Fab's fall from grace and the difficulty of startups

2014-11-22 1 min read

    The recent news that PCH is set to acquire Fab reiterates how difficult startups are. So many startups strive to get an investment and believe that once they raise a round everything will get easier. That’s when things get difficult. Instead of focusing on achieving product market fit you start worrying about market share, competition, company culture, recruiting, process, which require a completely different skillset than what you started with. And to add to that you’re now accountable to a growing list of employees, shareholders, and customers. When I was working on my first startup I really thought that being able to get funding was the measure of success. Now I realize how naive that view was and how much more there actually is. Fab raised over $330M and wasn’t able to grow into a successful business despite undertaking massive pivots. There are probably thousands of founders claiming that they’d be able to succeed with that kind of money without realizing how difficult it actually is.