8 ms·

The key to building an idea seems to be blind faith

150 points by manabovethesky 8y ago

abhinai 8y ago
The key to building an idea seems to be blind faith. Blind faith is a bad idea. You want to start with an idea and become its biggest enemy for a few weeks. You need to attack it from all angles, talk to potential customers and try to find reasons why it would not work and why you wouldn't want to spend the next 5-10 years of your life building it. If after several weeks you still cannot prove that you have a bad idea then congratulations you have a good idea candidate. Luck is still going to play a big role in your success but at-least you have a sound starting point.
- manabovethesky 8y ago
  Ha. I agree. People these days just seem to respond to outlandish claims over something real like - I’m building a venture network that helps teams come together and here’s an article I wrote about everything I’ve learned so far.
- hjk05 8y ago
  That sounds like a horrible suggestion when considering the stories of most successful start ups. Look at Theranos, it would have died a quick death like this, but ended up being a hugely successful business right up to the point of collapse. And had someone with the tons money and resources solved the core issue a month before the collapse Theranos would be a gigantic success overall. The one mistake of Theranos was committing outright fraud instead of just doing legal bullshiting and being honest about potential critical failings. The key to building and idea is to ensuring the resources are there to build it, not to kill it while it’s still in the idea phase. No one ever became the founder of a billion dollar company by being cynical early on. And sure you might think that you save yourself from “wasting 5 years of your life”. It my experience is that founders who work 5 years on establishing a vc backed company that ultimately fail just walk straight on to another leadership role in another company, and they had a great sallery and job for those five years, so what is really wasted?
  - abhinai 8y ago
    Have you or someone you know successfully ran a company for 5 years on an idea that you/they simply had a blind trust on? My goal is not to insult your intelligence. I merely want to point out that this is the strategy I have seen most experienced entrepreneurs around me use.
  - labster 8y ago
    Oh wow, a Theranos apologist! I can't believe I actually saw one of those in the wild, I'll record it in my logbook. There's a big difference between "fake it till you make it" and "crime it till you climb it". You can have blind faith in your product, but you can't lie just lie about your business constantly in the hope that maybe one day your lies will be true.
    - hjk05 8y ago
      I’m in no way a Theranos apologist. What they did was evil and crimininal because they pushed far ahead of what any moral startup would do. But they weren’t evil solely because their leadership had blind faith in their product. And for all intents and purposes emulating everything at Theranos that made them Successfull, minus the criminal parts, is a good idea. No one was saying “I wouldn’t invest in them, they believe touch in their product” back in the early phases when they where booming forwards. At the same time, if you skip the blind faith, Bill Gates would just be a regular boring rich kid today, never having bought DOS after already sellling IBM, he would have just told them cynically that he weren’t even sure if it would work out and they would have passed him up.
  - rhizome 8y ago
    >Look at Theranos, it would have died a quick death like this, but ended up being a hugely successful business right up to the point of collapse. Your mistake is in conflating "successful business" and "fraud." It was not a successful business until the collapse, it was a successful fraud. In this way, I believe you're promoting a poor ethical standard, one that valorizes crime as long as you get away with it.
    - 8y ago
- whiddershins 8y ago
  I would like to know if you’ve had a successful startup using that technique, or if you are speculating about the correct approach.
  - manabovethesky 8y ago
    I run a successful business and have been trying to build nextcept for a while now on the side. I think it's just a needed area. Depth over superficial conversations to find solid people to work with.
  - abhinai 8y ago
    Not speculating. Also, this is the strategy I have seen most experienced entrepreneurs around me use.
    - hutzlibu 8y ago
      "Not speculating" So just to be clear, you have had a idea, used your approach and succeded?
    - oaeide 8y ago
      [Citation needed]
- folli 8y ago
  Does such an idea really exist? One that would truly survive this approach? It's a bit of a Hackernews meme, but just look at the infamous comment about Dropbox (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224).
  - thatoneuser 8y ago
    Right. You can come up with a million excuses why any idea won't work. Then you look at things like spacex and realize that it took someone trying an idea that by all means should have failed. I mean you gotta have some insight and rationality to avoid making another pet rock, but it's not hard to find potential flaws. The op above sounds like an engineer commenting on how to be a ceo.
    - afarrell 8y ago
      > that by all means should have failed Why should it have failed? What did the engineers and salespeople at SpaceX do about those reasons? A) Throw their hands up and decide they weren’t worth investigating solutions to them B) Plow forward and completely ignore them C) Study the problems to understand the conditions that would make them irrelevant D) Study the problems, decide the only way out of them was through solving them, and then apply their skills and time to doing so E) both C and D ———— There is this idea I keep seeing. I’ll call it, “Impossible is Nothing”. Where you ignore roadblocks just plow forward blindly in spite of them and overcome them through force of will. But magic doesn’t exist. Things don’t get built because someone shouted loud enough. Things get built because people saw the potential problems and then 1) Exercised judgement to evaluate if the problems were real. 2) If so, applied skill to uncover their details and solve them. If you decide to skip step #1 and just blindly have faith that the problem isn’t real, then it still stands in your way and still causes you to fail.
  - afarrell 8y ago
    The top reply to that comment is Drew Houston explaining why the first two objections aren’t true and the third one will be fixed in an upcoming release. Blind faith would have led Drew to ignore the comment out-of-hand and stay focused on plowing forward. (Or try to anyway. Some people don’t know how to avoid distraction when they’re trying to suppress suspicions that they are going down the wrong path.)
- ams6110 8y ago
  Aren't most of Elon Musks projects examples of blind f faith? Who would have agreed that starting a new auto manufacturer based solely on electric vehicles was a good idea? A new rocket company? Going up against some of the biggest most established companies with probably the "old boy network" working to prevent entry of newcomers. Seems like blind faith to me.
  - Retra 8y ago
    Just because something is aspirational does not mean it is an exercise in blind faith. Plenty of aspirational things have happened in the past.
  - abhinai 8y ago
    Being aspirational does not imply lack of homework on Elon Musk's part. In fact I would respect Elon Musk a lot less if he did not do his due diligence before starting to work on all of his companies. Faith is tested deeply during most entrepreneurial journeys, which is all the more reason why one needs to do their homework before starting.
    - solipsism 8y ago
      You seem to be missing everyone's point. Virtually anyone who would consider Elon Musk's ideas using your approach would immediately throw them out, for many many reasons. So your approach is meaningless unless you can tell everyone exactly what criteria to use when deciding if something "would not work." If your assertion is just that you have to be so smart that you can analyze all the variables and correctly predict the future, then that's not really useful to anyone is it?
  - davebryand 8y ago
    From Elon’s perspective, we live in a simulation, so it’s not faith, it’s understanding how the simulation works.
  - sah2ed 8y ago
    There is a saying that approximates to: "your solution is only as good as your understanding of a problem" and this is especially true of Elon Musk. From your perspective, his projects might look like blind faith. But from Elon Musk's perspective, he felt he had a better understanding of the viability of those projects to undertake them -- he knew or had a vague idea of which levers to pull that hadn't been pulled in a certain way before, or perhaps new levers had appeared that hadn't been noticed by experts in the field. This is why humans are different -- our life experiences shape our perspectives and our perspectives shape our understanding. Elon's confidence comes from his better grasp of the challenges to make EV a reality which is why he felt emboldened to tackle the problem anew, where others had failed. Elon felt his understanding of EV and how they would evolve made him uniquely qualified to invest in an EV venture called Tesla when he was pitched by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. And it goes both ways: bankrolling a EV startup at that time was considered crazy. Elon's personal bankrolling of a rocket company back in 2002 gave off two crucial signals: 1. a money-bag that gets manufacturing (only a handful fit this criteria); 2. a money-bag with the right kind of crazy (an even smaller handful fit this criteria); that assured Martin and Marc that Elon was the right person they should be speaking to to invest in Tesla, which he did. Those two signals were necessary for the investor minority at that time to appreciate the value proposition of Tesla. The majority of investors actually laughed off such an investment as what Elon himself characterized as "idiocy squared".
- usrusr 8y ago
  Ideas that survive this amount of scrutiny will have many competitors, because they are reasonable. This limits the magnitude of possible success. A foolish idea however, one where almost everybody finds a good reason not to do it will be exceptionally successful for that one blindly faithful fool if the reasons not to do it turn out wrong due to some unpredicted freak coincidence. Blind faith is the lottery approach, can't beat the ROI of a winning lottery ticket.
- stupidcar 8y ago
  If Google's founders had done this, they would never have started the business, as at the time search was considered a poor market, already carved up between a few dominant players, and with no effective means of monetisation.
  - sah2ed 8y ago
    The Google founders kept trudging on because they had seen an anomaly that no one else had observed or no one else was willing to fix. They had built PageRank for BackRub that proved to be superior in almost every way to the dominant way search engines were built. The dominant way also had a glaring flaw that skewed search accuracy — keyword spam. In a way, they saw themselves as been on a mission to rectify the anomaly in how search results were currently being computed by demoing to investors just how better their search results were compared to the competition, and in the end, with their help, they managed to succeed.
- anonytrary 8y ago
  It depends on how many domain experts (N) disagree with you and how much of an expert you are. If you're not an expert in the domain, you can forget about it. If you are, then the chance you should scrap the idea is proportional to N. With technologies pushing the edge of research, N is typically very small, and being headstrong and willing to take risks and experiment is an essential skill. At some point, you alone are a large enough fraction of N that all of humanity is essentially depending on you to take the risk. If you don't then it might be a very long time until someone equally as capable will.
- techsin101 8y ago
  Sometimes this works but most times you don't know what you don't know. And because of that you end up discrediting an idea which if you had stayed at would have revealed a new direction that would become a success. In sense the idea becomes a stepping stone for you to see farther and higher. Although not all the time. So decision is still a big chance, either way
oneowl 8y ago
Ok. But why is blind faith a bad idea?
grzm 8y ago
Title of linked article: "How to know if an idea is any good."
eponeponepon 8y ago
