Walking Through Mud

Friction is the baseline

There’s a lot of romanticizing in starting a company. About the hero founders, bold leaps, and innovative decisions. But the reality is closer to a long trudge through mud.

When I’m asked about my takeaways from my first company, I’ve emphasized a lot of answers that you’ve heard before. Most of it is repeating the same collective wisdom that floats through the startup zeitgeist. Well-worn, broadly correct, and easy to recognize.

• Focus on your customers.

• Build something people want.

• Distribution beats product.

• Know when to say no.

• Don’t lie to yourself.

• Do things that don’t scale.

• Do things that scale.

• All technical problems are people problems.

• Embrace the suck.

You’ve heard these before. But until you live through them, they sound like banal platitudes. They sound good in a tweet or a clip, but the best lesson is in the deep and visceral pain of the experience.

The pain of releasing a product you poured yourself into, that customers ultimately don’t care about.

The pain of the churn notification from one of your biggest customers.

The pain of talented people choosing not to work at your company.

The pain of laying off talented people because you missed your growth goal.

The pain of deep interpersonal conflicts that seeps into the team.

The pain of competitors taking customers you fought hard for.

The pain of hearing “no” over and over and over again, until it starts to sound like background noise.

These are the parts that don’t make it into the stories. At some point, the pain stops being surprising and starts becoming familiar. It won’t go away, but you’ll recognize it as a part of the terrain.

None of this is meant to detract from the entrepreneurial path. For some people, there’s a deep, almost visceral urge to be in the arena. They’d rather struggle toward something uncertain than remain comfortable in something static.

But a level of expectation should be set going into it.

If you can embrace the suck and have the courage to push through it, there’s an incredible level of fulfillment on the other side.

I hate losing. I hate losing more than anything. I hate losing more than I like winning.

That’s the paradox. Many founders share this trait, yet they choose to operate in a domain littered with the countless bodies of failed startups. Only a small percentage ever make it to something that looks like success. The odds are visible, the data is public, and still, people enter. I have enormous respect for the builders of the world that take the leap.

There’s so much material on how to start and run a successful business. Books, podcasts, blogs. Much of it is worth consuming if only to recognize known patterns and build a strong scaffolding on the collective philosophy.

But it doesn’t substitute for lived experience.

You won’t truly understand until you step into the arena. Until you make the same mistakes countless others have made before you. Until you feel the weight of decisions that don’t have clean answers.

So my advice ends up sounding the same as most of what you’ll hear, because it is. You will make mistakes. You will experience failure. There’s no shortcut.

But if you can embrace the suck and if you can find the courage to keep moving forward when the path feels slow, lonely, and unrewarding, you’ll give yourself an advantage.

Not because the mud disappears. But because you learn how to walk through it.