Dharmesh Shah explains why starting a company is harder now: everyone knows the basics like liquidation preferences and viral loops, so founders can't stand out on knowledge alone. Technical barriers have dropped, flooding the market with startups competing for talent and capital. The real bottleneck is hiring the right people and keeping them as you scale.
Chapters
What's the hardest thing you think today about being an entrepreneur? A couple of things. I think this is both good news and bad news. The good news is that there's so much literature and content and knowledge that's out there shared around venture term sheets and just about every startup topic you could imagine. There's lots of good stuff out there. So I'm startup stuck on. But the downside to that is that now things that entrepreneurs could have legitimately used as excuses, like, well, I just didn't know about that or whatever, this entire body of stuff that you're supposed to know, because that's like the table stakes have gone up, essentially, in terms of because the content is out there. Like, if you're not If you're not reading it, I guarantee you— You don't know what a liquidation preference is?
Exactly.
You don't know how to do the viral loop? So it's just harder to stand out, right? And the other thing is easier— not easy, but easier to start a company. Not easier to build a company, but easier to start a company. Right. So just the raw competition for talent, to some degree competition for capital, although that seems to be relatively plentiful. Most problems most startups have fundamentally come down to people. They're all people issues. Do we even know what the right people are? Can we attract them? If they're not the right people, will we know it? Will we be able to act on it? You know, how do we scale that? How do we continue to kind of fill the bus up with the the right kinds of people. And as you grow, it's harder because, you know, everybody wants to hire like scrappy entrepreneurial types, right? That's a different recruiting process today than when you were 10 people.
And if you bring a scrappy person in, they might not be appreciated as much as when you were a 20-person company. Totally.
