Removed because I am an idiot
> Theranos and, by extension, Jessica Livingstone [sic]
What's the connection between those two??
You don't think all women look alike, do you?
Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail
71–80 of 200 posts
Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is where starting out small and simple usually works. You normally start with an idea that somebody wants whether it's you or a friend. You want your house to warm when you wake up and when you come home. You convince some other people. You build a small prototype. You try it out on people. They either want one or they don't. We all know companies that have built products that nobody wants. They went thr…
>I think this is where starting out small and simple usually works. Very much agree. Make something quickly that somebody really likes, and try and find more people who like it. Figure out what people like about it and expand in that direction. Rinse and repeat, as you expand just keep making sure more people want it.
The corollary to this is also that if nobody likes your product, adding more features to it isn't likely to help. Lots of developers also fall into that trap.
Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail
#73"The best metric to choose is good old fashioned revenue." The best metric to choose is good old fashioned profit. I appreciate that growth can be hindered by making a profit, but isn't that what matters in the end? Amazon, Twitter, Box and many other public tech companies went public without turning a profit so it seems I'm wrong.
> The best metric to choose is good old fashioned profit.
No, the best metric to choose is 'discounted future profits'. That frequently means the best strategy is 'lose millions now to make billions later'.
Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's true that luck is important, shouldn't it be 'smart' to try many 'fail fast' things so there's room in a career to fail 20-30 times and have a more reasonable shot at success?
What about those that stuck with an idea and hit gold eventually at some point? What if failing fast is too fast and you don't give an idea enough time to grow? MVPs and failing fast is an idea that started in the past ~7 years, and it works for some people and not for others.
I didn't imply there weren't other ways to make it. But there are only a few ways to hedge as an individual dev. One of them is to shoot with a shotgun. It's more or less what incubators attempt to do, but spread out over times since each of us only has one brain to go around.
Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail
#75It would be wonderful if these sorts of articles (which efficiently generalize advice based on thousands of data points) could back their assertions up with a few telling case studies. It's often too easy to nod sagely at advice like "don't loose focus" but not actually recognize the pathology in ourselves in our day to day lives.
Read books. They often contain anecdotes like that.
Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail
#76So networking, "grabbing coffee" with investors and talking to potential acquirers are a waste of time, yet YC insists that startups go to one of the most expensive place in the world just because it's more convenient to to those three things.
Here's a nice example of where we can apply the Principle of Charity (http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html). That's the idea that you should respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of an argument, instead of a weaker one.
Sure, you can interpret YC's advice as containing an obviously silly contradiction. But you could also interpret it as saying that you should fundraise when you need to, but not waste time on coffee meetings when you don't.
Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail
#77Yeesh. #2 hits close to home. I think I've asked this question but I found myself a cofounder with 2 others that prioritized too highly IMO coffee meetings with "investors", no name board advisors, expensive conferences, and basically everything on that list. My approach was to gently voice my concern and but also let them do it in the hopes they'd see how useless it was. The other thing that didn't help was I was th…
IF you have something of value, all that social stuff can help monetize it. First, you need to build a thing. If you have no thing, all that stuff is either hot air or basically con artistry.
Women in business face special challenges. Failing to deal with them at all can be catastrophic. But getting too focused on that piece can also be problematic. It can be challenging to figure out which is which.
Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail
#78"...shares her learnings about..." -- this is not English. Failing in the second sentence.
Critiquing others without understand the subject matter is a surefire way to make yourself look foolish.
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19227/plural-of-l...
Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail
#79> 1. Make something people want. I haven't had a ton of experience in startups...once I had to work out of a startup space. And it amazed me the number of conversations I would hear between aspiring entrepreneurs and random strangers that were variations of, "Please tell me if you think this is a good idea". Everyone knows what it's like to want something. I didn't really hear about Tinder until after it blew up into…
It's well-established, within YC at least, that solving a problem you yourself have is one of the strongest foundations for a startup.
Edit: actually Jessica says it in her talk:
My advice to those of you who are still looking for an idea is to solve a problem that you yourself have. Then you’ll know it’s something at least one person really wants. And when you’re part of the target market, you’ll have insights about it that you wouldn’t otherwise.
Re: Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail
#80It would be wonderful if these sorts of articles (which efficiently generalize advice based on thousands of data points) could back their assertions up with a few telling case studies. It's often too easy to nod sagely at advice like "don't loose focus" but not actually recognize the pathology in ourselves in our day to day lives.
Part of the problem is that the teams that lost focused probably quietly dissolved before they got to any of our attentions. (Maybe Yahoo?)
Personally, I find that there's a simple question:
Does this move the company, project, or team forward in a measurable way?
If the answer is "No" then you need to take a long hard look at it and explicitly decide that it's either okay and then stop doing it (ideal) or limit it. And that varies from person to person. Spending time with my toddler is okay in my book. HackerNews, less so.
The next level question is:
Is this the most effective task to this move the company, project, or team forward?
And that is way harder to answer.