disruption.ca

In January I read a blog post on likely causes for failure in a tech startup. This article resulted in a comment thread on Y Combinator’s Hacker News that I found to be particularly interesting.

The conversation starts with Joel Spolsky stating that the real reason why startups fail is because their founders give up.

The response to this is; yes, and their real cause of death is always heart failure. Why do founders give up?

Paul Graham replied:

The biggest reason founders stop working on their startups is that they get demoralized. Some people seem to have unlimited self-generated morale. These almost always succeed. At the other extreme there are people who seem to have no ability to do this; they need a boss to motivate them. In the middle there is a large band of people who have some, but not unlimited, ability to motivate themselves. These can succeed through careful morale management (and some luck).

Then a later in the conversation he said:

There seems to be some tendency of never-give-ups to cluster, but it’s not absolute. It’s common to have one founder who’s super determined and another who is less so.
If the never-give-up is sufficiently convincing, that’s almost as good as having all never-give-ups. He drags the rest along. The dangerous case is the startup that has all middle of the road founders. These have to get lucky fairly quickly or they give up.

This struck me as really deep, important stuff. I was surprised that it didn’t receive more attention from the Y Combinator community. Apparently Joel also found the discussion interesting, and wrote about it in his Inc. Magazine column.

In a nutshell, Graham’s observation is that if you have “unlimited self-generated morale” you will almost always succeed. If you don’t, you need to get lucky fairly quickly or you risk becoming demoralized and giving up.

When I read this I immediately wanted to know what the difference was between those in the first category and those in the second. Unfortunately, the discussion thread didn’t offer much useful insight and I didn’t find an answer to my question.

I recently started Carol Dweck’s book Mindset. Her theory is that people view the world with two different mindsets. People with a “growth” mindset believe that their abilities and intelligence can improve over time through hard work and challenging situations. People with a “fixed” mindset believe that their abilities and intelligence are innate and fixed. This difference may seem relatively minor, but according to Dweck’s research it has deep implications for how a person deals with challenges.

Here are some quotations from the book. I appologise for the lack of context.

The more depressed people with the growth mindset felt, the more they took action to confront their problems, the more they made sure to keep up with their schoolwork, and the more they kept up with their lives. The worse they felt, the more determined they became!

Also interesting:

People in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on it.

Finally:

Students with the fixed mindset stayed interested only when they did well right away. Those who found it difficult showed a big drop in their interest and enjoyment. If it wasn’t a testimony to their intelligence, they couldn’t enjoy it.

Sound familiar? I don’t know if Dweck’s growth mindset is the key to Graham’s unlimited self-generated morale, but the dots seem to connect.

Dweck’s theories appear to be backed by sound research. Also, she claims that it is possible to learn the growth mindset, which is encouraging. I’m looking forward to the rest of the book.

Links:

• Paul Buchheit discusses Dweck’s research
• Wikipedia’s Article on Mindset
• Mindset Online
• Buy Mindset from Amazon (Not an affiliate link.)