ELON MUSK: "STARTING A COMPANY IS LIKE EATING GLASS" (BRUTAL ADVICE)

Описание: In this powerful video, Elon Musk meets with students at one of his factories and delivers a brutally honest reality check about entrepreneurship. Speaking candidly, Musk explains that starting a company isn't the glamorous journey many imagine.

"A lot of times people think creating a company is fun. Well, there are periods of fun and there are periods where it's just awful," Musk reveals to the students. He describes entrepreneurship as "staring into the abyss and eating glass" – a vivid metaphor for the constant existential threat facing startups and the painful problems founders must tackle.

As CEO, Musk explains you experience "a distillation of all the worst problems in the company" because you only spend time on things going wrong, not what's going right. This creates a filter for "the crappiest, most pernicious and painful problems" landing directly on your desk.

Why Starting a Company Is So Difficult

Musk breaks down the entrepreneurial journey into two challenging parts:

"Staring into the abyss" - Constantly facing the potential death of your company, as 90-99% of startups fail

"Eating glass" - Working on problems the company needs you to solve, not the ones you want to work on

He emphasizes you need to "feel quite compelled to do it and have a fairly high pain threshold" to succeed as an entrepreneur. When students at Draper University asked for his top tip for entrepreneurs, Musk responded bluntly: "If you need inspiring words, DON'T DO IT!"

The Work Ethic Required

For those still determined to start a company, Musk stresses the importance of extraordinary work ethic. "Depending on how well you want to do—particularly if you're starting a company—you need to work super hard," he advises.

To illustrate this point, he shares how he and his brother lived when starting their first company: "Instead of getting an apartment we just rented a small office and slept on the couch. We showered at the YMCA. And we had just one computer so the website was up during the day and I was coding at night—seven days a week, all the time".

The math, as Musk puts it, is simple: "If somebody else is working 50 hours a week and you're working 100, you'll get twice as much done in the course of the year as the other company".

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