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Founding Stories Are Myths

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Re: Founding Stories Are Myths

#41

Post by ninly »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #27
52-6F-62 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It only shows beautiful companies/people. You don't need to found a space exploration company to be happy just like you don't need to be with a model. We certainly don't hear much about efforts or successes in anyone's effort to "disrupt" the toilet paper industry, yet it's something most people use daily. It's not sexy, but we all care a lot when it sucks.

I'll be honest with you: almost every single "SV success story" I can think of is boring. Advertisement, book shops, groceries, taxis, food delivery, none of this is particularly glamorous. I don't know where people get this apocryphal wave of "nobody ever talks about boring things". Space X is pretty much the only non-boring "hip" company I can think of!

Even if the Boring Company is hip, I guess no one can get away with saying they're not boring.

Re: Founding Stories Are Myths

#42

Post by nikanj »

mmsimanga wrote: post #31
sharno wrote: post #18

It doesn't just stop at the successful startup stories. It's the same style of stories we face in products successful stories, job offers and love stories. examples: REGAINE (hair loss treatment) only works for some people, not everyone and if you use it consistently twice a day for the rest of your life. A job at Google/Facebook/haskell job requires you to study day and night for algorithms/functional programming/im…

Paraphrasing a quote on social media I once heard, "People forget social media is like a highlights reel. It doesn't show the full game"

Social media makes us depressed, because it makes us compare our behind-the-scenes blooper reel to their highlights of the season reel.

Re: Founding Stories Are Myths

#43

Post by kens »

Walmart gets a lot of flack for moving into small towns and ruining the existing stores. But the 1969 New York Times excerpt in the article mentions how Walmart was dominant in small, rural towns but was facing competition as "the industry's big guns are moving in". ("Big guns" being K-Mart, Gibson and Arlans. K-Mart declared bankruptcy in 2002, Gibson in 1996, and Arlan's in 1973.)

It's kind of mind-blowing to think that in 1969 Walmart was the local store needing to fight off the big chains. But now it's the exact opposite.

Re: Founding Stories Are Myths

#44

Post by rdtsc »

This is how most myths are born - by winners retro-actively rewriting history and including things like predestination, God's vision in their dreams (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Milvian_Bridge), being The Chosen One, etc as the reason for their success.

Today of course those are not appealing, and just sound crazy, so it is something like "I was just returning a late movie", "I was coming back from my yoga massage and had this idea...", etc.

The important part is that only after winning and looking back the history is rewritten. The boring things like plain luck, or maybe persistence, or enough resources (say because of inheriting money for example) to try some business idea multiple times, failing and try again until one sticks is just not a cool story.

Even more interesting is that not just the myth is born but anything the company did, all practices, rituals etc end up promoted as the cause of success. Anyone notice this? It's the cargo-culting of methodologies. Successful startup did some crazy development practice, but as soon as they become popular everyone starts copying that thinking "surely that is the main cause of their success". What if the successful startup could be have been even more successful without that practice, or maybe it had no impact at all.

How about copying personality traits. There was once a CTO I knew. He fancies himself to be like Steve Jobs. Except instead of copying persistence, intelligence, attention to details and design, understanding what would work and what won't for users, he just copied the part of being an asshole. The idea was that Jobs was an asshole, and look at Apple, that's how I'll have to act to make my company have the same success. It ended as well as you'd expect. Developers who didn't want to deal with that simply left and projects started tanking.

Re: Founding Stories Are Myths

#45

Post by TheWrongGuy »

Great point that these narratives are usually self-mythologizing and mostly untrue. Success is more than just a “eureka” moment where it all comes together. It is also more than the alternative that you present here, wherein the person succeeds purely by outworking the competition. A much more complete — and frankly, more interesting — picture of success would include the ideas, the hard work, and also explain how Walton’s early stores were financed by his father in law Leland Stanford Robson (who often paid his son-in-law’s bills, sometimes even without Walton’s knowledge), that he was active in Missouri’s fraternity communities, was a member of QEBH, the UoM secret society that also includes several past and current state governors as well as one of the founders of Kinder Morgan. If your aim is to demythologize success and present a more accurate view of the the path one must walk to become massively successful, isn’t it kind of misleading to omit Walton’s network of powerful family, friends, and benefactors?

