I’ve been building a database of successful companies

Post by sethammons » Wed, Sep 21, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

_tom_ wrote: post #2

Don't just record successful companies. You can't figure out what actually matters if you don't compare to failed companies. If ten successful companies do something, you'll think it's a good thing to do. But what if one hundred failed companies do it, too?

Post by melvinmelih » Wed, Sep 21, 2022, 7:09 PM UTC

sethammons wrote: post #21

_tom_ wrote: post #2

Don't just record successful companies. You can't figure out what actually matters if you don't compare to failed companies. If ten successful companies do something, you'll think it's a good thing to do. But what if one hundred failed companies do it, too?

somebody can probably find the real story better than I can. Back in World War 2, the B29 Bomber would go out on long flights but not all of them returned. Of the ones that returned, they saw the hauls were full of bullet holes, so they kept adding armor to the haul and kept losing planes. By focusing on the planes that were not coming back, it turned out the problem was holes in wings - planes were surviving the hol…

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 21, 2022, 7:26 PM UTC

sethammons wrote: post #21

_tom_ wrote: post #2

Don't just record successful companies. You can't figure out what actually matters if you don't compare to failed companies. If ten successful companies do something, you'll think it's a good thing to do. But what if one hundred failed companies do it, too?

somebody can probably find the real story better than I can. Back in World War 2, the B29 Bomber would go out on long flights but not all of them returned. Of the ones that returned, they saw the hauls were full of bullet holes, so they kept adding armor to the haul and kept losing planes. By focusing on the planes that were not coming back, it turned out the problem was holes in wings - planes were surviving the hol…

Post by forgetbook » Wed, Sep 21, 2022, 7:54 PM UTC

speakfreely wrote: post #18

mym1990 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably has a nice React front end and Stripe for payment processing, so that would put it in the startup bucket :)

Yikes, people still start new projects with Stripe after all the horror stories here on HN? In my mind they are on PayPal's level of broken fraud prevention by now.

Post by robocat » Wed, Sep 21, 2022, 10:05 PM UTC

hcks wrote: post #19

A lot of commenters here are rightly pointing out survivorship biais. Im even more concerned with the measure of « success » employed. It seems that the only metric reported here is monthly revenue, which by itself can tell you if a project is further than the idea on a PowerPoint stage, but cannot tell you anything about meaningful success (at a very basic level revenue is not profit, and a few months data don’t tel…