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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

#111

Post by jl »

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…

I was giving a talk to 800+ women (most of whom were not affiliated with YC in any way) who attended the Female Founders Conference last April in SF. A majority of them have already started a startup, so of course I'm hoping they will become successful someday.

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

#112

Post by dang »

asimuvPR wrote: post #105
dang wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, that's one of the advantages of doing a low-status activity. The people doing it really want to.

We're seeing a similar shift with programming, too. When one's formative experiences were in the low-status phase, it can be weird and challenging to realize that's not true anymore.

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

#113

Post by selectron »

saganus wrote: post #98
selectron wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The role of luck explains why your startup succeeds while that of another person who works just as hard and is just as smart fails. Obviously hard work is important, but most startups have a lot of hard-working and smart people behind them, and yet still fail. Those that do succeed are very hard to predict. If success is unpredictable, that usually means that luck plays a large role. In general people prefer to under…

> If success is unpredictable, that usually means that luck plays a large role. Could it be also that maybe we are not yet aware of the myriad of other factors that also influence the outcome? i.e. it may seem like luck but it could be something we just aren't modelling properly, unless you define luck to be precisely the "bag of unknown variables". However more than once I've seen people define luck as "that ether a…

Yes part of it is certainly hidden information, but for me luck is about how well the hidden information winds up helping you. The "ether around us that makes lucky people lucky" is a bit of a tautological definition of luck, really not sure what you mean by this. For me luck is when the variables you cannot control for work out in your favor. In physics we have what is known as the "look elsewhere effect", which is the phenomenon that if you look for new physics in many different places you are likely to find anomalies that look like new physics just due to chance. In the startup world this is roughly equivalent to saying that a startup's success was due to exceptional early founders or an exceptional idea only after that company has been successful.

Here is an example - the article says to focus on building something people want. Well how do you know you have built something people want enough to pay for before they buy it? You can't really know, which is why VCs fund a lot of companies for cheap and try to see who is lucky enough to actually be building something people want.

The conclusion of the article says that if you follow these steps you will be the master of your own fate, but this conclusion is disingenuous. It is based on looking backwards rather than forwards - all companies that succeed have made something people want and quickly increased their revenue, so all you have to do to succeed is make something people want and grow! Good luck.

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

#114

Post by hordeallergy »

castis wrote: post #78
nutheracc wrote: post #52

"...shares her learnings about..." -- this is not English. Failing in the second sentence.

Critiquing others without understand the subject matter is a surefire way to make yourself look foolish. http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19227/plural-of-l...

That link is the weakest possible support. The previous poster is correct. Look elsewhere.

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

#115

Post by nostrademons »

birken wrote: post #109
akg_67 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 corporat…

For most people on the business end of things, networking is your job.

There's a whole world out there that technologists like us rarely pay attention to, which mostly consists of building relationships with other people whose only job is networking so that when their company is looking to purchase, they think of us. Familiarity is a remarkably effective distortion on our evaluation of what is "good", and many technologists who didn't realize this ended up building something that nobody ever heard of.

The reason YC (and other top startup advisors) say to ignore this isn't that it's unimportant, it's that you can fairly easily hire all the people whose day job is networking once you have a product that people want on its own merits, while if nobody wants your product, you'll have to hire them at fat prices to get anywhere. It's a matter of negotiating leverage: show up at the table with something people really want and you will find plenty of people willing to help sell it, while if you spend all your time trying to sell what nobody wants, it will never become something people want.

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

#116

Post by lotharbot »

usmeteora wrote: post #34

as a 26yr old female Electrical Engineer getting involved with entrepreneurship and doing my own software startup, I agree there is too much controversy, talk and fear surrounding being a female in tech. Don't get me wrong, it is isolating in general but after working for two startups, one bought out by a foreign company and another now has billions in funding, doing software analytics on the trading floor through su…

> "notion that if we have an environment where we can all be super girly like omg together"

My wife normally works remotely, but meets with her team in person twice a year. Last time, at the first whole-team dinner, she announced she was pregnant... and the other women on the team fawned and fussed over her the rest of the week. Which was super duper uncomfortable for her, as one of the most extreme introverts I know.

She's not interested in being "girly". She's interested in being who she is -- technical, brilliant, competitive, powerful, and into My Little Ponies because it's a great show, not because it's girly.

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

#117

Post by jpm_sd »

douglance wrote: post #75
ajessup wrote: post #14

It would be wonderful if these sorts of articles (which efficiently generalize advice based on thousands of data points) could back their assertions up with a few telling case studies. It's often too easy to nod sagely at advice like "don't loose focus" but not actually recognize the pathology in ourselves in our day to day lives.

Read books. They often contain anecdotes like that.

I really enjoyed this one in particular: Founders at Work (http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/d...).

Hey, look at that! It's by Jessica Livingston!

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

#118

Post by asimuvPR »

dang wrote: post #112
asimuvPR wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, that's one of the advantages of doing a low-status activity. The people doing it really want to. We're seeing a similar shift with programming, too. When one's formative experiences were in the low-status phase, it can be weird and challenging to realize that's not true anymore.

I'm still a bit shy when people ask about what I do. My answer is always: I fix and program computers. They don't probe anymore. To be honest, programming is not glamorous or even "cute". I find it really challenging (in a good way) and interesting. Sometimes even fun. But high status? Allow me to simply LOL.

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

#119

Post by castis »

hordeallergy wrote: post #114
castis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Critiquing others without understand the subject matter is a surefire way to make yourself look foolish. http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19227/plural-of-l...

That link is the weakest possible support. The previous poster is correct. Look elsewhere.

Incorrect, the weakest possible support would have been me just backing up the idea with my own words, which is not what happened. If you need further proof then that is your burden, not mine.

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

#120

Post by jtbigwoo »

birken wrote: post #109
akg_67 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 corporat…

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

This isn't true, in my experience. I have a few pretty good jobs on my resume (System Architect at a Fortune 50 company, Manager of Development at a big ad agency). Last year, when I was looking for work, those titles were pretty much entirely disregarded by the employers I applied to. Almost every one of them told me they never trusted titles from other companies and tried to get me to join as a mid-level engineer.

Every time I had a friend inside the company, however, I was routed to senior-level jobs that actually matched my experience. I've spent time keeping up those friendships with occasional notes and lunches. If I had just assumed that being really good at my job would be my best insurance, I would not have found the opportunities I did.

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