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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

#91

Post by jo909 »

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…

I read that in the sense that you don't need very many ("a bunch") of PhDs in a small company. That does not imply that one or a few people of that background might not be useful.

If AI is an integral part of my startup I would prefer to have someone with adequate experience in the founding team or very early hire.

90% of the work might not be super deep fundamental design decisions or debugging.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#93

Post by nunez »

delhanty wrote: post #68
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…

>Startups are (by necessity) filled with generalists; big companies are filled with specialists. People underestimate how effective a generalist can be at things which are done by specialists. People underestimate how deep specialties can run. These are simultaneously true. [0] For Google etc. it probably makes sense to pay top dollar for lots of ML PhDs (specialists). A startup looking for opportunities engendered b…

Yes, because at their scale and revenue, it makes sense to start pumping out your own research. Some PhD theses do eventually become competitive advantages (Paxos comes to mind), and nothing is better than being able to work on your “thesis” with a nice paycheck and without the threat of “publish or perish.”

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#94

Post by nunez »

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…

> Right, so readers at home, if you can start a business, do that, but also maybe don't. It's not easy, it's a lot of work and there are a lot of things that valuable in life that have nothing to do with money, that's how I'd put that.

I hate this narrative.

Yes, there are things in life worth more than money, but it just so happens that having a shitload of money makes living the life you want WAY easier.

What Vincent is saying is “Doing startups is hard, so just settle and be happy with what you have.”

What if you’re not? It just so happens that making very large amounts of money as an engineer is hard too!

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#95

Post by nunez »

bolololo1 wrote: post #90
nostrademons wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I still think it is, but having quality engineering is always important, especially as you scale.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#97

Post by MichaelGG »

mschuster91 wrote: post #27
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. Google and Amazon are hardly the classic 100x-hypergrowth model. Facebook and Twitter DID really mess up, have you seen how much utterly vile stuff you can report to them and it will still be around months later? Have you been at the receiving end of a shitstorm or Nazi trolls? Peo…

> The president of the US leaves the rest of the world in panic when someone will finally declare war with him after yet another tweet.

You know if people are actually in panic over him tweeting, maybe the problem is in those people.

It's like those folks posting pictures of their kids crying when Trump won, saying "my 6 year old is now scared he'll be murdered". Uh, you did that to yourself.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#98

Post by ViktorV »

sytelus wrote: post #55
matte_black wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, it's nothing unlearnable. You read a couple good books and blogs, do some experiments, and you're about 80% of the way there.

Nothing is unlearnable - it's never question of "if it can be done" but question of "how much effort is needed". Read few blogs, books and take Coursera classes etc are all good but the real thing is working on multiple real and new problems. Anyone who has read books/blogs etc, give them a new problem, for example, predicting pedestrian intent for crossing a road from set of video frames. See how far they get.

Sorry to be that guy but this kind of "elitism" seriously bothers me. I've seen this thing in almost all of the fields related to CS like "you have to spend 16 hours a day for 10 years to understand assembly" when I know a guy who became a malware expert in 4 years ( winning world class tournaments with his team ). This thing is very discouraging, and it is false. You stated a problem which is hard to solve, but 99% of problems are not like this. Like: - tell what kind of mineral deficiency a plant has? - what kind of bug do you see? - what kind of plant do you see? - is this thing broken ( MRI or X ray )? - what kind of musical notes are in a waveform?

See how far they get. A talented guy can solve these within one year.

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#99

Post by stretchwithme »

FireBeyond wrote: post #42
stretchwithme wrote: post #26

Pretending to be a family is bad news. Especially if you tell prospective employees that and then remind them that employment is "at will".

Right? "We're a family... and if you fuck up, you're outta the family."

Not even. Business errors or just a bad economy can get you laid off from the family.

"Times are hard, Jimmy. So Mom will drop you off downtown."

Re: Trends to Avoid When Founding a Startup

#100

Post by jjeaff »

hugs wrote: post #86
jjeaff wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Cool, I'll take a look. There are always exceptions to the extreme norm, of course.
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