Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Projects and Companies

blog.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 52 posts

Re: Projects and Companies

#11

Post by babababa »

pmichaud wrote: post #8
babababa wrote: post #5

"All of these were ideas that seemed bad but turned out to be good, and this is the magic formula for major success." I see this sentiment expressed often, like it's a good thing that you want to pursue an idea that seems bad. If I were to think about founding a start-up, I'd rather find an opportunity that makes sense and sounds good, validate the opportunity, talk to potential customers, and do as much diligence as…

I think the more nuanced version of the prevailing wisdom is "it seems like a bad idea to everyone else, because of a key set of facts that you know that very few other people know." Knowing that secret, whatever it is, probably requires special insight into a particular area of the world, special ways of thinking that few others are using, and perhaps special methods of operating that few others are using. That's ho…

Well put and totally agree - in other words, as the start-up founder, you know it's a good idea.

My cynical take on "many bad ideas become major successes" is that as an investor betting on 100 companies, your best economics are from 1 or 2 unicorns, and not 50 base hits.

The investor optimized approach is 1 or 2 crazy ideas ended up being prescient and create awesomeness, but the remaining 98 ideas are indeed bad and go nowhere. The founder optimized approach is 50 good ideas create meaningful outcomes that aren't outsized.

Re: Projects and Companies

#12

Post by malanj »

7Figures2Commas wrote: post #9

> The best companies start out with ideas that don’t sound very good. They start out as projects, and in fact sometimes they sound so inconsequential the founders wouldn't let themselves work on them if they had to defend them as a company. Google and Yahoo started as grad students’ projects. Facebook was a project Zuckerberg built while he was a sophomore in college. Twitter was a side project that started with a si…

Starting a company when there are already established and strong competitors probably counts as "looks like a bad idea". I think the point is that the company (or project) seemed like a bad idea, not necessarily the market as a whole.

Google and Facebook are both often used as examples exactly because they were "late" to the party. That seemed like a bad idea, but they both had a secret (as Peter Thiel likes to say), that made it not a bad idea.

Re: Projects and Companies

#13

Post by cossatot »

I like the long-standing definitions of the words: the company is the entity composed of the workers in their official capacity as well as its other resources, legal rights and so forth, and the project is the work the company has undertaken, and you are a beautiful if monomaniacal human being.

>It’s far better to be thought of—and to think of yourself—as a project than a company for as long as possible.

'You' are neither the company nor the project, even if you are the sole person in the company. Startups are of course typically single-project companies, but the two are still not to be conflated.

If any of these things were synonymous, there would be some serious implications. If your project fails, then you as the projectcompanyperson, are a failure and may cease to exist(instead of you still being an alive person whose project failed and whose company may or may not be on the rocks). If the company is the project, then after a pivot the company is not the same company (instead of it being still the same company with a different project). But with the real concepts, definitions and identities, these are different abstraction layers essentially, and everything is more transferable, fault tolerant, and so on.

I get that with sufficient dedication and focus these things can feel like the same. I also believe that I have been someone's project.

This being said, I agree with the general analysis of the essay, specifically with regards to throwing bureaucracy to the wind in favor of lean-and-mean experimentation (and who really wants to grow up?).

Re: Projects and Companies

#14

Post by fredliu »

babababa wrote: post #5

"All of these were ideas that seemed bad but turned out to be good, and this is the magic formula for major success." I see this sentiment expressed often, like it's a good thing that you want to pursue an idea that seems bad. If I were to think about founding a start-up, I'd rather find an opportunity that makes sense and sounds good, validate the opportunity, talk to potential customers, and do as much diligence as…

I vaguely remember sama had a comment some time ago, kind of related to what you are saying here (paraphrasing here): "being contrarian is easy, being contrarian and right is hard." Working on a seemingly bad idea is being contrarian by definition, that's the easy part. And if people just take the advice at its face value and intentionally work on "bad ideas", that's being a fool. The real hard part is "being right", which requires the founder to have a unique vision or belief in his idea, and drives it really hard, maybe even to the point of being "delusional" to outsiders, but again, being delusional about your own idea doesn't guarantee it's "right".

Re: Projects and Companies

#15

Post by kepano »

I've always liked the word project when talking about startups. The word inherently conveys the idea that you're building up to something that will exist in the future (in Latin it means "throw forward"). It gives you the flexibility to change and evolve. "Company" feels like something established and somewhat static.

