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Why Toys?

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Why Toys?

#71

Post by taeric »

zerostar07 wrote: post #41
taeric wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested in citations saying personal responsibility has declined. More likely that your exposure to everyone else's responsibility has increased.

We 'd need a personalresponsibilitymeter for that. However we can consider trends, such as the use of death penalty only for heinous crimes, its abolition in most of the world, and constant increases in government welfare.

Are you really equating the abolishment of the death penalty with a decline in personal responsibility?

But... you are the one asserting there is a decline in personal responsibility. How are you asserting that?

Re: Why Toys?

#72

Post by mseebach »

durandal1 wrote: post #63

"The third thing that goes wrong when you take your toy too seriously is that you immediately start optimizing on the things that you believe serious businesses should – profit and margins." This is of course only true if you're playing the Silicon Valley VC game, a lot of healthy businesses has been built by focusing hard on turning profit early. For an example from recent news, look at IKEA.

Building toys probably requires the VC game. Ikea was never a toy.

Re: Why Toys?

#73

Post by afarrell »

fiatjaf wrote: post #62
jpwagner wrote: post #20

The best dichotomy I've heard for this is: Are you building [Ice Skates] or are you building [Ear muffs]? Ice skates allow you to do something new that you didn't even know you had a demand for. Ear muffs solve a problem that you were already solving poorly (with your hands). [Business vs toy] is an insanely counterproductive mental framework which will create a false sense of security in founders who are actually bu…

Good point. I believe you can only do that distinction (business vs toy) after the fact. So it offers no guidance at all. Was Dropbox a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Google a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Uber a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Airbnb a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Unless, of course, you're talking about the famous SOCIAL NETWORKS. In which case they were -- and…

It is worth noting that Dropbox took a bundle of business problems that already had been solved in one small community and solved it for a much wider community. Specifically, the problems of "cloud" file storage were being solved by AFS in MIT's Project Athena. So, to argue at Dropbox's founding that it was a toy would require first arguing that businesses didn't have problems that resembled "All the folks working on this class project need to have one accessible and shareable place to store files".

Re: Why Toys?

#74

Post by fiatjaf »

loorinm wrote: post #68
fiatjaf wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're saying is partly true, but what do you think YC should do?

To solve inequality?? I don’t think that’s the business YC is in. But we can do a lot. We can drastically reduce the potential financial rewards for extracting value from millions of people. We can set a max income of $300k per person and the rest goes to elevating the poor. It would pretty much destroy the VC industry though.

I don't understand why are you complaining they aren't solving inequality, then.

Re: Why Toys?

#75

Post by turingcompeteme »

loeber wrote: post #44
turingcompeteme wrote: post #27

Standard Oil actually did start out as a toy. They provided oil to burn in lamps. At the time most people thought that was a somewhat silly gimmick and a fad that would quickly pass. Oil in general was seen as something neat but not essential for years. But just like facebook, many people soon came around to the idea and it took over the world. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. covers this all in incredible…

This is plainly wrong. Rockefeller started dealing in oil because the unit economics were excellent, and because he recognized that no dominant players had emerged in the market yet, opening it up to vertical & horizontal integration (both of which he executed flawlessly). Furthermore, asserting that indoor lighting was a toy -- in an age where other light sources were dim, prohibitively expensive, or excessively smo…

How about this: oil was being given to kids to play with when Rockefeller was getting started.

Yes the economics were excellent. But very few actually wanted it for years. Oil was fun to set on fire, but hadn't found mainstream use yet. Rockefeller created and dominated the market.

Many of Rockefeller's early writings were about his frustrations of oil not being taken seriously. And he definitely agreed with you that it was a mistake to see oil lamps as toys.

Re: Why Toys?

#76

Post by taeric »

zerostar07 wrote: post #37
taeric wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be surprised if we are truly more childish than historical periods. Indeed, just going off of naive views of life expectancy, we used to spend more of our living time as children. Now, leisure time has certainly increased. To an extent. We now have to spend far less time preparing food/clothing/etc. At least, for the average person. Upper classed people probably had more leisure time in the past, since they had o…

> we used to spend more of our living time as children. not really, children used to work as soon as they were able to, agriculture or industry from very young ages and get married young. People marry a lot later now. IF for example we assume that ppl married at 18 when life expectancy was 60, and at 32 when life expectancy is 80, they spend a larger fraction of their life unmarried.

