4 ms·

I'm deeply skeptical of anyone who wants to start a startup. I'm very respectful of people who have great ideas. One thing about startup first is that it ends u

I'm deeply skeptical of anyone who wants to start a startup. I'm very respectful of people who have great ideas. One thing about startup first is that it ends up with a lot of duplication. Granted Google and Facebook were duplicates. And so it's fitting that they are in essence aggregators. But I'm an engineer (and not a VC) and I have a natural inclination towards the Woz approach. The magic happens in the process of work. It doesn't happen in office hours at an incubator. I think a more useful article would be Ideas For Founder Teams. But that's some hard thinking.

dasmoth 10y ago
One reason to want to do a startup (in the abstract) is because you're unhappy with the degree of autonomy at most 9-5 jobs. I somewhat think a bootstrapped-profitable business might be a better route though, if you can manage that.
- Tharkun 10y ago
  It's true that a lot of startups have, well, a "startup vibe" at first. I many cases that seems to disappear as soon as external capital is poured in :-(
  - k__ 10y ago
    Well, besides "what" you sell in the end, running a company is a job of its own. And you can only learn it by running a company... So if you want to be a "Professional Company Runner", you got to start somewhere. I mean its as legitimate as being a professional programmer or a professional artist, etc.
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  I met with a "startup" founder who wanted to "disrupt" hiring. His idea was to provide a platform for hiring which would be audio/video based and would use some magic to connect companies and people. As if parsing a resume wasn't enough and like recruiters don't know how to use Skype. All the time we were talking, he was explaining more about "disruption" rather than talking concretely about the idea itself. Sam Altman, in the startup course in Stanford said a nice quote, " don't start a startup just because you want to start one, work on something and if it clicks, then start a startup"
  - BjoernKW 10y ago
    > As if parsing a resume wasn't enough and like recruiters don't know how to use Skype Actually, it isn't and no, they often don't. The way many recruiters behave makes you think they're not allowed to use the internet at all. Recruiting or rather the market for expertise is broken. It's not a problem of technology though but one of cargo cult practices and entrenched middlemen.
    - thewhitetulip 10y ago
      Correct, it is not much about technology. The process is broken.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
If you respect Woz, you should also know that Apple was not the only company that was in the personal computing space when they started. They were just passionate about what they were doing and they did the best job at it. I myself hate the cliche "Ideas are worth nothing it's all about execution", but at the same time I also have no respect for people who think they have the best ideas but never execute on them. Ideas do matter, except that most ideas are too abstract, and you won't realize if your idea works or not unless you start it. That's why "idea people" with no execution are never respected by people who actually do stuff. Of course, that is, when we're talking about startups. if you're an actual philosopher who theorizes abstract things, you are an idea person and I totally respect philosophers
- LiweiZ 10y ago
  The later need to show their work in detailed logic way, e. g, a book. That's real idea with execution.
- CalChris 10y ago
  You are correct that Apple was a duplicate. At a certain level, just about all companies are. Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land. Same with movies. Do you really want to see something truly original because you will recognize nothing. However, having no respect for people who think they have the best ideas but never execute on them is going a bit far. Arthur C Clarke wrote an article EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL RELAYS: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage? http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/1945ww_oct_305-308.html http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/1945ww_oct_305-308.html It calculated the geostationary belt and showed that it could be applied to communications satellites. No patent, no possibility of exploiting it. Basically a really interesting blog post before there were blogs. So I give credit to great ideas that are short of startup potential. What I yawn at is startups not based on great ideas. I'll grant that there are successful startups out there that aren't based on great ideas, just execution. But they don't interest me. So fundamentally, that's a personal evaluation.
  - cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
    "Great idea" is an extremely subjective thing, and I don't even mean it in a loose sense. Many people think great ideas are things that are so obvious like flying cars or fixing cancer, fixing aging, going to mars, fixing racism, fixing global warming, etc. They are great ideas, but at the same time they are all just obvious ideas. If something is obviously a great idea and has great market potential, it would be stupid for a large company to be not working on it. That's why these ideas are mostly tackled by already large companies and almost never by startups. In fact I have never seen a startup that succeeded by working on an idea that was already obvious to the masses, nor have I seen world-changing come out of this. Most groundbreaking ideas started out as something you would think is not one of those "great ideas". Use the same Apple example, most people didn't think personal computers would change the world, they just thought it was some nerdy tech thing that would stay as a fringe culture. That's why IBM got into the game late. That said, I am not disagreeing with you that philosophers are bad, I already mentioned that. I use the term "philosophers" loosely here. For philosophers, theorizing is execution, it's not like they can build something. And I totally appreciate thought experiments.

dasmoth 10y ago

One reason to want to do a startup (in the abstract) is because you're unhappy with the degree of autonomy at most 9-5 jobs. I somewhat think a bootstrapped-profitable business might be a better route though, if you can manage that.

