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Entrepreneur Epidemic: Second Startup Syndrome

doctor

You’re successful. An entrepreneur who nailed your first startup, raising tons of VC and creating a great product. You feel like a regular Mark Zuckerberg.

But now you’ve come down with a serious condition: Second Startup Syndrome. Warning: This needs to be treated immediately.

BY Austin Carr1 minute read

doctor

You’re successful. An entrepreneur who nailed your first startup, raising tons of VC and creating a great product. You feel like a regular Mark Zuckerberg.

But now you’ve come down with a serious condition: Second Startup Syndrome. Warning: This needs to be treated immediately.

According to Ben Horowitz, cofounder of venture cap firm Andreessen Horowitz, Second Startup Syndrome “occurs when an entrepreneur wants to pick up her second startup right where her first startup left off.” As Horowitz explains, this condition starts when entrepreneurs believe they can simply continue their wave of success rather than starting from scratch–that is, founding a startup based on the right product and the right market.

“During this period, there is no glamour and very little breadth–the company must be narrow,” Horowitz prescribes on his blog. “Serial entrepreneurs who suffer from Second Startup Syndrome want to skip through the narrow early steps and move quickly to more exciting topics such as long-term strategy, sales and marketing, company positioning, company culture, and more. Unfortunately, when you build a house, it’s usually a very bad idea to start with the roof.”

The most telling symptom of Second Startup Syndrome is a lack of anxiety. Finding success with a new startup, Horowitz believes, should always be difficult, stressful, and never certain–there is no way to skip the grueling side of the process. However, “all those things that you go through,” he says, “turn out to be good.” After all, success always requires you to “sweat the details” and put in the hard work.

Other symptoms, as Horowitz describes in WebMD fashion, include:

•”The company assumes that the first product will succeed and spends more time figuring out business models and monetization strategies than developing the core product idea.
• The company becomes obsessed with the things that went wrong in their last company and focuses entirely on how to rid the new company of these mistakes. If the previous company was successful, the entrepreneurs often ignore what went right and focus on what went wrong.
•The company glosses over important details assuming that what worked the first time will automagically work the second time.”

What about you? Do you have Second Startup Syndrome?

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Austin Carr writes about design and technology for Fast Company magazine. More


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