Somewhere in the early 2000s, a software engineer at a small avatar-chat startup watched six months of work evaporate. His team had built an elaborate system for importing contacts from other messaging networks – the whole product hinged on the assumption that people would want to chat with their existing friends using 3D avatars. They’d…
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Nobody tells you, when you start a company, that the job is to become a stranger to yourself – not once, but five or six times over, on a schedule that has nothing to do with your readiness and everything to do with the organism you’ve built. The startup doesn’t care that you were good…
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You didn’t get laid off because you were bad at your job. This sentence circulates through professional networks with the force of revelation, and something in it rings true. The people who lose their positions in corporate reductions rarely match the profile we’d expect if merit drove the process. They include top performers, devoted employees,…
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If you collected the reasons startups fail and arranged them by what founders believe versus what the data shows, you’d find a striking mismatch. Founders tend to blame external forces – fierce competition, bad timing, market downturns. The evidence points inward. Most startups die from dysfunction that builds quietly inside: relationships that fracture, psychology that…
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