Naval Ravikant on shutting down a startup

November 22, 2024

“One thing I’ve learned myself the hard way, is that it is easier to tear down a company and restart it in Silicon Valley, than it is to constantly try to pivot or keep something alive. There’s very little stigma associated with capital loss or shutting down and restarting. And investors want to back entrepreneurs of experience. They know how difficult it is.”

He continues:

“It is so difficult to build something brand new that the world has never seen and to break through the noise and to get people to pay for it, to make an institution… It’s so difficult to do that. Very, very, few people succeed in the first go around. For every person you heard who succeeded in the first go around, they actually did five, ten other things at the same time or before. Even Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs—it wasn’t just their first thing. They built many projects along the way. They just started younger than you, and they parallel tracked, and they got lucky, and they were good.”

Investors know this:

“As an investor, you do want to back previously failed entrepreneurs. The ideal is to find someone who’s failed through no fault of their own or as little fault of their own or they’ve learned their way past it. Either the whole sector failed or there was a cofounder that’s no longer with them or there was a particular shot or a bet that they took and they followed the bet properly. The bet didn’t pay off and they realized it didn’t pay off and they moved on. But it’s easier to start over. So trying to cling with your fingernails onto something that’s not working, can waste a lot of your time.”

Naval Ravikant: “Networking is overrated... Do something great and your network will instantly emerge. “Don’t spend your time doing meetings unless you really, really have to. I really think networking is overrated. There’s all these articles about how you’ve got to network more, and it makes me want to vomit.” (full article).

Naval Ravikant explains why startup founders should be able to code “You guys should be coding from the start. Web and mobile startups are so competitive right now. You have to assume that anything you’re doing, there’s a team of 2-4 dedicated, hardcore hackers working 24/7 on something extremely similar.” (full article).

Naval Ravikant: “Human creativity is non-linear” “You just need to figure out how to get a small number of very innovative people in the same idea space together and cooperating with each other to create the next round of institutions… A few dozen, a few hundred, a few thousand people can come up with the right ideas that will completely change things for everybody.” (full article).