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There is not much that you can learned from people who failed, neither. I think PB's comment is still the best, "Advice = Limited Life Experience + Overgeneral

There is not much that you can learned from people who failed, neither. I think PB's comment is still the best, "Advice = Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization". However, what I learned is that if I accept that there is limitation to other people's advise, I would still like to hear from them in order to help me make my own decision and according to my own circumstances. My experience with startups is that it always come down to impedance match. Having an academic background in mechanics, what I learned is that condition for perfect impedance match is when system is at resonance. The opposite of resonance is dissonance. In my previous career, I had discovered that dissonance is in fact a resonance, but it is a resonance of a sub-structure when someone has put an artificial constraint on the sensory point (such that there is no signal). In some way, that's how startups work. Just because you fail doesn't mean that the rest of the world has failed. In fact, they might very well have succeeded but somehow you just weren't part of that success. So our job is make sure that we have as perfect as an impedance match with the rest of the world as possible, so that we are part of the resonance and not part of the dissonance. This sounds very theoretical. But it is not. It is really about paying attention to others in your eco-system (VC's, customers, co-Founders, channel partners, etc.) and make sure that you are part of their success. Specifically in this conversation thread, we are talking about starting startups with VC money or through bootstrapping. I never felt that it is a religious question. Either way will lead to success and either way can lead to failure. But as entrepreneurs, our job is to figure what VC's bring to the party and if we take VC money, how we could be part of their success. If we don't take money from VC's, how we could still be successful nevertheless. I tried to organize my experience and my thoughts in my book-in-progess (http://www.StartupForLess.org http://www.StartupForLess.org).

dhs 19y ago
<blockquote>"[O]ur job is make sure that we have as perfect as an impedance match with the rest of the world as possible, so that we are part of the resonance and not part of the dissonance."</blockquote> As a starting point, this analogy seems useful to me, but I believe that when probing further, more complexity often shows up. Various stakeholders might have different impedances; e.g. your investors might resonate with you on a different frequency than your customers do. There can be many mismatches like that, and I don't see how I could possibly foresee them all while I'm building in order to prevent them upfront. Another aspect: paradigm shifts in Thomas Kuhn's sense seem to <i>require</i> dissonance. After all, how can you make a radically innovative product if you're in perfect resonance with "the rest of the world"? To some engineers, "Make something people want" might seem like a less precise directive than "Match impedances", but it might actually be more useful when getting up in the morning thinking of what to do today.
- dennykmiu 19y ago
  Recently, I talked about how "Entrepreneurship is a deep desire to create and destroy at the same time." So clearly we have to be in dissonance with some and resonance with others. http://foundread.com/2008/04/18/why-you-must-embrace-rejection-to-succeed/ http://foundread.com/2008/04/18/why-you-must-embrace-rejecti... But more importantly, to follow up on your comment. The question really is about "making something people want". We all know that this is a necessary condition but is it also sufficient. In the old days, it would take a lot more than that to succeed (so it was not sufficient). But time has changed. I believe today under certain constraints, it can actually be both. In the following, I talked about "narrowcasting" and "entre-sumers" which are the corner stones for such paradigm shift. http://foundread.com/2008/04/11/to-yc-or-to-vc-that-is-my-question/ http://foundread.com/2008/04/11/to-yc-or-to-vc-that-is-my-qu...

dhs 19y ago

<blockquote>"[O]ur job is make sure that we have as perfect as an impedance match with the rest of the world as possible, so that we are part of the resonance and not part of the dissonance."</blockquote> As a starting point, this analogy seems useful to me, but I believe that when probing further, more complexity often shows up. Various stakeholders might have different impedances; e.g. your investors might resonate with you on a different frequency than your customers do. There can be many mismatches like that, and I don't see how I could possibly foresee them all while I'm building in order to prevent them upfront. Another aspect: paradigm shifts in Thomas Kuhn's sense seem to <i>require</i> dissonance. After all, how can you make a radically innovative product if you're in perfect resonance with "the rest of the world"? To some engineers, "Make something people want" might seem like a less precise directive than "Match impedances", but it might actually be more useful when getting up in the morning thinking of what to do today.

dennykmiu 19y ago
Recently, I talked about how "Entrepreneurship is a deep desire to create and destroy at the same time." So clearly we have to be in dissonance with some and resonance with others. http://foundread.com/2008/04/18/why-you-must-embrace-rejection-to-succeed/ http://foundread.com/2008/04/18/why-you-must-embrace-rejecti... But more importantly, to follow up on your comment. The question really is about "making something people want". We all know that this is a necessary condition but is it also sufficient. In the old days, it would take a lot more than that to succeed (so it was not sufficient). But time has changed. I believe today under certain constraints, it can actually be both. In the following, I talked about "narrowcasting" and "entre-sumers" which are the corner stones for such paradigm shift. http://foundread.com/2008/04/11/to-yc-or-to-vc-that-is-my-question/ http://foundread.com/2008/04/11/to-yc-or-to-vc-that-is-my-qu...