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Elon Musk’s warning to startup founders: "it can be very painful for several years”

January 11, 2024

Elon Musk is famous for saying, “Trying to build a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.”

In the clip below, he elaborates on this further:

“What tends to happen is that it’s quite exciting for the first several months. Then reality sets in: things don’t go as planned; customers aren’t signing up; the technology or product isn’t working as well as you thought… It can be very painful for several years.”

He continues:

“Occasionally there are companies where there’s not an extended period of extreme pain, but I’m not aware of many.”

He advises people starting companies:

“Expect quite a long period of high difficulty. But if you can stay super focused on creating the absolute best product or service that really delights your end customer you have a better chance of succeeding… If your customers love you, your odds of success are dramatically higher.”

Paul Graham and the other Y Combinator partners captured this well in a diagram they drew at YC dinner called the “Trough of Sorrow”.

It captures a viscerally truthful thing about the life of a new company—first you’re excited, then you’re not, and if you stick with it, you just might make it work. It could take years. But you may fail too, you never know until you do it.

With respect to dealing with this uncertainty, I like a16z partner Andrew Chen’s advice in his “Trough of Sorrow” blog post:

“It’s ultimately the entrepreneur’s personal decision to quit, because there’s always some alternative scenario, as unpleasant as it might be. You can always dilute yourself more, raise more capital, or reduce the burn rate. It can add more time to the clock, which might be unpleasant, yet it might save the company. Is it always logical to do that? Maybe, and maybe not! But it’s worth considering that there’s always another move, and an entrepreneur shouldn’t ever feel like they’re somehow “forced” to quit.

A lot of entrepreneurs quit when they hit the Trough of Sorrow, struggle for 12-24 months, and face up to the reality that they’ll have to raise another dilutive round. Is this a good time to quit? Maybe. But given that the majority of startups go through this kind of stage, I’d actually argue that it’s just part of struggle to being successful. Sometimes it just takes 3 years to get through the Trough of Sorrow, but on the other side is something that might really be worth the pain. Maybe :)”

But what I love most about the Elon clip is that it emphasizes that this is something even the most successful entrepreneurs go through. You are not alone.