What Goes Wrong - Founders at Work

"… determination is really two separate things: resilience and drive.
 …
Let me give you one last example of improvising. The Justin.tv founders were having a lot of scaling issues in the beginning. One weekend their whole video system went down. Kyle was in charge of it, but no one knew where Kyle was. And Kyle wasn't picking up his cell phone. This was live video so it was pretty critical that this get fixed immediately.

Michael Siebel called Kyle's friends and found out he was in Lake Tahoe and got the address of the house. So here's a problem for you, you know the address where someone is and he's not answering his phone. How do you get a message to him right away? Michael went on Yelp and looked for a pizza place near the house and called them up and said, "I want to have a pizza delivered.  But never mind the pizza. Just send a delivery guy over and say these four words: The site is down." The pizza place was very confused by this, but they send the pizza guy without a pizza, Kyle answers the door, and the pizza guy says, "The site is down." Kyle was able to fix it, and the site was down for less than an hour total from beginning to end.
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… one of the founders of one of our more successful startups had a longstanding relationship with a VC. When the founder started the company and did YC, this VC kept in touch through the 3 months, not really doing anything except keeping a benevolent eye on him. The VC attended demo day, but didn't invest. After a few months, the startup got a termsheet from a prestigious VC. When the first VC heard about this, he shifted into panic mode. He faxed the founder a termsheet from his firm with the valuation blank and said, "Fill in whatever valuation you want and we're in."
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We tell people that during YC there are really only three things you should focus on: building things, talking to users, and exercising. …"

What Goes Wrong - Founders at Work