61–70 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.
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…
I was with you until this comment. Unnecessary ad-hominem, as well as a misguided premise. It looks like Josh has worked specifically in the "startup success" space for several years now. A lack of formal education does not preclude someone from being an expert. Not even sure what a formal education in this context would entail.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Simple science: you need a control group. While controlled experiments are the ideal for hypothesis testing, as someone who does stats for a living it's worth point out observational studies do exist . Entire fields, such as anthropology, depend entirely on observational statistics. The field has also come a tremendously long way in recent years with lots of very useful tools coming out of the Bayesian community (a…
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’d be very surprised if lots of failing companies are doing the _exact_ same as the most successful ones. Maybe cargo-culting all of the things, or actually doing _most_ of the same things but missing one necessary thing. There is an element of luck to it for sure, but the intangibles like business strategy, product market fit iterative discovery, hiring, managing, developing people, are all quite hard to pin down in pithy summaries. The best startups get these right either by meta-level luck of happening to have the right skill set for the problems they ended up facing (vs. rolling a natural 20 on a skill check with the same stats as other founders) or by actually working harder on acquiring the skills that they most need to develop. But doing these (hard, time-consuming) things well is uncommon.
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.
- Treat people like volunteers vs treat people like paid employees
- Protect the team from distractions vs distract your team
- Minimize unnecessary micromanagement vs introduce unnecessary micromanagement
- Invite disagreement vs squash all disagreement
- Preserve interpersonal equity vs treat people arbitrarily
- Keep pace with expertise vs ignore whats going on around you
- Overcome discouragement vs succumb to discouragement
The ineffective founds list would probably be something similar, like "be a dick", "ignore your colleagues", "be volatile", etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would you propose as an alternative? 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 poi…
When you need to project into an alternate universe you know you've got a weak argument. Micromanagement is a negative thing regardless of if you think the person needs and deserves it. You're not going to find anyone out there that says, "They really let me down. I mean I didn't want a lot of it but I didn't even get a little micromanagement. I'm really looking for this goldilocks micromanagement. Not too much, not…
All of us want the right "resolution" of management. Some people might say the right level of micromanagement (in your example, the goldilocks micromanagement). You may say anything that is "too detailed" is "micromanagement" by definition.
I am not saying you are wrong, but I am saying that as long as we agree on the underlying reality, I don't much care what you call it.
I do not see it being specific to founders or startups.
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.
In this case, a volunteer is a nice mission-less proxy. Is some work engaging for the owning employee, or do you need to get someone else on it, or even switch to outside staff for it?