Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics
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Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics
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Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics
#2> To validate your hypotheses as quickly as possible with as little money as possible and the try and create experiments with asymmetrical risk.
> Because the world is so complex, you’ll often have an answer faster by just building some prototype of the hypothesis you want to test.
> If it catches on, you can always scale later.
I think one of the coolest real-world examples of this in practice is how Facebook runs thousands of mini-experiments with different users. Facebook is known for having one of the best data science departments in the world and when they want to change or add a feature of the website they do it for a small subset of users and see what the response is like. If the users seem to like it they can repeat the experiment with a larger subset of users. If the users don't like the change there's no big risk because only a few users were exposed.
Contrast this to how Snapchat completely changed their UI for nearly every user all at once and got a ton of negative feedback for it. That was a complete UI overhaul which is different than FB and their hundreds of mini-changes but the idea is similar.
Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics
#3This reminds me of a CNN video I saw today [1].
Maybe this is what makes the difference between statisticians trying to predict the election and the method used by "Trafalgar Group" who try to understand each states regulations and specifics to make rule based predictions, instead of extrapolating from a big pool of data. In two days we will know who was right.
[1] Pollster who predicted Trump's 2016 win makes 2020 prediction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BOhRCeoMzM
Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics
#4> To validate your hypotheses as quickly as possible with as little money as possible and the try and create experiments with asymmetrical risk. > Because the world is so complex, you’ll often have an answer faster by just building some prototype of the hypothesis you want to test. > If it catches on, you can always scale later. I think one of the coolest real-world examples of this in practice is how Facebook runs t…
> That was a complete UI overhaul which is different than FB and their hundreds of mini-changes but the idea is similar.
The problem with facebook's approach is that you can get stuck in local optima and it might be hard to break out. That is why Facebook has done some big changes in the past as well, not just incremental improvements
Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics
#5> To validate your hypotheses as quickly as possible with as little money as possible and the try and create experiments with asymmetrical risk. > Because the world is so complex, you’ll often have an answer faster by just building some prototype of the hypothesis you want to test. > If it catches on, you can always scale later. I think one of the coolest real-world examples of this in practice is how Facebook runs t…
> That was a complete UI overhaul which is different than FB and their hundreds of mini-changes but the idea is similar. The problem with facebook's approach is that you can get stuck in local optima and it might be hard to break out. That is why Facebook has done some big changes in the past as well, not just incremental improvements
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Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics
#6> To validate your hypotheses as quickly as possible with as little money as possible and the try and create experiments with asymmetrical risk. > Because the world is so complex, you’ll often have an answer faster by just building some prototype of the hypothesis you want to test. > If it catches on, you can always scale later. I think one of the coolest real-world examples of this in practice is how Facebook runs t…
If their approach worked, Facebook would actually be good.
Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics
#7Has anyone discovered a way to bring the content into a form that is halfway bearable to read? Neither zoom nor reader mode of Firefox helps.
Edit: before you spend time trying this: it does not have a proper printing stylesheet either.
Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics
#8> To validate your hypotheses as quickly as possible with as little money as possible and the try and create experiments with asymmetrical risk. > Because the world is so complex, you’ll often have an answer faster by just building some prototype of the hypothesis you want to test. > If it catches on, you can always scale later. I think one of the coolest real-world examples of this in practice is how Facebook runs t…
If their approach worked, Facebook would actually be good.
Good for whom is the question. I suspect they’re quite good for what they’re seeking.
Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics
#9[deleted]
Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics
#10The basic premise of this article seems to be that, yes, entrepreneurship is not physics, mainly because human behavior is harder to model than things like motion and forces. So the TLDR (according to the author) is:
"The point is not to ‘not fail’, the point is to fail quickly and fail often in non-lethal ways so you have pragmatic, real-world knowledge to help you guide your decisions."
I liked the part where they also talk about "asymmetrical risk" and creating experiments where you may risk 10% of your capital, but if that thing works, it will double your business. I think this applies to all aspects of entrepreneurship, not just building the product. For example, I write about acquisition channels that consistently work for founders [1] and found the most successful ones place "small bets" that can potentially have "big results". Like mentioning their idea in a FB community where they could get 1000s of potentially interested people. Time invested: 10 minutes. Results: 1000+ potential users. Not bad.
Nassim Taleb also talks about this "asymmetrical risk" concept [2] and a lot of his "Antifragile" book was about it. I'm really curious who originally came with this concept (it seems to go by different names, the OP calls it "asymmetrical risk", Taleb calls it "convexity), and it seems the first person who came up with it was someone from the finance industry decades ago.
[1] https://firstpayingusers.com
[2] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/articles/2013/07/16/nass...