Baby Startups: Handle with Care

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I don’t know how humans haven’t driven themselves to extinction.

Breeding is easy, my unwed cousin can tell you that. But the resulting offspring have no survival skills whatsoever. A baby horse can run with the herd two hours after birth. A newborn human, left to its own devices, will crap itself and die.

Today was our final day at AOL’s First Floor Labs. As we were saying our goodbyes, I realized that everything had changed. No company was leaving with the same team they had six months ago. Some had vaporized completely. I’m not one to talk, because we are no longer the company we arrived with.

At my age, 6 months feels like nothing. For a startup, 6 months is a death-defying feat.

Paul Graham says that inexperienced founders and investors forget just how fragile startups are. We spend our days scheming ways to take over the world and forget basic care and feeding instructions in the process.

Startups are newborn babies, they need to be kept in incubators with adult supervision. We’ve moved out of our First Floor Labs office, but we’re going someplace bigger and better. In spite of our best efforts, we’re not dead yet.

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See Also:
The Best Way to Succeed is to Not Die

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