The myth of the startup grind

This clip might ruffle some feathers.

When VC money was growing on trees, products in search of a solution were given oxygen. Product funding was propelled not by necessity but by the mere availability of capital.

Elad Gil wrote the essential High Growth Handbook, and this insight is essential watching for founders building in a post-ZIRP world.

"In general, there's undoubtedly a few counter-examples, but the things that I've seen work have worked very fast. Yes, they've worked very fast after launch. So, if somebody talks about grinding for many, many years after the product has been in the market, it could be consumer, it could be enterprise, it could be whatever, it usually means there's no market pull, which means the thing isn't going to work.

The trap that founders fall into is saying, well, 'Just one more thing I need to try,' and 'One more thing I need to ship,' and 'one more, one more,' and then suddenly four years have passed, and you haven't made much progress, and you could have told two years ago that it wasn't going to work.

So, I do think that there's a little bit of a myth in Silicon Valley that you should keep grinding no matter what, and it's just about the grind and it's just about the perseverance, and I think that's really bad advice because it's the best years of your life, right, and you're kind of burning them away grinding on something that's never going to work.

Now, there are counterexample stories to that, about the company that for five years was trying something and then changed direction and then suddenly it started working, and you're like yeah, it changed direction, right? It's not the same company or the same product or the same whatever, and so I think most of those things are actually proof points back to the same point, but they're kind of positioned as like an insight.

So, I think, in general, things that work tend to work pretty fast, and usually, that's within the first year of launch."