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The Pivot

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Re: The Pivot

#101

Post by gbog »

sdenton4 wrote: post #70
rmrfrmrf wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

One of the fundamental problems in American society is the failure to recognize that hard work is a necessary but not sufficient condition for big success. Yes, you do need to work hard, and do a hundred other things right, but even then, it still may not be enough to really make that big break. So yes, you need to analyze your customer data, have a great idea, smart people, and so on, but it may still not be enough,…

> hard work is a necessary [...] condition for big success

I think this is not always true, therefore wrong.

If you allow me to extend the notion of success to old writers, I can give the example of La Fontaine, whose poems are still read and learnt by kids and grown-ups 300 years after he wrote them. He is often considered as a lazy guy.

So hard working is certainly not sufficient, and not even always necessary for success. So long for this magical recipe. For me, luck (be there at the right time) is the best non-magical explanation for success-stories, and any non-superstitious book accounting the successes of our times should have one page and only three words on it: "He was lucky".

Re: The Pivot

#102

Post by wlievens »

wdewind wrote: post #31
wlievens wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big question is: how do you discover and identify a good b2b problem that needs solving in the first place.

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…

Most people here mention "larger businesses". But aren't exactly those much more likely to buy their solutions from established software houses, for regulatory reasons, or higher guarantee of continuity? I don't see how a bank, pharma producer, shipping company or publishing house would buy software from an ISV...

Re: The Pivot

#103

Post by eterm »

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #65
imgabe wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it's all luck, but if you have a million people rolling dice, some percentage of them will have a lucky streak doing "better than rolling dice would suggest". A random outcome doesn't mean every individual gets the average result every time.

Is this actually true? I know it's definitely not true if a million people are rolling dice forever -- each die should land on 1-6 with equal frequency. Given a limited number of rolls, though; say, 20 rolls per person; is there actually a consistent, measurable percentage of people that will outperform others? Somehow I doubt it.

If just 1000 people all each toss a coin ten times you'd expect there to be a person who landed ten heads.

Still just luck though.

Re: The Pivot

#104

Post by confluence »

rglullis wrote: post #97
diego wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that you can play hundreds of poker hands in a night. For your analogy to hold, you'd need to be able to start companies for a million years.

Call me cynical, but to me it feels like the people working on the startup are the cards of the game, being played by the VCs and the status quo.

Depends on the point in the funding cycle. I'm not sure this applied during the dotcom bubble. Most of them got wiped out.

Re: The Pivot

#105

Post by jorleif »

devindotcom wrote: post #9

If you remove the questionable assumption that most of the ideas are good, isn't it rather kind of institutionalizing "throw enough shit at the wall and some of it will stick?"

Yes, but you say that as if it was a bad thing. For me it was a really hard experience when doing science, that I could not "be smart about it", and do things "in smart ways", because that would require me to be able to predict which experiments would work out etc. Any high uncertainty environments are "throwing shit on the wall". You can't be smart about the throwing part, only what you do when something sticks. This is very hard for smart people to accept. See also: http://www.ted.com/talks/uri_alon_why_truly_innovative_scien...

Re: The Pivot

#106

Post by golergka »

> Every entrepreneur is now a psychologist by trade. The ONLY thing that matters to success in our anything-is-buildable Internet world is psychology. How does the customer perceive this product? What causes someone to share? What makes virality happen? What makes something sticky?

That sounds like marketing, not psychology. Of course, marketing is heavily relying on psychology, but still.

Re: The Pivot

#107

Post by yesbabyyes »

paul wrote: post #72
callmeed wrote: post #56

> 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…

I think a lot of it comes down to how you define "luck". Finding the right investor or employee involves a lot of luck, as does getting helped or hurt by a Google algorithm change. Google itself was lucky that it raised a lot of money shortly before the tech crash that killed off many of its competitors. A better way of understanding the startup world is that everything has a high degree of uncertainty (which you can…

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, at least that's what Seneca said.

Re: The Pivot

#109

Post by pbhjpbhj »

hyperbovine wrote: post #82
HNJohnC wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most startup folks don't believe this because it would mean they aren't the special snowflakes they think they are.

I think this also explains why most startup founders are the age that they are. The further my 30th birthday recedes into the past, the more the "success is mostly luck" hypothesis rings true. I'd be much more reluctant to roll the dice now than 10 years ago. (On a related not, fame and fortune seem less appealing now as well.)

You must be well off? Fortune seems far more important to me now that it's rather late in the day to be doing anything about it ... [fame can hang for all I care].

Re: The Pivot

#110

Post by GFischer »

freshhawk wrote: post #40
wlievens wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big question is: how do you discover and identify a good b2b problem that needs solving in the first place.

Got some great pithy advice about this a while ago: find something still being done with paper and fax machines. There are a ridiculous number of them out there.

There are some interesting legal barriers to overcome in some of those cases.

In my country, faxes are legally recognized as evidence, but email isn't, so there's a strong incentive to fax documents.

A law recognizing electronic signatures might help things, but it's still pretty cumbersome.

I tried to build a solution for "escribanos" - the U.S. approximate equivalent is notaries, but they're specialized lawyers actually - and the legal hurdles proved impossible to overcome.

Stuff that is being done with fax machines out of ignorance would be a better place to start, but there you have to face conservatism (an admittedly easier barrier than legal obstacles).

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