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Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

fast.ai

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Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#81

Post by nostrademons »

polkapolka wrote: post #75
sytelus wrote: post #47

The catchiest (and wrong) assertion is this: "even for highly technical aspects like deep learning, fast.ai has shown that people with 1-year of coding experience can become world-class deep learning practitioners" Yes, any Joe can train deep network with dozen lines of Keras. Sure, your startup can use off-the self models and tweak it a bit... That doesn't make you "world-class deep learning practitioner". If you ar…

If you spend one year on applying deep learning, you can train a net on a 100 different data sets. That's where the intuition comes from. You'll debug a lot. People with zero experience with deep learning have ended in the top 10 for Kaggle computer vision competitions. Applied ML does not require a PhD in Computer Science. It is not like you are debugging Cuda as was the case a few years back. Even then, a PhD in st…

"How rare is it to find a new problem domain these days? Most if not all problems tackled with deep learning have already been done in one form or the other."

Curious if anyone's done this: deep learning on DOM trees, to recognize portions of HTML pages. This has elements in common with both CNNs (where you want surrounding context - parents, ancestors, siblings, and descendants - to influence the recognition of a particular DOM element) and with RNNs (because elements may have an unbounded number of children, and potentially a recurring substructure), but I don't know offhand how you would combine them to solve the problem.

Anyone working on this? A quick literature search turned up nothing.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#82

Post by dang »

delhanty wrote: post #66
csallen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: Blog posts like this one are useful, because the VC-funded companies you named are so successful at dominating our thoughts, conversations, and news feeds (HN included) that many founders never see any examples of people following an alternative path. It can be inspiring to a lot of people to simply hear about the possibility of building a small, revenue-generating business or side project. I've been ru…

+1 >because the VC-funded companies you named are so successful at dominating our thoughts, conversations, and news feeds (HN included) Right - HN's corporate sponsor is YC Combinator, so it's kind of inevitable that the VC narrative dominates. The good thing about Indie Hackers being acquired by Stripe in April [0] (congratulations!) is that, even though you now have a corporate sponsor too, in the short term at lea…

The "VC narrative" doesn't dominate HN. Quite the opposite.

Most everyone thinks it does, but that only makes it more untrue.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#83

Post by kriro »

First of all fast.ai is awesome and most of the points they make align quite well with my personal views which of course doesn't mean they are the right views ;) but...

"""Hiring a bunch of academic researchers will not improve your product and harms your company by diverting so many resources (unless your goal is an aquihire)."""

Disagree. Ceteris paribus a previous academic researcher isn't necessarily a worse hire than a graduate or someone who has worked at other tech companies. I'm really not a fan of this "don't hire people from academia" narrative. A good scientist is well versed in systematic problem solving which doesn't sound like a horrible skillset for someone working at a startup. Sure there's enough people with PhDs that can't write working code but there's also enough people that can. I'm not sure about the US but hiring a PhD isn't necessarily more expensive than hiring someone with job experience in the tech sector either. I get their basic idea but it's news to me that even AI startups are on "only PhDs all the time" hiring frenzies.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#84

Post by delhanty »

dang wrote: post #82
delhanty wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 >because the VC-funded companies you named are so successful at dominating our thoughts, conversations, and news feeds (HN included) Right - HN's corporate sponsor is YC Combinator, so it's kind of inevitable that the VC narrative dominates. The good thing about Indie Hackers being acquired by Stripe in April [0] (congratulations!) is that, even though you now have a corporate sponsor too, in the short term at lea…

The "VC narrative" doesn't dominate HN. Quite the opposite. Most everyone thinks it does, but that only makes it more untrue.

Seeing as you're associated with HN that can hardly be an objective claim.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#85

Post by CM30 »

birken wrote: post #20

I don't want to diminish the success that this company is having being run in their own way, but give me a break with these blog posts. VC is a "trend to avoid"? Avoid "Hypergrowth"? I guess companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest and a hundred others all really messed up. I mean I could go point by point and give examples that are the opposite of these trends, but that is…

To be honest, Twitter seems like exactly the kind of company that this advice was made for. It had a neat idea that could have been made them a steady profit as a small to medium sized company, but took on billions of dollars in funding, hired thousands of employees and hired a bunch of scientists and high end engineers for a project that arguably didn't need most of that stuff to begin with.

