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From Beating the Averages by Paul Graham (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html): If you do everything the way the average star
by hga 10y ago
From Beating the Averages by Paul Graham (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html):
If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.
That said, quoting for example jdiscar (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11804709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11804709), "'Choose the tech I know best'" is a better metric than "boring" per se. Circling back to Graham, perhaps you should defer doing a startup until you know enough "non-average" tech.
And I add this rule of thumb: adopt at most 1 new (big) technical thing. With everything else you'll be doing, you're not likely to be able to come up to speed on anything more.
And very possibly that one new thing is built into what you're doing, such as applying technology you know at a qualitatively greater scale than you're familiar with. I saw this a lot in the late '80s and '90s when PC architects familiar with single user systems tried to make the jump to multi-user client server systems.
- freddref 10y agoIs using "boring" tech odd for startups? Choosing and using tech is only one of the things a startup does. I would guess it's more important to do something odd for everything else than it is to do something "odd" tech-wise.
- hga 10y agoPerhaps that's an "it depends", and "odd" tech can enable you to do something "odd" that your competitors can't do. When I was skimming the cited article for the quote I plucked out of it, I came across this bit: What were the results of this experiment [in using Lisp, which we knew, but didn't know anything else, like about business]? Somewhat surprisingly, it worked. We eventually had many competitors, on the order of twenty to thirty of them, but none of their software could compete with ours. We had a wysiwyg online store builder that ran on the server and yet felt like a desktop application. Our competitors had cgi scripts. And we were always far ahead of them in features. Sometimes, in desperation, competitors would try to introduce features that we didn't have. But with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. By the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling us, we would have the new feature too. While currently popular scripting languages can also give you fairly rapid new feature development times, their decision to use a language and ecosystem that allowed for lightening fast development (plus, let's admit, very smart programmers) allowed them to do something that every else was doing, web storefronts, but in an "odd" manner, with an OODA loop their competitors couldn't dream of touching (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop).