TechCrunch vs. Reality

I started this thread on Reddit /r/startups and was upvoted to the top and was on the front page. I think the discussion is interesting.

Being more involved in the startup community as an employee, then founder and also an active investor in the past couple of years, I have concluded that what people read on TechCrunch ( I mean the tech press in general. But these days TechCrunch == Tech Press) is pretty far away from the reality.

You’ve heard about those stories about the 25M in funding for the next Mark Zuckerberg’s company, a company that has figured out their growth path or a company that has been acquired and their investors are pleased with the outcome.

But in reality? The company with 25M of funding still hasn’t launched for years, the company that *figured out* their growth path couldn’t scale up at all after receiving their 4.3M series A and shut down after 18 months with their expensive 36K/mo lease hanging. The company who got acquired barely paid back their investors. These stories keep repeating themselves. They appear to be really badass and successful on TechCrunch. Under the hood, it’s a lot of struggle and frequently, a lot of fuck-ups.

At the end of the day, getting on TechCrunch won’t save your business or make you more successful. You have to actually make it work and it’s very hard. Those overnight growth stories usually take years to happen (Pinterest, Evernote, AirBnB and etc.) with a lot of bumps on the road.

If you wonder why your startup founder life is so much more difficult and mundane than the ones featured on TechCrunch, I can tell you that their lives are equally difficult and mundane. It’s just less newsworthy to write how creating a startup oftentimes involves incessant coding, bug fixing, cold calling customers, trying out 10 different marketing strategies and seeing which ones work, dealing with personnel problems, legal bills, asking 100 investors for money and meeting payroll. These things are boring, not scalable and not exciting to write about. Yet, that’s the everyday life of an entrepreneur.

So don’t compare your startup to the ones on TechCrunch. Focus growing your business and knowing your customers, users and competitors. Build products people want. Make things happen and be the change you want to see in the world.

UPDATE: I believe TechCrunch has tremendous value for companies that get featured and it’s a good place to know what’s going on in the tech space. My point is that people should read these stories with a grain of salt. Instead of forming an opinion on how startups work by reading TC, people really need to be actually involved in creating and investing in companies to really know what it’s like.

UPDATE 2: An alternative to knowing approximately how startups work is to read Jessica Livingston’s Founders at Work. It’s less news-y but more informative than TechCrunch if you are interested in starting up your owncompany.

Read more on the reddit thread.