Founder Stories
Stop Reading Startup Porn
Most blogs about startups today could easily be classified as startup porn. Take an article like “When to Expand Your Business, According to This Successful Serial Entrepreneur.” The title alone should be a red herring. Instead of delivering the value premised by its title, the article offers up chestnuts like:
- “If you already own one company and are looking to start another, you have to first master these fundamentals: a great team, customer service, sales, and marketing.”
- “If you want to start multiple businesses, here’s something to keep in mind: You have to be self-aware.”
Something else to keep in mind: Anyone looking for practical advice about expanding their business won’t find it here. This is startup porn. And I want to offer an alternative to the Marker community, based on my experience.
I’ve started three companies. I’ve shut down one. I’ve been betrayed by a co-founder and pushed out. And yet, miraculously, that betrayal led me to sell my shares at exactly the right moment. It was an incredibly lucky outcome.
So I get that things aren’t always straightforward for founders. Our job is often to choose between a host of bad options — that’s the founder’s reality — and yet it’s hard to find nuanced perspective on those types of decisions, because it’s not the type of content that can be conveyed in a tweet. I’d love to change that by building a forum where I can give back some of the lessons I’ve learned over the years, instead of creating more startup porn.
With that in mind, let’s look at what startup porn is, why it sucks — and what you should read instead.
Startup porn: You know it when you read it.
Like any genre, startup porn can be classified according to certain characteristic features (or in this case, faults). Most notably:
- It doesn’t deal directly with the daily realities of running a startup. It rarely gets into the nitty-gritty that helps you move forward.
