41–50 of 87 posts
I'm honestly more interested in studying the most ineffective founders. We spend too much time focusing on survivors, when I feel like the best learning comes from looking at failure. I'd be willing to be there's a lot of failed / failing companies out there doing the exact same thing as the "most effective founders", so what makes them different? I'd be interested to know.
I would have expected stuff like: - expertise or at least competency related to the domain - social currency, ability to influence/convince people - stamina and fortitude Most of the points in the very short article are about "don't be an asshole to your employees", which is certainly a good thing and what people should be doing. But I can think of quite a few outrageously successful founders who have been insufferab…
When you work at trillion dollar company that likes to think of itself as a small nimble startup, you write articles like this… the point isn’t to help startups, it’s to influence people in the organization to behave in a certain way by attributing the behavior you want to another group you admire.
Google doesn’t care about creating a successful startup.. they do care about how their employees work together.
A slightly less cynical take is that when Google "studies" startups, they dont recognize problems like you describe because creating a startup isnt a problem they are faced with. But cultural issues exist everywhere, and so those are the problems that the person sees and addresses in their writeup.
The result is the same either way. You're not going to get startup lessons from one of the largest companies in the world.
If Google considers this quality content, is it really surprising their search results increasingly return non substantive answers to questions?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably a good point. Like that anecdote about the studying the WW2 planes that went down vs the ones that made it back to see where to add more armour.
To be fair, in that anecdote you are extracting meaningful information just from observing the literal survivors, which sort of points in the opposite direction to the GP’s point. I’d say examining survivors is useful and can provide information, but you need to be careful to correct for survivorship bias. But that’s not to say you cannot gain any information from examining cohorts of survivors. I think most people p…
“What is it the successful planes do? Well, they didn’t get shot here (points)”
I would have expected stuff like: - expertise or at least competency related to the domain - social currency, ability to influence/convince people - stamina and fortitude Most of the points in the very short article are about "don't be an asshole to your employees", which is certainly a good thing and what people should be doing. But I can think of quite a few outrageously successful founders who have been insufferab…
I'm honestly more interested in studying the most ineffective founders. We spend too much time focusing on survivors, when I feel like the best learning comes from looking at failure. I'd be willing to be there's a lot of failed / failing companies out there doing the exact same thing as the "most effective founders", so what makes them different? I'd be interested to know.
Simple science: you need a control group. The whole "25 things that successful people do" completely ignores the entire question of whether unsuccessful people also do those things, and therefore whether those things have anything to do with success. Survivor bias is so prevalent in any thinking about "what makes someone successful?" that yes, it would be much more effective at this point to consider "what makes some…
Every company is unique and problems are different and in different domains at different external conditions.
Statistics would just be a sample size of 1 and std dev of infinity.
I do not understand "treat people like volunteers".
I think the idea is to treat employees you pay as if they where doing it for free. Say you give a boring task that’s not meaningful to a volunteer they’ll just up and leave as they won’t gain anything from it.
I'm honestly more interested in studying the most ineffective founders. We spend too much time focusing on survivors, when I feel like the best learning comes from looking at failure. I'd be willing to be there's a lot of failed / failing companies out there doing the exact same thing as the "most effective founders", so what makes them different? I'd be interested to know.
[1] effective here is subjective and reported. They have a discussion of why they don't use other metrics like company valuations and it boils down to that data is harder to collect I think
I'm honestly more interested in studying the most ineffective founders. We spend too much time focusing on survivors, when I feel like the best learning comes from looking at failure. I'd be willing to be there's a lot of failed / failing companies out there doing the exact same thing as the "most effective founders", so what makes them different? I'd be interested to know.
Self help pablum for aspiring founders. I'll just highlight a couple of the ridiculous things in there. "Minimize unnecessary micromanagement". There's just a ton in there. First, micromanagement already has a negative connotation so recommending to minimize it rather than eliminate it is just an obnoxious hedge. Then it doubles down on recommending minimizing only "unnecessary" micromanagement. You just go right ahe…
In an alternative universe, ZCW101 is complaining that they said "eliminate micromanagement" and that person is arguing that sometimes you simply have to micromanage and eliminating it is unrealistic but they should have said something about minimizing it. And then someone complains that some is necessary and you should only minimize the unnecessary parts.
Anyway, my real point is that the summary necessarily only captures the data in an inexact manner and if you are interested you can dive in. The real point is that some % of people feel micromanaged and it is a large point.
By the way, even that point is a summary. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/startup.google.co...