Re: Founding Stories Are Myths

#46

Post by timcederman »

k1ns wrote: post #23

This is why I love the How I Built This podcast. It tells the story of a successful founder from childhood to present day. It discusses early successes and failures that ultimately led to that person becoming an "overnight success" decades later. It doesn't try to build this narrative of them being one-hit wonders, it tells the truth. The truth, which isn't nearly as sexy as people would like, is that building a busi…

And even then, their messier version of the truth is cleaned up for a lot of the stories.

Re: Founding Stories Are Myths

#47

Post by TheWrongGuy »

jfasi wrote: post #13

The author is criticizing a genre of narrative that I like to call "career porn." Consider the similarities between "how I started this company" type stories and actual porn: * It depicts something everyone fantasizes about and offers a quick if ultimately unsatisfying release. Who doesn't imagine themselves building something amazing and being idolized by magazines and the general public? * It happens in an unrealis…

Maybe true, but the article is pretty much replacing what you'd call "career porn" with what I'd call "persistence porn." About the kid who walked in the snow wearing nothing but a t shirt every day to get his degree, yadda yadda.. ignore the fact that Sam Walton he had a rich stepdad who financed his businesses, that he was in a prestigious fraternity and secret society at UoM, and had a number of other benefits that are simply not available to your average hard-working chump.

Re: Founding Stories Are Myths

#48

Post by newsat13 »

kens wrote: post #43

Walmart gets a lot of flack for moving into small towns and ruining the existing stores. But the 1969 New York Times excerpt in the article mentions how Walmart was dominant in small, rural towns but was facing competition as "the industry's big guns are moving in". ("Big guns" being K-Mart, Gibson and Arlans. K-Mart declared bankruptcy in 2002, Gibson in 1996, and Arlan's in 1973.) It's kind of mind-blowing to think…

As a non-american, what's wrong with walmart? Apart from them being 'big'?

Re: Founding Stories Are Myths

#49

Post by adventured »

TheWrongGuy wrote: post #47
jfasi wrote: post #13

The author is criticizing a genre of narrative that I like to call "career porn." Consider the similarities between "how I started this company" type stories and actual porn: * It depicts something everyone fantasizes about and offers a quick if ultimately unsatisfying release. Who doesn't imagine themselves building something amazing and being idolized by magazines and the general public? * It happens in an unrealis…

Maybe true, but the article is pretty much replacing what you'd call "career porn" with what I'd call "persistence porn." About the kid who walked in the snow wearing nothing but a t shirt every day to get his degree, yadda yadda.. ignore the fact that Sam Walton he had a rich stepdad who financed his businesses, that he was in a prestigious fraternity and secret society at UoM, and had a number of other benefits tha…

> benefits that are simply not available to your average hard-working chump

What smart investor seeks out "average chumps" exactly? That's an excellent way to lose money. Your setup is a rather amusing contradiction.

You think the $200,000 (Walton put in $50,000) - inflation adjusted - that his step-father put in, was unavailable to everyone else and it made all the difference in Walton's success?

I grew up in an extremely poor part of the country, financing like that was available to a lot of business people. It's typically how most new small businesses that required any meaningful capital got started: other people in the community with money would invest, as banks would never risk their capital without collateral.

$250,000 is about what it costs to open a small convenience store.

The Ben Franklin store Walton opened and operated, was a very successful venture. His father-in-law made an extraordinarily smart investment. As it turns out, Walton wasn't an average chump.

Re: Founding Stories Are Myths

#50

Post by lemonberry »

nikanj wrote: post #42
mmsimanga wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paraphrasing a quote on social media I once heard, "People forget social media is like a highlights reel. It doesn't show the full game"

Social media makes us depressed, because it makes us compare our behind-the-scenes blooper reel to their highlights of the season reel.

I'm a fan of similar, but cheesier, saying, "never compare your inside to someone else's outside"
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