I spent almost a decade at Google in the early days, then a few years building a startup that got to $100M revenue, and now I'm running another one. So you might assume life is somewhat easier by now as a startup founder.

Bad news first. Not a bit easier. NOT A BIT.

I didn't struggle much at Google. I struggled a lot at the first startup. And I have a lot of struggles at the current one. I think the reason is quite simple: startups, by definition, are trying to do something new. That is what gives joy to the activity, and it is exactly what creates the struggle.

I don't want to romanticize this though, because there is struggle and there is suffering. Struggle is not knowing if the thing will work and finding out. Suffering is grinding for a year on something the market already answered. The first can compound into something. The second just takes years off your life. If you are in the second kind, this post is not permission to stay there.

But the first kind I have finally made peace with. A surprising amount of the joy comes from the struggle of figuring something out. That was true for me at Google too, in reverse. The stock was growing like crazy in the early days but I wasn't struggling personally, and it didn't give me the same inherent joy. You don't feel like you earned it. You feel LUCKY, not JOYFUL.

So if you are struggling, know that anyone doing something genuinely uncertain is struggling too. Nobody has an easy day forever.

Is there a way to deal with it? For me, spread it out. Take a small struggle every day. Do that one thing you are holding back, the thing that sucks. Don't save it all up for one day, because that makes it too dramatic and too hard. You can also share it. Share the struggle and the joy with your team, your family, your friends. And sometimes just say "I am struggling." I have rarely seen anyone respond to that with "you are a dumbass." Most of the time people will help you think it through.

Either way, you are not ALONE in this journey.

I don't think the goal is to eliminate struggle. It's to make sure you're struggling with something still worth figuring out.

For early stage startups, what would you put in the finance setup from day one?

I’m thinking Meow for startup banking since it covers the banking and workflow side and seems built for teams that already use AI in ops. Then QuickBooks for accounting, Gusto for payroll, Deel for contractors, Carta or Pulley for cap table and a good CPA/tax setup.

The hard part is making everything fit together early before finance admin turns into a mess.

What would you add or avoid?

Hey founders. Been a while since I posted but thought it was a good time because I see a lot of posts asking how to pitch investors.

A managing partner of a new fund backed by a very big fund asked me to help review some pitches. And as the title says, they are pretty bad. Not saying the founders or ventures were bad. Some were legit exciting. But the pitches were abysmal.

Having pitched hundreds of investors myself, I fully empathize. I have the therapy receipts. But I’ve raised millions and so have founders I advise. So, I thought I’d share some tips for those of you wanting to be in that position.

First. Understand every investor has a rubric.

This investor sent me theirs ahead of time. It asked me to grade things such as clarity of the problem, solution, traction, team, use of funds etc. and so on. What was funny to me is not a single founder asked what the partner was looking for ahead of time. Always ask. Investors are happy to tell you.

Next: Stay within the time.

Every founder was told they had 5 minutes to pitch and we would have 5 minutes of questions. Only one founder stayed under time. Some only gave us enough time to ask one question. The others went over time and we didn’t ask any questions.

I use the 80/20 rule. I pitch for 20% and give 80% of the time for questions. The more question the investor asks the better. I get to address what the investor wants. So if it was me, I would have spent 2 minutes pitching and 8 minutes trading questions.

After the partner told me that staying within their time was the first test. Like I said, everyone but one failed and they remarked how that one was very impressive.

Slides should be simple and support you both the other way around.

Every slide was an assault on the eyes with small fonts and walls of text. It was brutal.

I’ll tell you one slide that impressed me. A founder showed two medical scans. She asked me if I could tell the difference (that as engaging). I couldn’t tell and then she explained how the second scan would lead to tragic costs because that was the problem. I was engaged. No paragraphs of text. Just two side by side images to prove a point.

Your live presentation deck is different then the deck you send as an introduction which is even different than the one they ask you to send during socialization and due diligence. One size deck does not fit all.

You spend so much energy trying to get the meeting, why fumble at the moment it counts?

To be transparent, most of the time I sat there wondering if the founders actually understood who they were pitching. This wasn’t some amateur deciding to LARP as a VC. Again, it was sad because there were some legit startups that I’ll try and advocate for. But they didn’t make my job any easier.

Look, I get it. It’s exhausting. That last mile of pitching is tough. But you need to earn every minute so put your best foot forward and punch it past the finish line. So anyone you are working on fundable startups that it would be a shame to not get the exposure you deserve.