Hence what could have been a decent company making a cool few million a year is instead one making huge losses on the assumption it's the next Facebook.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#86

Post by hugs »

jjeaff wrote: post #65
birken wrote: post #20

I don't want to diminish the success that this company is having being run in their own way, but give me a break with these blog posts. VC is a "trend to avoid"? Avoid "Hypergrowth"? I guess companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest and a hundred others all really messed up. I mean I could go point by point and give examples that are the opposite of these trends, but that is…

The problem with VC money is that you are likely taking on powerful investors / co owners that are unlikely to have the same goals that you have (or should have). VC money comes from those that have already become successful. So they are pushing for a strategy that will cause the majority of companies to fail but with the small chance that one will become the next Google, fb, etc. Most founders can't afford that meth…

"When was the last time you heard of a VC that wanted good dividends from their portfolio companies?"

Indie.vc (Bryce Roberts)

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#87

Post by srean »

birken wrote: post #20

I don't want to diminish the success that this company is having being run in their own way, but give me a break with these blog posts. VC is a "trend to avoid"? Avoid "Hypergrowth"? I guess companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest and a hundred others all really messed up. I mean I could go point by point and give examples that are the opposite of these trends, but that is…

> I guess companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest and a hundred others all really messed up.

This reeks of selection bias.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#88

Post by dang »

delhanty wrote: post #84
dang wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "VC narrative" doesn't dominate HN. Quite the opposite. Most everyone thinks it does, but that only makes it more untrue.

Seeing as you're associated with HN that can hardly be an objective claim.

Oh indeed, but seeing as we work on HN every day, we're more steeped in the data than anyone else is, and to us this is a pretty obvious observation. I'm saying 'we' because I'm sure all the moderators agree.

The HN community stopped being based in SV many years ago, if it ever was to begin with. It's heavily international, widely distributed even in the US, and significantly more sympathetic to boostrapper/indiehacker narratives than to VC ones. Which is pretty easy to understand if you think about who the users are and how many of them there are.

In terms of comment quality, the cynical end of anti-VC sentiment is a problem because it's so knee-jerk and predictable. Solid critique is welcome, but alas, there isn't much. As a moderator I don't care what people like or hate but I do care about getting the best insights from all sides, and this is one area where we don't, really. Or rather, we do, but it's drowned out by Dunning-Kruger and reversion to the mean and all the other phenomena that make internet forums suck.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#89

Post by bolololo1 »

nostrademons wrote: post #81
polkapolka wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you spend one year on applying deep learning, you can train a net on a 100 different data sets. That's where the intuition comes from. You'll debug a lot. People with zero experience with deep learning have ended in the top 10 for Kaggle computer vision competitions. Applied ML does not require a PhD in Computer Science. It is not like you are debugging Cuda as was the case a few years back. Even then, a PhD in st…

"How rare is it to find a new problem domain these days? Most if not all problems tackled with deep learning have already been done in one form or the other." Curious if anyone's done this: deep learning on DOM trees, to recognize portions of HTML pages. This has elements in common with both CNNs (where you want surrounding context - parents, ancestors, siblings, and descendants - to influence the recognition of a pa…

Unsupervised learning to recognize patterns?

Seems like a really interesting idea to work on.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#90

Post by bolololo1 »

nostrademons wrote: post #33
birken wrote: post #20

I don't want to diminish the success that this company is having being run in their own way, but give me a break with these blog posts. VC is a "trend to avoid"? Avoid "Hypergrowth"? I guess companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest and a hundred others all really messed up. I mean I could go point by point and give examples that are the opposite of these trends, but that is…

It was interesting reading this, because those 5 points basically describe Google to a T. It's an aborted Ph.D thesis that took VC, hired lots of Ph.Ds with a culture "like a family", and then embarked on a hypergrowth trajectory. The irony is that when Google was young, there was a different set of "destructive trends". They still included taking VC, but it was also common knowledge that: 1. You had to sell a physic…

Isn't still Sales & marketing more important than engineering?

You can build whatever you want but if you don't tell anybody you'll fail.

There are hundreds of successful companies with rubbish products but great business connections and marketing.

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