#40 - Kyle Mathews - How To Know If You Should Start a Startup

The Entrepreneurial Coder Podcast

Kyle Mathews is the founder and CEO of Gatsby, one of the most popular frameworks around for creating websites with React. After authoring Gatsby as an open source project in 2015, he later started a company of the same name to take it even further. He's fascinated by technology, open source, and making the web better.

Kyle's Links

Gatsby
Kyle and Twitter
Kyle's Website

Transcript
[0:00] [music]

Ryan Chenkie: [0:07] My guest today is Kyle Mathews. Kyle is the founder and CEO of Gatsby one of the most popular frameworks around for creating websites with React. After offering Gatsby as an open source project in 2015, he later started a company of the same name to take it even further.

[0:22] He's fascinated by technology, open source, and making the Web better. Kyle, welcome to the show.

Kyle Mathews: [0:28] Yeah, thanks. Glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Ryan: [0:31] Absolutely. I have been following your work for quite some time. I've been seeing the great things that have been going on in the Gatsby world. We did some interview stuff a couple years back, which was a lot of fun. I'm excited to chat to you today about startups more in general.

[0:47] One thing that piqued my curiosity was a tweet that you had recently where it sounded like you had done a talk at your college perhaps, and you mentioned in the tweet that you were giving the advice or wanting to give the advice that may be startups aren't a great idea for everybody. Maybe it's not everyone that should go out and start a startup.

[1:11] I was hoping to chat with you on that. Give me some of the background around that sentiment. Why is it the case do you think that maybe not everyone should be looking to do a startup?

Kyle: [1:25] The scenario was that there was a technology club at my college that's part of the major I did. They invited me like, "Hey, Kyle. You created Gatsby. Come talk about it. Gatsby is cool." I guess the person inviting me has been using it recently. That was fun, and a weird trip, like, "Oh, college. I remember that. That was fun." Then like, "Why y'all look younger than I used to," sort of thing.

[1:52] [laughter]

Kyle: [1:54] Been just long enough that all these weird like, "I'm getting old" feelings are coming into play. Anyways, they had some question about Gatsby, but a lot of people in the Q&A started asking about startups. They were like, "How did you come up with the idea," on and on?

[2:13] It was funny because I had this thought a lot, but it just afterwards, I don't know. Talking about startups is weird because there's this really strong glamour field around doing the startup that is not...The lived reality of doing a startup is not actually how it's perceived a lot of the time from the outside.

[2:44] Anyway, I always have this feeling when people are asking about startups because I downplay it a lot and discourage people more because, startups are absolutely right. Doing a startup, having a startup, absolutely the right decision for some people. For a lot of people, if they get into it, it'd be actually a very difficult, dispiriting, unpleasant experience for them. That was an interesting reaction.

[3:14] Having all these people like, "Oh," fascinated by the idea of startups, and me, cringing a little bit like, "I don't know. You're probably better off getting a nice job and going home and having fun with your friends and family, and doing side projects and stuff like that."

[3:34] The actual lived reality of a startup is, it's hard. It's emotionally super intense. Intellectually, it's very challenging. It depends, of course, but there's often very difficult challenges that you have to figure out immediately or the whole thing goes kaput.

[4:02] There's tons of uncertainty. That's the emotional stuff. It takes a lot of courage to do anything in a startup because there's a lot of pressure to make the right decision. You just don't know enough to figure that out. There's a whole bunch of things that...Unless you sort of weirdly tuned to enjoy that.

[4:23] [laughter]

Kyle: [4:25] You're going to have an unpleasant time. There's really no point.

Ryan: [4:29] That makes a lot of sense. I wonder, in your experience, are those things that you had in mind going into founding Gatsby as a company? You're working on the open source projects, decided to build a company around it. Did you have those things in mind when you entered this venture, or are these things they have become apparent to you over the course of time?

Kyle: [4:52] I've done startup pretty much my whole career. I started my first startup in college. I moved out to SF and joined an early-stage startup there. Did another startup before Gatsby. I knew I liked startups and enjoyed that space before going into Gatsby, for sure. No new discoveries per se, just all the same.

Ryan: [5:20] Got it. A lot of people who listen to this podcast, they are the indie hacker types. They're people that want to do stuff. Business wise, they want to create products and release products. They are people that might want to do startups, or maybe they're doing startups or whatever.

[5:37] For those people who have it in mind, in the future they would like to do a startup around whatever, what would you say is the best way to assess whether or not it would be a good fit for you?

[5:50] It's possible that you've got these lofty goals of like, "Yeah, I'm going to do a start up. Maybe it'll be a little tough, but it'll be awesome eventually." Then, of course, reality hits when you settle into the thing. Any advice you'd give for people that are trying to make that assessment now?

Kyle: [6:11] A lot of it's knowing yourself and learning about what makes you tick. To me, life should be lived to the fullest. What is the answer to living your life to the fullest? It depends on who you are. The first question's like, "What should I do with my life? What do I enjoy? What matters to me?"

[6:36] The answer's very different for every person. There's no one right answer. You shouldn't make decisions based on, that's what I was saying, like the glamour field. People are like, "Ooh, doing a stripe looks glamorous." It's not actually what it is.

[6:49] You have to understand what makes you tick. You have to understand where to put yourself so that you're going to be enjoying your life.

[6:57] I would say the type of person that enjoys a startup, and there's a few types, but a lot of it boils down to a desire for adventure, for intense experience, for life being interesting, and prioritizing that over comfort and security.

[7:28] When I was a kid, I read a lot of kid adventure novels. I loved them. I devoured them and read them over and over again. All these stories about trudging through jungles and exploring outer space and inventing rockets and whatever, I don't know.

[7:46] Tom Swift, I don't know if there's anyone out there that's read that, I loved those books. The idea of adventure and inventing things and doing things is really fun.

[8:02] Another good clue for me was I've had one normal job-ish. It was even at an early-stage startup, and I still found it kind of boring. I would go in, fix an issue or two, write a new component. It was like, "Man, this is boring and predictable."

[8:25] It was a great job. It was a super-good company. The founders are awesome, really cool product. Everything could have, should have been perfect, maybe, but I was still dissatisfied with the whole thing. I wanted more.

[8:41] If that's what you want and you're comfortable with the risk associated with it, but your soul might be crushed by...