# General Business Category > Entrepreneurship and Business Management Forum >  How not to die

## duncan drennan

Paul Graham, a venture capitalist from Y Combinator, has put up a speech that he gave at one of their dinners. *You should all read this*, it is certainly worth while, especially for startup businesses.




> When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. Often the two occur simultaneously. But I think the underlying cause is usually that they've become demoralized. You rarely hear of a startup that's working around the clock doing deals and pumping out new features, and dies because they can't pay their bills and their ISP unplugs their server.
> 
> Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!
> 
> If so many startups get demoralized and fail when merely by hanging on they could get rich, you have to assume that running a startup can be demoralizing. That is certainly true. I've been there, and that's why I've never done another startup. The low points in a startup are just unbelievably low. I bet even Google had moments where things seemed hopeless.
> 
> Read the full speech


There are some other quotes from the essay which I think are worth sharing,




> ...startups run on morale.





> Distraction is fatal to startups.

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## Dave A

It reminds me of the "I'm looking for one person - is it you?" type of speech. They work pretty well.

Lots of solid truths in there, of course. I liked this one - there's more truth in this than one might think:



> We avoided dying till we got rich.


On the pain of start-ups: My last start-from-scratch was almost 10 years ago (all the others have been add-ons with some kind of base in place, really) and I reckon I'm only now getting to the point where I might consider doing that again. It takes a heck of a lot out of you.

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