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Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics

younglingfeynman.com

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Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics

#41

Post by rjyoungling »

projektfu wrote: post #36

Please consider trying this: Paragraph 1: Topic paragraph, introduce topic and question. Paragraph 2: Summarize argument. Paragraphs 3-n: Topic/assertion sentence. Support assertion/argument. Last sentence may summarize support. These paragraphs should follow the overall structure but sometimes you will need more than one paragraph to support something you suggested in the second paragraph. Paragraph n+1: Review conc…

Thanks projektfu! That's extremely helpful feedback. I'll try to use it to improve future work.

Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics

#42

Post by rjyoungling »

lambdatronics wrote: post #40
projektfu wrote: post #36

Please consider trying this: Paragraph 1: Topic paragraph, introduce topic and question. Paragraph 2: Summarize argument. Paragraphs 3-n: Topic/assertion sentence. Support assertion/argument. Last sentence may summarize support. These paragraphs should follow the overall structure but sometimes you will need more than one paragraph to support something you suggested in the second paragraph. Paragraph n+1: Review conc…

The blog's style appears deliberate. I doubt you and I are his target audience, though. Check out this exchange: https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/comments/jl02ba/useless_i...

hmm.. that person came from a place of bad faith. Clearly, I do not shy away from productive discourse as long as it's done respectfully. But if your first comment immediately starts with name calling...

Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics

#43

Post by rjyoungling »

ahartmetz wrote: post #31
yumraj wrote: post #14

Business plans and financial models are useless, yet they are not. They force the entrepreneur to put some level of deep thought into the entire endeavor and create some sort of initial hypothesis. Even if it proves to be entirely incorrect in future, it provides a very good starting point, that you can keep iterating upon as you learn more. Most of the times you don't know what you don't know and the business plans…

Someone summarized that as "Plans are worthless, but planning is essential" :)

Very good aphorism. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics

#44

Post by rjyoungling »

redis_mlc wrote: post #38
ISL wrote: post #13

It is difficult to believe that a business plan is useless. It provides a framework for evaluating a business and its progress. If the plan is wrong, an underlying assumption is incorrect.

> It is difficult to believe that a business plan is useless. It provides a framework for evaluating a business and its progress. They all show hockey-stick growth up and to the right. Not many businesses succeed by that measure. And the goal of a lot of business plans is not to plan a business, but to plan to get funding. Big difference. And a lot of businesses pivot after realizing they were totally wrong. > If the…

In fairness, silly ideas can work. Take Dyson, Nespresso, or Red Bull for example. I think it's tempting to succumb to hindsight bias. I'm sure that had Juicero succeeded and become the Apple of juicing, people would've been saying how obvious it was.

Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics

#45

Post by rjyoungling »

_Microft wrote: post #39
rjyoungling wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Could you let me know what's wrong so I can fix it. It looks solid on my end unfortunately.

This is what it looks like for me. The headlines / interjections are really tall, paragraphs have huge vertical paddings or margins. There is little actual content per screen. I'll have a look at the source for a few minutes. https://i.imgur.com/mAP7Uqe.png Edit: judging by the CSS, it seems actually intended. It just does not work well with my screen or reading habits then. (For what it's worth, here is what would w…

Thanks so much for your generous feedback. Ah, yes. That was intentionally. Ironically, to improve the legibility. I've "stolen" your notes and I've added it to my Kan Ban. Thank you for taking the time out of your day.

Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics

#46

Post by rjyoungling »

projektfu wrote: post #35
rjyoungling wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Could you let me know what's wrong so I can fix it. It looks solid on my end unfortunately.

My issue on the iPhone SE 2 was an obnoxious overlay that hid its close button.

That's annoying. Was it the pop up, or the red hello bar?

Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics

#48

Post by gist »

rjyoungling wrote: post #29
gist wrote: post #27

The OP 'studies what makes companies successful'. The issue is you are only studying the lucky sperm ones (if we take that sentence at face value; maybe 'they' do) as opposed to the complete set of companies. And also you'd never be sure anyway since people are connected to people and you'd never know how a connection resulted in success (vs. some other factor). It's an art and luck it's not (as a point was made) 'sc…

I can assure you I didn't have Feynman in the name of my company to score some extra upvotes on HN. Not that that would even help btw. If you browse through my submission history, you'll see that most of my posts get It's interesting that you accuse my company of not taking survivorship bias into account yet here you are falling victim to retrofitting.

> I can assure you I didn't have Feynman in the name of my company to score some extra upvotes on HN

Ok so why do you have 'Feynman' in your company name then? And I didn't say it was for getting upvotes either. I implied (or meant to imply) that it was as a way to get attention by inventing some kind of fake association. The fact that it didn't do anything before does not mean it has no value (as a test).

> yet here you are falling victim to retrofitting

Explain what you mean by 'retrofitting' in this context I don't understand that meaning here.

You are familiar with the use of celebrities who associate with products. The idea is that someone is more likely to pay attention and consider if they think a celebrity is involved or associated than a random person. Does not mean it will always work or that you can succeed without it. It means in many situations it will get you more than w/o it as always 'it all depends'.

Paul Newman's salad dressing came out in 1982. By Paul having his name on it he got instant recognition in the press and in supermarkets. Doesn't mean people would buy it if it wasn't good but more likely to take a chance as a result of that name a shopper would stop and say 'hmm what's this'.

Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics

#49

Post by redis_mlc »

rjyoungling wrote: post #44
redis_mlc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is difficult to believe that a business plan is useless. It provides a framework for evaluating a business and its progress. They all show hockey-stick growth up and to the right. Not many businesses succeed by that measure. And the goal of a lot of business plans is not to plan a business, but to plan to get funding. Big difference. And a lot of businesses pivot after realizing they were totally wrong. > If the…

In fairness, silly ideas can work. Take Dyson, Nespresso, or Red Bull for example. I think it's tempting to succumb to hindsight bias. I'm sure that had Juicero succeeded and become the Apple of juicing, people would've been saying how obvious it was.

I thought of those. Nespresso has a restaurant-grade product that competes favorably with Starbucks at a querter of the price.

Red Bull is kind of a sleep replacement/stimulant, which a lot of people needed pre-corona. Americans somehow were willing to sacrifice their sleep for their job/commute.

Dyson vacuums - that I can't explain. Maybe their high prices signal them as better quality. Maybe somebody can explain that?

Re: Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics

#50

Post by bullen »

rjyoungling wrote: post #41
projektfu wrote: post #36

Please consider trying this: Paragraph 1: Topic paragraph, introduce topic and question. Paragraph 2: Summarize argument. Paragraphs 3-n: Topic/assertion sentence. Support assertion/argument. Last sentence may summarize support. These paragraphs should follow the overall structure but sometimes you will need more than one paragraph to support something you suggested in the second paragraph. Paragraph n+1: Review conc…

Thanks projektfu! That's extremely helpful feedback. I'll try to use it to improve future work.

I agree with projektfu, there are lots of good ideas that don't sum up to a punchline, I wrote a very introverted reply that "unfortunately" became a pitch, but it's more concentrated: http://move.rupy.se/file/park_engine.html
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