How To Identify and Respond To Your Startup’s Haters

You need to understand them, but you don’t owe them anything

When you take big swings, some people are going to push back. Sometimes they’re right. Most of the time they’re wrong. Occasionally they’re idiots.

To level-set that premise with a simple real-world example, I want to start by globally responding to some of the pushback I’ve received for a post I wrote calling the startup ecosystem broken without providing the (required) proof as to why the startup ecosystem is broken.

And please note, this is not about me or my writing. I already hate myself for this response post, especially for those snarky parentheses in the last paragraph.

Those are just there to poke the haters.

Anyway, I went back to that post and re-read it a couple times, looking for where I went wrong. And I confirmed that, no, I wrote exactly what I set out to write. So I read it one more time. Then it hit me.

The problem wasn’t in the post, it was the expectations of the reader.

Is that my fault? Yeah, probably. Do I regret it?

No.

The thing is, I have provided a multitude of reasons as to why I believe the startup ecosystem is broken. I’ve…