491–500 of 808 posts
Nah man, it's because every time they’re asked about security they say “yes we did an audit no we won’t release the results”? I don’t know about you but I’d like to keep my passwords to myself
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That founder naïveté, however, is also what often leads to founders winning. Building Stripe really seems like a schlep if you’ve built a payments company before - so much so that you might not want to do it. It’s hard, and annoying, and has all sorts of regulatory hurdles. But if you don’t know any of that, you build it anyway, because schleps are really just long collections of much smaller problems, and naive foun…
There is a difference between thinking something is a bad idea because it's hard and thinking something is a bad idea because it's dangerous. Your Stripe example is an example of something that was hard. Mighty is an example of something that is may not actually be hard but is most likely dangerous.
It's hard to predict how the end of a startup will look from the beginning, but ambitious ideas often look dangerous, scary, hard, or impossible at the beginning.
Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you ju…
> It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. This is basically putting the cart before the horse and pretty much the definition of hindsight bias. We all know the BrandonM/Dropbox quip, but that's just a fun anecdote, not som…
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That founder naïveté, however, is also what often leads to founders winning. Building Stripe really seems like a schlep if you’ve built a payments company before - so much so that you might not want to do it. It’s hard, and annoying, and has all sorts of regulatory hurdles. But if you don’t know any of that, you build it anyway, because schleps are really just long collections of much smaller problems, and naive foun…
It's true, but we shouldn't forget survivor bias here. We tend to focus on the stories of successful founders. To some extent, those are even the only ones we hear about. Because of that phenomenon, there is absolutely no incompatibility between the existence of disruptive startups, and the opinions of more conservative voices. Similar to how there's no incompatibility between the existence of people who win the lott…
Lots of startups fail, and a few succeed. I find it an interesting leading indicator that most startups who succeed have founders that are naive in some way.
Doesn't mean you can't win and not be naive, and obviously correlation doesn't imply causation, but the phenomenon is frequent enough that I don't think it's entirely baseless either.
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That founder naïveté, however, is also what often leads to founders winning. Building Stripe really seems like a schlep if you’ve built a payments company before - so much so that you might not want to do it. It’s hard, and annoying, and has all sorts of regulatory hurdles. But if you don’t know any of that, you build it anyway, because schleps are really just long collections of much smaller problems, and naive foun…
>> That founder naïveté, however, is also what often leads to founders winning I think you overstate your case with the word "often". It is far more often that what they're building never amounts to anything. Even the most successful founders typically bat less than 500
I did not mean to imply all naive founders win; that would be absurd. :)
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I’m curious if you got this idea from the famous HN comment about Dropbox.
No would you post a link? It does fit with the general idea.
Note the date of course - this is well before Dropbox was a household name.
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Mighty's problem is different than the others though, in that it is a thin client for a thin client. If web apps are too big to the point people need to stream Chrome in a container to get them to run well, why wouldn't you just stream them a full operating system where developers didn't have to target the web with all of its oddities and instead could just target Windows (or Linux)? The entire point of web applicati…
Linux has low market share, Apple won't let you on non-Apple hardware, and Windows has high fees to license in that way. The only path is the browser and most desktop apps are web apps. Feel free to read my post that goes deeper about our thinking: https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-the...
Is it possible to add a HN filter (hide) all paulgraham.com posts? I'm not interested in his posts and they pop up very often on HN.
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I’m curious if you got this idea from the famous HN comment about Dropbox.
No would you post a link? It does fit with the general idea.
Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you ju…