Andrew Lacy
speaker
125 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Andrew Lacy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And if you don't have a co-founder, I'm in a number of groups now, entrepreneurial groups. And I think there's always people asking for advice, including myself. And then just having a community of people that have gone through that experience, I think is really valuable.
Co-founder is the closest relationship to marriage. 50% of all marriages end up in divorce. A certain number of marriages end up in accommodation, right? Where you sort of live together, but you're maybe not in love. And then some of them are really happy. And I think probably the co-founder relationship is similar, probably has similar stats too. So it's really hard.
It's not a panacea of everything. And if that co-founder relationship ends up being a relationship of friction, it's almost the worst possible thing because then you don't have... This person that you would normally confide in, the problem is with them. But I still think net-net, there's something about going through that experience together.
You're giving birth to a child that is a new business or venture. And I think just because a lot of those relationships don't end up well doesn't mean you shouldn't aspire to find that, I think, when you go out there and figure out what to do.
Because that sounds like... I was still on this path to learn things. And after we sold that company, I figured what I didn't want to do was jump into something straight away. I said, well, what can I do? What's that fun problem-solving thing to do that will help me be more capable in the future if I want to do another company?
I thought, well, why don't I learn how to code because that's the one part of the startup business I never fully understood. So I was fortunate enough to just hire someone to tutor me one-on-one. Just like learning a language tutored one-on-one, you can learn pretty fast. And so I really sort of got into it. And I'm not really good at learning from books. I like to do things.
And so most of my learning was applied, which is like, hey, let's pick a problem and see if we can solve this problem. And so we picked a problem at the time, which was a vertical search problem, searching inside certain domains. And I just remember one day I looked up sort of six months into this process and I had a few other people working for me on this problem with me.
And I realized that I was sort of inadvertently had started another company. And that's sometimes how companies start to, you know, not with a lot of thought. It's just passion again for like solving a problem. Actually, not even with a particular amount of thought for like whether this problem deserved to be solved, which is, if anything, the problem with that second company.
But that's how that came about. Back in those days, there wasn't a lot of entrepreneurship in France. So I found a bunch of misfits because it was not very common to get into entrepreneurship there. And we also hung out in a little office there and we cranked out code.
the French lifestyle is very funny because on the weekends or in the evenings, there's a lot of societal pressure to not be working actually. And I don't think this reflects startups today, but back then when we did that. And I remember, you know, if my website broke after like 7 or 8 p.m., it was like good luck finding any engineers on the team that could ever fix it.
That was finally my graduation from Coding Academy, jumping online and trying to fix a website when I couldn't get in touch with anyone because probably all their friends and family were telling them, don't answer the call from the boss. He's trying to get you to work too hard. So that was my sort of French experience. In a lot of ways back then, much harder to build a startup over there.
But it was a fun experience to do it in the context of a different culture.
And I don't believe that that's just because we are, I mean, we probably are those type of people, but it's becoming a more and more unpopular thing to say. But building a startup is really hard. And it's hard in the sense that you often have a limited amount of time and money to reach a milestone. And you're competing against companies that have way more resource than you do.
And so like really the only... benefit that you have is to move fast. That's the only way that you can really thread that needle. And moving fast implies working really hard. And people these days, I think, are looking for a way to do entrepreneurship somehow while maintaining a level of balance. If they can do it, they're a better entrepreneur than I am. I think it's really difficult.
I try and find balance over like my long term, work really hard for five years and take two years off. And the challenge is with different cultures, some cultures are more open and excited about you making career shifts and reinventing yourself. But that's sort of at this macro level. At the sort of more micro level, we face so much pressure from the society that we're in.
There are certain cultures out there. If you're working too late, all your friends who are out having beers or drinking and they're like, oh, look at you, you're stupid. Why would you do that? If you're the CEO, maybe you get more of a pass. But if you're working for the CEO, let's say you're an engineer, they're taking advantage of you.
Or it's your mother or your parents that are like, oh, you're working too hard. Why would you do this? You're going to kill yourself. And that sort of slowly erodes that entrepreneurial, I think, passion and drive. My thought process has been always being an entrepreneur is very, very difficult.
Be very aware and conscious of all the ways in which you might handicap yourself and your potential for success. And one of those might be the people that you surround yourself with or the location that you decide to build a company or the type of company you build. And I just think this is sort of Olympic sports.
You really need to have the least amount of handicap possible if you want to maximize your chances to change the world.
Yeah, and the stories that you see, the dramatizations of these startups, I think, doesn't do the field a lot of service because they do make it look easy. Like the formula for success is dropping out of high school or college and... going into a garage with three or four people and having some pizza and then shipping a product the next week.
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