Slogging it out Silicon Valley style
You mean that I will have to keep working at this company after I start it? Lame.
Today's WSJ (login required) has a great article about Voltage Security and the less glorious side of founding and running a startup--the fact that you have to keep slogging away regardless of what's going on around you.
Every industry has its superstars and its sloggers, of course. But the tech industry of the late 1990s and earlier this decade has seen an unusual number of two-year cycles end with a lucrative sale or initial public offering. When that doesn't happen, the process can get so grueling and protracted that some VCs say they have to get creative to convince burned-out entrepreneurs not to bail.
The profile on Voltage's Sathvik Krishnamurthy is interesting as a parallel for many open source projects that have become companies. This hits home for my company, as Ross started Mule back in 2003 and we started MuleSource in 2006. Here we are some five years into and we are only now starting to really figure things out. The ability to weather the storm and make smart decisions is key to success, but *very* hard to execute on.
Disclosure: MuleSource shares two investors with Voltage, and Sathvik and I have been in the same place at the same time though I am not convinced that we have met.