Tinesh Chhaya
A lot of startup books are written by people who made it. This one is written by someone who nearly didn’t.STARTUP WTF! is a short, sharp founder survival guide about the parts of entrepreneurship that seldom make it into pitch decks, accelerator programmes or social media success stories.For more than twenty years, Tinesh Chhaya, a founder in his 50s, has built businesses across technology, cybersecurity, marketplaces and professional services. Some of them worked. Quite a few didn’t.Along the way came co-founder conflict, financial pressure, bad advice, difficult investors and advisers, failed businesses, rebuilding, starting again, and a point where the personal cost of building became far greater than the financial one.STARTUP WTF! is about the side of building a business that rarely makes it into the social media posts or founder success stories. It explores what happens when the excitement wears off, things don’t go to plan, and you still have to decide what comes next.It’s about the pressure, uncertainty and very human reality of trying to build something, while trying not to lose yourself in the process.And ultimately, it asks one of the hardest questions a founder can face:When do you keep going and when might it be time to stop?This isn’t another book telling you how to build the perfect startup.It’s about what building one can do to the person doing the building.Tinesh shares what happened, what he got wrong and what he wishes someone had said to him earlier.There are no ten-step formulas, billionaire routines or promises that persistence guarantees success.Instead, this is an honest conversation from one founder to another.Your co-founder isn’t just your skills partner. They’re your risk partner.Mental runway matters just as much as cash runway.And sometimes the bravest decision isn’t to keep going.Written for startup founders, entrepreneurs, small-business owners and anyone lying awake at 2am wondering whether to keep going, STARTUP WTF! is designed to be read quickly, returned to often and passed to another founder who might need it.Because building a company is hard. 6
