Best post I’ve ever read about aqui-hires via Jason Freedman, co-founder of 42Floors (which seems to be doing quite well) and author of the excellent humbledMBA blog.
This part about when to give up really hit home for me:
The best reason to seriously consider giving up is if you yourself have lost your passion for this startup idea. Long before startups run out of money there is usually a moment where they run out of hope. It’s a sad time – I’ve been there several times.
This is exactly what happened with my first startup, TenthRow. After a year and a half of grueling effort, slow progress, and a whole bunch of mistakes by yours truly, I just couldn’t get excited about the concept anymore. Primarily because I just couldn’t convince myself that there was a way to make it work in a scalable way.
But I didn’t actually realize I had lost my passion for the concept until an investor pointed it out to me – he could see it in my eyes. But I didn’t give up for another 6 months or so, and it ended up being pretty damaging to me personally (financially and otherwise).
Wish I had listened to one of my investors about that part – he suggested I give up earlier than I did to avoid that kind of damage. But I wasn’t ready to embrace that at that point – I was determined to find a successful outcome of some sort. Lesson learned.
Never every startup can work out, and if you lose your passion for the idea, there’s no chance it’s going to work out favorably. That’s when it’s time to give up, as difficult as it may be to declare failure.
Will expand on this in a blog post at some point.
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