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How Not to Die (2007)

paulgraham.com

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Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#41

Post by rossdavidh »

diego wrote: post #22

I don't think "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich" has proven true. I've invested in startups (including YC ones) that followed this to a tee. They never found product-market fit, they could have been going forever, investors forgot about them. Some are still going, some managed to get acquired, some closed shop. It's really a false dichotomy, only a small fraction of the companies that avoid dying manage to e…

Definitely a selection bias going on, but also he did say that you might have to change what you're doing.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#42

Post by Swizec »

diego wrote: post #22

I don't think "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich" has proven true. I've invested in startups (including YC ones) that followed this to a tee. They never found product-market fit, they could have been going forever, investors forgot about them. Some are still going, some managed to get acquired, some closed shop. It's really a false dichotomy, only a small fraction of the companies that avoid dying manage to e…

> only a small fraction of the companies that avoid dying manage to explode

And none of the companies that die do. Surviving gives you infinitely better odds of success than dying.

That said, for personal success it is often important to let bad projects die.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#44

Post by burtonator »

perfunctory wrote: post #21

> One of the most interesting things we've discovered from working on Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating. Oh, boy. Why can't we have a world where I can pursue my interests without the fear of loosing something. I g…

Commitment device... they're really interesting but they can also cause you to do stupid things.

One example of a commitment device is to tell your friend something like "I'm going to write a book and get it published in six months and if I don't I'll give you $5k"

... the problem is, what if you legitimately decide that writing a book is just not for you?

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#45

Post by Uehreka »

jessmartin wrote: post #3

I read this post so many times when I was working on my startup ( https://first.io ). I particularly love this quote: "Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!" In fact, I even had it as a banner on my desktop for a while: "JUST KEEP TYPING!"

Not a startup, and not necessarily dying, but here’s a personal anecdote of mine that goes against this:

In 2016 I was working on a UX team, making improvements to components that were used across the entire front-end of the new platform we were building. One spring afternoon I was working on a new hierarchical selector widget while a quarterly executive town hall was playing on the projector in our team room. Midway through writing an AngularJS directive, our head of product surprise announced that we were pivoting and that the platform we had been building for the past year was going to be mostly thrown out. I basically closed my editor and never touched that component again.

The upshot here is that in startups or big companies, change can come very suddenly. And when big problems with a strategy are only known to those at the top, it makes the sudden changes even more surprising for those down the ladder. If you’ve got a bad board, you might find out about a change that you need to make the day that you need to make it.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#46

Post by tpmx »

consultutah wrote: post #4

So did the Octopart guys ever become billionaires?

I feel like I can share this particular piece of gossip - hopefully it's useful to someone - I'm not particularly interested in going after this particular slice of business:

So we just had a sales guy join from a large electronics components distributor - the kind that handles the interfaces between

a) globally known consumer hardware brands both in "the west" and in PRC

b) the hardware manufacturers (mostly PRC, some TW)

c) the component manufacturers (mixed)

I had been assuming they had been running some super sophisticated globally integrated software system. I was really curious about how this stuff actually worked, in real life. It turns out it's just excel sheets and phone-calls in the end. They are working to introduce ERP systems, but..no.

This seems like something that's ripe for a software-based revolution.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#47

Post by ErikAugust »

badestrand wrote: post #33
ErikAugust wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't even believe that. A bad idea, as long as it produces an asset of value, is okay. You can move your asset to a more viable market. That is what a real pivot is. Pivoting is not "we have nothing but an idea, so we change our idea."

> A bad idea, as long as it produces an asset of value, is okay. You can move your asset to a more viable market. Sorry but it sounds to me that you are not speaking from experience but just from reading many "startup culture" posts. In reality there just are many startups that have ideas and build products that never get to profitability. Most even have users that love the product but that doesn't help you if you ca…

Do you care to share what makes an idea matter? Do you have a framework?

Is Uber a bad idea, given it is not profitable?

Feel free to share your experience, since you are implying you have any.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#48

Post by azinman2 »

> “In fact, it's kind of weird when you think about it, because our definition of success is that the founders get rich.“

Does this not appear to be really terrible to others? That the metric of success is just founders getting rich? At minimum, what about employees? But really, shouldn’t we be aiming higher where the companies are creating useful impact on the world and improving it?

I understand he’s saying this as a contrast to the investors getting rich, but this train of thought and the people chasing it is what has caused SF to lose its soul IMHO.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#49

Post by diego »

Swizec wrote: post #42
diego wrote: post #22

I don't think "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich" has proven true. I've invested in startups (including YC ones) that followed this to a tee. They never found product-market fit, they could have been going forever, investors forgot about them. Some are still going, some managed to get acquired, some closed shop. It's really a false dichotomy, only a small fraction of the companies that avoid dying manage to e…

> only a small fraction of the companies that avoid dying manage to explode And none of the companies that die do. Surviving gives you infinitely better odds of success than dying. That said, for personal success it is often important to let bad projects die.

Infinitely better is not 100%, which is what his quote literally says. Say it's 0% vs 5%. That is my point.
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