Lovinsky: Startups fail from loss of stamina before running out of money
Noam Lovinsky · The happiness and pain of product management | Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, FB, Thumbtack, YT) · Mar 17, 2024 · at 19:57
Former Thumbtack Chief Product Officer Noam Lovinsky discusses how psychological exhaustion kills early-stage companies and teams faster than running out of capital.
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“What kills most projects, most early companies is, is stamina. And I think that you know we all need to work on, you know, kind of being more resilient about kind of like, I remember at Thumbtack, Marco, the CEO, we used to say that it feels like we're running uphill and chewing glass. And you kind of like, that's right. Like we want to do that. That's good. That's good for us. We're take, take our medicine. So you want to practice that sort of resiliency, but ultimately I think that what starts to happen is you start to lose the stamina. And you're just not bringing your best self to the, ah, to the situation. And so many of these things that are like so high ambiguity where you don't know exactly what to build or you don't know exactly, you're not getting the signal you need or the feedback you need to be able to hone it in and know that you're doing something well. They require like just an ungodly level of faith and stamina. And so I, that's sort of like what I look to when you see like a team That is motivated. That is building something like they, they're really excited about. I mean, just like the inertia, the quality, like just everything. It's just, it's like a whole different game where when you see a team that's sort of like down and out and they've, you know, they, they've really, they've been hitting their head against the wall for a long time. Sometimes they just need like a change of scene, a change, change of pace. And they get to like a much better situation. So my honest answer is, is yeah, it's the, When do you run out of steam is usually the question. And I think that happens usually before you know, like in the startup case, a lot of times before you run out of money or, you know, these other things.”
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