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The Only Way to Grow Huge

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#91

Post by cousin_it »

PakG1 wrote: post #81
ekanes wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be blunt, people who've done consistently well in the startup world run circles around "professors of business".

This is probably true at the averages, but at the topside of the scale for both populations, I wonder if it still applies. Do the Peter Druckers and Clayton M Christensens of the world really not know more than the Steve Jobs and Bill Campbell types? I choose those names rather than Bill Gates or Larry Page because those guys have done multiple companies, which seems to be an important criteria for doing "consistentl…

> those guys have done multiple companies, which seems to be an important criteria for doing "consistently well"

That's an interesting question. It depends on the size of the population, I guess. If we acknowledge that a minority of people can start a successful company by chance, why don't we acknowledge that an even smaller minority can do it multiple times, also by chance?

Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#92

Post by steveklabnik »

adamzerner wrote: post #88
larrys wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect to Sam I have no idea what qualifies Sam to even be opining on this subject without a bit more of a circumspect attitude. If he was a professor of business or had a long standing knowledge of business that would be one thing. The word "most" would certainly be better but even that goes a bit to far with a subject as large as "business" and "companies".

That is a DH1 argument. Anyone is "qualified" to talk about anything. Idea: A social news aggregator that scores people on the disagreement hierarchy, and penalizes people who score poorly by not letting them comment and post (or at least gives a lower weight to their comments and posts) (not trying to single you out larrys, just throwing it out there because I think it's a valuable idea)

Slashdot had/has a qualifier attached to up and downvotes.

Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#93

Post by steveklabnik »

pak wrote: post #76
apu wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an example of this, look at the sibling comment by pak (made after yours) =) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6844169

To which I say, what is the point of words like "only" and "all", if they do not mean what they are supposed to? I'm not trying to be a stickler. Granted, I work mostly in science research, where broad claims are discouraged and quantifying confidence in a hypothesis is expected. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. At best, I think this rule could apply to (maybe) 80% of "huge" tech companies. 80% is…

Because humans are not logical inference engines; language is flexible, nuanced and complex. A blog post is not a industry research paper.

Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#94

Post by prottmann »

But many companies have good / excelent products and services and nobody now them.

If the companies grow you are absolutely right, but what did this companies do that they grow ?

That is the crucial question. I think there are many services like Dropbox before Dropbox exist, but nobody now them.

Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#96

Post by eved1973 »

jacques_chester wrote: post #61
adwf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is that I come from a physics degree background and hence have a tendency to stick with the more scientifically accurate "I think, maybe, probably, possibly, almost always", rather than going for absolutes. However, when you enter into the business world, you tend to find that this kind of language comes across as weak and uncertain. Even though you are merely trying to be correct and not give false i…

So, you got me to thinking. As a side-effect of his work on expert forecasting[1], Tetlock discovered that people put more stock in those who made confident predictions than those who qualified their predictions. To the point that he basically says: if a person is a famous pundit, they are more likely to be wrong, because the media prefers bold predictions to maybes and perhapses. In business you can be bold or not b…

That reminds me of a story I heard about doctors who are asked to determine the gender of a baby during a pregnancy scan. They will announce the gender to the parents verbally (It's a boy!), but put the other gender in their files. If you do end up having a boy, it doesn't go further. If you end up having a girl, and question the doctor, he/she points to the file and says "You must have misunderstood what I said".

Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#97

Post by eved1973 »

I am new to HN, and excited to be here, but the level of nitpicking with this point is horrifying. Sam's message is clear: you want to get big, get good. Can we really argue with this? Is it really worthwhile to fight over the semantics of "only" or "best" etc. If you want to get big, make sure you have a good product.

(My personal extrapolation of this is that if you have a product that grows big on hype in the beginning, even if justified, but your product doesn't continue to meet growing expectations, someone new is going to enter the market and shake things up (maybe again). So stay good, and make it really difficult for someone to compete.)

Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#99

Post by brc »

jsnk wrote: post #2

This is not necessarily true for social apps where number of active users are actually a feature. Your app itself might be great, but if you don't have active users, say good bye to ever growing big. This is also true on the contrary. If you happen to have started some service before others (Craigslist, dare I say Hacker News), even though the app itself might not be as good, because of the people you have on the sit…

You have to look at it at a different level. Build something customers want is implicitly 'something they want more than the current options they have'. If the thing they don't have is clearly inferior, then no problem. This applies to completely new ideas.

When you have a site like Facebook or Craigslist which has very large network effects, to bust into that you have to produce something people want more than those. That is a very difficult - though not impossible - thing to achieve.

Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#100

Post by smoyer »

pbreit wrote: post #85
smoyer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an almost 25-year veteran of the cable industry and I can tell you that Comcast and Time-Warner didn't grow huge via word-of-mouth. The benefits of cable service grew community systems by word-of-mouth, then Comcast and Time-Warner grew by acquiring and consolidating systems. For example, Time Warner Cable Oceania now provides cable service to the entire Hawai'ian island chain, but they had just bought out the la…

Time Warner is Time magazine, Warner Bros, HBO and TBS. All having massive word of mouth spread.

I should have specified Time-Warner Cable (which is now a separate company - http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/twc).
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