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Value is created by doing

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Value is created by doing

#41

Post by TheSOB888 »

lquist wrote: post #37

Value gets created when a company does things like build widgets and sell them to customers. As a rough guideline, it’s good to stay in roles where you’re close to the doing. It’s easier to sit around and talk about building a startup than it is to actually start a startup. And it’s fun to talk about. But over time, the difference between fun and fulfilling becomes clear. Doing things is really hard—it’s why, for exa…

But they are close to the doing. They are only one step away from a person who is doing. Actually, hundreds of people who are doing.

Re: Value is created by doing

#42

Post by CapitalistCartr »

In business, money is how we keep score. Like in a game, the score doesn't lie. i do not mean to imply that money is the ultimate why: money is rarely why we do what we do. But in this game of business, it is the score.

If you're not making money by doing it, its a hobby. There is nothing wrong with hobbies, but they aren't business. Want to know if you are heading in the right direction? Are you headed towards money positive? That's your answer.

Re: Value is created by doing

#43

Post by soneca »

natural219 wrote: post #11

All advice is a two-way street. I think at this point, the proverbial "advice market" is saturated with this idea that "doing" is far superior to "thinking". This is because, traditionally, hackers tend to lie squarely on the "thinking too much" end of the spectrum. I'm interested to read at least one post on the opposite advice -- what happens when you're too heavy on the "doing" end of the spectrum? Are there examp…

Groupon (and everybody else looking at it) never stoped to think if their business model was good. They were so good executing it that no one thought it wouldn't.

But the bill came.

Re: Value is created by doing

#45

Post by tvladeck »

soneca wrote: post #43
natural219 wrote: post #11

All advice is a two-way street. I think at this point, the proverbial "advice market" is saturated with this idea that "doing" is far superior to "thinking". This is because, traditionally, hackers tend to lie squarely on the "thinking too much" end of the spectrum. I'm interested to read at least one post on the opposite advice -- what happens when you're too heavy on the "doing" end of the spectrum? Are there examp…

Groupon (and everybody else looking at it) never stoped to think if their business model was good. They were so good executing it that no one thought it wouldn't. But the bill came.

Groupon has a market capitalization of 7.3 billion USD.

Re: Value is created by doing

#46

Post by gboudrias »

theoh wrote: post #44

Seriously, this _is_ the labor theory of value. Don't know why the other comment to point this out is dead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value It's completely inadequate. See, for example http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_a...

I've always been fascinated by people's propensity to write about things they don't know, with the excuse that it's just humanistic sciences. There's a huge body of work that's largely ignored on the Internet, because while the average geek knows a lot about hard sciences, they're very ignorant on humanities (maybe because it's not taken as seriously).

(As a side note, it's ironically hard to find out what this guy actually does!)

Re: Value is created by doing

#47

Post by toddh »

Value is never created, it is a human construct assigned by humans to something for a variety of reasons. It isn't tied to work or any type of currency. So "commenting on HN, tweeting, reading about other companies" can indeed have value if humans deem it having a value.

Re: Value is created by doing

#48

Post by jmathai »

a-priori wrote: post #33
jmathai wrote: post #4

I realize this is pointed out in the original post but it's important to state for those of us who only read comments and headlines. The longer I do this the more I believe that value isn't created by doing. It's created by selling. As hackers and engineers the idea of "creating value by doing" resonates with us. We're happy to hole up in a dark room and create. It feels great. Wish I could do that for the rest of my…

The longer I do this the more I believe that value isn't created by doing. It's created by selling. You can't sell something that doesn't have value to the buyer. Therefore, if someone buys a thing from you, it already had value before you sold it. But don't get me wrong here, effective sales is an essential part of the value-creation process. It's the other side of the coin. Like the old tree-in-a-forest adage, if s…

Selling something may not create value, but it does realize it

Well put. What we have to be careful of is being fooled into thinking we're creating value if in the end that value can never be realized. Essentially, not having value.

Re: Value is created by doing

#49

Post by jmathai »

webwright wrote: post #5
jmathai wrote: post #4

I realize this is pointed out in the original post but it's important to state for those of us who only read comments and headlines. The longer I do this the more I believe that value isn't created by doing. It's created by selling. As hackers and engineers the idea of "creating value by doing" resonates with us. We're happy to hole up in a dark room and create. It feels great. Wish I could do that for the rest of my…

Selling is a subset of doing. That said, I like your point.

It absolutely should be.

Re: Value is created by doing

#50

Post by rpedela »

discreteevent wrote: post #22
minimax wrote: post #6

Writing software no one wants does not create value—that’s called a class project. My corollary to that is that if you write software that does create value, it doesn't matter what editor or language you use. So if you're super duper productive in Perl (or whatever) don't worry too much about chasing after whatever language HN is fetishizing at the moment. It will change in a few months anyway.

A while ago I met an older friend for lunch. I used to work with him years ago in my first job (failed startup). He was out on his own again building out an innovative idea he had in Smalltalk, (which is what he knew). I was talking to him about FP and type theory about all the debates that were going on about it. He just said that its a waste of time listening to most of the people on these kinds of sites because yo…

FP? floating-point? functional programming? firepower?
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