21–30 of 79 posts
But that was certainly not wasted time and effort. Not only did it improve my skillset, but large amounts of the code written could be repurposed for other projects, giving a head start on them.
Multiple times. The perspective I've adopted is to look at what you learned in the process of each failure and how that improved your ability to do a better job on the next venture. The truth is that many don't have the stomach for "sticking with it," doing whatever is necessary to keep going in the down phases (I highly recommend the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling and see if it resonates). You only truly "fail" when y…
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1033193-if-you-think-you-ar...
I've spent the last decade doing this. Building up my savings, draining them on an idea. I put in 40+ per week for a couple years on my last startup in the real estate space. Poached some top level VP's from the biggest firm in our country, but we ran through our capital too quickly due to too many pivots and licensing costs, I could only do no salary for so long, tough when your rent is $2.5k/mo. Now I am back at my…
I'm not dissing that mindset at all, but it is essentially gambling. Over the decades, I've warmed to "the pioneers get all the arrows" mindset: that from a business perspective, it's better to be the second or third in a new area, because you can learn from the pioneer's mistakes. It's rare that the entity that invented a thing is the entity that makes the most profit from it.
Kishore and I have worked together on about 12 different side projects over the course of 13 years, and we've tried to adopt this mindset of consistency, persistence and long timeframes for each.
A few of these projects got good traction, but most of them didn't do well (at least revenue-wise). But here's the thing: working on all these projects consistently over the years, has also helped us learn about things like how to pick a market, how to validate our hypotheses, how to choose technologies when building products, how to maintain codebases over a decade, how to stay nimble, etc.
I would say that the sum total of our collective learnings through all these projects, have helped us significantly in our Typesense journey.
So I would say, showing up everyday is not a magic bullet to making a project successful. Instead, it's a magic bullet to continuous learning and building up a wealth of experience, that might just come in handy when you're working on your next project, which then increases your odds of success.
I worked nearly full-time for about 2 years using my personal savings on a project management software for labs ("Labengine"). The big hook was that it let you run common bioinformatics apps on your data and it would automatically convert the input file to the expected format (there were lots of competing bioinformatics file formats at the time). I had a few of my old professors use it and "love" it but nobody ended…
I worked nearly full-time for about 2 years using my personal savings on a project management software for labs ("Labengine"). The big hook was that it let you run common bioinformatics apps on your data and it would automatically convert the input file to the expected format (there were lots of competing bioinformatics file formats at the time). I had a few of my old professors use it and "love" it but nobody ended…
It's a very tough space to break into it and my recent experience is that the big EMS/EMR vendors are increasingly trying to offer "modules" to do LIMS and bioinformatics analysis pipelines.
Every now and again I start thinking about unsupervised learning projects in this space but look around and see just how little spend on analytics software there is for bioinformatics tools and settle down to focus on helping folks with our cluster and general reporting needs . . .
Multiple times. The perspective I've adopted is to look at what you learned in the process of each failure and how that improved your ability to do a better job on the next venture. The truth is that many don't have the stomach for "sticking with it," doing whatever is necessary to keep going in the down phases (I highly recommend the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling and see if it resonates). You only truly "fail" when y…
Or run out of time?
You don't have infinite time to keep trying things.