On 20 March 2012 I read a paragraph by Chris Dixon. Rovio’s Angry Birds was their fifty second game. Pinterest called its first year catastrophically small. I posted the paragraph on my blog and added one line underneath it, “How true!”
I did not say what year I was actually in. By March 2012, Squirro was starting, built directly out of Memonic failing. Namics had already spent years clawing through what the dot com crash did to the agency business. Local.ch had already fought its way through a brutally competitive market to become the one that won. Three cycles of the same thing, two of them finished, one just beginning again, and all I wrote in public was two words agreeing that it takes a while.
Nobody needs convincing anymore that overnight success is a myth. Rovio’s fifty second game and Pinterest’s brutal first year are the two examples everyone already reaches for. CB Insights puts the real odds of a venture backed startup reaching a billion dollar outcome at about 1.28 percent. Everyone already knows the truth is grind, not luck on day one. That is not the confidential part of this story anymore. Saying so out loud is the safe thing to say.
The seemingly confidential part is what you do while you are still inside the grind. Research on entrepreneurship names this directly: The way many approach is “Fake it till you make it”. It is a documented, accepted norm in how some think startups get built. You claim traction before you have it because that is what gets you the next round, the next customer, the next hire. Until the fake catches up with reality. You never hear of those ones again.
The uncomfortable part is what never got closed afterward. Namics survived the crash. Local.ch won its market. Squirro took years after Memonic to become what Gartner calls the only European vendor with a notable GenAI offering. Three real outcomes. It’s the grind in-between that never gets much attention. And yes what Chris Dixon wrote “You tend to hear about startups when they are successful but not when they are struggling. This creates a systematically distorted perception that companies succeed overnight. Almost always, when you learn the backstory, you find that behind every “overnight success” is a story of entrepreneurs toiling away for years, with very few people except themselves and perhaps a few friends, users, and investors supporting them.” is today true as it was then.
If you have a post like mine sitting somewhere, one where you agreed with someone else’s startup truth, I would read it.
