Criticism — The Lifeblood of Startups

So for the past 3 years approximately, I’ve run a small LLC out of my apartment. It’s nothing fancy, just a way for me to make games for virtual reality devices and learn about the world of startups. This of course means that I’ve spent quite a large chunk of time around other startups, which have in turn, inspired this blog post. Specifically, I’ve noticed what I consider to be a pattern of not handling criticism properly in startups. This ranges from taking criticisms too seriously, to not taking them seriously enough. The story of Theranos is a great warning sign for not taking criticisms seriously enough, whereas I think startups that do take it too critically have failed to show up at all. As a result, I really want to focus in on not taking startup criticism enough, and how this can negatively affect you, as well as how I believe you can do so in a healthy manner.

Let’s start with the one thing I’m sure a lot of folks are thinking: Is all criticism valid? By valid, I mean is the criticism being brought up an actual problem, or something that is only a problem to the person giving you the criticism. This is a bit of a trick question, in that I think what we really want to know is not whether the criticism is valid, as validity is not specific enough to describe what we want. What we want to know is how can this criticism be helpful. Criticism can be invalid, but still be…