The key to building an idea is inducing blind faith in others. ...imho. Edit to expound: if you have blind faith in your idea, then when it is about to fail, you will go down with it. If you don't, and it's about to fail, you will recognise this and extract yourself in time to survive. At that point it's up to your personal moral compass whether you help the others whose blind faith you've built to reach the escape pods.
eruci 8y ago
The key to building an idea is getting excited enough about it. Blind faith is counterproductive, as is faith in general.
- wrnr 8y ago
  Columbus discovered America but died thinking he found a shorter route to India, he was operating with the knowledge the earth is round but did not know how big the world is
  - Jare 8y ago
    I think in this context, "faith" and "knowledge" can be considered opposites. Sort of like "opinions" vs "facts", the former can emerge from the later but not the other way around.
dvt 8y ago
I think this premise is reinforced by pg in several of his essays, so it's weird to see such push-back here on HN. Blind faith seems to be, by and large, necessary, especially when fighting against colossal odds (as is often the case in startups). This kind of "insanity" is the precursor to the relentless determination one needs when leading a scrappy team of underdogs. Pragmatism and level-headedness sound good on paper, but borderline irresponsible risk-taking is what, at the end of the day, gets rewarded. There's no way to convince anyone -- potential employees, co-founders, investors -- without a cult-like aura. If you'll allow me some hyperbolic flair, startup founders are prophets.
- abhinai 8y ago
  Which pg essays?
  - dvt 8y ago
    http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html > "Live in the future, then build what's missing." http://paulgraham.com/swan.html http://paulgraham.com/swan.html > "The fact that the best ideas seem like bad ideas makes it even harder to recognize the big winners."
    - paulsutter 8y ago
      The latter quote is about having a unique insight, not blindly charging into bad ideas. I can’t see any possible connection between the first quote and blind faith.
      - dvt 8y ago
        The latter quote is about bad ideas and good ideas being virtually indistinguishable in the early stages. The corollary is that to move forward towards execution, (blind) faith is required. This is also why YC invests in people and not in ideas -- pivots happen all the time.
    - scottlegrand2 8y ago
zackmorris 8y ago
The funny thing is, as logic and science-driven as I am, I've come to believe that this is actually true. We only have to rely on audacity and tenacity and serendipity because success is an emergent phenomenon that results from a loosely associated sequence of deterministic processes. In other words, there is no formula for success because it's not a rational construct. Many of us aren't driven by credentials or money or power, yet those things are a prerequisite for anyone to listen to us or to have any kind of quality of life in a capitalistic society. The notion of success is at odds with its expression. It's not that ideas are worthless, but that most people don't have the discipline to trade months or years of their lives to see them through. If the person with the idea is not the one who reaps its rewards, then it's easy to see how there could be bias against ideas. I would even go as far as to say that the most successful people have the fewest ideas that would change the status quo. To put all of that in more of a positive light, I prefer to consider the success of others as part of any idea. So in these times, I feel that most startup ideas just aren't very good. They're too busy trying to satisfy constraints of finding capital or product-market fit or achieving a big exit instead of actually solving the problems facing the world like authoritarianism, underemployment, unsustainability, etc, etc, etc that are too numerous to even begin to list here. Maybe those challenges don't require big ideas so much as being more clever with how and where we apply the disruption we're so infatuated with where it could really make a difference.
- manabovethesky 8y ago
  This is my goal for www.nextcept.com. I focus all my spare time on building to see if I can create a new way of finding people to work with through personal questions rather than something like a resume. Thanks for checking out the article. It was more of just a rant about what I’ve run into over the years.
hogu 8y ago
There is a whole culture of boots-trappers who focus on testing and making pre-sales rather than sinking time on blind faith. I just came home from hanging out with them at https://www.microconf.com https://www.microconf.com I don't see why blind faith is necessary for the majority of ideas.
otakucode 8y ago
The article appears to provide no support for it's bold claim. Why is that? Why can't they provide an argument that shows that examining the fundamentals and rational consequences of an idea can actually evaluate whether an idea is 'good' or not? That seems like a valid strategy to me. Often good ideas are rooted in a fundamental shift in perspective on an admitted need. Yet this article makes the claim that this method of evaluating a good idea, and every single other possible method one could formulate, must be wrong. And then they fail utterly to ever substantiate or defend that claim. They just presume the audience accepts it on blind faith. This is a common problem with arguments that invoke 'blind faith' in almost any capacity. Even Kierkegaard's famous 'Leap of Faith' interpretation of belief in God (the idea that because God is beyond human understanding, belief in it can only come through a 'leap' and not through a chain of reasoning) is underlaid with an unsupported presumption that there exist things which can be beyond human understanding, or that such an idea is even sensical itself. Yet that is never supported there either.
- manabovethesky 8y ago
  Thanks for checking out the article. These are really just areas I’ve found over the years. I’m sure there are many other successful methods.
crimsonalucard 8y ago
I found the same strategy works for the lottery too.
- techsin101 8y ago
  Winning comment ^^
crimsonalucard 8y ago
The only people who win the lottery are those that are stupid enough to play.
- contingencies 8y ago
  Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  The only people who lose the lottery, on the other hand ... are also those stupid enough to play. And what are the odds?
