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If it isn't going to work, just shut it down

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Re: If it isn't going to work, just shut it down

#51

Post by anonymouse008 »

user3939382 wrote: post #48
nlh wrote: post #32

A great quote sticks in my mind, shared with me by a founder who was going through hard times with his startup. The company was going through a bad spot, and one of his investors suggested just giving up and returning the existing capital to the investors. An advisor then said: "It's not their money anymore. Don't you dare give up." He didn't, he persevered, and the company had a fine outcome years later. I would not…

I burnt years of my life following advice like this when I was young and didn’t know better. If your formula is sufficiently wrong, which is the rule not the exception, you can’t make up for it with perseverance. There’s a selection bias in these stories you hear. Stories about people who gave it their all and failed aren’t popular.

What would you do differently? How do you know now that you were wasting your time?

These moments make you more powerful than ever to be able to articulate why those precious (auto corrected but worked) times were not the myths you heard.

Re: If it isn't going to work, just shut it down

#52

Post by memish »

dvt wrote: post #31
ncmncm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can dream.

What's up with the weird Elon hate recently? I don't care for the guy one way or another, but it's just bizarre. Plus, I have friends that worked for both Tesla and SpaceX and from what I hear, apart from being big and corporate-y, it's a pretty awesome place to be at.

He challenged the narrative and now he's a sworn enemy of the establishment.

Re: If it isn't going to work, just shut it down

#53

Post by ncmncm »

dvt wrote: post #31
ncmncm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can dream.

What's up with the weird Elon hate recently? I don't care for the guy one way or another, but it's just bizarre. Plus, I have friends that worked for both Tesla and SpaceX and from what I hear, apart from being big and corporate-y, it's a pretty awesome place to be at.

It is not weird. He is the world's biggest grifter. Precisely, a great deal more of what he says is a lie than is true, and he has profited more from his grift than anybody except (maybe!) Putin.

Pedo Guy. Hyperloop. Full Self-driving. Electric truck-tractor. Cybertruck. Sub-orbital passenger service. Sub-orbital freight. One-day turnaround. Mars Colonization.

(To be clear: Starship, even 1000 of them, is totally inadequate to colonize Mars, and barely enough, maybe, to maintain an outpost. And it takes 9, not 6 months to get there. And one ship could take 17, at most, not 100 people.)

Re: If it isn't going to work, just shut it down

#54

Post by ncmncm »

brazzy wrote: post #42
ncmncm wrote: post #24

Yes: e.g., Energy Vault (NRGV, $2B+) absolutely cannot work, and should be shut down immediately. Maybe give back whatever of the pigeons^Winvestors' money is left? Somebody should sue the founders for fraud. The crane thing was actively stupid, and very obviously could not ever have worked. An investor who bothered to consult literally any mechanical engineer would have run a mile. Lots did, of course. But somebody…

Can you give a quick rundown why "the crane thing" could not ever have worked, and what exactly it was, separate from the "condominium for concrete blocks", which seems to be what is described in the Wikipedia article, but also uses cranes? As a non-mechanical engineer, it's not obvious to me.

It doesn't work if there is any wind at all. Even with a dome over, it could store only a pitifully minuscule amount of energy. There are lots of YT vids about how stupid it is.

Compare to e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31736539 . Somehow people are unable to do even the most trivial reasoning about cost, where energy storage is involved: expensive stuff is expensive. Utilities will buy what is cheap to build, cheap to use, cheap to maintain, and reliable. NRGV checks zero boxes.

(Hydrogen and ammonia synthesis equipment will not be super-cheap, but its output burns in gas peaker turbines, and can be sold for hard cash.)

Even NRGV dropped the crane thing like a hot potato the moment they got their IPO cash.

Re: If it isn't going to work, just shut it down

#55

Post by hinkley »

flaviut wrote: post #49
brazzy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give a quick rundown why "the crane thing" could not ever have worked, and what exactly it was, separate from the "condominium for concrete blocks", which seems to be what is described in the Wikipedia article, but also uses cranes? As a non-mechanical engineer, it's not obvious to me.

Compare it to water energy storage. Water is 1kg/L. Concrete is 2.4kg/L. Therefore, the volume of concrete lifted is 40% the volume of water you would need to store the same amount of energy. Here's the biggest water energy storage facility in the US: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dominion+Bath+County+Pumpe... Cost of the water for that facility? $0/L. Equivalent cost for concrete? $0.15/L ( https://www.google.co…

> like thousands or tens of thousands of the motor/generator devices. I can't imagine the cost.

