Jon WestenbergI know startups are cool right now. They’re incredibly hot, they’ve broken into the mainstream spotlight and not a day goes by that we don’t read about some young 20-something who quit their job and made a billion dollars.
And you want to be just like them, don’t you. You want to build that indefinable entity, a startup. And you want to be a golden ticket holding super genius.
Maybe you’ve spent too long watching Silicon Valley, or you’ve read too many middle-class-comfortable-rags-to-riches stories about young white kids who became incredibly wealthy.
Well, fuck you.
Do you know what a startup actually is? It’s a business, pure and simple.
What you’re doing isn’t anything more important than the work that a hundred thousand immigrants did when they reached Australia in decades past. They set up shop and they sold something.
A startup isn’t magical, and it’s not glamorous, and you don’t get a free pass to the world just because your business has a domain name with “.ly” or “.co” stuck on the end and you’re building an iPhone app.
Building a startup doesn’t make you a special snowflake
1. Startup founders are not owed shit.
I’ve seen this more than a few times. Young founders who set up donation pages to pay their rent because they’re focused on building their startup.
Like they think the world owes them something purely by virtue of their career choice.
No. This is not the case. Do you think the founders of any of the major companies that you look up to were expecting people to give them money just so they could build something?
This isn’t a charity. The world doesn’t owe you admiration, forgiveness or donations.
The same thing applies when you treat the rest of the world like collateral damage or non-player characters.
Disruption isn’t actually a word that means “making the world a better place” — and if you’re not making the world a better place, it doesn’t owe you anything.
