Marc Andreessen says entrepreneurship is romanticized but brutal: persistent rejection, sudden threats, product failures. People should only do it if they can't not do it, like running an ultramarathon.
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You know, it's a little bit less now, but there have been times when the idea of being an entrepreneur and, you know, tech entrepreneur has been like a romanticized concept. And, you know, there used to be TV shows talking about how much fun it was. And. And, you know, I. You know, I have people ask questions like, well, how do we. How do we encourage more people to be entrepreneurs? My answer was always was like, no, we shouldn't do that. Like, people shouldn't be encouraged to do something that painful. They should do it because they really want to do it. In fact, they should do it because they can't not do it, right? So I'm not an endurance athlete, but it would be a little bit like encouraging somebody to do a triathlon or an ultramarathon, right? Like, yeah, why don't you go out there and run 120 miles in the heat? Right? Like, no, like, that's bad. No, most people should not do that, but the people driven to do that should do that. And by the way, the people driven to do that will do that, right? For their own reasons. And so it really is like that. And, yeah, and then, look, it's tremendously painful. You know, most of the experience of being in business in a competitive setting and a startup is sort of the peak version of that is most of it consists of basically being told no, you know, by everybody. You know, you need all these things, right? You need employees, and you need, you know, financing, and you need customers. And, you know, you go around all day long asking people for those things, and they tell you no, or, you know, half the time, they don't even respond. You know, they just go dark on you and ghost you. And then, you know, just when you think you get it working, a new competitor emerges and just starts, like, you know, punching you square in the face. And, you know, the minute you think your product's working, there's a problem in it. You have to do a recall. And every, you know, just. Yeah, it's just this constant. It's just kind of this constant rolling, you know, horror story.