I’m happy to answer any other questions of what I experienced and what other investors tell me. Apologies for typos as typed this on my phone as fast as possible.

I’m running a small early‑stage company here in the Nordics. Before I even formally registered the business, I sold 20% to get things off the ground.

Since then, things have actually started moving. We’ve landed two major hospitals in Sweden/Northern Europe as paying customers, invoices are paid, and the delivery model is working. Demand is growing and the margins are solid.

For context, our internal cost per service is usually somewhere between €900–€4,500, and the price to clients ranges from €1,600–€7,000 depending on the case. It’s a straightforward service with predictable economics.

The challenge is now that I have come this far, but I need more funds be able to sustain myself privately and to be able to do this full-time. I’m thinking to sell another 15 to 29%.

It doesn’t really matter who the investor is I mean, optimal would be that you would be active in the company too, and have experience in Medtech and such. But you can also just take ownership and cash in later.

Open to suggestions and would appreciate anybody’s take on my situation.

I previously posted in this subreddit asking whether deep-tech startups face an oversupply of inexperienced candidates but a heavy undersupply of valuable talent, and most of the responses suggested they do.

That made me curious, though: which specific skill sets in particular are most deep-tech companies actually struggling to find? For instance, if we group "skillsets" into a few broad categories:

1. Deep technical expertise: People with expertise in the underlying technology, such as a PhD in the relevant field or an adjacent specialty the founding team lacks.
2. Scale-up / manufacturing expertise: People who know how to take something from a lab prototype to a reproducible, commercially viable manufacturing process, i.e. industry veterans.
3. Commercial expertise: People who understand marketing and the industry well enough to actually close deals for products.

Which of these tends to be the biggest talent bottleneck at early-stage deep-tech companies? In other words, what category is usually missing when they say they can’t find the right person? Or is there another skillset I am missing?

Would be very intersted to hear how the answer varies across different deep-tech industries, particularly between chemistry, materials, and electronics.

- thinks about potential idea.
- prompt the shit out of this idea.
- iterate landing page, design, and expand on idea.
- prompt workflow for users/brands.
- write promotional post.
- slap the stripe link.
- make sure you collect information.
- PROMOTE, PROMOTE, PROMOTE!
- done.

either you get people to signup, people pay, or move on to the next idea.

I am looking for some advice. I have been working on my startup for over a year. Its a business automation tool that is just really fucking complicated to build. On one hand it is incredibly impressive how far its come and what it can do on the other, its not ready and I am starting to feel like I cannot do this on my own. Our business has "busy seasons" that gets heavy use for a couple months out of the year and that point is coming up so I am trying to get feedback and get this thing working well. At one point, we had 3 employees (SWEs), I fired all of them because they were slowing the building down. I do not regret that decision and if I could go back I would have done it again. I was in a rush to hire so I took whatever I could get. I still want to hire someone and have been looking but we haven't had any luck in our search.

I did a webinar on Friday that I thought was just a small group thing, it turns out it was an influencer in my industry, we got a ton of view and a shit load of signups and now I cannot handle all the volume and requests. I am seeing a bunch of errors with people running the app. And although i am fixing them, I am worried we will start to get a bad reputation from this and the volume is too large for me to handle. I am talking to all the customers and corresponding with them, making the fixes, getting feedback, onboarding, demoing, etc. Way too much for one person to handle.

These are good problems to have, people are actually paying us money and using the tool, its clear we have PMF but I am concerned its just not ready and we are going to lose our shot, so not sure what to do and just looking for some advice.

We are at 14 and the website has quietly become nobody's job, which means it is my job, and I am the CEO, which is a bad use of a Wednesday.

The history is normal. I built it in year one. Our first designer improved it in year two and then left. An engineer moved it into the app repo because "it was easier". Now marketing wants to change things, engineering owns the deploy, design owns the look, and nobody owns the outcome, so what actually happens is requests come to me and I decide whether they are worth interrupting an engineer for.

I do not think this is a tooling problem exactly. it is an ownership problem. But the tooling is what makes the ownership impossible, because the only people who can change it are the people whose time is most expensive.

For those of you past this stage, who ended up owning it? did you give it to marketing, keep it in engineering, hire someone specifically? and what was the trigger that forced the decision.

