A short excerpt from a YouTube talk by Jason M. Lemkin arguing that most startups experience a truly rough year and founders should not quit. He supports the claim with founder anecdotes, mentioning Duo Security (an exception) and Slack (originally Tiny Speck), recounting that Slack nearly failed, was built as a side project, and later had a $27 billion exit.
$27 billion
There's a few that I know. I remember I asked Doug Song, who founded Duo Security, which Cisco bought for a couple of billion. I'm like, what was your rough year? Well, actually, we didn't have one. He's the only one. But everyone else, every other founder I've ever asked on stage knows Stuart Butterfield, Slack. Slack almost failed as Tiny Spec. It started off as Tiny Spec. They lost all the money, right? But they didn't quit. They built Slack as a side project. Stuart offered to give all the money back to Andreessen. You can just Google this, He said. We failed at Tiny Spec. You want your money back? Andreessen said, this Slack thing looks pretty good. You're a good founder. Just go do it. Don't quit. Didn't quit. Had a 27 billion dollar exit, right.
