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If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

steveblank.com

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Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#161

Post by nyeah »

SoftTalker wrote: post #159
nyeah wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxis have offered pickup and delivery service since forever, and yet here we are.

OK, again, the context is a "laundromat" business. Laundry as a service with an app to schedule pickup and delivery? OK, people have tried that. Not that exciting, not that scalable. You still need a lot of facilites, machines, and humans to make that work. It's not something that exists as a virtual product that can be scaled up with an AI.

Ok, again. Taxicabs are not exciting, not scaleable, and involve a lot of machines and humans to make them work.

How many iterations do you have in mind for this?

EDIT: My answer for "can a rapidly growing start-up successfully take on taxicabs?" is "yes."

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#162

Post by SoftTalker »

nyeah wrote: post #161
SoftTalker wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, again, the context is a "laundromat" business. Laundry as a service with an app to schedule pickup and delivery? OK, people have tried that. Not that exciting, not that scalable. You still need a lot of facilites, machines, and humans to make that work. It's not something that exists as a virtual product that can be scaled up with an AI.

Ok, again. Taxicabs are not exciting, not scaleable, and involve a lot of machines and humans to make them work. How many iterations do you have in mind for this? EDIT: My answer for "can a rapidly growing start-up successfully take on taxicabs?" is "yes."

Will AI take over the taxicab business, somehow eliminating the need for cars and drivers?

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#165

Post by DontchaKnowit »

petervandijck wrote: post #139
nateburke wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add on the compounding effect that "QA" or "test" in someone's job description was viewed as a synonym for "less-highly compensated" over the past few decades, and you have an entire generation of mid career devs with poorly adapted instincts regarding what is valuable in the process of shipping working product. The bottleneck was never coding...

I keep seeing people say that, but the bottleneck really was, to a large degree, writing the code.

Has never been true in my career.

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#166

Post by lesostep »

ubauba wrote: post #156
lesostep wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> $20B in defense VC "defense VC budget" seems like a generous way of saying "USA attack budget". Not everyone wants to deal with moral implications of building automation for that.

Chris might have good reasons to avoid defense. But Blank's point is that he didn't even know the opportunity existed. The issue is not really about a moral choice, more generally it's a situational awareness problem.

>> But Blank's point is that he didn't even know the opportunity existed

His point is that, true. However, it relies on a big assumption.

Blank confidently says that opportunities were missed, and he knows they were missed only because they weren't taken. My counterargument was "Chris could have chosen not to get involved. It's not necessary a lack of awareness on his part"

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