Reminds me of the book "Good To Great". The author took a bunch of successful companies, and found patterns that they all had in common. But just because all these companies did X, didn't mean that made them successful. It could've been because of survivorship bias. So yes, most business/startup advice is curve overfitting, imo.
Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs
41–50 of 171 posts
Re: Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs
#42I'm surprised this blog post made the first page of HN given its lack of sources or analysis. Maybe a good discussion can come on one example startup advice from YC: do things that don't scale. I think this is really sound in that they're saying "get product-market-fit with some segment of users." i.e. know that there's demand for your product/service even if it's pretty manual to deliver early on. Then see how to au…
> I'm surprised this blog post made the first page of HN given its lack of sources or analysis.
Sometimes people will upvote articles not for the quality but for the discussion they will trigger.
Re: Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs
#43I think having lots of data points is the only way to give proper advice about Startups. YC has given outstanding startup advice from a specific SV perspective.
I've been running a UI/UX design firm for the last 10 years, working with small unknown bootstrapping founders, up to well funded and awesome companies founded by super stars like Elon Musk and others. Though this was never my intent, over the years we've collected so many datapoints that alongside our design work we tend to advice and steer the companies we work with into directions we think the company should go. All backed by real examples from previous experiences. Being in positions where you work with a lot of companies over a longer period of time, I think, is the best way form thoughtful startup advice.
Re: Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs
#44I'm surprised this blog post made the first page of HN given its lack of sources or analysis. Maybe a good discussion can come on one example startup advice from YC: do things that don't scale. I think this is really sound in that they're saying "get product-market-fit with some segment of users." i.e. know that there's demand for your product/service even if it's pretty manual to deliver early on. Then see how to au…
> I'm surprised this blog post made the first page of HN given its lack of sources or analysis. Sometimes people will upvote articles not for the quality but for the discussion they will trigger.
Ah, good point. Thanks.
Re: Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs
#45I'm surprised this blog post made the first page of HN given its lack of sources or analysis. Maybe a good discussion can come on one example startup advice from YC: do things that don't scale. I think this is really sound in that they're saying "get product-market-fit with some segment of users." i.e. know that there's demand for your product/service even if it's pretty manual to deliver early on. Then see how to au…
I'm surprised myself. But I guess it's right in the target group. "Do things that don't scale" is good advice, I agree. But maybe the reality is more "Do ALSO things that don't scale", and then it becomes much more obvious and irrelevant, doesn't it?
Sorry shafyy. I don't understand why the addition of "ALSO" chnages the statement. Sorry for being dense.
Re: Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs
#46The other side of the coin is after you've built a few startups, you see the same pattern coming up again and again. Part of being creative is to know where to focus your attention (I.e. figuring out PMF) rather than wasting cycles on problems with clear solutions.
Re: Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs
#47I think having lots of data points is the only way to give proper advice about Startups. YC has given outstanding startup advice from a specific SV perspective. I've been running a UI/UX design firm for the last 10 years, working with small unknown bootstrapping founders, up to well funded and awesome companies founded by super stars like Elon Musk and others. Though this was never my intent, over the years we've col…
While data points do help, impactful startups often change the paradigm and how things are done. So, again, I don't think relying too much on emperical data points is good for founders. If you do, you'll rarely do something interesting and new.
Re: Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, there is randomness but in normal cases you can apply statistics to describe it reasonably well. The results are not 100% sure but 99% or 99.99999% or whatever you need. It's not that the laws of gravity stop working entirely over night. Newtons theory wasn't perfect and Einsteins theory isn't perfect but it describes what happens in nature very very well for billions of years.
You could find physical places where things seemed to change drastically one hour to the next, for example my dog. You can also find things in economics that don't change, like the laws of supply and demand in a true commodity market. Supply and demand in a true commodity market is a pretty narrow situation, but the early history of physics is full of narrow theories like Kepler's laws and the precursors to PV=nRT. I…
The emotions of your dog are not laws of nature.
The "true market" is like "no true Scotsman" or "a closed system" or "a spherical cow on a frictionless plane". It assumes something that doesn't exist. In economics the influence of the things it assumes wrongly can be very significant. In physics wrong assumptions can also make the results wrong and a lot of work (or rather most work) is done on checking if all the assumptions are sound and ensuring that the influence of the remaining gaps are negligible. That is something that is hard to do in economics when it involves interactions with the global market.
Yes, special theories can be precursors for more general theories.
Re: Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm surprised myself. But I guess it's right in the target group. "Do things that don't scale" is good advice, I agree. But maybe the reality is more "Do ALSO things that don't scale", and then it becomes much more obvious and irrelevant, doesn't it?
Sorry shafyy. I don't understand why the addition of "ALSO" chnages the statement. Sorry for being dense.
My point is they're not saying "ONLY do things that don't scale". It's more like, "from time to time, ALSO do things that don't scale". Which, as I said, I think is good advice, but also pretty common sense.
Re: Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs
#50I can't help thinking of this wonderful talk about how to win the lottery:
https://youtu.be/l_F9jxsfGCw