Tharkun 10y ago
It's true that a lot of startups have, well, a "startup vibe" at first. I many cases that seems to disappear as soon as external capital is poured in :-(
- k__ 10y ago
  Well, besides "what" you sell in the end, running a company is a job of its own. And you can only learn it by running a company... So if you want to be a "Professional Company Runner", you got to start somewhere. I mean its as legitimate as being a professional programmer or a professional artist, etc.
thewhitetulip 10y ago
I met with a "startup" founder who wanted to "disrupt" hiring. His idea was to provide a platform for hiring which would be audio/video based and would use some magic to connect companies and people. As if parsing a resume wasn't enough and like recruiters don't know how to use Skype. All the time we were talking, he was explaining more about "disruption" rather than talking concretely about the idea itself. Sam Altman, in the startup course in Stanford said a nice quote, " don't start a startup just because you want to start one, work on something and if it clicks, then start a startup"
- BjoernKW 10y ago
  > As if parsing a resume wasn't enough and like recruiters don't know how to use Skype Actually, it isn't and no, they often don't. The way many recruiters behave makes you think they're not allowed to use the internet at all. Recruiting or rather the market for expertise is broken. It's not a problem of technology though but one of cargo cult practices and entrenched middlemen.
  - thewhitetulip 10y ago
    Correct, it is not much about technology. The process is broken.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

If you respect Woz, you should also know that Apple was not the only company that was in the personal computing space when they started. They were just passionate about what they were doing and they did the best job at it. I myself hate the cliche "Ideas are worth nothing it's all about execution", but at the same time I also have no respect for people who think they have the best ideas but never execute on them. Ideas do matter, except that most ideas are too abstract, and you won't realize if your idea works or not unless you start it. That's why "idea people" with no execution are never respected by people who actually do stuff. Of course, that is, when we're talking about startups. if you're an actual philosopher who theorizes abstract things, you are an idea person and I totally respect philosophers

LiweiZ 10y ago
The later need to show their work in detailed logic way, e. g, a book. That's real idea with execution.
CalChris 10y ago
You are correct that Apple was a duplicate. At a certain level, just about all companies are. Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land. Same with movies. Do you really want to see something truly original because you will recognize nothing. However, having no respect for people who think they have the best ideas but never execute on them is going a bit far. Arthur C Clarke wrote an article EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL RELAYS: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage? http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/1945ww_oct_305-308.html http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/1945ww_oct_305-308.html It calculated the geostationary belt and showed that it could be applied to communications satellites. No patent, no possibility of exploiting it. Basically a really interesting blog post before there were blogs. So I give credit to great ideas that are short of startup potential. What I yawn at is startups not based on great ideas. I'll grant that there are successful startups out there that aren't based on great ideas, just execution. But they don't interest me. So fundamentally, that's a personal evaluation.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  "Great idea" is an extremely subjective thing, and I don't even mean it in a loose sense. Many people think great ideas are things that are so obvious like flying cars or fixing cancer, fixing aging, going to mars, fixing racism, fixing global warming, etc. They are great ideas, but at the same time they are all just obvious ideas. If something is obviously a great idea and has great market potential, it would be stupid for a large company to be not working on it. That's why these ideas are mostly tackled by already large companies and almost never by startups. In fact I have never seen a startup that succeeded by working on an idea that was already obvious to the masses, nor have I seen world-changing come out of this. Most groundbreaking ideas started out as something you would think is not one of those "great ideas". Use the same Apple example, most people didn't think personal computers would change the world, they just thought it was some nerdy tech thing that would stay as a fringe culture. That's why IBM got into the game late. That said, I am not disagreeing with you that philosophers are bad, I already mentioned that. I use the term "philosophers" loosely here. For philosophers, theorizing is execution, it's not like they can build something. And I totally appreciate thought experiments.