81–90 of 121 posts
In 2010 Ross Anderson pointed out (stated rather emphatically actually) that security is driven by only two things - psychology and economics. Software is no different. Security Engineering - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B004BDOZI0/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qi...
> And then they find out that success in the start-up realm is mostly luck. They discover this by trying great ideas coupled with great execution and failing. While I believe this (the luck part), I'm not sure most startup folks do. Or, there is at least some severe cognitive dissonance going on when they begin to discover it. Even "the pivot" itself was made popular by The Lean Startup–the book that many take as the…
Most startup folks don't believe this because it would mean they aren't the special snowflakes they think they are.
Saying there's probabilistic uncertainty in something doesn't mean the distributions are uniform. It just means given all the inputs you can't always predict all the outputs. No matter what you do, no matter what happens, the result can be one of many things. 1 or 0. Success or failure.
This doesn't mean you can't DO SOMETHING about it though, and that's precisely what people are doing. Figure out the patterns, cut through the uncertainty, and try to find your way to the promised land.
What the author's describing using the language of social science and valley speak is the same thing that the machine learning/AI/robotics community learned in the past few decades. They started out with formal logics and rigid rules, and they learned that to succeed in a random world, you have to embrace the randomness. Build it deeply into your systems and processes and all of a sudden you start performing better than your wildest expectations.
Model, measure, evaluate, pivot, repeat. That's pretty damn familiar. What's it describing? A closed loop control system. Change the terminology a bit and you're talking about a Kalman filter with a feedback controller. What's a learning algorithm but a way to fit patterns to noisy, partially random data?
And that's what this is all about. Luck doesn't mean it's all random, just that you can't control everything. And being good doesn't mean you eliminate the randomness, it means finding the patterns and making randomness work for you.
Is there randomness in poker? Sure. Of course. But there's a shit ton of skill too (I know, because I don't have any of it). Don't confuse a poker game for a game of dice.
All this to say, there are definitely a ton of bad startups out there, people who see an easy fundraising landscape, take advantage of connections or even make them. Or people that get to a certain point and don't really want to face reality. Instead of floating all the platitudes we float about there being lots of talented teams, it would be nice to see some honesty. That a lot of startups have a founder or two that isn't that dedicated but is there because he/she isn't sure what else to be doing. That a lot of startups are a vanity project of one of the founders and the founder doesn't have the modesty to actually sell to users/potential employees. That at a lot of startups there is friction between the founders that puts the product in danger because they have equal-ish power but between them lack a coherent vision for the future.
And a lot of these companies with bad foundations have brilliant founders. Just because companies are founded by smart people doesn't mean they have a strong foundation. That is something we should be honest about. This isn't to say that it doesn't take luck, but there is a lot that helps to get right that a lot of startups aren't getting right off the bat.
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> While I believe this (the luck part), I'm not sure most startup folks do. Probably because it's not exactly true. The whole point of all that data is to see which aspects of a business work and which parts don't. The author is describing pivots a bit hyperbolically for the sake of drama/artistic license, but it's not like the C-level executives pivot by rolling the dice and seeing what they come up with. A successf…
Succeeding in the startup world is luck like succeeding in poker is luck. Sure, there is an element of luck undeniably involved, but in the long term, raw talent should play a significant role as well.
So, we're producing crap ... but it's really quick crap quickly crapped.
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A small bit of feature isn't much different than nothing. So the salesman shows you a brush - but his sample case is empty. Same issue - its a hoax, designed to waste my time so the guy can case my house, my computer, my needs.
Not what I meant. Suppose a company produces brushes. But they find out there a lot of people buying their brushes just to remove the handle and attach it to other things because they happen to really love the handles. Maybe the brush company is in the wrong business.
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A lot of the "throw it up there and see what happens" movement comes from young engineers who literally lack the life experience to know what problems to solve. Given that scenario, and the intense pressure that comes from SV for young people to succeed, the approach makes sense, but there is a longer term, more considered approach to things. Especially for B2B startups, the best way to come up with an idea is to wor…
PG is one of those who strongly advocates for "throw it up and see what happens". He is probably more influential to the movement than any young engineers, and he is decisively neither young nor inexperienced.
Man can't wait for someone to build a pivoting web framework on Github, where I can build a subscription based service and then switch whatever the product is with the data schema, and the pricing and the description page changes. Basically a framework that already has Stripe/Paypal payment integration to charge a user's CC, a schema for a informational or subscription-based product that I can modify pricing and desc…
> Internet is no longer a technology. The Internet is a psychology experiment.