Kelly Smith, one of my advisors, has a great post about the sacrifices one must make for their own Start-up. I can tell my story and how I’m managing my personal life… I had a very good and stable job

Great comments and I do think that a solid support base can be helpful but may not be necessary. I’ve been fortunate in that my wife lives the same lifestyle I do over at http://www.theplatform.com She (Tricia Iboshi)is part of the management team and fights hard every day to insure that start-up grows up into a healthy company. So we are basically waging the same kind of war each and every day. Having said that, I don’t lean on her for support necessarily because I know there is only so much she can do. The main thing is that she trusts my judgement and she believes that the mistakes we’ve made in the past actually increase our chances for more successes in the future.

In your case, I’m sure the same thing is true. You are aware of the problems that plagued your previous ventures and you have made mental notes of ‘what not to do’. Once your friends and family see you parlay those learning experiences into your first “base hit” I suspect you’ll get more and more ‘energy add’ and less ‘energy drain’ from the support structure around you. In my limited experience, it comes down to simply being present in the 9th innning no matter what the tribulation. For some reason the world likes to dole out successes only after the seeming breaking point. Anytime you get a nice base hit before a breaking point (e.g. where you say “that was easy”) just chalk it up to a lucky break and go back to assuming the next base hit will be hard again. I don’t think this means being negative. I think it means being aware of the challenges and hard work and loving the battle.