Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 618 posts

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#351

Post by eries »

mannanj wrote: post #248

Hi Eric. In this day and age, and in the next year or two, what do you foresee as the most practical first steps for someone to work towards delivering a startup for income they can sustain themselves on? And how has the traditional loop of validation, delivering and iterating on products, and getting your first paid customers changed since fast output is now possible with AI and technology? Please structure this for…

This is kind of a big and deep question, more than I can get into with so many other questions pending, but let me see what I can offer. First of all, we are living through a golden age of entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, because times of tremendous turmoil are often times of tremendous startup opportunity.

But in particular, this moment, the capabilities of individual people are being amplified thanks to all these new technologies. You have the opportunity to be an early adopter of a technology that billions of people will use just a few years from now, but you get it first. That probably means that the things you care a lot about or know a lot about, you could do something about it that would have been absolutely impossible even five years ago.

Now, you have to avoid that feeling that you're too late. I remember feeling, in 1998, that I'd already missed the internet. The vast majority of people have never used Claude Code. The vast majority of people have no idea how LLMs work or what they do. The vast majority of people simply don't even know that starting a company is something you could use this technology to do.

As inexperienced or behind as you might feel, just the fact that you're here having this conversation right now proves that you are way, way, way ahead. All you have to do is use that advantage.

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#352

Post by eries »

elisbce wrote: post #285

It's all about specific people at the leadership. No structure is immune to corruption because people come and go all the time. The reason why Nintendo is so resistant to slop for so long is because their key leadership people were homegrown all the way from entry-level jobs and are still there.

Everything you say is true, but I might like to ask you this question: who chose those specific people at the leadership?

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#353

Post by eries »

madibo3156 wrote: post #282
eries wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend, I know you think this is a criticism. It's pretty obvious that you haven't read the book. I'd encourage you to do so, or at least ask yourself, "Why are you commenting on a book you haven't read?" The answer must be that you're upset about a different book or about a whole class of books that have done you wrong. That's fair. I know what you're talking about. But for what it's worth, I tried really hard to…

My friend, I know you think you're defending your position well, but you've done the opposite. Scrolling to the bottom of the comments and seeing this response from you is like speedrunning your books' one-star reviews and coming to the definitive conclusion that it's not for me. Thanks for saving my time.

Your comment made me smile because the book hasn't had a one-star review yet. Maybe you'll get to be the first.

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#354

Post by eries »

zaphar wrote: post #265
patcon wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if you think that the courage that Dario has regularly shown would be possible with a conventional "best practices" structure, I think you're kidding yourself. With respect to OP (who has a unique vantage from inside), I do agree with this on principle. When there are uncommon outcomes, there must be uncommon structure imho. A "good structure" is like oxygen, water, or peace: When it's well-maintained and well-…

The structure requires maintenance and that is done by an individual or individuals. The real reasons a good company stays good is because the leadership stays good. When the leadership begins to disengage or leaves or changes in some way then the structure will begin to break down. You can't fix it with a "better" structure. It will decay over time unless someone is actively maintaining it.

What you say is true, but there is more to it. Decay is not the only thing that can happen to a structure. It also can be actively destroyed from the outside. Rather than ask whether a structure is right or wrong, good or bad, we instead need to learn to ask whether it is strong or weak.

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#355

Post by thevibesman »

"The Lean Startup" was recommended to me about 10 years ago in the short phase when I was trying to build a startup (cool prototypes, no business model or product market fit, and starting the project with half the seed money I thought I needed to get it off the ground made it a short project).

It was a big influence on me and something I recommend and quote often.

I'm curious if your perspectives on the topics of "The Lean Startup" have changed I the era of AI tools. Particularly curious what you think about the role of MVPs to test a market.

This has been on my mind the past few weeks because of a recent experience during a company hackathon:

A few years ago I gave a talk about prototyping and MVPs at the Audio Developers Conference and in this talk to explain the concept of an MVP I proposed a silly idea for an audio plug-in (that replaces a singers voice with the sound of flamingos) as a demonstration of how we might test that there is a market for this plug-in before building it. I gave some examples of how we could test this like a landing page MVP, concierge MVP, etc.

Recently during the two days of this company hackathon I was too busy to do a project of my own because I was helping on-board colleagues with Claude and getting sucked into some leadership meetings. During the demos meeting I decided to try to build my voice replaced with flamingos plug-in and built a working plug-in in under two hours and this got me thinking:

If I can build a real functioning plug-in that a user can try in their host application in less than two hours why would I use non-software MVPs to test a market when I can build working software just as fast or faster than I could setup a non-software MVP a few years ago.

Of course there is more to learn from "lean" than just MVP (I'm also a big fan of the andon cord and the 5 why's)

(to anyone commenting on vibe coding I looked at the code and while not all of it was ideal I wouldn't consider this "vibe coded" and for serving the purpose of an MVP a couple things in the code that were a little funny are not a problem)

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#356

Post by chrisgd »

lebovic wrote: post #168

I worked at Anthropic, and I wouldn't attribute much to the structure itself – so I'm wary of using it as a positive example here. I do attribute a lot to specific people. Concretely, to much of the intitial team, who they recruited on the research/infra side, and some very close personal relationships within research/infra. That dynamic, paired with their unwillingness to accede to something against their values, is…

What does ICs stand for?

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#357

Post by eries »

nostrademons wrote: post #280
skybrian wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think their dispute with the Department of Defense would have gone the same way? We didn't see that at OpenAI or Google. (Although it does remind me a bit of Google pulling out of China back in the day.)

I was at Google when it pulled out of China. GP's post reminds me a lot of early Google - it wasn't evil because there were people in high places, who were critical to its operations, who cared deeply about doing the right thing , and as a result other people who cared about doing the right thing felt like they had cover, and people who were willing to do the wrong thing to hit a short-term number found that they wer…

I don't know, man. There seem to be enough exceptions in the world to make me at least curious about whether this is really true. For what it's worth, the story of Google and "Don't Be Evil" is in the book.

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#358

Post by eries »

lebovic wrote: post #250
skybrian wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think their dispute with the Department of Defense would have gone the same way? We didn't see that at OpenAI or Google. (Although it does remind me a bit of Google pulling out of China back in the day.)

Yeah, I lean towards the structure not being the cause of the outcome here (i.e. if you rotated the governance structure of Anthropic and OpenAI, I think the decisions at each would likely stay the same). If they made that decision and it destroyed revenue, I could see an alternate timeline where a standard C-Corp + board with non-founder control may have ousted leadership. But that wasn't the situation for OpenAI or…

I just like to ask one little question: Who chose the structure in the first place? It's kind of a chicken and egg situation.

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#359

Post by sanswork »

chrisgd wrote: post #356
lebovic wrote: post #168

I worked at Anthropic, and I wouldn't attribute much to the structure itself – so I'm wary of using it as a positive example here. I do attribute a lot to specific people. Concretely, to much of the intitial team, who they recruited on the research/infra side, and some very close personal relationships within research/infra. That dynamic, paired with their unwillingness to accede to something against their values, is…

What does ICs stand for?

Individual contributor(non-managers)

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#360

Post by eries »

Boxxed wrote: post #275
eries wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to appreciate you for this comment, even though I disagree with it, because this is a really articulate version of the conventional wisdom that I think all of us have imbibed since before we could talk.

For that to be the case, wouldn't that mean that companies are awful not in the name of money but just because they're evil? Which I thought was the antithesis of your whole thesis, so maybe I should read your book.

I think if you read the book, you'll find the answers you seek. Either way, I hope you'll come back and tell me.
Post reply on HN