Justin Kan, founder of Twitch.tv, talks about why startups are mostly bad days. He describes the constant struggle: crises, scaling problems, fundraising stress, managing employees. The wins people post on social media are the tiny exception, not the rule.
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I think entrepreneurship is like 90% bad and— or like 95% bad days and like 5% like great things that happen, right? Or not bad days, but like 95% like struggling and like 5%, oh, you got like a New York Times article or you closed your financing or something good happened. The thing is that like on Facebook you just post those 5% of like good things, right? Mm-hmm. So it gives this very kind of unrealistic view of what you're actually doing on a day-to-day basis. Yeah. Most of the time you're dealing with things you don't want to do, like managing your employees or dealing with problems that come up. Basically, you're running from emergency and crisis to crisis. Like, the site went down, you can't scale, customers are deserting you in droves, you're running out of money and you're gonna die if you don't raise money, and so you have to go and beg dozens of VCs to, like, invest in you. Those are all the things that people, like, talk about only when they're already successful, which is, I guess, is what's happening now. Right. But most of the time they're not talking about it. Most of the time they're posting, like, all the, like, fun things that happen on Facebook.
