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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

#101

Post by iLoveOncall »

nc wrote: post #98

This has to be the worst advice I've seen on HN since 2008. It assumes if idea #1 doesn't work out quitting is the best way to go. The reality is once you have even a small team of co-founders or a slightly larger one together you have a group of people who have _hopefully_ learned to work with each other well and can move unencumbered to explore and test a variety of ideas, develop insights and ultimately increase t…

I think your reality is very far from the actual reality.

What I have witnessed with every single startup where I personally knew the founders was that the ideas were bad, the people were bad and the way of working was bad.

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

#102

Post by iLoveOncall »

onion2k wrote: post #84
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.

If your formula is sufficiently wrong, which is the rule not the exception, you can’t make up for it with perseverance. You can make up for it by examining your formula and experimenting with changes to it though, even when something is hugely wrong. Persevering with the same thing when it doesn't work is stupid; understanding that and trying to fix it is not. It's what startups call pivoting. You might still fail if…

> You might still fail if you pivot but you'll definitely fail if you stop.

I think this is a skewed way to look at it, because it doesn't take into account what happens once you failed.

Fail your startup after a year, get hired as an employee and grow your career for a few years, and you have immensely more chances to be in a good place to succeed than if you choose to push and spend years before failing your startup.

Failing is the rule for startups, by far not the exception. Persevering at some point becomes sunk time fallacy, not something to be proud of.

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

#103

Post by ineedasername »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #94
ineedasername wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

> I think a lot more people persevere past the point of salvation than persevere against long odds and succeed One would hope so, that's the definition of long odds!

Yes, I realized that semantic issue when I wrote it :). But I figured the meaning was clear enough anyway and I would have tried to hold my ground rhetorically against a counter argument purely on that basis, though I do enjoy arguing from positions where I can't possibly wrong.

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

#104

Post by zemvpferreira »

StriverGuy wrote: post #66
zemvpferreira wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes, but let's bear in mind that there's a big confirmation bias there. Were these hundredaires more or less willing to give up than your ordinary founder who ends up with nothing after a few years to a decade at the wheel of a zombie company? Have they never given up on anything at all? Extraordinary people can fail and regular people can make a lot of dough. I've met with a few billionaires myself and I have…

I am not by any means calling it an absolute. But the data points tilt in favor of working through the pain and difficulties instead of throwing in the towel at the slightest speed bump.

Consider another point of view then: how many people struck it big on their second, third, fourth startup?

Off the top of my head Uber was Travis' third startup. Does that make him a quitter or a perseverer?

At my age I known plenty of tech entrepreneurs who've been at it for 10 years with no big hits. Statistically some of them will eventually make it. I doubt I'll be able to say sincerely they were the ones with more grit. But I'm sure they themselves will say it for me :)

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

#105

Post by lawl »

fragmede wrote: post #33
habitue wrote: post #3

What about the classic story of the AirBnB founders pivoting from selling cereal? It seems like the metric for whether you decide to pivot or shut down depends on how many rounds you've done and how many employees you have. Early on, couple of founders & handful of employees: maybe do whatever pivots you can to survive. If you're a big boat and pivoting will require firing 80% your staff and starting an entirely diff…

But selling repackaged cereal in cutesy boxes was never Airbnb’s long term plan. Can it be called a pivot at that point?

I wouldnt consider it a pivot in that case. Some business plans feel like an onion, there's always a layer more to it.

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

#106

Post by lazyant »

Book is a nice read, have some good advice but it's so unrealistic. One example: somebody finds out about event-driven architecture and in a weekend (or a week?) they successfully refactor a complex system with multiple disparate components that now can produce the reports or whatever they needed, I was shaking my head.

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

#107

Post by flaviut »

hinkley wrote: post #55
flaviut wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pu…

I was thinking of the CGI render at the top of this page: https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris...

You're right, linear may be a better use of resources, since you don't need thousands of towers, each with their own crane/generator system.

I don't know. But this is a battle against cost, in an industry where the required 10x or 100x is impossible.

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

#108

Post by idoh »

hinkley wrote: post #59
idoh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But cloud computing?

Agree that this was not in line with selling books and other things, but that's more of an expansion and not a pivot.

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

#109

Post by hodgesrm »

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.

> If your formula is sufficiently wrong, which is the rule not the exception, you can’t make up for it with perseverance.

It's not a simple decision, at least based on my personal experience. If you have a good team, a good market, and economics that let you exist in the market until you get the product right, it's worth hanging in there for a really long time. The reason there's "selection bias" on persevering is that it's how a lot of companies actually succeeded.

It's not just tech, either. There's a reason why people like Eddie Cantor said "It takes 20 years to make an overnight success."

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

#110

Post by hinkley »

flaviut wrote: post #107
hinkley wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pu…

I was thinking of the CGI render at the top of this page: https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris... You're right, linear may be a better use of resources, since you don't need thousands of towers, each with their own crane/generator system. I don't know. But this is a battle against cost, in an industry where the required 10x or 100x is impossible.

The video shows roughly n^1/3 generators, which is still a little high but more manageable.
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