  - crimsonalucard 8y ago
    The contradiction lies in the winning hand. You have to be stupid to win. Being stupid to lose is a given.
    - dredmorbius 8y ago
      There are better games to play.
      - crimsonalucard 8y ago
        Indeed. One should note that stupid people rule the world. Trump, for example.
technobabble 8y ago
@manabovethsky. Assuming this is true, do you think one develop blind faith for anything? Why or why not?
contingencies 8y ago
The easiest option is always quitting. In the same way that a flexible opinion is a sign of intelligence in individuals, an adaptable vision is an asset to any venture. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
raz32dust 8y ago
Blind faith, with a good sense of when to open your eyes. There is always an element of faith in any venture or risk. But I doubt it is totally blind. If there is evidence that the idea is not working, you have to see it and adjust your plan. Do you think it is not working because your assumption was wrong? Or was it because your execution is flawed? Is it some temporal issue that should get fixed? You have to ask these questions constantly and know why you decided to push on, instead of ignoring everything.
dredmorbius 8y ago
No, it is not. You do haveto suspend judgement, for a time, when it's not clear whether the idea is good or not. That's the incubation stage, a point of deliberate, but measured, risk-taking. Blind faith leads you to reject obvious signs of nonviability or danger. And whilst some may get lucky (or cash out before reality requests payment), many don't. I'd suggest looking at the 3M model instead. Large-scale diversified but manageable risks.
- Farradfahren 8y ago
  Most people i met can not do that. They tear themselves to shreds, going back and forth over when to leap and where to leap. Sometimes you need a madmen.
pessimizer 8y ago
Or lots of friends with money. I'm pretty sure blind faith is a euphemism for Always Be Selling and a willingness to go into deep debt.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
There is actually research that indicates "luck" isn't as random as we usually imagine. People with certain habits tend to be perceived as "lucky." Faith literally means believing in something. The idea that believing something will work is simply delusional is inherently problematic. You may actually have good reasons for believing it will work. We always have only partial information. That doesn't mean just bulling on ahead, and don't confuse me with the facts, is a good approach. It means that the people who succeed can't necessarily explain their success adequately to satisfy those who would like to follow in their footsteps. I also would bet that sometimes they don't really want to explain it. Giving away "the secret sauce" may not be in their best interest.
- contingencies 8y ago
  I like the take Mark Burgess gives in In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure where he states that separation of concerns is "a necessary consequence of loss of resolution due to scale ... a strategy for staying sane." Perhaps having scope-blinders and persistence is simply perceived by outsiders as irrational, whereas internally it is an intellectual tool for focus and achievement. Of course, there are drawbacks to mad focus...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
galaxyLogic 8y ago
The key to becoming a stock-market billionaire is taking big risks. But that does not mean it works for everybody it actually works for very few the lucky few. Same thing probably happens with startups. You don't start a startup unless you have Blind Faith (btw. great album). But only a few of the startups make it big. When we see the ones that made it we may see that none of them would exist unless their founders had had blind faith. So (more or less) Blind Faith seems to be a prerequisite for success. But it is not a guarantee, far from it.
hevi_jos 8y ago
I do not believe in blind fate, but common sense. You can extrapolate the future following the trends just like Jules Verne did. Take for example smartphones and tablets. After the "one computer in every desktop" was accomplished, it was obvious that one computer in every pocket was going to be the next big thing. So companies like Microsoft invested billions of dollars in that (think in Pocket PCs and TabletPCs). The vision became a reality and today all of us could have a GPS, cameras and more computer power that desktops had 10 years ago incredibly cheap. We humans tend to believe only in what we can see, but some people just see the future possibilities just like they are realities. It is not like these people, the visionaries, have more faith than normal people, but that they see the future as real as if it exist here. Of course watching the future as real have lots of problems in real life, specially when this people have to live along people only interested on reality, like doing the laundry or searching for a better "real job" instead of following "dreams".
talkingtab 8y ago
While I agree with the gist of the article I think "blind faith" is misleading. Having faith in your intuition is certainly the key. In my experience intuition comes from pattern recognition and often from recognition of discontinuities. Christopher Alexander, he of "A Pattern Language" has another book, "Notes on the Synthesis of form", in which he discusses what I think can be summarized as: we can tell that something is wrong, but understanding how to fix it is harder. At least that is what I took away. The "blind" part half way applies. You have to have faith that you recognized something that that is out of kilter, and you have to be blind to the fact that you don't know the solution.
esolyt 8y ago
From the section about Naming: > Means something somewhat relevant to your company or is completely random. Well, is there any other possibility?
- manicdee 8y ago
  Calling a grocer “Widgets R Us” is neither relevant nor random.
- rabidrat 8y ago
  Yes, you could name it something that has another established meaning that is not relevant to your company. Most names are like this.
nielsbot 8y ago
“If we had known it was impossible, we never would have succeeded.”
- techsin101 8y ago
  Although Survivor bias very much
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
amitport 8y ago
Unfortunately, the key to losing money, health and family while attempting to build an idea also seems to be blind faith.

