How I Created a $350M Software Company Knowing Nothing About Software
1–10 of 110 posts
Re: How I Created a $350M Software Company Knowing Nothing About Software
#2"I created a horse-racing simulation game in Applesoft BASIC in Manhattan Beach Middle School’s computer classroom and ran a small gambling operation."
Great story about a successful business that gained tremendous value based on domain knowledge and grit. But you can't say you knew nothing about software.
Re: How I Created a $350M Software Company Knowing Nothing About Software
#3You can distill this article into two key insights:
1. Find great people to believe in your vision. Without the two amazing coders to help him, he wouldn't have made much headway in the project at the beginning. To be able to convince brilliant developers to quit their job, sell their house, and move across the country takes an incredible visionary to convince such a skeptical demographic as the brilliant developer.
2. Get people to buy the thing you want to sell before you make it. He had $150,000 from a wealthy financier before he had a product to show for it. To be able to secure capital and then worry about delivering on it is a much more tenable problem to solve than trying to build a business without some sort of capital to live off of while you develop it.
Re: How I Created a $350M Software Company Knowing Nothing About Software
#4Interesting article and impressive to see that kind of tenacity. Truly that's a take-away from the full perspective. The other take aways, for me, aren't nearly as complimentary.
1. Want to make a lot of money? Find an out-dated system where grunt labor is worth a lot less than the technology the grunt labor uses, and target this gap mercilessly (call centers)
2. Act like every other shady, fly-by-night, asshole salesman and cold call people without a real product until some sucker from Provo, Utah cuts you a check ($40,000 should be a good amount)
3. Aim to arbitrage a stale technology like long-distance phone calls before any of the competition, pretend getting lucky in such an opportunity is a validation of tenacity ("blieve in yourself" is trite because it's trite)
>Believe that even if you do something stupid like quit your job without a clue, somehow you’re going to figure it out.
...or, you can study up on something called "survivorship bias" and realize most of the "wisdom" in the article is utterly useless.
Re: How I Created a $350M Software Company Knowing Nothing About Software
#5You can distill this article into two key insights: 1. Find great people to believe in your vision . Without the two amazing coders to help him, he wouldn't have made much headway in the project at the beginning. To be able to convince brilliant developers to quit their job, sell their house, and move across the country takes an incredible visionary to convince such a skeptical demographic as the brilliant developer.…
Isn't this the Theranos business model?
Re: How I Created a $350M Software Company Knowing Nothing About Software
#6You can distill this article into two key insights: 1. Find great people to believe in your vision . Without the two amazing coders to help him, he wouldn't have made much headway in the project at the beginning. To be able to convince brilliant developers to quit their job, sell their house, and move across the country takes an incredible visionary to convince such a skeptical demographic as the brilliant developer.…
There's a third really important insight here: "Know thy product area." The author of the article may not have known anything about software, but he definitely knew a lot about call centers, as did the coders who were working with him.
Re: How I Created a $350M Software Company Knowing Nothing About Software
#7Interesting article and impressive to see that kind of tenacity. Truly that's a take-away from the full perspective. The other take aways, for me, aren't nearly as complimentary. 1. Want to make a lot of money? Find an out-dated system where grunt labor is worth a lot less than the technology the grunt labor uses, and target this gap mercilessly (call centers) 2. Act like every other shady, fly-by-night, asshole sale…
Not sure why you think those 3 points aren't complimentary. They seem like great + useful takeaways. No, they aren't new, but they are useful.
Regarding your last point: nothing is a sure thing. Of course survivorship bias is a thing. Of course believing in yourself/ability to figure stuff out isn't a sufficient condition for success. But, maybe it's just a necessary one?
Re: How I Created a $350M Software Company Knowing Nothing About Software
#8You can distill this article into two key insights: 1. Find great people to believe in your vision . Without the two amazing coders to help him, he wouldn't have made much headway in the project at the beginning. To be able to convince brilliant developers to quit their job, sell their house, and move across the country takes an incredible visionary to convince such a skeptical demographic as the brilliant developer.…
Isn't this the Theranos business model?
I think the difference for me here was that they took money to create a known solution to a known problem. Theranos, on the other hand, seemed to have claimed to have already had a solution, when in reality they were pursuing an unknown solution to a hazy problem.
(And by "hazy problem" here I basically mean that Theranos is pursuing something that sounds like a problem (medical testing) but is actually a large number of only somewhat related problems. For me, going after a known problem would have been picking one test, or a small number of them and then nailing that before expanding to adjacent problems.)
Re: How I Created a $350M Software Company Knowing Nothing About Software
#9Interesting article and impressive to see that kind of tenacity. Truly that's a take-away from the full perspective. The other take aways, for me, aren't nearly as complimentary. 1. Want to make a lot of money? Find an out-dated system where grunt labor is worth a lot less than the technology the grunt labor uses, and target this gap mercilessly (call centers) 2. Act like every other shady, fly-by-night, asshole sale…
> but then found someone who would mail me a check for $40,000, even during a recession, because they were risk-taking business owners themselves.
Perhaps the guy from Provo Utah, instead of being a sucker, really wanted to see something new and better succeed? Just because he paid for something before it was ready doesn't mean he didn't know what he was doing.
Re: How I Created a $350M Software Company Knowing Nothing About Software
#10That was a great article. Funny and inspiring. Like to see that for a change.
Far as lessons learned, I agree with 6stringmerc on targeting anything where tools are overpriced and investing in aggressive, skilled salespeople. These are proven practices. The first can be tricky, though, because it's often other factors that keep that tech there. Resistance to change, preferrence to deal with mature businesses, integration with horrible stuff (eg mainframe stack), and so on. Not always the case but it can kill startups when it is. Healthcare systems are a good example as many HN posts show.