331–340 of 346 posts
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I love the man's essays and he is clearly a genius, but he's getting carried away a bit on Twitter.
People considering him a genius as opposed to a narcissist who accidentally got rich likely fuels his need to drop nuggets of "wisdom" to the peasants like this.
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People considering him a genius as opposed to a narcissist who accidentally got rich likely fuels his need to drop nuggets of "wisdom" to the peasants like this.
There is some percentage of people who become wealthy accidentally - but PG is not one of them. He's like the Michelangelo of early internet startups.
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Yeah politics on twitter is awful. For outsiders like me it is often hard to even understand what a popular political tweet is even about. Twitter is good for pictures of nature though. And somehow a great deal of decent scientific discourse goes on twitter without descending into the crap that political twitter does.
Outsider, as in, not a person bubbled into social media derived feuds regarding politics?
I find politics is best learnt from history books. There isn't that much about today's politics you can't learn from 19th-21st Century history books.
I'm a seed stage VC. Reposting my thoughts on this from twitter: YC invests at $2m valuations, so Paul's take is very logical. This won't apply to startups raising seed rounds at 10x higher valuations. At a 10x valuation, you (literally) need to show your startup is 10x more likely to win. Progress and pitching are part of that, but so are financial plans. Some examples of what financial plans reveal: - are the busin…
> At a 10x valuation, you (literally) need to show your startup is 10x more likely to win. Progress and pitching are part of that, but so are financial plans. Nitpick but this is (literally) not true. Expected value is a function of FUTURE VALUE and PROBABILITY. Unless all the wins are the same future value you can't reduce the reasoning just to probability as you suggest. Practically the valuation is also determined…
I'm a seed stage VC. Reposting my thoughts on this from twitter: YC invests at $2m valuations, so Paul's take is very logical. This won't apply to startups raising seed rounds at 10x higher valuations. At a 10x valuation, you (literally) need to show your startup is 10x more likely to win. Progress and pitching are part of that, but so are financial plans. Some examples of what financial plans reveal: - are the busin…
Cool. Counterpoint from the opposite side of the table. I agree that modeling these factors, checking your assumptions, finding what factors your plan is most sensitive/responsive to, estimating realistic buffers, etc. is extremely useful, and even essential. And doing so at an early stage is very good. However, as Eisenhower said: “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is i…
> I'd think it would instead be a great exercise to do with a candidate after the first few meetings
We're on the same page here, too. If we ask for a financial plan it's usually after a meeting or two, not as a filter for whether to take a first meeting.
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It reveals PG's MO. Which is to say edgy things at the expense of accuracy to attract attention. The reaction is not directed towards business plans or whether PG has even read one or not (hint: no one cares). It is about his consistently proven proclivity to say edgy, inaccurate things, often which add 0 value. Then get upset that people are pointing this out on twitter. It's pretty annoying that he acts this way on…
If his MO is to have fun watching small-minded idiots trying to misinterpret every word he says, then yeah, I guess the tweet does indeed reveal it.
Seems like a lot of people are missing the point of this one. PG/YC invest at the earliest stages. The information they need is pretty much: 1. What are you doing? 2. Do people like it? 3. How big is the market? 4. What are you/team like? Could you cover all of those in a formal business plan? Sure, but you can also do so in a short-form application that's 1/20 the length or in a 10-minute back-and-forth conversation…
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Over the last 15 years, I built a unicorn and sold it for more than a billion and half. We wrote unit tests extensively.
Clearly one of you must be wrong or lying
I mean, who would even think it is?
There are also alternative approaches to achieving quality, and there was that report/"study" circulating around that claimed Team Software Process actually beats most agile/extreme programming methodologies in at least one metric (or two: defect rate and time to completion, IIRC). Of course, none of the actual "agile" development teams do clear-cut TDD or Extreme Programming either, so you are never comparing apples-to-apples.
As a corollary, I'd also say that neither does the UI or UX matter that much to success, and there are simply a bunch of intangibles that can make or break a product.
But one "tangible" thing is that you've got to be serving some customers' needs, and need to continue to do that. And rare are businesses which have a need of "my button needs to be rounded and 10px away from the next button" or "my code needs to be unit tested": those are actually "my customer can get their work done through my product" and "it should rarely break".
None of this means that you should not invest in pretty/functional UI/UX or well-tested code. Just don't expect that to mean much in the grand scheme of things. They will affect your ability to hire top-level people once you are an established business, though.
(I personally am too attached to "high-quality" [as in well tested] code and would struggle to kick off a start-up for that reason only, even though ideas keep popping up :)
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Clearly one of you must be wrong or lying
Or both could be right
The idea that you need to throw unit testing out to be successful is kind of silly.
When you’re growing a very complex system (huge micro services pattern and dealing with sensitive data) you’ll be happy you have tests to save your ass.
…speaking from experience.
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Clearly one of you must be wrong or lying
Clearly the value of business being sold is not dependent on the application of standardized programming approaches to quality. I mean, who would even think it is? There are also alternative approaches to achieving quality, and there was that report/"study" circulating around that claimed Team Software Process actually beats most agile/extreme programming methodologies in at least one metric (or two: defect rate and…
Product/market fit has more to do with functionality and the minimum quality design aesthetic required by the customer.
In our case, we disrupted a rather boring, traditional field. Our UI/UX was never great neither did we hire “frontend” people until post-acquisition but performance and data security were huge to our clients thus testing.