The key to building an idea seems to be blind faith. Blind faith is a bad idea. You want to start with an idea and become its biggest enemy for a few weeks. You need to attack it from all angles, talk to potential customers and try to find reasons why it would not work and why you wouldn't want to spend the next 5-10 years of your life building it. If after several weeks you still cannot prove that you have a bad idea then congratulations you have a good idea candidate. Luck is still going to play a big role in your success but at-least you have a sound starting point.

manabovethesky 8y ago
Ha. I agree. People these days just seem to respond to outlandish claims over something real like - I’m building a venture network that helps teams come together and here’s an article I wrote about everything I’ve learned so far.
hjk05 8y ago
That sounds like a horrible suggestion when considering the stories of most successful start ups. Look at Theranos, it would have died a quick death like this, but ended up being a hugely successful business right up to the point of collapse. And had someone with the tons money and resources solved the core issue a month before the collapse Theranos would be a gigantic success overall. The one mistake of Theranos was committing outright fraud instead of just doing legal bullshiting and being honest about potential critical failings. The key to building and idea is to ensuring the resources are there to build it, not to kill it while it’s still in the idea phase. No one ever became the founder of a billion dollar company by being cynical early on. And sure you might think that you save yourself from “wasting 5 years of your life”. It my experience is that founders who work 5 years on establishing a vc backed company that ultimately fail just walk straight on to another leadership role in another company, and they had a great sallery and job for those five years, so what is really wasted?
- abhinai 8y ago
  Have you or someone you know successfully ran a company for 5 years on an idea that you/they simply had a blind trust on? My goal is not to insult your intelligence. I merely want to point out that this is the strategy I have seen most experienced entrepreneurs around me use.
- labster 8y ago
  Oh wow, a Theranos apologist! I can't believe I actually saw one of those in the wild, I'll record it in my logbook. There's a big difference between "fake it till you make it" and "crime it till you climb it". You can have blind faith in your product, but you can't lie just lie about your business constantly in the hope that maybe one day your lies will be true.
  - hjk05 8y ago
    I’m in no way a Theranos apologist. What they did was evil and crimininal because they pushed far ahead of what any moral startup would do. But they weren’t evil solely because their leadership had blind faith in their product. And for all intents and purposes emulating everything at Theranos that made them Successfull, minus the criminal parts, is a good idea. No one was saying “I wouldn’t invest in them, they believe touch in their product” back in the early phases when they where booming forwards. At the same time, if you skip the blind faith, Bill Gates would just be a regular boring rich kid today, never having bought DOS after already sellling IBM, he would have just told them cynically that he weren’t even sure if it would work out and they would have passed him up.
- rhizome 8y ago
  >Look at Theranos, it would have died a quick death like this, but ended up being a hugely successful business right up to the point of collapse. Your mistake is in conflating "successful business" and "fraud." It was not a successful business until the collapse, it was a successful fraud. In this way, I believe you're promoting a poor ethical standard, one that valorizes crime as long as you get away with it.
  - 8y ago
whiddershins 8y ago
I would like to know if you’ve had a successful startup using that technique, or if you are speculating about the correct approach.
- manabovethesky 8y ago
  I run a successful business and have been trying to build nextcept for a while now on the side. I think it's just a needed area. Depth over superficial conversations to find solid people to work with.
- abhinai 8y ago
  Not speculating. Also, this is the strategy I have seen most experienced entrepreneurs around me use.
  - hutzlibu 8y ago
    "Not speculating" So just to be clear, you have had a idea, used your approach and succeded?
  - oaeide 8y ago
    [Citation needed]
folli 8y ago
Does such an idea really exist? One that would truly survive this approach? It's a bit of a Hackernews meme, but just look at the infamous comment about Dropbox (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224).
- thatoneuser 8y ago
  Right. You can come up with a million excuses why any idea won't work. Then you look at things like spacex and realize that it took someone trying an idea that by all means should have failed. I mean you gotta have some insight and rationality to avoid making another pet rock, but it's not hard to find potential flaws. The op above sounds like an engineer commenting on how to be a ceo.
  - afarrell 8y ago
    > that by all means should have failed Why should it have failed? What did the engineers and salespeople at SpaceX do about those reasons? A) Throw their hands up and decide they weren’t worth investigating solutions to them B) Plow forward and completely ignore them C) Study the problems to understand the conditions that would make them irrelevant D) Study the problems, decide the only way out of them was through solving them, and then apply their skills and time to doing so E) both C and D ———— There is this idea I keep seeing. I’ll call it, “Impossible is Nothing”. Where you ignore roadblocks just plow forward blindly in spite of them and overcome them through force of will. But magic doesn’t exist. Things don’t get built because someone shouted loud enough. Things get built because people saw the potential problems and then 1) Exercised judgement to evaluate if the problems were real. 2) If so, applied skill to uncover their details and solve them. If you decide to skip step #1 and just blindly have faith that the problem isn’t real, then it still stands in your way and still causes you to fail.
