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Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

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Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#101

Post by balls187 »

usmeteora wrote: post #91
balls187 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, your point that the men assuming women weren't engineers was incredibly sexist (although as I often joke with one of my friends when she talks about some game designer she infatuated with, by asking if she runs the game companies social media account). I do also think that it's less about Men & Women creating a sexist atmosphere, but rather, the old addage that sex sells (assuming the conference room floor was a…

ok well an afterparty is an afterpary. and she wasnt at a Pharma Convention, she was at Google I/O. Her stuff is everywhere, and has nothing to do with Pharmaceuticals.

Also fun fact, I survived being poisoned in Meteora.

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#102

Post by poof131 »

Not sure I agree about advisors. Getting smart people who have experience in places the team is lacking seems pretty critical to me. Perhaps it’s different at YC where you have advisors built into the program and getting ‘boards of advisors’ is extraneous, but for other teams without those resources behind them this seems like bad advice. Find people who’ve done it before and learn from them.

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#103

Post by rdtsc »

cableshaft wrote: post #2

Jessica asserts that conventions are too distracting and you shouldn't go to them. I don't completely agree with that. Depending on what type of business you're making, the best way to get work done is to go to conventions, because that's the only time you can easily meet with a bunch of people that are related to your industry and make new partnerships, check out new hardware/software solutions to save time or money…

She assumes you are already building what people want.

There is a bit of circular reasoning there. How do you know what people want? If you don't, you might have to go and talk to people. Some of those could be at conventions for example. Certainly true for niche markets.

The assumption perhaps is at this point in the process, you've already been to all the conferences, had coffee with all the VCs and now you are focused on delivering.

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#104

Post by contingencies »

wvenable wrote: post #30
ape4 wrote: post #22

On "making something people want"... You don't always know. If its a cheaper version of something else then - yah. But if its a new category you don't know. eg Nest - turns out people did want an expensive smart thermostat. But wasn't obvious.

I think this is where starting out small and simple usually works. You normally start with an idea that somebody wants whether it's you or a friend. You want your house to warm when you wake up and when you come home. You convince some other people. You build a small prototype. You try it out on people. They either want one or they don't. We all know companies that have built products that nobody wants. They went thr…

I think this is where starting out small and simple usually works

Of course, some ideas are impossible to execute small and simple.

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#105

Post by asimuvPR »

dang wrote: post #76
S4M wrote: post #64

So networking, "grabbing coffee" with investors and talking to potential acquirers are a waste of time, yet YC insists that startups go to one of the most expensive place in the world just because it's more convenient to to those three things.

Here's a nice example of where we can apply the Principle of Charity ( http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html ). That's the idea that you should respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of an argument, instead of a weaker one. Sure, you can interpret YC's advice as containing an obviously silly contradiction. But you could also interpret it as saying that you should fundraise when you need to, bu…

The romanticised idea of being a founder focuses on the lifestyle. Getting coffee is akin to "Let's play tennis sometime!" in other social circles. People want to be seen as founders but not a lot of them are willing or capable to do the work. Reality is that founding a startup is not glamorous. Its lots of hard work with no promise of anything.

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#106

Post by nostrademons »

djb_hackernews wrote: post #36

Yeesh. #2 hits close to home. I think I've asked this question but I found myself a cofounder with 2 others that prioritized too highly IMO coffee meetings with "investors", no name board advisors, expensive conferences, and basically everything on that list. My approach was to gently voice my concern and but also let them do it in the hopes they'd see how useless it was. The other thing that didn't help was I was th…

The tricky thing about this is that networking is often the right move if you're playing to do well rather than to win. If you're looking for a mid- to upper-management role at an established company, networking is great. If you're going into an established, competitive market with no intentions of "winning" the market (and becoming a monopoly), then networking can get you customers, it can get you distribution partners, and it can get you funding. Just not lots of all of the above, and you will have to fight hard for each.

Most business founders come from an environment where this is what has worked for them their whole career. That's how you get a job on the business side of things, and it's how you do your job on the business end of an established company.

The take-away, I think, is to know which game you're playing and make your moves accordingly. Being a great research engineer is one game; being an engineer at a startup is another, and moving up the ranks in a big company is another one entirely. Doing sales for a big company is a different game from doing customer development for your own startup, which is different from doing business development for either. Building a lifestyle business in a competitive niche is very different from doing hard tech research, which is very different from solving a problem that seems crazy in an area nobody else will go near. If you apply the rules of one game to the situations of another, you're unlikely to get good results.

(A corollary of this is to make sure that all your startups' other decisions are lined up with the game it is playing. I've seen a number of startups with ideas & personal goals that are clearly in the "lifestyle business" camp, but then they make decisions about markets, fundraising & hiring that put them in the "we're gonna be Google" camp, and unsurprisingly this tends to end poorly.)

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#107

Post by outworlder »

Overall, I found the reading very enjoyable. And down to earth, which is refreshing.

Until this part, that is:

> And you know where the founders of these big winners are going to come from? From this room!

Not sure how to view this part. On one hand, of course she's right. If no "unicorns" ever came from YC, they wouldn't be around still. But it seems to imply that all founders that are going to be wildly successful were in that room. That's either appealing to emotion for morale purposes, or way too elitist. Not sure which.

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#108

Post by tmaly »

I think #1 is the key to the whole thing.

I love how Pat Flynn talked about building a market map in his recent book Will It Fly. I think this method is very helpful in finding out if what your doing is something people want.

Derek Sivers of CDBaby has this same mindset. He has always worked off the pull method rather than the push method for what he creates.

Ash Maurya in his book running lean gives you a nice script for customer development interviews. I have tried this with a previous startup idea, and they saved me from going down the road of working on something people did not want. They are probably a bit more involved than Pat's method, but it is something else to consider.

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#109

Post by birken »

akg_67 wrote: post #67
djb_hackernews wrote: post #36

Yeesh. #2 hits close to home. I think I've asked this question but I found myself a cofounder with 2 others that prioritized too highly IMO coffee meetings with "investors", no name board advisors, expensive conferences, and basically everything on that list. My approach was to gently voice my concern and but also let them do it in the hopes they'd see how useless it was. The other thing that didn't help was I was th…

The networking is the personal insurance policy by your cofounders against startup failure. The people connections built during networking events will land these cofounders leadership/management positions at other companies if and when startup fails instead of being unemployable or starting at the bottom. The founders, typically technical co-founders, that don't network has no such insurance in place and tend to go b…

The problem with this line of thinking is that smart companies:

1) Aren't going to hire somebody for a leadership position because they met them networking --- they are going to hire them based on merit

2) The people in charge of smart companies aren't at networking events because networking events are a waste of time

Startups are a way to "level up" your career only because you can skip years of moving up a corporate ladder by starting at the top and building a successful company below you. This doesn't mean that by being a CTO of a 3 person company you are all of the sudden eligible to be a CTO at a big, successful company. The process of being CTO at your 3 person company and growing it into a big, successful company is what makes you eligible for that position at a different company.

The best insurance policy for your career is to be really good at your job, which means working on your job instead of networking.

Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

#110

Post by alain94040 »

outworlder wrote: post #107

Overall, I found the reading very enjoyable. And down to earth, which is refreshing. Until this part, that is: > And you know where the founders of these big winners are going to come from? From this room! Not sure how to view this part. On one hand, of course she's right. If no "unicorns" ever came from YC, they wouldn't be around still. But it seems to imply that all founders that are going to be wildly successful…

You're over-analyzing this. It's a speech at a conference, addressing entrepreneurs. That sentence is just pep talk. Don't take it literally.
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