Working age is different than child age. Even today. My point was more on the description "childish." There are childish ways of acting that persist even in work for folks. The way my children "clean" their room, for example, is a lot less deliberate and effective than how I would do it.

Which is really missing my main point. The leisure time aspect is much more relevant.

Re: Why Toys?

#77

Post by TeMPOraL »

Interesting; I'm surprised to see this comparison made, even though in retrospect (thanks to 'ujeezy for pointing it out), I recognize the PG quote about things "described as a toy".

The funny thing is; they've drawn a mostly different comparison using the same dichotomy ("toy" vs "serious") that I use for occasional rants on this site. I say mostly different, because here's the intersection:

If you give people a tool and tell them it will perfectly solve an important problem, any imperfection in the tool is going to make them angry. If you give someone a toy and say “Look what I made! Isn’t it fun? It kinda does this thing.” then you’ve set yourself up for a positive reaction. It’s much easier to beat low expectations than high ones, so you’ve materially increased your chances at having a happy user.

What I loathe about current startups and SaaS companies is that they seemingly can't - or don't want to - progress past the stage of a toy. I agree that when I see a random toy on the net, I'll have a positive reaction of curiosity. But then, at some point, I'll have an actual thing I want to get done efficiently. Suddenly, the toy becomes borderline useless, because it either can't help me with the task at all, or the help is very weak.

What I mean is: if you're trying to show that something entirely new is possible, by all means, make it a pretty little toy. But when your site is full of advertising copy around "helping users" and "making world (of niche thing X) a better place", then for the love of $deity, make your product functional and efficient.

The reality is, most SaaS startups seem to be toys in that sense, to the point (or because of) it infected the modern UX trends! UX people will tell you about uncluttering, removing functionality, "your user doesn't need that", "this is confusing", "put this in 'advanced options'", "actually, 'options' are confusing, drop it entirely"... For example, observe how, over the years, Google dumbed down its products from actual tools to pretty Material Design toys with a fraction of original functionality. And then people treat Google as role model...

So yeah, startup founders: don't treat yourself seriously, but please, try to actually work on the value you're saying you're providing to your users.

Re: Why Toys?

#78

Post by lotyrin »

schnevets wrote: post #23

I am constantly thinking about the question: What is the future tech entrepreneur's lemonade stand? It would have to be something typical and low-skill so a young entrepreneur can build it and learn the hard lessons about running a business, but it needs some special defense to avoid being out-innovated by an Amazon or Google. The Facebook example as a toy is perfect - the platform was able to thrive by being hyper-l…

I think the simple realtime competitive "io games" that cloud computing, nodeJS, SVG / Canvas have allowed to explode in recent history are probably one playground for fledgling entrepreneurs.

Re: Why Toys?

#79

Post by [deleted] »

zerostar07 wrote: post #16
runesoerensen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Unless you are doing cutting-edge research in your daily job, you are not much different from those indies working on "superficial crap", apart from the fact that being "part of a company" gives you the illusion that it's more legitimate. Was google search or skype superficial and trivial? They started as programmer toys. The point of the article is that a programmer can start with $0 and build the whole product." Y…

This is not the sense of the word "toy" that the article discusses about. He brings up facebook as a primary example of a toy project, not in the sense that it was fun for the programmer (aren't they all?) but in the sense that it was fun for the end user, not serious business. Google for example was not trying to be fun from the get-go, maybe skype was, i m not sure. Facebook is a tool that brings adults back to hig…

[deleted]

Re: Why Toys?

#80

Post by TeMPOraL »

schnevets wrote: post #23

I am constantly thinking about the question: What is the future tech entrepreneur's lemonade stand? It would have to be something typical and low-skill so a young entrepreneur can build it and learn the hard lessons about running a business, but it needs some special defense to avoid being out-innovated by an Amazon or Google. The Facebook example as a toy is perfect - the platform was able to thrive by being hyper-l…

Look for things that don't scale. At all.

A lemonade stand makes sense because it captures people who want lemonade now, but not enough to get in a car and drive to the closest store. In practice, no single shop can scale itself to address this time/location limitation[0].

Similarly, an "e-Lemonade stand" has to be something that just can't scale beyond local level. Anything that a single entity could do for customers from around the country, or around the world, is out of the picture. So such "lemonade stand" would have to be something either with strong time/location constraints, or something unique to a very specific subgroup of people, that just can't be trivially copied to a different subgroup.

--

[0] - Except people putting out vending machines; this is real life, there are exceptions to every heuristic.

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