? The number of motor/generator pairs is proportional to the charge/discharge rate of the system. I'm not saying that because I'm an insider or have any special knowledge, I'm saying that because nothing else makes sense. So the question is whether it's cheaper to maintain a bunch of cranes and miles of steel cable and pulleys or a water generator and pipes. And then things like how each responds to earthquakes and thunderstorms (water probably wins in the latter, but the former is a little more complicated).

Re: If it isn't going to work, just shut it down

#56

Post by ineedasername »

anonymouse008 wrote: post #51
user3939382 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I burnt years of my life following advice like this when I was young and didn’t know better. If your formula is sufficiently wrong, which is the rule not the exception, you can’t make up for it with perseverance. There’s a selection bias in these stories you hear. Stories about people who gave it their all and failed aren’t popular.

What would you do differently? How do you know now that you were wasting your time? These moments make you more powerful than ever to be able to articulate why those precious (auto corrected but worked) times were not the myths you heard.

I think a lot more people persevere past the point of salvation than persevere against long odds and succeed. There's no clear cut answer to determining 100% of the time, in the moment, if failure is a foregone conclusion, but that doesn't mean you should stick it out until the bitter end. Since most startups fail anyway, if you're already near failure mode then the bias should be in needing an extremely compelling reason-- beyond blind perserverence-- to keep going. Otherwise just salvage anything that might be salvaged and try something else with the new benefit of experience.

"What would you do differently" is easily answered with "anything but the thing that just failed."

Re: If it isn't going to work, just shut it down

#57

Post by gweinberg »

I don't think the metaphor works well here. The argument that the ship of Theseus is the same is because even though each component has been replaced, it has been replaced by something pretty much indistinguishable from the original. One plank or rope or sail is much like another. I don't think anyone would claim it's still the ship of Theseus if you took all the wood and build something else out of it that wasn't even a ship anymore. But in any case I don't see how invoking the metaphor in any way supports the op's argument.

Re: If it isn't going to work, just shut it down

#58

Post by hinkley »

ncmncm wrote: post #53
dvt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's up with the weird Elon hate recently? I don't care for the guy one way or another, but it's just bizarre. Plus, I have friends that worked for both Tesla and SpaceX and from what I hear, apart from being big and corporate-y, it's a pretty awesome place to be at.

It is not weird. He is the world's biggest grifter. Precisely, a great deal more of what he says is a lie than is true, and he has profited more from his grift than anybody except (maybe!) Putin. Pedo Guy. Hyperloop. Full Self-driving. Electric truck-tractor. Cybertruck. Sub-orbital passenger service. Sub-orbital freight. One-day turnaround. Mars Colonization. (To be clear: Starship, even 1000 of them, is totally ina…

I used to work with an ex paypal employee who carried around a block of salt for Elon Musk. I never did get the full story. You could see the hate-lines coming off of the guy any time you accidentally mentioned the two in the same sentence.

On the Starship front, I don't doubt that he's moved the needle, but I think people are also glossing over that whole, "Send up multiple ships, have them all transfer fuel to another ship in zero G" bit. It's presented as a 2:1 thing but does the math work out for that, or is it three ships combining fuel into a single vessel?

Re: If it isn't going to work, just shut it down

#59

Post by hinkley »

idoh wrote: post #21
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #7

On the other hand, Microsoft was just a BASIC vendor, Amazon was a bookseller, Netflix was mail oder DVD company. Sometimes if you have a really good team/organization it makes sense to pivot based on the market.

Amazon always had ambitions to go beyond books, that's not a pivot.

But cloud computing?

Re: If it isn't going to work, just shut it down

#60

Post by ineedasername »

harpiaharpyja wrote: post #16
diob wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind survivorship bias though. There are probably loads who pivot multiple times yet still end in failure.

It's tricky though, you often can't tell if you are in the survivor set or not until after all those attempts at perseverance. Its easy to assume that after N failures the company is not in the survivor set, but you can never actually know. So without perseverance, no one would be a survivor.

That just amounts to never cutting your losses & throwing good money (or time) after bad.

The fact that it's a difficult decision with risks of being wrong either way is not a good reason to avoid making it. If you're going to choose perseverance it should be a reasoned choice, not the result of inaction due to uncertainty in the face of a difficult choice.

Before "move fast & break things" became the slightly misguided mantra for SV the message was often wisdom, much more tempered by decades of startup culture, was "fail fast and move on".

Most will fail. If the only thing you have left is vague hope and a willingness to work hard and very little else then it's best to put that optimism and work ethic into a course of action where the preponderance of evidence doesn't already point towards failure.

Of course it's a balance, but don't be afraid of making a decision just because it isn't an easy one to make.

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