- afarrell 8y ago
  The top reply to that comment is Drew Houston explaining why the first two objections aren’t true and the third one will be fixed in an upcoming release. Blind faith would have led Drew to ignore the comment out-of-hand and stay focused on plowing forward. (Or try to anyway. Some people don’t know how to avoid distraction when they’re trying to suppress suspicions that they are going down the wrong path.)
ams6110 8y ago
Aren't most of Elon Musks projects examples of blind f faith? Who would have agreed that starting a new auto manufacturer based solely on electric vehicles was a good idea? A new rocket company? Going up against some of the biggest most established companies with probably the "old boy network" working to prevent entry of newcomers. Seems like blind faith to me.
- Retra 8y ago
  Just because something is aspirational does not mean it is an exercise in blind faith. Plenty of aspirational things have happened in the past.
- abhinai 8y ago
  Being aspirational does not imply lack of homework on Elon Musk's part. In fact I would respect Elon Musk a lot less if he did not do his due diligence before starting to work on all of his companies. Faith is tested deeply during most entrepreneurial journeys, which is all the more reason why one needs to do their homework before starting.
  - solipsism 8y ago
    You seem to be missing everyone's point. Virtually anyone who would consider Elon Musk's ideas using your approach would immediately throw them out, for many many reasons. So your approach is meaningless unless you can tell everyone exactly what criteria to use when deciding if something "would not work." If your assertion is just that you have to be so smart that you can analyze all the variables and correctly predict the future, then that's not really useful to anyone is it?
- davebryand 8y ago
  From Elon’s perspective, we live in a simulation, so it’s not faith, it’s understanding how the simulation works.
- sah2ed 8y ago
  There is a saying that approximates to: "your solution is only as good as your understanding of a problem" and this is especially true of Elon Musk. From your perspective, his projects might look like blind faith. But from Elon Musk's perspective, he felt he had a better understanding of the viability of those projects to undertake them -- he knew or had a vague idea of which levers to pull that hadn't been pulled in a certain way before, or perhaps new levers had appeared that hadn't been noticed by experts in the field. This is why humans are different -- our life experiences shape our perspectives and our perspectives shape our understanding. Elon's confidence comes from his better grasp of the challenges to make EV a reality which is why he felt emboldened to tackle the problem anew, where others had failed. Elon felt his understanding of EV and how they would evolve made him uniquely qualified to invest in an EV venture called Tesla when he was pitched by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. And it goes both ways: bankrolling a EV startup at that time was considered crazy. Elon's personal bankrolling of a rocket company back in 2002 gave off two crucial signals: 1. a money-bag that gets manufacturing (only a handful fit this criteria); 2. a money-bag with the right kind of crazy (an even smaller handful fit this criteria); that assured Martin and Marc that Elon was the right person they should be speaking to to invest in Tesla, which he did. Those two signals were necessary for the investor minority at that time to appreciate the value proposition of Tesla. The majority of investors actually laughed off such an investment as what Elon himself characterized as "idiocy squared".
usrusr 8y ago
Ideas that survive this amount of scrutiny will have many competitors, because they are reasonable. This limits the magnitude of possible success. A foolish idea however, one where almost everybody finds a good reason not to do it will be exceptionally successful for that one blindly faithful fool if the reasons not to do it turn out wrong due to some unpredicted freak coincidence. Blind faith is the lottery approach, can't beat the ROI of a winning lottery ticket.
stupidcar 8y ago
If Google's founders had done this, they would never have started the business, as at the time search was considered a poor market, already carved up between a few dominant players, and with no effective means of monetisation.
- sah2ed 8y ago
  The Google founders kept trudging on because they had seen an anomaly that no one else had observed or no one else was willing to fix. They had built PageRank for BackRub that proved to be superior in almost every way to the dominant way search engines were built. The dominant way also had a glaring flaw that skewed search accuracy — keyword spam. In a way, they saw themselves as been on a mission to rectify the anomaly in how search results were currently being computed by demoing to investors just how better their search results were compared to the competition, and in the end, with their help, they managed to succeed.
anonytrary 8y ago
It depends on how many domain experts (N) disagree with you and how much of an expert you are. If you're not an expert in the domain, you can forget about it. If you are, then the chance you should scrap the idea is proportional to N. With technologies pushing the edge of research, N is typically very small, and being headstrong and willing to take risks and experiment is an essential skill. At some point, you alone are a large enough fraction of N that all of humanity is essentially depending on you to take the risk. If you don't then it might be a very long time until someone equally as capable will.
techsin101 8y ago
Sometimes this works but most times you don't know what you don't know. And because of that you end up discrediting an idea which if you had stayed at would have revealed a new direction that would become a success. In sense the idea becomes a stepping stone for you to see farther and higher. Although not all the time. So decision is still a big chance, either way

