Mountain and summit

Deciding to take a career break for six months, I spent the whole time with my family, and a lot of things shifted in my mind. Sometimes, finding peace requires simply sitting and reflecting, a process that can ultimately make your comeback stronger.

During this break, I decided to start writing and sharing my views on startups, culture, products, designs, and other topics that interest me. While books and travel help to find new perspectives, nothing quite matches the lessons learned through firsthand experience. Sharing the experience is a part of startup culture.

Doing a startup, especially for the first time, feels like attempting to summit a mountain whose height you don't even know. Nowadays, it’s becoming more and more difficult to succeed in the startup world. For every idea, there is likely someone across the globe already doing it. Competition has never been harder before.

As founders, we are watching notable startups like Open AI, Stripe, Slack, Notion, etc. I’m calling them 8000-meter summits, which are too hard to discover and difficult to climb. These are the summits we aspire to conquer, but reaching them requires the ultimate test of endurance, skill, and mental resilience. By setting your sights on 8000ers, it’s great, but along the way, you will face numerous challenges and stress.

Aiming for 8000-meter summits sometimes is more stressful than beneficial in the long run. Less than 1% of founders can reach it with their first try. You need to train on small peaks before 8000ers; even if you reach 1000 meters for the first try, it could be a wonderful achievement. To become an 8000-meter climber, you need to be trained a lot on different small mountains and peaks; on average, it could take 5-6 years of training and then 5-6 years of climbing to reach 8000ers.

Using a climbing strategy for your startup means daily incremental progress. Doing great work requires laser focus on a few pillars in the initial stage. Sometimes, founders are trying a lot of different things hoping to find shortcuts. Even if you are very lucky, your first attempt to reach 8000ers in a 5-year span is only 0.003%. From day one, you need to be ready for hard work and durable patience to reach your summit.

Climbing an unknown size of mountain with a lot of climbers could be more distractions than an advantage. In the early stage, more team members does not mean you are increasing the chance to summit. First, you need to find if you are on the right mountain, then you need to look up and find if it has a summit, which you are looking for. Great products are shipped with a top-notch team under 5 members. Until the first 2 years of climbing, you should be focused on talking with customers and making as many iterations as possible. After finding product-market fit, congratulations, you reached the base camp of your mountain.

At every new camp you need to stop for a some amount of time for acclimatization.

I hope to share my views here with those who might be starting their climbing right now. If you have any comments or opinions on this blog, I'd be happy to hear from you. The best way to reach me is on X / Twitter or LinkedIn.