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Don't want to personalize this but, since we're mutually reflecting on the sociology of talking about running a company and dealing with external perceptions: t

Don't want to personalize this but, since we're mutually reflecting on the sociology of talking about running a company and dealing with external perceptions: the specific names of the pessimists may change but there is absolutely no level of success at which folks will stop saying "Pfft, that's not a real business." I think the takeaway for founders is being prepared for this and learning to not weight external pessimism all that highly, particularly not of the low-brow dismissal variety (what are the general odds that someone who has known about a business for 180 seconds has found the fatal flaw). For the broader community, I think the takeaway is intentionally being almost unreasonably supportive of people building things.

tway2888888 8y ago
>I think the takeaway is intentionally being almost unreasonably supportive of people building things Hate to break it to you, but "building things" doesn't make you special; solving hard problems does. Not sure why the latest data-selling photo app needs "unreasonable support".
hangonhn 8y ago
I had a friend who said the same thing about Google when they first IPOed. His suggestion was that they should take their new cash and just go buy a real business so they're real (specifically suggested AOL Time Warner). This was a trader at one of the world's biggest hedge funds. He went on to have a very successful career in finance nonetheless. It's hard to make predictions about things we don't understand. A lot of our expertise isn't transferable to other domains and we sometimes overestimate the generalizability of our expertise. Doubters and cheerleaders are both likely to be wrong and there is also so much you can't predict about the boarder environment businesses must operate in. Sometimes even the best of us fail and the most incompetent of us get lucky once in a while.
andy_adams 8y ago
As a pessimist for the first 30 years of my life, I've finally realized just how little utility there is in being negative. On the flip side, being positive: 1. Helps you get more done 2. Helps other people get more done 3. Makes you more friends
- Lich 8y ago
  Love this comment. I do a lot of self-reflection and one thing I've realized and still trying to change about myself is that I'm a huge pessimist and those 3 things you listed are things I'm terrible at.
- existencebox 8y ago
  So I'm going to chime in as a perpetual pessimist. I've found tremendous utility in expecting negative outcomes. I'm wording this very pedantically, because my father and I used to argue past each other for hours re: "being negative vs saying something is negative." Perhaps it's just that I've been in Ops/distributed system maintenance and development, but I've found expecting a worst case/pessimistic outcome pretty much always leaves me far more prepared, and more often than not, ends up being more predictive than my optimistic peers. This has held true across time estimation, black box complexity, political outcomes, social overhead, model performance, outage frequency, pretty much every situation I can think of where I had to do long term planning in recent memory I feel well served by attacking from a "how is this going to go wrong/what are our blind spots/what do we do when this fails" angle. The primary reason I make the (socially risky) statement of this is that I very often get (no hyperbole) guilted for being a pessimist, even when taking nontrivial effort for the negativity to be actionable and focused. It took me a good few decades to learn how to wrap my words and beat around the bush, (I was told by managers early on in my career things verbatim such as "you need to toe the party line more.") but even now that I experience almost none of the social friction that I used to, I find myself frustrated by the inefficiencies and gaps in this manner of communication, and find these gaps almost immediately ameliorated when I'm on teams which have a much more pragmatic approach towards being pessimistic. Simply put, I had a very different experience than you, I've found an fixation on "being positive" to _massively_ impede Just Getting Things Done, and I've actually had much more luck bonding with coworkers over shared frustrations/issues and building lasting friendships like that than in teams where we're all wearing "let's be happy" masks. (This is a strawman, I don't expect you were arguing to this extreme, but I often find it manifests in this way in larger companies and as such want to try and argue the benefits of other angles of approach)
  - zestyping 8y ago

tway2888888 8y ago

>I think the takeaway is intentionally being almost unreasonably supportive of people building things Hate to break it to you, but "building things" doesn't make you special; solving hard problems does. Not sure why the latest data-selling photo app needs "unreasonable support".

hangonhn 8y ago

I had a friend who said the same thing about Google when they first IPOed. His suggestion was that they should take their new cash and just go buy a real business so they're real (specifically suggested AOL Time Warner). This was a trader at one of the world's biggest hedge funds. He went on to have a very successful career in finance nonetheless. It's hard to make predictions about things we don't understand. A lot of our expertise isn't transferable to other domains and we sometimes overestimate the generalizability of our expertise. Doubters and cheerleaders are both likely to be wrong and there is also so much you can't predict about the boarder environment businesses must operate in. Sometimes even the best of us fail and the most incompetent of us get lucky once in a while.

andy_adams 8y ago

As a pessimist for the first 30 years of my life, I've finally realized just how little utility there is in being negative. On the flip side, being positive: 1. Helps you get more done 2. Helps other people get more done 3. Makes you more friends

Lich 8y ago
Love this comment. I do a lot of self-reflection and one thing I've realized and still trying to change about myself is that I'm a huge pessimist and those 3 things you listed are things I'm terrible at.
existencebox 8y ago
So I'm going to chime in as a perpetual pessimist. I've found tremendous utility in expecting negative outcomes. I'm wording this very pedantically, because my father and I used to argue past each other for hours re: "being negative vs saying something is negative." Perhaps it's just that I've been in Ops/distributed system maintenance and development, but I've found expecting a worst case/pessimistic outcome pretty much always leaves me far more prepared, and more often than not, ends up being more predictive than my optimistic peers. This has held true across time estimation, black box complexity, political outcomes, social overhead, model performance, outage frequency, pretty much every situation I can think of where I had to do long term planning in recent memory I feel well served by attacking from a "how is this going to go wrong/what are our blind spots/what do we do when this fails" angle. The primary reason I make the (socially risky) statement of this is that I very often get (no hyperbole) guilted for being a pessimist, even when taking nontrivial effort for the negativity to be actionable and focused. It took me a good few decades to learn how to wrap my words and beat around the bush, (I was told by managers early on in my career things verbatim such as "you need to toe the party line more.") but even now that I experience almost none of the social friction that I used to, I find myself frustrated by the inefficiencies and gaps in this manner of communication, and find these gaps almost immediately ameliorated when I'm on teams which have a much more pragmatic approach towards being pessimistic. Simply put, I had a very different experience than you, I've found an fixation on "being positive" to _massively_ impede Just Getting Things Done, and I've actually had much more luck bonding with coworkers over shared frustrations/issues and building lasting friendships like that than in teams where we're all wearing "let's be happy" masks. (This is a strawman, I don't expect you were arguing to this extreme, but I often find it manifests in this way in larger companies and as such want to try and argue the benefits of other angles of approach)
- zestyping 8y ago