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The Only Way to Grow Huge

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#71

Post by tvladeck »

rebelidealist wrote: post #15

Good marketing and advertising can cover up a bad product. A prime example is GoDaddy. When their product is not growing like it should, Silicon Valley startups always hire more engineers to add more features. Oftentimes, the product is good enough they just need put in more marketing efforts. It almost feels like marketers and business dev people are second rate employees compare to engineers when their job is could…

An alternate take, using your example: good marketing and advertising can make a bad product good. In GoDaddy's case, by reaching a segment of the market that is unaware of the options. For this segment, it's not GoDaddy vs. Namecheap; it's GoDaddy vs. not knowing how to put up a website.

Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#72

Post by jacques_chester »

001sky wrote: post #68
jacques_chester wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universal qualifiers aren't absurd for headlines pitched at HN. They seem to work as intended.

'Best' vs 'Only' should be a title-fight deathmatch

    Why "Best" is Best

    How "Only" Got Me To the Front Page of HN

Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#73

Post by jacques_chester »

adwf wrote: post #65
jacques_chester wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you got me to thinking. As a side-effect of his work on expert forecasting[1], Tetlock discovered that people put more stock in those who made confident predictions than those who qualified their predictions. To the point that he basically says: if a person is a famous pundit, they are more likely to be wrong, because the media prefers bold predictions to maybes and perhapses. In business you can be bold or not b…

Yes it's actually quite an awkward point for me at the moment. I have a side-project that I've been developing for a while. My attachment to it means that I know every single bug and flaw within the product. But at the same time I know that if I add caveats to any marketing (it's a bit alpha/beta, etc.), then it will come across as unconfident. On the other hand, if I just say it's amazing and will change your life,…

I know how you feel. The way I deal with it is to find the claims I can confidently make and stick with those. A lot of the time you can do that by looking at the business value side of things.

For example, I can't truthfully say that my code is bug free or the best or whathaveyou. But I can say "My product improves ."

I guess the trick is to have two hats. The first hat is the problem domain hat. This is where you make confident, accurate claims about your product.

The second is the solution domain hat. This is where you park your professional anxieties about whether you've crossed and dotted everything.

Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#74

Post by jacques_chester »

001sky wrote: post #67
adwf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is that I come from a physics degree background and hence have a tendency to stick with the more scientifically accurate "I think, maybe, probably, possibly, almost always", rather than going for absolutes. However, when you enter into the business world, you tend to find that this kind of language comes across as weak and uncertain. Even though you are merely trying to be correct and not give false i…

Edge cases seem to be where all the fun is, tho... =D

What I like about fuzzy logic is that it pushes a lot of paradoxes down a level. Instead of having paradoxes bubble up to the top level and derailing discussion, you instead turn fuzziness into an abstract object which is polymorphic to other logical objects.

This gives you the handles you need to grasp and wrestle with the vagueness of the actual world without either needing to give up rigour or rely on hacks and undocumented conventions about the mapping from the real world into the logical world.

If you've got the patience, I can give as an example a long review I wrote of Sidney Dekker's Drift into Failure, where in part I argued that his argument largely vanishes if reframed in terms of fuzzy logic: http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/

Edit: Hmm, I really look like a spammer in this thread. Not intentional. No more than usual, anyhow.

Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#75

Post by pak »

sjtgraham wrote: post #26

Looking at the comments here, most of them would be nullified if the article wasn't "the only way to grow huge", but instead "one way to grow huge". So far it's looking like this item will soon incur the controversy penalty. I enjoyed the post; simply making something good is the growth strategy that is most applicable to a random kid reading this, but it's not the only way.

The controversy penalty would be perfect for an article like this that features and builds off a linkbait title, which I now feel a little duped for reacting to.

But after finding out Sam Altman is a YC partner, and reading more about how the controversy penalty and other arbitrary penalties actually work, I don't really buy into anything scoring equitably on this site (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6844169) in the long term...

Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#76

Post by pak »

apu wrote: post #66
adwf wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now put it in an algorithm that detects any mention of "only, always, never" or any other absolute. Then insert a boilerplate at the top of such discussions, saying there are always exceptions, but the gist of the argument is still valid ;)

For an example of this, look at the sibling comment by pak (made after yours) =) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6844169

To which I say, what is the point of words like "only" and "all", if they do not mean what they are supposed to?

I'm not trying to be a stickler. Granted, I work mostly in science research, where broad claims are discouraged and quantifying confidence in a hypothesis is expected. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

At best, I think this rule could apply to (maybe) 80% of "huge" tech companies. 80% is a disingenuously long distance from "all companies".

Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#77

Post by nostrademons »

larrys wrote: post #54
pak wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this case the most common misunderstanding seems to be not to realize that present day big companies were once small. You could have pre-empted that by reminding readers that once companies reach a certain size they don't have to rely on making something great to grow bigger, but that if you look back at the earliest history of those companies, you'll find most did. (emphasis mine) It's hard to call it a misunde…

With all due respect to Sam I have no idea what qualifies Sam to even be opining on this subject without a bit more of a circumspect attitude. If he was a professor of business or had a long standing knowledge of business that would be one thing. The word "most" would certainly be better but even that goes a bit to far with a subject as large as "business" and "companies".

He's founded a company. It was talent-acquired, but that's more than most professors of business ever achieve.

Aside from the specific situation - I'm kinda curious what HN readers think "qualifies" a person to give advice. My girlfriend's doing an MBA. I read her coursework sometimes. Some of it is useful with the appropriate grain of salt applied, but I find that blog postings from people who have actually run businesses (or listening to Larry, Urs, Amit, Milo, Andy etc. at Google-internal presentations and trying hard to read between the lines) are far more informative. There is the theory and there is the reality when it comes to running businesses, and most of the theory is bunk.

Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#78

Post by conductr »

Author mentions _product_ a few times without consideration to the problem it's meant to solve. Sometimes the problem being solved just isn't big/important enough for users to risk the social capital of making a recommendation; even when the product solves it perfectly

Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#79

Post by gk1 »

arthuredelstein wrote: post #64

> Having a growth team is still a good idea--you almost always need to jumpstart things. But don't forget about what you actually have to accomplish. Maybe it's better not to jumpstart things. One strategy could be to fail faster by purposely not marketing, to quickly find out whether a product is intrinsically viral.

Most products are not intrinsically viral, and they have no reason to be such.

Re: The Only Way to Grow Huge

#80

Post by argumentum »

larrys wrote: post #54
pak wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this case the most common misunderstanding seems to be not to realize that present day big companies were once small. You could have pre-empted that by reminding readers that once companies reach a certain size they don't have to rely on making something great to grow bigger, but that if you look back at the earliest history of those companies, you'll find most did. (emphasis mine) It's hard to call it a misunde…

With all due respect to Sam I have no idea what qualifies Sam to even be opining on this subject without a bit more of a circumspect attitude. If he was a professor of business or had a long standing knowledge of business that would be one thing. The word "most" would certainly be better but even that goes a bit to far with a subject as large as "business" and "companies".

Sam is precisely one of the few people whose opinion I would never want to miss on the subject of how to grow "huge". Loopt was in the original YC batch, and so he has had a bird's eye view of hundreds of startups, most of which have or will fail to grow huge .. but also a few that will succeed. That's nearly 10 years of seeing things very few others (in the world) will get the chance to see.

Plenty of other very impressive business people, including the likes of pg, peter thiel etc lend a careful ear to what Sam has to say .. so, with all due respect, I think you'd be a fool to disregard his thoughts.

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