part because it seemed disingenuous. But primarily it was because taking half a million dollars of other people’s money would have moved my stress level from unhealthy to crippling.
>But skipping Demo Day didn’t fix our lack of conviction. The rapid-fire pivoting continued. Around this time, I started coming to terms with the fact that I was seriously unhappy. For as long as I’ve been interested in startups, I have never wanted to start a company simply for the sake of starting a company. Yet doing things “for the sake of starting a company” was where I found myself, as I scrambled for a plausible idea.I don’t know if this is true for other people, but as a flailing founder I desperately wanted to believe in the startup myth—that success was just over the next ridge, that if we waited a bit longer, or had a slightly better idea, we would suddenly be riding a rocket ship. I hated doubting myself, but I’ve never been good at blind faith. So I decided to leave.
Really hard to read the article and conclude that "YC forced them to pivot". Sounds like things weren't working and YC was honest with them.
From the same article:
> We went back to PG, and he told us to stop worrying about Demo Day. With the right idea, we’d be working on the company for the next five-plus years. It was foolish to sacrifice the quality of the company to optimize for the next five weeks."
Seems like a good long-term view and very reasonable way to look at things... definitely not crazy "pivot-right-now-or-die" pressure.
...except every 5 weeks is do-or-die with starving startups. Sounds like PG had some inside info on whether they would get funding. Otherwise that would have been the most foolish advice.
They were told their original idea wouldn't work, and they were put in a highly stressful situation of having to come up with a new idea under a short deadline, with high expectations. It doesn't matter if PG was nice about it, there was an enormous amount of pressure put on them to do something to be worthy of their position, pushed along with the implied message that that's what founders do - they can make magic from thin air, instantly. The cult of the founder. It's no surprise that this made him stressed and unhappy. I wonder how many people have been through the same situation, with YC and beyond, but will not speak out.
Agreed that there's a ton of pressure and that can lead to unhappiness, stress, or worse. Doing startups isn't for everyone. Doing YC isn't for everyone. Doing YC with an idea that isn't working must be extremely unpleasant.
But pressure is the nature of startups whether you're in YC or not. And while YC knows a lot about good, bad, ugly startups and how to potentially fix things, it's fundamentally the founders' company and they have to make the decisions and execute. I don't think that's "founder worship" - it's just reality. Default state of the company is "dead". Good ideas and good execution are the only things that change that. It's not YC's company. They're there to help.
Anyways, we likely agree that the mental health downside of doing startups is poorly understood or appreciated so maybe let's leave it at that.
I read that story and the author's own comments on HN, and they do not support the argument that YC "forced" them to pivot. If anything, they barely knew what they were in YC for in the first place.
Actually, that's my point. They were accepted and told that their product was no good straight away, thus forcing them to pivot. So why were they accepted with a poor product, when other applicants who had stronger ideas were turned away?
A selection process that supposedly values the skills of the people over the combination of skills and product will lead to people like this guy not knowing why they were selected, and not being able to handle pivoting. It's something YC should stop doing before it causes real damage.
You keep saying they were forced to pivot as if you might convince by sheer repetition. They made the choice. They surely didn't have to. For that matter, if they wanted to drop out, they could have.
