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Most of these points are "too much of X" on things that are not necessarily obvious. Don't have "too many" meetings, or buy "too much" schwag. There's an arbitr

Most of these points are "too much of X" on things that are not necessarily obvious. Don't have "too many" meetings, or buy "too much" schwag. There's an arbitrary value in there where apparently you've passed the invisible marker, and you're not a real business anymore to this guy. It really reeks of someone looking in retrospect and saying "oh, you spent too much time in meetings maybe?" Why can't this just be real businesses who are making mistakes, which could or could not be fatal?

wpietri 10y ago
It could be, but I've seen the problem as well. One obvious reason it's different is the number of people who now have the explicit goal of doing a startup. They don't know what they want to do, but gosh golly they're sure they want to be startup founders. This is different than, say, 2003. Or 1995. Then, basically nobody wanted to "do a startup". Starting a company was not generally seen positively. It was hard to do, it took many years to get anywhere, it was likely to fail, and you could end up broke. So the people doing it really wanted to launch a particular product, solve a particular problem. They were people with a specific burning vision that they wanted to make real. But now you'll talk to people who see it as just another career choice. They're going to go to grad school or do a startup. They'll join an investment bank or do a startup. Their idea, their burning passion? They don't have one. But they want to be a founder! Maybe! What that means, of course, is they want to appear a founder. It's basically like playing dress-up. Except at $1m+ per year of other people's money. That's why the failure mode involves things that look like business but are anathema to serious founders: lots of meetings (where, yay, everybody listens to you because you're the founder), lots of headcount (because that's what grown-up businesses have), vanity metrics, fancy office space, etc, etc. To people really in business, "too many" has a pretty clear baseline: the absolute minimum you need to get shit done, to make and sell your product. That's why HP started in a garage. Every dollar you spend on vanity is a dollar you you aren't spending on something that matters to your customers.

wpietri 10y ago

It could be, but I've seen the problem as well. One obvious reason it's different is the number of people who now have the explicit goal of doing a startup. They don't know what they want to do, but gosh golly they're sure they want to be startup founders. This is different than, say, 2003. Or 1995. Then, basically nobody wanted to "do a startup". Starting a company was not generally seen positively. It was hard to do, it took many years to get anywhere, it was likely to fail, and you could end up broke. So the people doing it really wanted to launch a particular product, solve a particular problem. They were people with a specific burning vision that they wanted to make real. But now you'll talk to people who see it as just another career choice. They're going to go to grad school or do a startup. They'll join an investment bank or do a startup. Their idea, their burning passion? They don't have one. But they want to be a founder! Maybe! What that means, of course, is they want to appear a founder. It's basically like playing dress-up. Except at $1m+ per year of other people's money. That's why the failure mode involves things that look like business but are anathema to serious founders: lots of meetings (where, yay, everybody listens to you because you're the founder), lots of headcount (because that's what grown-up businesses have), vanity metrics, fancy office space, etc, etc. To people really in business, "too many" has a pretty clear baseline: the absolute minimum you need to get shit done, to make and sell your product. That's why HP started in a garage. Every dollar you spend on vanity is a dollar you you aren't spending on something that matters to your customers.