oneowl 8y ago

Ok. But why is blind faith a bad idea?

grzm 8y ago

Title of linked article: "How to know if an idea is any good."

eponeponepon 8y ago

The key to building an idea is inducing blind faith in others. ...imho. Edit to expound: if you have blind faith in your idea, then when it is about to fail, you will go down with it. If you don't, and it's about to fail, you will recognise this and extract yourself in time to survive. At that point it's up to your personal moral compass whether you help the others whose blind faith you've built to reach the escape pods.

eruci 8y ago

The key to building an idea is getting excited enough about it. Blind faith is counterproductive, as is faith in general.

wrnr 8y ago
Columbus discovered America but died thinking he found a shorter route to India, he was operating with the knowledge the earth is round but did not know how big the world is
- Jare 8y ago
  I think in this context, "faith" and "knowledge" can be considered opposites. Sort of like "opinions" vs "facts", the former can emerge from the later but not the other way around.

dvt 8y ago

I think this premise is reinforced by pg in several of his essays, so it's weird to see such push-back here on HN. Blind faith seems to be, by and large, necessary, especially when fighting against colossal odds (as is often the case in startups). This kind of "insanity" is the precursor to the relentless determination one needs when leading a scrappy team of underdogs. Pragmatism and level-headedness sound good on paper, but borderline irresponsible risk-taking is what, at the end of the day, gets rewarded. There's no way to convince anyone -- potential employees, co-founders, investors -- without a cult-like aura. If you'll allow me some hyperbolic flair, startup founders are prophets.

abhinai 8y ago
Which pg essays?
- dvt 8y ago
  http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html > "Live in the future, then build what's missing." http://paulgraham.com/swan.html http://paulgraham.com/swan.html > "The fact that the best ideas seem like bad ideas makes it even harder to recognize the big winners."
  - paulsutter 8y ago
    The latter quote is about having a unique insight, not blindly charging into bad ideas. I can’t see any possible connection between the first quote and blind faith.
    - dvt 8y ago
      The latter quote is about bad ideas and good ideas being virtually indistinguishable in the early stages. The corollary is that to move forward towards execution, (blind) faith is required. This is also why YC invests in people and not in ideas -- pivots happen all the time.
  - scottlegrand2 8y ago

zackmorris 8y ago

The funny thing is, as logic and science-driven as I am, I've come to believe that this is actually true. We only have to rely on audacity and tenacity and serendipity because success is an emergent phenomenon that results from a loosely associated sequence of deterministic processes. In other words, there is no formula for success because it's not a rational construct. Many of us aren't driven by credentials or money or power, yet those things are a prerequisite for anyone to listen to us or to have any kind of quality of life in a capitalistic society. The notion of success is at odds with its expression. It's not that ideas are worthless, but that most people don't have the discipline to trade months or years of their lives to see them through. If the person with the idea is not the one who reaps its rewards, then it's easy to see how there could be bias against ideas. I would even go as far as to say that the most successful people have the fewest ideas that would change the status quo. To put all of that in more of a positive light, I prefer to consider the success of others as part of any idea. So in these times, I feel that most startup ideas just aren't very good. They're too busy trying to satisfy constraints of finding capital or product-market fit or achieving a big exit instead of actually solving the problems facing the world like authoritarianism, underemployment, unsustainability, etc, etc, etc that are too numerous to even begin to list here. Maybe those challenges don't require big ideas so much as being more clever with how and where we apply the disruption we're so infatuated with where it could really make a difference.

manabovethesky 8y ago
This is my goal for www.nextcept.com. I focus all my spare time on building to see if I can create a new way of finding people to work with through personal questions rather than something like a resume. Thanks for checking out the article. It was more of just a rant about what I’ve run into over the years.

hogu 8y ago

There is a whole culture of boots-trappers who focus on testing and making pre-sales rather than sinking time on blind faith. I just came home from hanging out with them at https://www.microconf.com https://www.microconf.com I don't see why blind faith is necessary for the majority of ideas.

otakucode 8y ago

The article appears to provide no support for it's bold claim. Why is that? Why can't they provide an argument that shows that examining the fundamentals and rational consequences of an idea can actually evaluate whether an idea is 'good' or not? That seems like a valid strategy to me. Often good ideas are rooted in a fundamental shift in perspective on an admitted need. Yet this article makes the claim that this method of evaluating a good idea, and every single other possible method one could formulate, must be wrong. And then they fail utterly to ever substantiate or defend that claim. They just presume the audience accepts it on blind faith. This is a common problem with arguments that invoke 'blind faith' in almost any capacity. Even Kierkegaard's famous 'Leap of Faith' interpretation of belief in God (the idea that because God is beyond human understanding, belief in it can only come through a 'leap' and not through a chain of reasoning) is underlaid with an unsupported presumption that there exist things which can be beyond human understanding, or that such an idea is even sensical itself. Yet that is never supported there either.

manabovethesky 8y ago
Thanks for checking out the article. These are really just areas I’ve found over the years. I’m sure there are many other successful methods.

crimsonalucard 8y ago

I found the same strategy works for the lottery too.

techsin101 8y ago
Winning comment ^^

crimsonalucard 8y ago

The only people who win the lottery are those that are stupid enough to play.

