Good post today, A “Third Way” in Entrepreneurship, that discusses the “always be winning”, annoyingly positive veneer of most startup entrepreneurs. This is a community where many founders you meet always share their latest victory and pretend that failures rarely happen.
… entrepreneurs are pressured to maintain a totally positive face to the outside world about the state of their company. In San Francisco, “we’re killing it” is almost now an inside joke because of the ubiquity of that response when someone asks an entrepreneur how their company is faring. Most of these companies are not “killing it”, and the entrepreneurs probably know that.
There is also a nice comment thread discussing the “we’re killing it” phrase, a discussion to which I contributed an anecdote and interpretation.
The comment I added to the discussion:
A friend once relayed a story to me of a dinner meeting of ~20 early-stage high-tech executives he attended that was sponsored by a startup organization. The moderator asked one question as an ice breaker to kick off the night: “What is the greatest challenge that your startup faces today?”
My friend was the first one picked to share. Being a very level-headed guy (who personally hates the term, “killing it”), he suggested that one of his biggest challenges was maintaining work/life balance & personal relationships, for himself & also for his employees, so that they don’t burn out on the job.
The baton then got passed to the next entrepreneur, and, as my friend tells it, entrepreneur after entrepreneur shared their “greatest challenge”, though they were only “challenges” in the weakest sense of the word. For example: “handling all the new customers we have”, “scaling our servers for our massive user-base”, “hiring enough software engineers to keep up with the business growth”.
He realized then that every entrepreneur was “positioning” the answer to make it appear that the greatest challenge faced was dealing with the company’s illusory massive success.
I think this anecdote describes the “killing it” mentality quite well — even among peers and in a setting where people should be comfortable sharing their fears, this community prefers reality distortion.