The thing that most people don’t realize is that startups are harder than they think, and that they think they’re an exception (which you sorta have to believe to even start a company in the first place)

I used to go to networking events in SF and I’d meet all these new starry-eyed founders

And within a year, they’d all left SF or shut down their companies

I now know maybe 50 founders who have shut down or left their companies. They just like quietly disappear from the SF scene

There’s a reason why people say “99% of startups fail”, it’s true. Even once you hit 8 or 9-figures in revenue, long-term success still isn’t guaranteed 

The ones that have stuck around are some of the same few that I first met when I  moved to SF 3 years ago and we’re all doing fairly well