Anish Acharya on the 3 traps founders fall into

I'll tell you about some of the traps. One of the traps is, "Oh my god, I'm too late." You know, and every founder has that feeling like, "Oh, I should have started my company a year ago, a month ago, you know, and if I had, I'd be where XYZ is." Another common one is even if I build something, nobody will pay attention. When I was building my first startup in 2009, I remember the Techrunch article. Well,

the headline was the end of venture capital. And I sent it to my co-founder and I said, "Ah, it's it's over." You know, like venture capital's over. Techrunch has said so and you know it doesn't matter what we build because no one will fund it. Looking at competition is another sort of mind trap where you can look around and feel like oh my god look at how much everyone else is raising from all these credible folks.

But if you're able to put the blinders on and just turn that noise down for a moment and look at where we are from first principles, what you'll see is actually we're in kind of the best time to build a startup we've ever been in that I've ever seen. For sure.