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Mistakes You Should Never Make

sethbannon.com

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Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#301

Post by Aqueous »

maxbrown wrote: post #294
nostrademons wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2. The reason engineers tend to hate tactics like this is that it shifts responsibility for fuck-ups from you, the CEO, who should be managing and prioritizing features so you get the best bang for the buck, to them, the engineers, who are now on the hook for a feature that may or may not be able to be built in the time frame you promised. Things go wrong in engineering, and there are unexpected snags and slowdowns,…

I see your point, it can put added pressure on developers, but don't you think (in a healthy company) that "shifts responsibility for fuck-ups" is a bit overstated? Certainly transparency in sales is preferable, but is promising a (unexpectedly important to that customer) feature to close a major deal a "fuck-up"? There are some potential issues to steer clear of - team burn-out, feature bloat, etc. - but I would jus…

Yes. Absolutely. I work for a company where deadlines are continually mismanaged for features because it really isn't predictable when a feature gets done or not. And the problem is at the top - but the top doesn't ever blame themselves. And so the blame shifts backward onto the engineers who didn't make the unreasonable deadline. The worst part is that the founders are non-technical so they really have no business making estimates about dea. We try to give the best estimate we can but it really is just an estimate, and it should be multipled by two and then have 10 days added to it just as a baseline. But the incentive is to overpromise, and so we're run into time compression again and again.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#302

Post by SoftwareMaven »

tptacek wrote: post #228
jacquesm wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the American system have any provision for payroll companies that fail to fulfill their obligations? (segregated accounts per client, accounts only usable for remittance of the salaries or taxes with the payroll company then taking out its slice when everything else has been done?) I remember the Accupay affair and that took a lot of employers by surprise, and even though 'best common practice in the US' may be…

You remember the affair of a tiny payroll processing company in Baltimore? Is there some news source about them that isn't in the local Baltimore media that I missed? I had to give Google News a custom search range just to find those local hits. If that's the kind of firm you're talking about, I agree. Don't use tiny fly-by-night payroll firms. Just use SurePayroll or someone like them. I'm serious: that's a good poi…

Like all the clients of Arthur Anderson[1]? You don't get much bigger than the Big 5.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#303

Post by dheer01 »

Seth - Thanks for sharing your perspective - its extremely courageous to talk about these things in the open.

I am a startup founder and have been there done that - allow me to seed you with a radically different perspective.

You made NO mistakes. None. Every lesson that you learned - you will unlearn it in the next year or so. There are lessons to learn over here, but not the ones you mentioned - they will come - just wait for it.

Everyone pointing out in this thread about your mistakes is dead wrong. They don't know what it takes - most have never been close to what you are doing - they just don't know. This is also one of the reasons it might NOT help to talk about these things in public - though I am not saying that you shouldn't.

Most successful founders make most of these mistakes - and then some. The only mistake that you really made is to not figure out the business - everything else is not important. Sales fixes everything - and it would have fixed all these mistakes. Specifically:

1. Skipping on taxes till its too late - this is a trait of a successful founder. It means you are focussed on the business too much to bother about paying taxes.

2. Poorly defined co founder relationships - the story about 'every' startup. Let me tell you the secret about founder relationships - ignore them. Figure out the 'business' - founder relationships will figure themselves out.

3. Hacks - This world is unfortunately run by people who don't see things like we do. To hack is to have tread that middle ground which keeps the peace and also lets us run things they way they should.

4. Going it alone - There is no other way. At the centre of the biggest changes the world has ever seen, there is a lonely founder. You have to do it alone - dont seek to change it - just understand it.

5. Investor relations - Investors like a good business more than you and me - you fix the business and let the investor will fix the relations.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#304

Post by Aqueous »

king_jester wrote: post #299
Aqueous wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we? Human beings tell half-truths and lies pretty frequently. I bet if you examine the history of your own utterances for the past several years. you'd find that you do, too. There are obviously different scales of truth-telling and deception. "It's your baby." is a lot different than, "Ah - I can't make it. I'm just too tired!" But it's still lying. In fact human lying is so frequent that a lot of the smaller lie…

I don't agree that lying in business is a requirement to run a business and do so well, although you are right in that lying is common in a variety of ways. But I don't have any intention of lowering my expectations nor should anyone have to. Why should workers just have to live with shitty working situations and bouts of unemployment created by liars that lead businesses into bad situations?

I don't think it's a requirement in business but that doesn't change the fact that businesspeople, and sales people and executives especially, lie and lie often.

They shouldn't. It would be better if nobody lied in a way that harmed people. But in a world where you have every reason to never disclose that you harmed people by lying, we should be encouraging people to eventually come clean. After all, the moral hazard here is that if you punish people for eventually coming clean you will never know what happened, which is worse than the already bad situation of only knowing after the fact.

