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Let's take the full quote: > Industry experience is often a negative, not a positive, for a new company. Could Hollywood execs have started Netflix? Would a bo

Let's take the full quote: > Industry experience is often a negative, not a positive, for a new company. Could Hollywood execs have started Netflix? Would a book publisher had started Amazon? Jack Dorsey, not Visa execs, started Square. He admitted, when asked how he learned about the world of payments, “We Googled ‘accepting credit cards.'” He clearly talks about founders and high-level employees, and provides examples. An obvious way of countering him would be to provide counter examples -- which truly innovative companies have been started by industry insiders?

lostcolony 10y ago
More to the point, what better way to disrupt an industry than be familiar with that industry, and its flaws? Yeah, I agree that being an executive (i.e., the only 'skills' they have is making decisions in a specific environment, i.e., the status quo one) is probably detrimental...but Netflix wasn't originally in the same industry as Hollywood (they started in the soon to decline industry of video rental, and naturally progressed to streaming, and then original content creation). Amazon wasn't in the industry of publishing, they started in the industry of mail order books using this newfangled internet thing. Square isn't in the same industry as Visa; they're a user of Visa's services to build an easy to use payment portal for mobile (Visa even invested in them). Googling 'accepting credit cards' is -exactly what I'd expect- if you're trying to accept Visa, not if you're trying to displace them (because if the latter, who cares how Visa does it?). I think this says more about having -tangential- industry experience. All of them had enough insight into the problems in related industries, without having grown complacent with them, that they either were able to move into those industries (Netflix was able to move into content creation, Amazon was able to move into publishing), or were able to create business models addressing those industry's pain points (Square).
noxToken 10y ago
I'm not saying that it's wrong to use people with industry experience. I'm saying don't devalue the people who do. ChemicalWarfare[0] said it best in a sibling comment: > There are some industries where getting up to speed just with the basic domain knowledge so that you don't have to google every other word/tla in the user story takes a good amount of time. My point is that people with experience can help spur along development. I'm not calling his statement false, because I know of some company that did it better my way. I disagree (perhaps erroneously), because I know there are not-so-obvious mistakes people can make in this industry that eat up resources. Getting a bunch of greenhorns together for sake of out with old is probably not ideal. You want people with experience to help avoid traps that prolong your process. Security comes to mind. Security is notoriously hard. And while you may not want to hire only security gurus for your business, it absolutely helps to have someone with security experience in your stable. From the article: > We ran circles around competitors who had teams of B and C players with security expertise but little else going for them. That last part is the issue. The employees had little else going for them. Your people with experience should have other qualities going for them. In addition to knowing security, they should be team players, open to new methodologies, effective communicators, and all those other soft skills that make teams function well. A team with no security experience can learn what needs to be learn without issue. I do not deny that. However, expertise doesn't automatically imply that everything else about the candidate is garbage, and having employees to give guidance helps avoid growing pains. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12158666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12158666
CM30 10y ago
Maybe someone with industry experience could have started those things. I mean, having experience doesn't mean you think the industry is working well right now or doesn't need to change in the future. Yeah, there are some people in various industries that either couldn't see approaching issues or just flat out ignored that they could be issues. But there are also people who saw say, the rise of services like Netflix as a positive or likely thing. People in the publishing industry who saw the possibility of selling books online or replacing them with eReaders like the Kindle. They just might have not done so for other reasons. Perhaps they saw what was coming, but thought they didn't have the entrepreneurial mindset to start their own company. Maybe they did start a company like this up, but they didn't find the right connections or investors or anything else to catch on. Always been bothered with the assumption that those in 'disrupted' industries are too stubborn to know what could replace their business.

lostcolony 10y ago

More to the point, what better way to disrupt an industry than be familiar with that industry, and its flaws? Yeah, I agree that being an executive (i.e., the only 'skills' they have is making decisions in a specific environment, i.e., the status quo one) is probably detrimental...but Netflix wasn't originally in the same industry as Hollywood (they started in the soon to decline industry of video rental, and naturally progressed to streaming, and then original content creation). Amazon wasn't in the industry of publishing, they started in the industry of mail order books using this newfangled internet thing. Square isn't in the same industry as Visa; they're a user of Visa's services to build an easy to use payment portal for mobile (Visa even invested in them). Googling 'accepting credit cards' is -exactly what I'd expect- if you're trying to accept Visa, not if you're trying to displace them (because if the latter, who cares how Visa does it?). I think this says more about having -tangential- industry experience. All of them had enough insight into the problems in related industries, without having grown complacent with them, that they either were able to move into those industries (Netflix was able to move into content creation, Amazon was able to move into publishing), or were able to create business models addressing those industry's pain points (Square).

noxToken 10y ago

I'm not saying that it's wrong to use people with industry experience. I'm saying don't devalue the people who do. ChemicalWarfare[0] said it best in a sibling comment: > There are some industries where getting up to speed just with the basic domain knowledge so that you don't have to google every other word/tla in the user story takes a good amount of time. My point is that people with experience can help spur along development. I'm not calling his statement false, because I know of some company that did it better my way. I disagree (perhaps erroneously), because I know there are not-so-obvious mistakes people can make in this industry that eat up resources. Getting a bunch of greenhorns together for sake of out with old is probably not ideal. You want people with experience to help avoid traps that prolong your process. Security comes to mind. Security is notoriously hard. And while you may not want to hire only security gurus for your business, it absolutely helps to have someone with security experience in your stable. From the article: > We ran circles around competitors who had teams of B and C players with security expertise but little else going for them. That last part is the issue. The employees had little else going for them. Your people with experience should have other qualities going for them. In addition to knowing security, they should be team players, open to new methodologies, effective communicators, and all those other soft skills that make teams function well. A team with no security experience can learn what needs to be learn without issue. I do not deny that. However, expertise doesn't automatically imply that everything else about the candidate is garbage, and having employees to give guidance helps avoid growing pains. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12158666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12158666

CM30 10y ago

Maybe someone with industry experience could have started those things. I mean, having experience doesn't mean you think the industry is working well right now or doesn't need to change in the future. Yeah, there are some people in various industries that either couldn't see approaching issues or just flat out ignored that they could be issues. But there are also people who saw say, the rise of services like Netflix as a positive or likely thing. People in the publishing industry who saw the possibility of selling books online or replacing them with eReaders like the Kindle. They just might have not done so for other reasons. Perhaps they saw what was coming, but thought they didn't have the entrepreneurial mindset to start their own company. Maybe they did start a company like this up, but they didn't find the right connections or investors or anything else to catch on. Always been bothered with the assumption that those in 'disrupted' industries are too stubborn to know what could replace their business.