Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

Why Startups Are Thriving Again: Entrepreneur Insights

15 Sept 2024 · 1 min

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Jason M. Lemkin reflects on how the perceived risk of founding startups has changed over time: when he began, starting a company was nearly certain to fail and therefore "insane," but entrepreneurship has since become more mainstream and "productized," leading many people to pursue startups even in tougher times. He also recalls a period when tech jobs were scarce, prompting several smart peers (including himself) to go to law school temporarily before returning to entrepreneurship.

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Like, you know what's, what's interesting, and I'll answer your question. When I went into startups, you were insane. And to start one, you really had to be insane because there was 100% chance you would fail. Yeah. Now, like, now it's become productized. Even in these slightly tougher times. Hundreds. And everyone wants to start a startup. It's seen as risk free for a variety of reasons, but anyhow, there was a period of time when startups were dead and a bunch of folks of my era that were smart, which would never do it today, actually went to law school. I did it. David Sachs did it. Keith Raboy did it. Peter Thiel. I know there's a lot of PayPal ones, but there's a reason there's a whole bunch of other ones. David Hornick, who's at August and Lobby Capital, a lot of us sort of went in what did this because we were. There weren't a lot of tech jobs for a while. You think it's bad? Trust me. There were times when there were zero tech jobs. And then as we kind of came out, we realized, hey, we learned something, but we immediately wanted to get back into entrepreneurism.