contingencies 8y ago
Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
dredmorbius 8y ago
The only people who lose the lottery, on the other hand ... are also those stupid enough to play. And what are the odds?
- crimsonalucard 8y ago
  The contradiction lies in the winning hand. You have to be stupid to win. Being stupid to lose is a given.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    There are better games to play.
    - crimsonalucard 8y ago
      Indeed. One should note that stupid people rule the world. Trump, for example.

technobabble 8y ago

@manabovethsky. Assuming this is true, do you think one develop blind faith for anything? Why or why not?

contingencies 8y ago

The easiest option is always quitting. In the same way that a flexible opinion is a sign of intelligence in individuals, an adaptable vision is an asset to any venture. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

raz32dust 8y ago

Blind faith, with a good sense of when to open your eyes. There is always an element of faith in any venture or risk. But I doubt it is totally blind. If there is evidence that the idea is not working, you have to see it and adjust your plan. Do you think it is not working because your assumption was wrong? Or was it because your execution is flawed? Is it some temporal issue that should get fixed? You have to ask these questions constantly and know why you decided to push on, instead of ignoring everything.

dredmorbius 8y ago

No, it is not. You do haveto suspend judgement, for a time, when it's not clear whether the idea is good or not. That's the incubation stage, a point of deliberate, but measured, risk-taking. Blind faith leads you to reject obvious signs of nonviability or danger. And whilst some may get lucky (or cash out before reality requests payment), many don't. I'd suggest looking at the 3M model instead. Large-scale diversified but manageable risks.

Farradfahren 8y ago
Most people i met can not do that. They tear themselves to shreds, going back and forth over when to leap and where to leap. Sometimes you need a madmen.

pessimizer 8y ago

Or lots of friends with money. I'm pretty sure blind faith is a euphemism for Always Be Selling and a willingness to go into deep debt.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

There is actually research that indicates "luck" isn't as random as we usually imagine. People with certain habits tend to be perceived as "lucky." Faith literally means believing in something. The idea that believing something will work is simply delusional is inherently problematic. You may actually have good reasons for believing it will work. We always have only partial information. That doesn't mean just bulling on ahead, and don't confuse me with the facts, is a good approach. It means that the people who succeed can't necessarily explain their success adequately to satisfy those who would like to follow in their footsteps. I also would bet that sometimes they don't really want to explain it. Giving away "the secret sauce" may not be in their best interest.

contingencies 8y ago
I like the take Mark Burgess gives in In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure where he states that separation of concerns is "a necessary consequence of loss of resolution due to scale ... a strategy for staying sane." Perhaps having scope-blinders and persistence is simply perceived by outsiders as irrational, whereas internally it is an intellectual tool for focus and achievement. Of course, there are drawbacks to mad focus...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

galaxyLogic 8y ago

The key to becoming a stock-market billionaire is taking big risks. But that does not mean it works for everybody it actually works for very few the lucky few. Same thing probably happens with startups. You don't start a startup unless you have Blind Faith (btw. great album). But only a few of the startups make it big. When we see the ones that made it we may see that none of them would exist unless their founders had had blind faith. So (more or less) Blind Faith seems to be a prerequisite for success. But it is not a guarantee, far from it.

hevi_jos 8y ago

I do not believe in blind fate, but common sense. You can extrapolate the future following the trends just like Jules Verne did. Take for example smartphones and tablets. After the "one computer in every desktop" was accomplished, it was obvious that one computer in every pocket was going to be the next big thing. So companies like Microsoft invested billions of dollars in that (think in Pocket PCs and TabletPCs). The vision became a reality and today all of us could have a GPS, cameras and more computer power that desktops had 10 years ago incredibly cheap. We humans tend to believe only in what we can see, but some people just see the future possibilities just like they are realities. It is not like these people, the visionaries, have more faith than normal people, but that they see the future as real as if it exist here. Of course watching the future as real have lots of problems in real life, specially when this people have to live along people only interested on reality, like doing the laundry or searching for a better "real job" instead of following "dreams".

talkingtab 8y ago

While I agree with the gist of the article I think "blind faith" is misleading. Having faith in your intuition is certainly the key. In my experience intuition comes from pattern recognition and often from recognition of discontinuities. Christopher Alexander, he of "A Pattern Language" has another book, "Notes on the Synthesis of form", in which he discusses what I think can be summarized as: we can tell that something is wrong, but understanding how to fix it is harder. At least that is what I took away. The "blind" part half way applies. You have to have faith that you recognized something that that is out of kilter, and you have to be blind to the fact that you don't know the solution.

esolyt 8y ago

From the section about Naming: > Means something somewhat relevant to your company or is completely random. Well, is there any other possibility?

manicdee 8y ago
Calling a grocer “Widgets R Us” is neither relevant nor random.
rabidrat 8y ago
Yes, you could name it something that has another established meaning that is not relevant to your company. Most names are like this.

nielsbot 8y ago

“If we had known it was impossible, we never would have succeeded.”

techsin101 8y ago
Although Survivor bias very much

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

amitport 8y ago

Unfortunately, the key to losing money, health and family while attempting to build an idea also seems to be blind faith.