4 ms·

On the flip side, the toughest thing sometimes with startups is to decide when to draw that line in the sand where you can say "okay, this isn't working, time t

On the flip side, the toughest thing sometimes with startups is to decide when to draw that line in the sand where you can say "okay, this isn't working, time to move on." You tend to bias yourself and your success. The YC partners are smart and have generally been right every single time when something I was working on wasn't going to work.

mswen 9y ago
Your comment echos a conversation I was having with my wife the other day as she was reading me bits from Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance Book by Angela Duckworth. As you might infer from the title the thesis is that Grit is a very powerful force. My comment in our discussion was that this whole body of social science research and life/career advice comes into conflict with other bodies of advice about cutting one's losses, the value of killing 'failing' projects early, avoiding the trap of sunk costs. How do we personally know or offer advice to others about whether current difficulties are likely to be overcome by renewed effort and persistence and when do we say it isn't working, try something very different?
- jacquesm 9y ago
  There are some examples of people plugging away on a 'failed' project for decades and eventually striking it rich.
  - mswen 9y ago
    Indeed, and that is the lure. And, when we read stories like that we get motivated to press on and never give up. But who writes the stories of someone who worked on a failed project for 20 years and never got anywhere? If we persist what are the odds that we will be the one for whom it works out? The question of when to persist, how long to persist and how to pay the bills while you persist are very personal to me. In 2000 I and a friend did research and the very beginnings of development on a semantic analysis technique that was notably better than anything we could find at the time including from Google and other search engines. But we couldn't find money fast enough and we both had families to support so we went our separate ways and did other things that were more commercial. About 7 years later VCs started funding similar technologies. And, somewhere around 2010 to 2013 technology seemed to have caught up to where we were at in 2000. So should we have persisted? It kind of seems like we should have. But, I have seen enough of life to know that sometimes a group of people have a lot going for them, winning awards, raising funding, rolling out product and still end up running into a roadblock on the way to commercial success that sinks them.
    - Hydraulix989 9y ago
      Timing sometimes matters a whole lot.
jacquesm 9y ago
That's because the vast majority of the start-ups won't work and all YC has to do is to pick the best from a batch, not viable start-ups in a vacuum. The more background data they have the better their decisions. Classes and the alumni network are the reason YC scales the way it does.

mswen 9y ago

Your comment echos a conversation I was having with my wife the other day as she was reading me bits from Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance Book by Angela Duckworth. As you might infer from the title the thesis is that Grit is a very powerful force. My comment in our discussion was that this whole body of social science research and life/career advice comes into conflict with other bodies of advice about cutting one's losses, the value of killing 'failing' projects early, avoiding the trap of sunk costs. How do we personally know or offer advice to others about whether current difficulties are likely to be overcome by renewed effort and persistence and when do we say it isn't working, try something very different?

jacquesm 9y ago
There are some examples of people plugging away on a 'failed' project for decades and eventually striking it rich.
- mswen 9y ago
  Indeed, and that is the lure. And, when we read stories like that we get motivated to press on and never give up. But who writes the stories of someone who worked on a failed project for 20 years and never got anywhere? If we persist what are the odds that we will be the one for whom it works out? The question of when to persist, how long to persist and how to pay the bills while you persist are very personal to me. In 2000 I and a friend did research and the very beginnings of development on a semantic analysis technique that was notably better than anything we could find at the time including from Google and other search engines. But we couldn't find money fast enough and we both had families to support so we went our separate ways and did other things that were more commercial. About 7 years later VCs started funding similar technologies. And, somewhere around 2010 to 2013 technology seemed to have caught up to where we were at in 2000. So should we have persisted? It kind of seems like we should have. But, I have seen enough of life to know that sometimes a group of people have a lot going for them, winning awards, raising funding, rolling out product and still end up running into a roadblock on the way to commercial success that sinks them.
  - Hydraulix989 9y ago
    Timing sometimes matters a whole lot.

jacquesm 9y ago

That's because the vast majority of the start-ups won't work and all YC has to do is to pick the best from a batch, not viable start-ups in a vacuum. The more background data they have the better their decisions. Classes and the alumni network are the reason YC scales the way it does.