Re: Projects and Companies

#16

Post by 77f89faf »

vog wrote: post #10
babababa wrote: post #5

"All of these were ideas that seemed bad but turned out to be good, and this is the magic formula for major success." I see this sentiment expressed often, like it's a good thing that you want to pursue an idea that seems bad. If I were to think about founding a start-up, I'd rather find an opportunity that makes sense and sounds good, validate the opportunity, talk to potential customers, and do as much diligence as…

I think you misunderstood the point of "seemingly bad ideas". This is not about ideas that seem bad to you . This is about ideas that seem bad to others , i.e. ideas that seem okay to you, that you probably even verified in the small, but still have trouble convincing others.

Yea, but how much of that is actually [clear understanding of idea + execution of idea] versus [marketing].

I'd say that probably at least partially depends on the group of people you know. The last set of people that I would think would be representative of a random distribution worthy of being a statistical sample is my set of friends, because not only is my idea biased, but I have also selected all of my friends with bias as well.

My general rule of thumb is 'bad ideas come out of nowhere' and 'good ideas are things that require effort'. If you are just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, probably not the best way to go about doing things.

Other than that, I think the idea is hardly representative of the product. I would guess that there is probably no reliable correlation between the evaluation of the idea, and the evaluation of the execution. The examples people mention are cherry picked examples. You can hardly evaluate your own potential based on comparing that to a few select examples that have been selected specifically to demonstrate a rhetorical opinion.

Re: Projects and Companies

#17

Post by mtberatwork »

malanj wrote: post #12
7Figures2Commas wrote: post #9

> The best companies start out with ideas that don’t sound very good. They start out as projects, and in fact sometimes they sound so inconsequential the founders wouldn't let themselves work on them if they had to defend them as a company. Google and Yahoo started as grad students’ projects. Facebook was a project Zuckerberg built while he was a sophomore in college. Twitter was a side project that started with a si…

Starting a company when there are already established and strong competitors probably counts as "looks like a bad idea". I think the point is that the company (or project) seemed like a bad idea, not necessarily the market as a whole. Google and Facebook are both often used as examples exactly because they were "late" to the party. That seemed like a bad idea, but they both had a secret (as Peter Thiel likes to say),…

When Google came about I don't recall anyone thinking that it (indexing the web, page rank, etc) was a bad idea. Everyone knew search was horrible at the time and many established players were simply directories with thin search layers. Yes, there were established competitors, but none of them were really strong aside from a tiny minority (altavista for example).

I don't recall anyone considering Facebook a bad idea either, just that it was "yet another social media" site. Facebook mostly lucked out because of MySpace's user exodus.

Re: Projects and Companies

#18

Post by paulsutter »

Peter Thiel has a famous Venn diagram with two circles: "good idea" and "sounds like a bad idea". He says that the best opportunities fall in the overlap between the two circles.

Here's a picture of the diagram:

http://www.businessinsider.com/this-venn-diagram-shows-why-s...

Calling an effort a project (or even, an experiment) helps free us up to be more flexible and receptive to the market, and removes a bit of our personal identity from the mix. Sam's great point is for a "project" we're more likely to pursue an idea inside the magic overlap zone of Thiel's diagram

Re: Projects and Companies

#19

Post by gozo »

I think the middle road between a project and a company is a small business.

Company over project is probably a bigger problem in SF/SV than anywhere else. I see a lot of people in both hardware and software making very elaborate and technically successful projects that never graduate from being projects.

Re: Projects and Companies

#20

Post by 7Figures2Commas »

malanj wrote: post #12
7Figures2Commas wrote: post #9

> The best companies start out with ideas that don’t sound very good. They start out as projects, and in fact sometimes they sound so inconsequential the founders wouldn't let themselves work on them if they had to defend them as a company. Google and Yahoo started as grad students’ projects. Facebook was a project Zuckerberg built while he was a sophomore in college. Twitter was a side project that started with a si…

Starting a company when there are already established and strong competitors probably counts as "looks like a bad idea". I think the point is that the company (or project) seemed like a bad idea, not necessarily the market as a whole. Google and Facebook are both often used as examples exactly because they were "late" to the party. That seemed like a bad idea, but they both had a secret (as Peter Thiel likes to say),…

> Starting a company when there are already established and strong competitors probably counts as "looks like a bad idea".

First-mover advantage is overrated, and in the tech industry, you'll notice that many if not most successful companies were not first-movers. Often, first-mover advantage is a disadvantage.

In even the most established markets, you can find meaningful niches and adjacencies that the big players aren't tapping. Many times, the untapped adjacencies can expand the overall size of the market significantly (see Airbnb).

Post reply on HN