41–50 of 228 posts
"Product Market Fit" that's it - #4 in the article. Few startups fail due to #1-3 after achieving #4. So many startups blame #1-3 because they couldn't find #4. If you don't have PMF, you're burning cash, pivoting, arguing (founder disputes) to figure out your way there. All #1-3. PMF is incredibly hard and don't let anyone fool you.
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"Is this a fail-safe path? Of course not. Even in chess. The rest of the game does matter."
I also think his framing is somewhat misleading, since the default mindset (Despite his hedging) is that you will win (Or have higher chances) if you don't blunder.
The problem is that winning in startups is often a tail event, which means reducing blunders doesn't have much impact on the overall probability. Is reducing blunders the highest order bit?
"An entrepreneur may look at a successful diner and think that customers are there because of the hip decor on the walls. She sets up a competing diner across the street with better decor only to find that it can't pull any customers away. The highest-order bit isn't the decor. It's actually the cheap but high-quality coffee that customers care most about. Without getting the coffee right, no amount of aesthetics will beat the competition."
https://commoncog.com/highest-order-bit/
The only time this is a winning strategy is if survival has compounding effects. For startups, they tend to be default dead.
This memo by Howard Marks explores the case when survival is actually a winning strategy:
"If we avoid the losers, the winners will take care of themselves"
https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/memo/fewer-losers-or...
Reducing blunders is obviously good in any situation, but is it the dealbreaker for startups? It always depends on the context.
"Product Market Fit" that's it - #4 in the article. Few startups fail due to #1-3 after achieving #4. So many startups blame #1-3 because they couldn't find #4. If you don't have PMF, you're burning cash, pivoting, arguing (founder disputes) to figure out your way there. All #1-3. PMF is incredibly hard and don't let anyone fool you.
One of my saddest investments was an amazing company gummed up in co-founder squabbles too far gone to recover, even while the product was growing like weeds. Company died in lawsuits and walkaways. Another was pre-PMF and ran into this, I learned from the previous experience and jumped in and helped them keep the band together. They found PMF the next year and off to the moon ($1M ARR, 100% QoQ growth, 36 months that, I have lots of examples of all 3 and more. It's all 100x easier than PMF but if you don't do FIRST then you don't get to work on PMF.
I think this is very true, I've found the same thing in e.g: - Simracing: getting faster doesn't make you win races. Getting more consistent does. - Squash: getting stronger and faster doesn't make you win games, getting less exhausted does, because you make less mistakes. These are surely not true when you're at a high level, but for most people it's the right focus. The corresponding insight for building software i…
"These are surely not true when you're at a high level" I don't know what you mean by high level, but I suspect that avoiding mistakes continues to be very important regardless of level in most things. I play Marvel Snap in the top 1000 and at that level most of the games comes down to whoever makes a mistake first loses.
I think this means at a high level, you're already not blundering. So you need to actually do something MORE in order to win. You need to force your oponent to lose, and not just play "OK" and wait for them to make a mistake.
Avoid blundering? To do that, you need to learn opening strategy, endgame strategy, tactics, etc. This isn't helpful
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"These are surely not true when you're at a high level" I don't know what you mean by high level, but I suspect that avoiding mistakes continues to be very important regardless of level in most things. I play Marvel Snap in the top 1000 and at that level most of the games comes down to whoever makes a mistake first loses.
>This observation applies only to amateur tennis. In professional tennis it’s just the opposite: 80% of the rallies are won rather than lost, as unforced errors are infrequent. This is true in chess as well, as high-level players don’t blunder, and thus it really is that litany of other skills that results in high standings. I think this means at a high level, you're already not blundering. So you need to actually do…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless your first mover advantage lets you just stay there for decades. See: PayPal they have only now been dethroned as the default credit card processor despite being awful to work with when I tried to integrate their API circa 2010
If first mover advantage in internet payment processing was important, CyberCash would still be around. I'm pretty sure there was another internet payment processor around before PayPal too. Setup was harder, and the integration wasn't the same, but it was before PCI, so integrating with CyberCash meant you could own the whole payment flow, and have a better experience than PayPal, where you send the user off, and wh…
> The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 11, 2001. VeriSign acquired the Cybercash assets (except for ICVerify) and name a couple of months later. On November 21, 2005 PayPal (already an eBay company) acquired VeriSign's payment services, including Cybercash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberCash
so in a way, PayPal ate a lot of the other payment processors