I had the chance to give a short talk to a room full of Cornellians at YC headquarters yesterday.  It was a nice escape from the day-to-day of running a startup and gave me a chance to reflect.  In thinking about what to say, I thought hard about some of the defining experiences in my life that have shaped the way I think and work, and none jumped out to me quicker than my first (and only) marathon in 2006.

As a second-year law student, I decided I was bored and up for a challenge.  I was looking for something difficult to do that didn't require much preparation time and wasn't very costly.  A marathon seemed like a reasonable idea - so I signed up.  At that time, the longest I had ever run was about 30 minutes.  I paid my dues, drove to Harrisburg one weekend, and just started running.  At the first checkpoint, I looked up and realized that I had completed the first 3 mile in 17 minutes.  My own personal "record" for a 3 mile race was about 21 minutes.  I was indeed running with the leaders of the race.  Needless to say, I quickly fell off that pace, but still managed to finish with a respectable time of 3h 57m.  Mission accomplished.  

Afterwards, I realized that If I had thought about it too much, consulted with experts, read more into the subject, I'd probably have come to the conclusion that trying to "wing" a marathon was a pretty dumb thing to do.  In the back of my mind, I realized it was crazy, but I just ignored it.  I figured that if I kept taking step after step, I'd finish sooner or later. 

Some of the best companies today were built by founders who started building something very small who simply kept their heads down and moved quickly, without much regard to anything else but acquiring more users or building something better.  Imagine if the Facebook founders thought about changing the way 500 million people viewed personal privacy before sitting down to write a line of code.  

If you'd like to get a sense of the perseverance needed to succeed as a startup founder, maybe give a marathon a shot.  Just remember to stretch.