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We Have Learned Nothing
51–60 of 65 posts
Re: We Have Learned Nothing
#52[dead]
Re: We Have Learned Nothing
#53The fact that the survival rate of startups hasn't improved doesn't show that our knowledge hasn't improved. Startups are competitive, with only 1 or 2 VC-scale winners per market. So, the claim is like "race car technology hasn't gotten better, because there's still only one winner per race."
A car race is a zero-sum game, which is not the case of economics (according to orthodox economists at least), so if there was a magic recipe for startups success, more of them would generate wealth, the pie would grow, therefore less should die?
Yes, and indeed more startups are addressing more markets every year. The total number of attempts and successes are both up, keeping the success rate fairly constant.
Re: We Have Learned Nothing
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hm, no, in F1 they don’t have the same car. Each season, each team builds their own (adhering to the Formula) and put massive amounts of efforts to gaining efficiency through engineering.
Oh really?! I said my statement was oversimplified. Not all groups have the same requirements. NASA Spec is very regulated for instance... But I knew a comment like this was coming, so as someone who grew up with a family race team, has a race car, and builds a motorsports app. Shut up. My eyes being rolling faster than my crank...
In National Stock Car Racing the cars are all nominally equal, that’s far from the case in F1 where some years a single competitor dominates partially from having chosen a superior technological implementation.
Re: We Have Learned Nothing
#55As a dabbler in startup punditry (I've written a couple of books on startup positioning), I find Jerry's take very thought provoking. The crux of the issue for me is what Dr Iain McGilchrist highlighted — we attend to the world in two very different ways. One mode of attention is a broad, open awareness to what's 'out there' and the other mode is a much more narrow focus on the parts and pieces. For startups, when yo…
I love your take, but I had a hard time getting through the article because “science of entrepreneurship” already feels like a contradiction in terms to me. Each startup is a product of its unique time and context. There are huge swings in fortune based on seemingly subtle factors that are not necessarily under the control of the founder but need to recognized and can force the whole vision, approach, or even the problem statement itself to shift wildly overnight. This happens over and over again, and so creating a successful startup is more akin to bull riding than any formulaic process.
Because entrepreneurship and markets overall are at the center of so many disparate human contexts, I just don’t think the scientific method is particularly applicable. I also think the minute you try to generalize between startups the fidelity of understanding the factors of success fall off exponentially. The most common failure mode—almost by definition—is failing to recognize that some seemingly good idea or pattern that worked in many other businesses just does not work in this particular context for whatever reason. This is why entrepreneurs that are too focused on theory and not enough on the details of their particular space tend to fail.
To me, The Lean Startup is useful food for thought, and can be useful in surprising ways (even in bigger companies), but the generalized ideas and statements are of very little value without a keen sense of applicability in context. Any “science” of entrepreneurship would basically be combining the systemic chaos of macroeconomics less the precision of standard financial metrics plus all the human factors of psychology. Fascinating to think about, but I doubt the best pundits and theorists would themselves make good entrepreneurs.
Re: We Have Learned Nothing
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey there's always communism to aim for when y'all fail to improve society
It makes sense to me to try to be good at Capitalism. You're right, it may be a fool's errand, but what's the alternative? FWIW, can't believe I'm replying to literally "throwaway random number" but Capitalism isn't my cup of tea. I rode around on a bicycle for the last decade. But it's what we've got.
It's not like the past generations didn't try to make it work, too, and for-profit development has failed to deliver the promise of technology that uplifts rather than oppresses by any metric i can think of. If capitalism doesn't work, and there are no alternatives, then perhaps we shouldn't be using chips at all and we should be focusing on other means to solve problems in our society.
Edit: wikipedia is nice. So are cheap universal personal cameras. Point to point communication is nice. None of these require capitalism at all; indeed, capital will want to rent out these as well (if you aren't already renting through a cell plan). why must our needs always be subservient to those of the market?
Re: We Have Learned Nothing
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh really?! I said my statement was oversimplified. Not all groups have the same requirements. NASA Spec is very regulated for instance... But I knew a comment like this was coming, so as someone who grew up with a family race team, has a race car, and builds a motorsports app. Shut up. My eyes being rolling faster than my crank...
In National Stock Car Racing the cars are all nominally equal, that’s far from the case in F1 where some years a single competitor dominates partially from having chosen a superior technological implementation.
> Nominally
I don't really follow NASCAR, but from listening to my (huge fan) father-in-law, that word is doing some work. His best (or, at least, my favorite) are the creative ways teams find to bend the rules - or blatantly cheat! - to give their cars an advantage.
One that made me laugh: a team once packed their suspension tubes with lead shot to make minimum weight. On the first lap the driver pulled a lever that dropped all the shot onto the track, and then enjoyed an underweight car for the rest of the race! They're always looking for "legitimate" optimizations, too.
Re: We Have Learned Nothing
#58The fact that the survival rate of startups hasn't improved doesn't show that our knowledge hasn't improved. Startups are competitive, with only 1 or 2 VC-scale winners per market. So, the claim is like "race car technology hasn't gotten better, because there's still only one winner per race."
Racing competition is flattened through regulation(oversimplified). All drivers have the same car. Drivers skill and fearlessness is the deciding factor. I came here to basically say this about running a company- but your comment was a better launching point. As someone who has run several companies over the last 25 years and has read and or tried nearly ever "method" mentioned... Im now running a company where Im ab…
I can't think of a single race where drivers are required to drive "the same car", by any reasonable definition of same. Not stock cars, F1, Nascar, demolition derby...
Re: We Have Learned Nothing
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may be defeatist, but it is correct. Seriously, how do you even realistically approach taking on ASML. They spent decades and billions of (investment) dollars to do insane moonshot research and it paid off. But it also closed off the door behind them. Entire countries (Russia, China, ...) have been trying to reproduce it. They have not succeeded yet.
>They have not succeeded yet. Reproducing an ASML machine is a piece of cake. Okay, not a piece of cake but definitely doable. The problem is that you cannot sell your reproduction in rich countries because the US government will threaten you with sanctions and US companies will screech "patents!".
Nonsense. Patents are a locked glass door; anyone can get in if they knock hard enough. And Chinese engineers wear heavy gloves and eye protection when going door-to-door.
I used to work for ASML as a design engineer, and I asked my manager why we didn't shred our paperwork, like some other companies I worked at.
"With all the trouble we've had, getting our designs to work? We should publish them to slow down our competitors!"
He wasn't wrong. “Nothing that's good works by itself, you've got to make the damn thing work.” — Thomas A. Edison.
Re: We Have Learned Nothing
#60[dead]