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Maybe not, but that doesn't mean talking to other successful founders isn't extremely helpful. The best founders have multiple great ideas and not enough time to execute on them. If you want to increase your success rate, you should use feedback from other successful founders to decide which great idea to invest your time in.
> Do you think Musk copied that strategy from the business school he never went to. Elon Musk did his undergrad at Wharton. I guess the statement might be true if you mean "business school" to strictly mean a graduate MBA program. But Musk definitely took business classes that would have been nearly identical to those taken by MBAs.
Now that I'm almost in my forties, I realize everything I wrote back then was bullshit. Earnest, but bullshit nonetheless.
I'm much more cynical, but I'm also much more likely to just do what seems right and figure out the rest as I go. I don't read "best practices" or advice articles anymore.
This is not to say that there is nothing to be gained from such sources; just that the likelihood of it being useful or accurate given my particular context is small.
In this, my attitude is much closer to where it was in my teens and childhood, where I just had to figure everything out on my own.
Maybe a good discussion can come on one example startup advice from YC: do things that don't scale.
I think this is really sound in that they're saying "get product-market-fit with some segment of users." i.e. know that there's demand for your product/service even if it's pretty manual to deliver early on. Then see how to automate. Because most product/services aren't materially better than existing options and so you never get product-market-fit even when it's entirely manual and customized to the user.
As a founder I've been guilty of building first because it's fun. I saw what I wanted in user research and built a whole app accordingly. It failed. Would've been better to start with a smaller attack surface (email newsletter) and once we found success to then scale. The interesting thing is I knew of the advice "do things that don't scale" beforehand. But until I failed I didn't know why it mattered and how to apply it.
Net: applying advice is harder than evaluating if the advice is good or bad. You want to have enough time to fail a lot and then appreciate the wisdom of startup advice :-)
Not all ex-post theories are BS. For example, I slam my hand in the drawer and theorize, "Slamming hands in drawers hurts; one should not do it." That theory is pretty solid. It doesn't cover all the edge cases, but following it is better than not following it. There are lots of startup theories that are equally solid, despite being ex-post. I know a startup that didn't pay payroll tax for a couple years, and it ende…
Not taking sides, but your example is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man fallacy.
The parent comment is criticizing the article for "cherry picking". That in itself is not a fallacy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> experiments can be repeated as many times as you like with the same results That is not actually true, there is a lot of randomness, and in quantum mechanics the randomness is fundamental. The real secret of the natural sciences is that good physicists never publish if they know they don't know the answer. It took hundreds of years of that policy before the narrowly applicable theories blossomed into the general la…
Sure, there is randomness but in normal cases you can apply statistics to describe it reasonably well. The results are not 100% sure but 99% or 99.99999% or whatever you need. It's not that the laws of gravity stop working entirely over night. Newtons theory wasn't perfect and Einsteins theory isn't perfect but it describes what happens in nature very very well for billions of years.
If you went back 400 years and demanded that physicists explain my dog's behaviors, you would probably get some answers that sounded OK (kind of like Aristotle's attempts at physics) and maybe even were convincing to people of the time, but they wouldn't have much truth value. Present day economics has a few equivalents to Boyle's gas law, many equivalents to ancient Greek physics, and no equivalents to atomic theory.
>> Do you think Musk copied that strategy from the business school he never went to? Do you think Brian Chesky of Airbnb heard that strategy from a friend? Maybe not, but that doesn't mean talking to other successful founders isn't extremely helpful. The best founders have multiple great ideas and not enough time to execute on them. If you want to increase your success rate, you should use feedback from other success…
From the article: ”Do you think Brian Chesky of Airbnb heard that strategy from a friend? Hell, do you even think that freeriding off of Craigslist was their reason for success?” Yes, freeriding off of Craigslist was the reason for their early success, without which their later success was not possible. Having a good model means absolutely nothing without some ability to market it, especially in the marketplace space…
> The idea of using free ways to get your startup initial momentum is absolutely not BS. Agree, and that's also not what I said :-)
I'm surprised this blog post made the first page of HN given its lack of sources or analysis. Maybe a good discussion can come on one example startup advice from YC: do things that don't scale. I think this is really sound in that they're saying "get product-market-fit with some segment of users." i.e. know that there's demand for your product/service even if it's pretty manual to deliver early on. Then see how to au…
"Do things that don't scale" is good advice, I agree. But maybe the reality is more "Do ALSO things that don't scale", and then it becomes much more obvious and irrelevant, doesn't it?
> Do you think Musk copied that strategy from the business school he never went to. Elon Musk did his undergrad at Wharton. I guess the statement might be true if you mean "business school" to strictly mean a graduate MBA program. But Musk definitely took business classes that would have been nearly identical to those taken by MBAs.
He has an economics and physics degree, not business. Did he take business classes and read business books? Probably. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk