To all the founders in the struggle zone: I have good news and bad news (i will not promote)

I spent almost a decade at Google in the early days, then a few years building a startup that got to $100M revenue, and now I'm running another one. So you might assume life is somewhat easier by now as a startup founder. Bad news first. Not a bit easier. NOT A BIT. I didn't struggle much at Google. I struggled a lot at the first startup. And I have a lot of struggles at the current one. I think the reason is quite simple: startups, by definition, are trying to do something new. That is what gives joy to the activity, and it is exactly what creates the struggle. I don't want to romanticize this though, because there is struggle and there is suffering. Struggle is not knowing if the thing will work and finding out. Suffering is grinding for a year on something the market already answered. The first can compound into something. The second just takes years off your life. If you are in the second kind, this post is not permission to stay there. But the first kind I have finally made peace with. A surprising amount of the joy comes from the struggle of figuring something out. That was true for me at Google too, in reverse. The stock was growing like crazy in the early days but I wasn't struggling personally, and it didn't give me the same inherent joy. You don't feel like you earned it. You feel LUCKY, not JOYFUL. So if you are struggling, know that anyone doing something genuinely uncertain is struggling too. Nobody has an easy day forever. Is there a way to deal with it? For me, spread it out. Take a small struggle every day. Do that one thing you are holding back, the thing that sucks. Don't save it all up for one day, because that makes it too dramatic and too hard. You can also share it. Share the struggle and the joy with your team, your family, your friends. And sometimes just say "I am struggling." I have rarely seen anyone respond to that with "you are a dumbass." Most of the time people will help you think it through. Either way, you are not ALONE in this journey. I don't think the goal is to eliminate struggle. It's to make sure you're struggling with something still worth figuring out.