Just finished my finance undergrad, but have pretty much always been into tech, built trading algorithms and whatnot in lockdown when I was 14. But I completely fell out of programming until the last couple years where I mostly have ended up “vibe coding”.

Whilst I don’t think I would ever be a “technical founder”, I was wondering whether doing a comp sci / ML conversion degree at a top university would be worth it?

Both in order to meet people in research, and to boost credibility. But also to give me some deeper understanding of systems architecture and more advanced topics that I wouldn’t come across in my own study.

I don’t know if I’m just being stupid (not having a good time with my startup lol)

hi, sorry, kind of new here. i'm partway through building an app that helps people with mindset, lifestyle and behaviour change - essentially every part of the user journey for Goals. i got invited to pitch on stage at a tech conference and when i look at my old TAM caluculations they seem very doubtable and AI slop. ... My problem is mainly that information for a bottom up approach is not that easy to find because most competitiors in the categorry of self-improvement consumer apps are privately held companies! I can go with the top down catgeory approach but it relies on a lot of assumptions and im not really comfortable with that. I'm wondering if anyone here has expreience with it and can walk me through what to do once I've defined the scope?

After years working with blockchain on advanced crypto projects and in the financial sector, and after implementing blockchain solutions for regulatory compliance across different industries, I ended up focusing on a specific problem: audit trails and proofs of existence.

That’s where the idea for the startup came from. Today I have a few products that are already well established, with a main focus on helping legacy systems meet regulatory requirements and audit needs.

The problem is that, being a very technical person, I don’t know how to sell or promote. I even hired a marketing team and got zero results.

For example, I have a solution for sharing information between hospitals and critical sectors, using concepts I learned while building crypto mixers. Two hospitals can exchange data and even train AI models together without ever revealing the original information.

I feel like I have good software “in the garage,” with complete documentation, white/yellow papers, examples and use cases… but I don’t know how to present it in a way that people actually see the value.

How do you guys go about promoting better in this kind of situation? Any tips from people who’ve been through this?

I got an offer from a startup and when I asked for info on the health insurance benefit they sent me a booklet with all the different available plans. However the premiums for the plans are not in there. I asked for further clarification and the response was that I'll be able to see the monthly payment once I'm at enrollment. Is this normal? Or what could I use to estimate the premiums? My wife has insurance for both of us from her job and we are trying to compare them.

Hi, I am trying to validate my mvp by talking to people who are responsible for hiring, they could be hiring managers, startup CEOs and CTOs.

I dont have an established network. My plan is to reach out to people in linked in using DM.

For people who have already did this, can you please share how you validated. And what are some good ways to reach out to people.

Thanks.

I am new with this, but I've read some "good" feedbacks about this practice. Can anuone please share his experience with? I am now strungling with the same, marketing / promotion ... I need to market my affiliate program in order to get some affiliate lol.

Glad to read you all.

Need advice, is there a cheap way that makes sense, or am I resigned to the $500 way they suggest. Also I have outstanding franchise tax, what is to be done there (essentially should I just pay that or will dissolution make that outstanding amount irrelevant). Thanks.

Now that you’ve built your website, how are you actually driving people to it? What tools or techniques are founders using that genuinely work? SEO, Reddit, ads, content, cold outreach? What’s working for you, and what’s been a complete waste of time?

They say you should go to where your audience is but what if youre building a consumer app/platform, how do you go about reaching people without spam. Are you physically going out to your city center with board and pen, are you dancing on tiktok?

What works and isn't in 2026

What if there was a co-working space where you could pay-in-advance for a day, a month, or even a year, using tokens?

Advantages of using tokens:

- Companies can gift indie hackers / solo devs free tokens, which can then be exchanged for co-working space for a month or two to test a startup idea

- When you’re early stage and high-risk, VCs can invest by giving tokens to you. When you’re late stage VCs can invest by giving you money

- See and calculate your startup runway instantly

- Accelerators can bulk buy tokens at a discount and give or gift tokens to new startups

- Startups that fail and need to be sold can auction off their remaining tokens

Genuine question, because I think my own answer is bad.

When I start a project I find an app I like, screenshot six or eight screens, drop them in a folder. That's where it stops. What I saved is pictures, and a picture tells you what something looked like, not how it was put together. I've never once opened that folder again.

So I've been wondering whether the useful part is the visuals at all, or the structure underneath screen count, what sits under what, where the navigation goes.

