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Value is created by doing

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Value is created by doing

#91

Post by digitalengineer »

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…

I've seen too much companies fail because of spending too little time of thinking what the customer actually needs. They just do what they like. In fact when studying UX, I've noticed a lot of companies don't actually even know who their most important client is and what (s)he wants, what her fears and motivations are and how she will go about getting what she wants. Creating a ux vision and strategy makes a lot of difference. (Based up on talking to actual potential clients Not based up on imaginging).

Re: Value is created by doing

#92

Post by jorleif »

DorintheFlora wrote: post #28
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…

I am of the opinion that "ideas are nothing, execution is everything" grows in part out of the lack of adequate language and mental models to distinguish amongst ideas of the armchair politician variety and ideas with legs. There are some words to distinguish such things, like hypothesis and theorem, but they mostly don't apply in the realm of business. I have been trying to sort out how to do a post on that very top…

That is very well put. I am often amazed what a big difference certain ideas make it possible to build complex things quickly and with low amounts of bugs. For example building a parsing subsystem "properly" as taught on compiler courses vs haphazard combination of regexps. It is mentally much more demanding, and requires more effort up front, but then to your surprise, every change you make just works almost immediately, and there are no hairy corner cases to resolve (this is kind of declarative vs imperative, but not quite). Another example is mathematical models, such as Markov Models and the like, where you can have a really complex behavior, but your parameters are simply matrices and all operations are some sort of matrix algebra. Difficult to understand at first, but very powerful and "clean" once you do.

In contrast, as you say, there are huge amounts of armchair ideas that are not worth very much even if they are correct. For example "software will eat everything" is something I believe is mostly right. It is also a business idea with direct implications for action. Despite this, it is only valuable to set the general direction (let's do software), but not any specific cases. It does not mean that every case of transforming a traditional business into a software one is going to be a grand success, or even profitable. In fact, these types of ideas have a tendency to cause one to forget the exceptions from the rule, and thereby being actively harmful.

Re: Value is created by doing

#93

Post by rjzzleep »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #83
nostromo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what happens when you're too heavy on the "doing" end of the spectrum? technical debt

I'll add to that... Technical Debt = When you coded without thinking AND your project is successful and growing. It's debt because now you have to go back and fix/change the code. Technical Grant = When you coded without thinking BUT your project is NOT successful and fails. It's a grant because it saved you time. Most projects / startups fail so for most people "Just Do It" works better. Plus the product you envisio…

And I'll add to that, you better pay off your technical debt otherwise you might end up with problems, in the long term - seen it way too many times.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/paying-down-your-te...

Re: Value is created by doing

#94

Post by b1daly »

Why does this truism get endlessly repeated? Is this news to anybody that if you don't make something that people will pay for, your business won't make money? In any case, it's so simple minded that I think it's wrong. It seems obvious to me that a successful enterprise needs the whole system to work: ideas (for a product), all the different kind of makers, sales, marketing, legal, various managers. Or at least these tasks need to be done.

Seeing big companies with money to blow on a product that no one wants take it all the way to market is sort of incredible to me.

Guess I'm just grumpy right now, but I sometimes feel like these posts are jokes put out there by successful people to see if they can make non-successful people feel stupid.

Re: Value is created by doing

#95

Post by tfb »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #83
nostromo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what happens when you're too heavy on the "doing" end of the spectrum? technical debt

I'll add to that... Technical Debt = When you coded without thinking AND your project is successful and growing. It's debt because now you have to go back and fix/change the code. Technical Grant = When you coded without thinking BUT your project is NOT successful and fails. It's a grant because it saved you time. Most projects / startups fail so for most people "Just Do It" works better. Plus the product you envisio…

It almost sounds to me like if the product we end up with isn't what was envisioned, then it wasn't executed properly. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, since how it ends up is usually due to the market guiding the product's development; and if the market is holding your hand, you're probably making some money, which is the goal of most startups.

But I would bet that if you let the market dictate too much too soon, it will be harder to truly innovate, which is usually what the original vision was about. I'm obviously making some pretty big assumptions here but people know only what they know, and sometimes it takes carefully timed and constructed execution to snap them out of it to create a new paradigm and take things to the next level.

Re: Value is created by doing

#97

Post by Crito »

zeidrich wrote: post #56
gboudrias wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

The average geek doesn't know a lot about hard sciences. The average geek is self taught and knows how to impress other people with scientific language. Rarely do I run into "geeks" that make me think, "Wow, this guy could write a novel paper on this". More often it's more a matter of "Wow, this guy knows just enough to completely misunderstand the subject but speaks like he has all the answers."

You should hang out with better geeks. Geeks that do, instead of just talk.

Re: Value is created by doing

#98

Post by jules »

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…

Rick Hickey says this well in his Hammock Driven Development talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc

Re: Value is created by doing

#100

Post by sireat »

commanda wrote: post #75
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #42

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…

I don't believe money is 1:1 with value. Consider for example a "Craigslist Flipper" - someone who finds items for sale on Craigslist, buys them, and turns around and sells them for a profit. Did this person create value? Not at all; I would argue they created negative wealth in the world. See also: people who run window installation companies and go around breaking people's windows at night.

I agree with you on the breaking windows guy but not with the Craigslist Flipper in the pure form(just buy and sell locally with no shipping or repairing which would add value besides flipping).

Why does the Craiglist Flipper add value? The Flipper takes away the random luck factor and distributes goods to those who can best utilize them.

Consider an iPad 1 listed for $10 on Craigslist by someone who just wants it gone. Almost anyone would buy just for the heck of it and take it away from the market even if they already have iPad Air and 3 other Android tablets gathering dust at home.

However, if the Flipper buys it and puts it back on the market at say $100, the person buying from the Flipper will actually have to think before making such a purchase.

So a reasonable Flipper adds liquidity and stability to the market. Unreasonable Flipper (one either putting prices too high or too low) does not stay in business for too long.

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