David Mandell is cofounder and CEO of PivotDesk, a TechStars Boulder 2012 company that helps find room for growing businesses. He was working with the Midtown Alliance earlier this year on helping to bring affordable work spaces to our local entrepreneurs. Check out his post urging startup folks to lift the veil on their struggles and quit sugar coating their experiences.
Most of the advice you hear ‘on the street,’ is full of inflated stories, usually filtered and glittered up by the media, about people who’ve already achieved a perceived level of success. (And I mean ‘perceived’ in a very real way. Success is very rarely defined in terms other than raising a big round at an obscene valuation.)
Or, it’s from people who have watched others do it, either from the Board or advisor level, but who never experienced what it’s like to be in the trenches of building a business.
Or, it’s from people who have done it, but are so hesitant to tell you the truth due to fear that it might damage their desired reputation as a ‘wunderkind.’ So what you end up getting is not much different than what you get in the media.
The fact is, we all go through a lot of the same shit. We’re just not sharing it. – David Mandell