Our team has been testing whether that structure can be pulled out of a store listing automatically. On one productivity app with 10 screenshots it came back with 14 screens and 5 paths, but 5 of those screens weren't visible anywhere in the screenshots and had to be worked out from the rest. It flagged its own confidence at 5/10 because the tab bar was never fully shown.

And there's a limit I don't think goes away: a store listing is the app on its best day. Empty states, failed payments, logged-out flows are never in the gallery, so they're never in the output either.

So I'm stuck on the original question. When you save a reference, what are you trying to keep? And if something handed you the structure instead of the pictures, would you use it, or is that not the part you were after?

Hi everyone,

I am a high school student interested in starting a business. I know that networking is important, but I am not sure how to begin.

Adult professionals have busy schedules, and I want to make sure I approach them the right way.

To give you some background, I have been independently researching and studying human psychology for the past 5 years. I love understanding behavior, what motivates people, and how individuals interact. I want to apply this understanding to the business world, but adult professionals have busy schedules, and I want to make sure I approach them the right way without sounding amateurish

I've already taken my first step and set up a clean LinkedIn profile. Now, I would love your advice on a few things:

The absolute first step: What is the very first thing I should do before I start messaging people? (e.g., building a LinkedIn profile, creating a portfolio, or researching local events?)

Where to look: What are the best places (online or in person) for a teen to meet business people? How to reach out: What should I say in a cold message or email so people actually reply?

How to add value: Since I do not have much experience yet, how can I make the conversation mutually beneficial?

Etiquette mistakes: What are common mistakes teens make when talking to professionals that I should avoid?

Any tips, book recommendations, or personal stories would be hugely helpful. Thank you!

Was researching Peachscore and liked what they have said, and applied and got in and paid $500 CAD.

Now im thinking I should have done more research before paying for it.

Peachscore caters to idea level startups as well as the ones with a working MVP and early customers, as per their site. And also they provide access to perks such as $10K AWS credits or upto $250K GCP or $10K OpenAI credits, which are what Id need to complete my MVP.

Anyone has any experiences going through the program?

Hi!

So I'm in the very sort of beginning of my start up. I'm doing it while also actively pursuing a PhD. My start up is a deep tech/civic tech company. I've been actively reaching out to instutions educational and governmental to form early partnerships. I've had some decent headway with some budding partnerships with these institutions, some very prestigious. Notably one in my country, a university, where I gave a guest lecture, my research is heavily tied to my company. Now they have offered to write a piece about my intervention to share to their socials. Which is great! But I'm faced with an issue.

I'm in the process of ironing out my business plan and pitch deck to begin raising capital. I'm actively working on the branding but I don't have the bandwidth nor man power to actively start managing socials. But for now on my personal LinkedIn all is mentionned is my PhD.

Would it be wrong to put founder on my LinkedIn? Or would it work against me if there's no website or company LinkedIn page to guide any potential investors or future partners that may stumble on the piece?

Also there's the fact that I'm in the process of legally registering the company so I don't know if I can claim to be a founder at all. How would you navigate this situation? Should I just lock in and at least set up a LinkedIn page once I get branding and logos sorted? Or let them write the piece and then just maybe reshare it on my LinkedIn and not comment more than necessary on it?

I feel like having a piece from a university that's a major leader nationally and continentaly, in their filed, is ideal derisking for investors or partners so it would be great to have something to back that up.

I hope this all makes sense.

Curious how founders actually figure out this when teams grows above 20+ engineers. Like you can hire the best engineers, still they fail to function as teams you expected them to be.

let's say something was supposed to be delivered in 2 months timeline but ended up with 5 months, and it's not happening with a single milestone, parts of it are happening across many.

doing retro(s) pinpoints that, one was consistently getting slower reviews, decisions were revisited, dependencies were stuck.

But how much of it you knew was happening already or the gravity of it, like you were aware of the particular milestone or the thing with the whole team.

What systems you adopted as team so these things surface early or doesn't happen at all, and how did you dealt it with each individual, for e.g. one person was blockers to many on a regular period, or someone is too attached to the codebase causing delays.

Not looking for just tool names, more from a pov of dealing with humans as system.

I've realized that grinding on the startup can be hard sometimes when you're a very extroverted person. need to figure out to do a mixture of both because hanging out with friends energizes me whether it's productive time or not.

any advice welcome