In a startup, absolutely nothing happens unless you make it happen. An established company has rhythms and infrastructure—people come in, code gets written, wastebaskets get emptied. A startup has none of that. Until you build those systems yourself, nothing happens. Have fun emptying those wastebaskets.

You get told no—a lot. By potential employees, investors, customers, partners, reporters, analysts. And when you do get a 'yes,' half the time you'll get a call two days later and it'll turn out the answer has morphed into 'no.' Better start working on your fake smile.

Hiring is full of windowshoppers. When Jim Clark—coming off Silicon Graphics, the most successful company in the Valley in 1994—recruited about a dozen people for what became Netscape, Andreessen was the only one who said yes (largely because he was 22 and had no reason not to). The rest flinched. 'How easy do you think it's going to be for you?'

Even when you do hire, your success rate isn't higher than 50% if you're good at it. Half or more won't work out—'too lazy, too slow, easily rattled, political, bipolar, or psychotic.' Then you have to either live with them, or fire them.

Culture usually goes sideways. In the best case you get people pulling together in pursuit of a dream; in the worst, 'widespread, self-reinforcing bitterness, disillusionment, cynicism, bad morale, contempt for management, and depression.' As founder you have much less influence over which way it goes than you think.

X factors will whup you upside the head and there's nothing you can do: stock market crashes, terrorist attacks, a better-funded stealth competitor that ships first and closes off your market, or Russian mobsters laundering money through your service until the credit card companies shut you down. He's not joking about that last one.

Work/life balance is a nice idea but mostly fiction for founders. 'It's not so easy when you're close to running out of cash, your product hasn't shipped yet, your VC is mad at you, and your Kleiner Perkins-backed competitor in Menlo Park—whose employees' average age seems to be about 19—is kicking your butt.' Even if employees get balance, the founder won't.