That's why these failure stories are good, even if they admit wrongdoing. And that's why we should be receptive to them, even if it's something we don't want to hear.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#305

Post by wavegeek »

sethbannon wrote: post #198
xcubed wrote: post #158

This is just awful. There's owning up to mistakes, which is very "trendy" right now, and then there's being a straight up terrible, unethical, incompetent person. It's a bit gross to reference Ben Horowitz, to try to make this seem like a "classic" startup moment that every startup goes through. E.g., "most companies go through at least two, and sometimes over a dozen WFIOs in their lifetime." 1. "And so I learned th…

I see that you made this HN account only to comment on this post. I've learned that getting into a back-and-forth with anonymous posters on HN is never a good idea, but I'll respond just this once. 1. You're absolutely right. I majorly screwed up here. I say so as much in the post. 2. I think people can reasonably disagree here. An example: a potential customer asks a sales guy during a demo "...and will we be able t…

> absolutely

When a vendor uses superlatives like "absolutely" in answer to a capability question, they are lying. This also applies to politicians.

If the answer is "yes", they will say "yes" or "yes, because/for example ...".

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#306

Post by wavegeek »

fredophile wrote: post #292
pyoung wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly. Those that are speeding have accepted the higher risk of accident in exchange for getting to their destination slightly faster (if at all). The choices of the speeders have externalities in the form of a higher risk of accident for all other drivers around them, regardless of others speed. The drivers who obey the law bear none of the of the responsibility for that increase in risk. If you want to argue…

Driving at a rate faster or slower than the flow of traffic increases the risk of an accident more than an equivalent increase in speed. Here's a detailed article about it: http://priceonomics.com/is-every-speed-limit-too-low/

The link is pretty weak evidence.

> “We all speed, yet months and months usually pass between us seeing a crash,”

This is a stupid argument. Do you really want to be in a crash every few months? Roughly the average person has a 1% lifetime chance of dying and a 10% chance of serious injury in a car crash. To me these are pretty high numbers.

> that sign won’t make people drive any slower

Where I live, speed limits are zealously enforced - loss of licence for a third offence in two years - and people do comply with them. So yes a sign won't do it but you can get people to comply.

As usual the US seems to find the worst solution: overly restrictive speed limits (55mph) combined with lack of enforcement. This causes large divergences in speeds, which is apparently dangerous.

The article seems to confuse the merits of driving slower than most traffic, with the merits of slowing traffic as a whole down. They are very different things. If most people on the autobahn are doing 110mph then one driver doing 55mph would be dangerous. However slowing everyone down to say 60 mph may be a much safer overall situation.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#307

Post by Natsu »

roel_v wrote: post #255
josu wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to file your company's taxes on your own is like trying to represent yourself in a trial.

Wisest advise in this thread. My mind boggles at the idea that apparently there are investors who give money to people who do their own taxes.

I won't even do my own income tax, I send that to our lawyer.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#308

Post by jon2512chua »

nyc_str8tsh00t wrote: post #269
jlevy wrote: post #250

As internal counsel for YC, it was very upsetting to learn about the ongoing troubles at Amicus. It was particularly distressing to hear about the payroll tax issues, given that YC has funded excellent companies that specialize in accounting and payroll for small businesses, such as Indinero and Zenpayroll. The tone of Seth's post suggest that YC has supported Seth in all of his recent actions. That is not true -- YC…

Good to see YC step forward on this. I'm not a HN regular, but I've been following this thread all day because I have a friend who worked at Amicus, and several others who have worked with their software. I know there are always many sides to any story. I wasn't there, just like most of you weren't there, but all I can say is Seth's version of this story does NOT fit with what I've heard, and everything I've heard ha…

> Seth absolutely deserves to have a forum to tell his version of the story, but I find it more than a little annoying that after everything he's done, he's still able to leverage his position as a YC Founder to ensure that his version of the story gets more attention than anyone else's.

I'm really interested to hear about the other side of the story. Any links?

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#309

Post by Natsu »

girvo wrote: post #290
afro88 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. I think people can reasonably disagree here. An example: a potential customer asks a sales guy during a demo "...and will we be able to export a list of our users?" Answer: "yes, absolutely". The customer signs. The sales person then runs to dev team and says "we need to build this export functionality before they launch". Did the potential customer think that feature already existed? Probably. Is anyone being h…

Look, ethically, I totally agree with you. Practically though, if you've worked in sales, you'll know that what the OP is talking about isn't just something that happens often, but is basically the life-blood of some rather large companies. Now, I dislike it because it puts the impetus on the developers to deal with it if it goes wrong, and that sort of crunch-time stress is just crazy, but it's also not something th…

Smarter clients (and I agree that there are plenty of not-so-smart clients), will actually double-check on these things before buying in various ways. They can, for example, request an evaluation version to use, check with the support department exactly what's actually supported, or simply have them demonstrate exactly how the product can meet that requirement.

I'm sure there are more ways of doing that too, though, so these are just my observations. And yeah, don't trust the sales guys :)

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#310

Post by argonaut »

MortenK wrote: post #232

It's absolutely astonishing to me that SV investors and incubators pass along ~4 million USD to a team of people with so little business experience, as to neglect hiring an accountant. End result being unpaid payroll tax for almost 3 full years! No one ever asked what accounting firm Amicus used? No one ever just glanced at the finances and thought hey, where's the frigging payroll tax? Is valley capital so readily a…

It's not astonishing to me at all. Look at Amicus now. 1) They're still around, and 2) it seems they have actual paying customers now (in a scaleable market). That is farther than 95% of startups.
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