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Timing Lessons

bizstone.com

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Re: Timing Lessons

#21

Post by evgen »

dotcoma wrote: post #11
growl wrote: post #9

It's called luck

good luck to you then with having as much luck, if all you think it takes is luck...

Luck is not all it takes, but these sorts of self-congratulatory stories (and the hagiographies written about such people after they succeed) always seem to downplay this particular element of the story. Having a great idea and a great team are not enough and sometimes those who "get lucky" can make do with substandard ideas or teams. It is hard to admit that the most significant determinant to success is completely out of your control, but if you accept this fact and plan accordingly you will be better off than someone who things that their superior team and idea are all they need.

A lot of the success of agile businesses and the whole mvp product strategy could be explained by the fact that it embraces the possibility of randomness and unexpected outcomes rather than ignoring it completely.

Re: Timing Lessons

#22

Post by wicknicks »

Very interesting! Its great to know that it takes years/decades to get to systems like Twitter. The media makes it look so much like a "it-happened-overnight" story.

Re: Timing Lessons

#23

Post by _delirium »

evgen wrote: post #21
dotcoma wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good luck to you then with having as much luck, if all you think it takes is luck...

Luck is not all it takes, but these sorts of self-congratulatory stories (and the hagiographies written about such people after they succeed) always seem to downplay this particular element of the story. Having a great idea and a great team are not enough and sometimes those who "get lucky" can make do with substandard ideas or teams. It is hard to admit that the most significant determinant to success is completely…

A lot of scientists, interestingly, are willing to admit a luck factor, especially when it comes to doing something Nobel-Prize-level world-changing. Some really did know exactly what they were doing, and it worked. But a lot of scientists frankly admit that the big career-making thing they did wasn't even something they thought was important at the time--- and sometimes nobody else thought it was important either, and it languished in a journal for 10 years before someone else noticed it had big implications. Of course, that's not purely luck, because they'd never have had that opportunity to get their work belatedly discovered if they hadn't done good work on interesting problems, and published it. But there does seem to be some element of luck in the work turning out to be huge. There are plenty of people in exactly the same position who do good work on interesting problems, write a good journal article, and it doesn't turn out 10 years later to have unexpected but important implications, winning them the Nobel Prize. Just sort of how it happens; you can't always predict what is going to turn out to be important.

I could be wrong, but my impression is that wealthy businessmen are somewhat less willing to admit the role of luck than famous scientists are. Due to real differences in the role of luck in the two areas? Due to political considerations (the implications of admitting that wealth disparities aren't all due to merit are more political than the implications of admitting that scientific fame isn't purely due to merit)? Due to the self-deprecating scientists being humbler personalities? Dunno. And I could be wrong on the aggregate difference; I haven't done a survey or anything.

Re: Timing Lessons

#24

Post by dotcoma »

evgen wrote: post #21
dotcoma wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good luck to you then with having as much luck, if all you think it takes is luck...

Luck is not all it takes, but these sorts of self-congratulatory stories (and the hagiographies written about such people after they succeed) always seem to downplay this particular element of the story. Having a great idea and a great team are not enough and sometimes those who "get lucky" can make do with substandard ideas or teams. It is hard to admit that the most significant determinant to success is completely…

Luck is important, no doubt. But a)first you must follow your heart; b)you must do great work; and c)then you probably deserve some luck, too, and/or create your own luck.

Re: Timing Lessons

#25

Post by ck2 »

Er, he personally launched Xanga? I think not from what I have read elsewhere.

More like he learned how to code/design from being given work to do on Xanga.

Rewriting history there eh?

Re: Timing Lessons

#26

Post by 0xygen »

I am glad that he purposefully calls out the balance between perseverance and a seemingly overnight success. This balance (or differentiation) is quite significant for anyone who is starting off. A week on TC and one would assume that raising money and releasing products is a matter of weeks if not days. But all good things (including wine) takes time to blosom.

Back to hardwork.com

Re: Timing Lessons

#27

Post by jiganti »

ivankirigin wrote: post #17

Great post, but as a side note: "Twitter has 145m users in the same way @MikeTyson has $400m in career earnings." http://twitter.com/AndySwan/status/22880346280

Yeah I was wondering about this, surely they didn't have 145 million "users" as in "created accounts", which is typically the definition. I imagine someone who checked the website once is part of their "user" tally.

Re: Timing Lessons

#28

Post by ivankirigin »

jiganti wrote: post #27
ivankirigin wrote: post #17

Great post, but as a side note: "Twitter has 145m users in the same way @MikeTyson has $400m in career earnings." http://twitter.com/AndySwan/status/22880346280

Yeah I was wondering about this, surely they didn't have 145 million "users" as in "created accounts", which is typically the definition. I imagine someone who checked the website once is part of their "user" tally.

Twitter has been quoted claiming 176M unique visitors a few months ago. That stat makes sense for a site like nytimes.com, but not for a social network. The number of active users is close to a standard in the industry. When Facebook says it has 500M+ users, they mean people who have accounts and have visited the site in the last 30 days.

Thing is that everyone knows the right stats to publish. They only use 145M because is sounds better than (the more likely) 70M active. This doesn't come as a coincidence as Twitter is trying to start selling ads. Attractiveness to advertisers is directly proportional to audience size.

Re: Timing Lessons

#29

Post by dabent »

ivankirigin wrote: post #17

Great post, but as a side note: "Twitter has 145m users in the same way @MikeTyson has $400m in career earnings." http://twitter.com/AndySwan/status/22880346280

I noticed this post from Biz (his first since July 7th) and compared it with this analysis of a post from Ev: http://social.venturebeat.com/2010/09/03/twitter-ecosystem-a...

It seems to me that a couple of people are trying to show how much value there is in Twitter, like a orphaned puppy looking extra adorable for possible new owners. Just saying.

Re: Timing Lessons

#30

Post by mkramlich »

bluishgreen wrote: post #19
dotcoma wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it makes setbacks tolerable, and day to day toiling a pleasure.

Not just on an emotional level, I think when a bunch of clever people get together a sort of super brain is formed which is greater than each of them. This is so since the super brain has the combined knowledge but not the combined biases of the individuals. To give an analogue this is like these comment threads where knowledge gets added and incorrect statements promptly and strongly refuted, but on a much much high…

I think if you were to plot it as a graph it has a curve though.

Sure adding that 2nd smart person, the 8th smart person, etc., can add benefit and yield a whole which is greater than the sum of the individual parts in isolation. But once you are in the organization size range where you're adding a 500th person, a 10,000th person, then the organization almost always takes on other qualities and conditions: bureaucracy, slowing down, middle management, rules, paperwork, gossip, insulation from consumers/competition, groupthink, aversion to risk, and so on. And these qualities dumb it down. The "group brain" becomes much dumber than a smart brain when left alone and unfettered as an individual.

Google is a bit of an exceptional case where despite having on the OOM of 20k employees they don't seem to have quite succumbed to Big Dumb Company-itis. Surely they have some aspects of it, but they've tried hard to fight it and stay like a smaller/younger org.

I once dealt with a startup that was around 12 people and already I could see symptoms of Big Dumb Company start to manifest themselves.

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