Naval Ravikant on shutting down a startup

Also, one thing I've learned myself the hard way, is that it is easier to tear down a company and restart it in Silicon Valley than it is to constantly try to be pivot or keep something alive. There's very little stigma associated with capital loss or shutting down and restarting. And investors want to back entrepreneurs of experience. They know how difficult it is. So one of the common complaints you hear from people who know nothing on Twitter is they say, oh, you know, you're backing failures and losers. No wonder venture capital doesn't work. No, it is so difficult to build something brand new that the world has never seen and to break through the noise and to get people to pay for it, to make an institution. And once it becomes an institution, then it's like a money printing and product printing machine that's almost hard to stop in the other direction. It's so difficult to do that that very, very, very few people succeed in the first go around. For every person you heard who succeeded in the first go around, they actually did five, 10 other things at the same time or before. Even Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. It wasn't just their first thing. They built many, many projects along the way. They just started younger than you and they parallel track and they got lucky and they were good. So as an investor, you do want to back previously failed entrepreneurs. The ideal is to find someone who's failed through no fault of their own or as little fault of their own, or they've learned their way past it. Either the whole sector failed or there was a co founder that's no longer with them, or there was a particular shot or a bet that they took and they followed the bet properly. The bet didn't pay off and they realized it didn't pay off and they moved on. But it's easier to start over. So trying to cling through with your fingernails to something that's not working, it can waste you a lot of time.