In this interview, Ali Partovi and an unnamed speaker discuss the hidden emotional challenges of founding a startup. They explain how founders must constantly project optimism to investors, employees, and the press, even when they feel fear or uncertainty, creating a profound sense of loneliness. The speaker highlights the unique value of a co‑founder as someone who truly understands the founder’s anxieties, contrasting this with family support. They also dismantle the myth of "overnight success," recounting their three‑year struggle to launch a prediction‑market platform, which involved navigating complex U.S. securities regulations, answering hundreds of regulator questions, and repeatedly re‑working data analyses. By breaking the journey into short, two‑month milestones, they kept momentum and avoided being overwhelmed by the long‑term horizon. The conversation underscores that real startup progress is incremental, fraught with regulatory and product‑market‑fit challenges, and emotionally taxing, contrary to popular narratives of rapid triumph.
It's a very lonely experience because as a founder, you can't say that to the outside world. You have to project, you know, optimism to the outside world and you have to, whether you're raising money or recruiting employees or talking to the press,
right,
say a certain story. And then whatever you're personally aware of or afraid of, you have to just keep to yourself.
Yeah. And for me, it was always harder even because, so I think, for example, having a co-founder is one of the best things you can do. Because at least you have someone else to kind of, you know, freak out to, you know, in a way. Really, it's like the amount of value that is in just having someone that you can freak out to. Obviously, you can do that with your family and all of that, but it's different because your family, like, they don't really get it exactly what you're going through. For me, it was always harder too because I am supposed to be the optimistic one. So even if I was freaking out, I couldn't even do that in front of Tarek because if I even showed A little bit of I might be worried about this or it might not work out. Tark immediately would be like, oh my God, if you're saying this, it's game over. We're done. So it's always a complicated thing. But I think that there's a story of the overnight success. It's just like not a real thing. When we started, the biggest question with prediction markets actually was, can this be legal in the US? There were only 10 financial exchanges becoming one of them. And took 3 years. It was Awful, like right every day we would. Tarek says is that it's like you're climbing a mountain and you think the peak is right above you, so you keep climbing. And when you get there, you look up and you're like, shit, that was just a little like you know a little plateau, and I have like to keep going and keep going because it's just always harder than you think. And I actually think that helped us because we always thought we were close. So if you always have a next goal, it's a little easier. You're like, well, I know what I have to do for next one to two months. So it's a little easier than thinking about this is what we have to do for 3 years. It would've been, I don't know if we would've done it in a way.
Right.
It's a lot easier to think there's 1 to 2. So that helped us kind of get through this. And it's just like, it's 1 to 2 months, let's just push through it. We need to see it through. And then we'd go and then the government would like, here are the answers to your 100 questions. And they would be like, well, we agree with 5% of them. We have follow-up questions on 90% of them and we disagree with 5%. So we'd have to go and like rework everything and do more data analysis to show kind of how these markets behave and all of that. You would expect that anything that takes 3 years, it would be, you know, immediate product market fit.
Right.
Because it's like, imagine, okay, it's an FDA approval or whatever, right? But for us, it wasn't the case. It was, if we are able to get this done, which people thought it was like 1% chance it would get regulated, then we would, all we would have is the shot of trying to build this and trying to get product-market fit into this thing. It's not guaranteed that people like trading like this and that is actually a better, a better, a better way to do it. It's just that was our thesis at the time.
