Suffering = Growth - by Calvin Chen - Calvin’s Substack
“Unfortunately, resilience matters in success. I don't know how to teach it to you except I hope suffering happens to you.” — Jensen Huang
When I left school in January of 2023 to build a startup, I didn’t know what to expect. I had previously built two startups — one was a success and the other did okay. If you had shown me what the next year and a half would look like, I may not have done it.
I have failed over and over again. Generating new ideas, building new products, even making substantial revenue and then pivoting away. Nothing seemed to click. On paper things looked great, but on the inside we were wondering around in the dark.
I wanted to write this to be transparent about my journey and what its has been like as a founder. We often hear of the success stories but rarely do we hear about how hard the beginning was. My hope is to be able to document my journey and jot down some lessons at this point in time so I can look back to see how far I’ve come in the future.
I went through many hard times. Co-founder breakups, pivot hell, solo non-technical founder, relationship issues, no time for friends. I learned to trick myself into thinking these were positives.
