Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup • Hacker News Board

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#41

Post by parthdesai » Wed, Jan 10, 2018, 2:08 AM UTC

linkmotif wrote: post #22

c8d3f7b49897918 wrote: post #18

Negative trend 6: adopting a trendy, complex web stack before you absolutely have to when a simple one would get you to market faster

What are some examples of a trendy, complex web stack? Or, what are some examples of a non-trendy, non-complex web stack?

Adding pub-sub/queue/message broker in your app when a normal when a normal connection to SQL db from your web app is more than sufficient. There are a lot of companies that have kafka in their stack when they actually don't need it. This is one thing i have seen a lot.

On front-end side adding redux when a normal react-app would be just fine.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#42

Post by FireBeyond » Wed, Jan 10, 2018, 2:08 AM UTC

stretchwithme wrote: post #26

Pretending to be a family is bad news. Especially if you tell prospective employees that and then remind them that employment is "at will".

Right? "We're a family... and if you fuck up, you're outta the family."

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#43

Post by Kerrick » Wed, Jan 10, 2018, 2:12 AM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #30

Is doubling in a year even "hypergrowth"? Doubling revenue every a month or two? Sure. Doubling revenue in a year is a very strong growth rate for an established company, but it doesn't strike me as particularly hypergrowth. Doubling headcount in a year seems also fairly routine for early-stage companies (assuming funding and cachet is in place).

Doubling headcount from 3 -> 6 is quite different than from 450 -> 909.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#44

Post by jmtame » Wed, Jan 10, 2018, 2:24 AM UTC

stretchwithme wrote: post #26

Pretending to be a family is bad news. Especially if you tell prospective employees that and then remind them that employment is "at will".

The family relationship has always been a horrible way of describing the employee/employer relationship. There's divorce or disowning someone, but do you really want to try and draw that comparison when you fire someone? A team has players and they're always being traded to different teams. That's both more positive and honest when you're trying to describe a high-performant culture.

And there's also no concept of unconditional love in a company. There's respect, which should be a given. But you shouldn't be expected to unconditionally love your co-workers.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#45

Post by EGreg » Wed, Jan 10, 2018, 2:25 AM UTC

nlh wrote: post #31

Great points. Strongly agree with #3 in particular ("like a family") because I've made this exact mistake with companies I've led in the past. To elaborate on what the piece touches on but doesn't specifically say: > You will need to make hard decisions for the sake of > the business. You can’t actually offer people anything > remotely close to lifelong loyalty or security, and it’s > dishonest to implicitly do so. T…

How about taking it one step further and not hiring people onto a team but instead rewarding them:

https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2016/11/properly-valuing-con...

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#46

Post by 40acres » Wed, Jan 10, 2018, 2:29 AM UTC

A trend that I would like to see more startups buck is the use of the independent contractor model. While I believe startups like Uber and Lyft could not achieve the scale that they have w.o this model, there are smaller startups & markets where I believe the increase in value to customer service can really differentiate a product.

Studies have shown that customer service, ability to execute & perform, and general quality of service correlate with whether or not the employee is an IC/temp or not. I've wondered if any startups have gone the opposite direction and hired folks FT/PT for roles that otherwise would seem to be filled by ICs.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#47

Post by sytelus » Wed, Jan 10, 2018, 2:32 AM UTC

The catchiest (and wrong) assertion is this:

"even for highly technical aspects like deep learning, fast.ai has shown that people with 1-year of coding experience can become world-class deep learning practitioners"

Yes, any Joe can train deep network with dozen lines of Keras. Sure, your startup can use off-the self models and tweak it a bit... That doesn't make you "world-class deep learning practitioner". If you are designing the network for new problem domain, there are thousands of decisions to make - everything from hyperparameters to network architecture to distributions in data. Making these decisions without having developed lots of intuition and good foundations is very hard. I often find usual developers without ML background and experience completely lost in these cases. Debugging a model that doesn't work is super hard. There are no IDEs, no breakpoints, no watches and in fact not even error messages. Its purely statistical debugging and probabilistic fixes.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#48

Post by gnicholas » Wed, Jan 10, 2018, 2:33 AM UTC

birken wrote: post #36

csallen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: Blog posts like this one are useful, because the VC-funded companies you named are so successful at dominating our thoughts, conversations, and news feeds (HN included) that many founders never see any examples of people following an alternative path. It can be inspiring to a lot of people to simply hear about the possibility of building a small, revenue-generating business or side project. I've been ru…

I disagree that this blog post is giving an interesting counterpoint. As I said, I'm not diminishing their success, but this blog post isn't about their story, it's about knocking other styles of companies they disagree with. For example, the VC thing: > Therefore, VCs often push companies to grow too quickly, before they’ve nailed down product-market fit and monetization [citation needed] > Staying small keeps you f…

I don't think a citation is needed for the proposition that VCs often push companies to grow too quickly, before they've nailed down product-market fit and monetization.

You could argue that VCs want to see product-market fit before they invest, but this is certainly not true of monetization.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#49

Post by gaadd33 » Wed, Jan 10, 2018, 2:35 AM UTC

dboreham wrote: post #17

dpwm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, trends #4 and #5 are both qualified with "AI Specific" further down. There will be some PhD theses that do solve real problems, but many are not going to make a startup successful by themselves.

Also FedEx

FedEx wasn't based on a PhD thesis

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#50

Post by jwilliams » Wed, Jan 10, 2018, 2:46 AM UTC

Without hyperbole, one of the biggest trends to avoid is overgeneralization.

A large part of one's experience at a startup is unique to that context.

Certainly not all. But certainly a lot -- Probably the majority of what counts as advice.

Being able to filter what's generalizable and what's not is the most useful skill an advisor can develop -- ironically, even more than the experience. (And I'm breaking my own hypothesis by giving advice there).