13 ms·

Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs

379 points by shafyy 7y ago

tlb 7y ago
Not all ex-post theories are BS. For example, I slam my hand in the drawer and theorize, "Slamming hands in drawers hurts; one should not do it." That theory is pretty solid. It doesn't cover all the edge cases, but following it is better than not following it. There are lots of startup theories that are equally solid, despite being ex-post. I know a startup that didn't pay payroll tax for a couple years, and it ended badly. The resulting advice is pretty obvious. There are theories about how to hire, how to find customers, how to negotiate deals. These theories might not apply in every single case, but you should definitely start by knowing what worked in the past. This post picks a couple of unsupported startup theories, but it's sort of like criticizing physics for the 1% of reality it can't explain and ignoring the 99% it can.
- edgarvaldes 7y ago
  Maybe theories about what not to do are more solid.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    Thank you for the validation! My purpose in life is to serve as an example of what not to do.
    - toss1 7y ago
      Sounds like fun! But you have a paradox. Do you demonstrate one big thing to not do and go out with a bang, winning a Darwin Award, or demonstrate many smaller (less lethal) things to not do? Which generates more net benefit for the world? Always these career choices, and what kind of advice is there on that?
  - davidivadavid 7y ago
    Nah. In fact that's the whole reason "contrarianism" is a thing.
- deleted 7y ago
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- sha_r_roh 7y ago
  > "Slamming hands in drawers hurts; one should not do it." This is a fact and don't think this is what the author is trying to say. I guess he's more focused on the kind of theories which people throw around as some sort of self-evident truth, when in fact it's a personal truth which they learned through trial and error. But I guess there's a point in learning from some of these "self-evident" truths (this is more rare though)
  - 8note 7y ago
    slamming your hands in drawers is also a personal experiment. I might be wearing a good set of gloves, and it won't hurt
    - ahhzen 7y ago
      There always has to be a balance between learning from other people's mistakes and making your own. However learning from the right people is important. You wouldn't use avocadoes when a recipe asks for flour but in the start-up world, everyone seems to think that what works for the well-known successes will automatically work for them. What really frustrates me (rant, rant... :)) is the notion that if I build, they will come. So so many of the start-ups I work with think that. What happened to people understanding basic business theory? Basic marketing theory would be useful but I don't hold out much hope for that!
  - deleted 7y ago
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- not_a_cop75 7y ago
  Not taking sides, but your example is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man fallacy.
  - pier25 7y ago
    Is it though? The parent comment is criticizing the article for "cherry picking". That in itself is not a fallacy.
  - smallgovt 7y ago
    It's not. He's directly refuting the claim made in the title of the blog post. That is: Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs. In the title, the author is seemingly making the claim that all ex-post startup advice is BS. The commenter is debunking that claim by providing sound ex-post advice.
    - neilv 7y ago
      > directly refuting the claim made in the title of the blog post. That is: Most [...] In the title, the author is seemingly making the claim that all [...]
      - CrazyStat 7y ago
        Very clever, but missing the point. Those two qualifiers refer to different classes: (1) Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs. (2) All ex-post startup theory is bullshit. Those claims may or may not be true, but there's no contradiction between the two. The title does indeed seem to implicitly claim (2), in the form of the following (implied) syllogism: Most startup theory is ex-post. All ex-post startup theory is bullshit. Therefore, most startup theory is bullshit. Or, more concisely: most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs.
        shafyy 7y ago
        Well, since I'm here no need for the guesswork. I'm not saying all ex-post theories all bullshit. I think that most ex-post startup thoeries are bullshit.
- deleted 7y ago
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- chibg10 7y ago
  The difference is the prior. There's strong prior reason to believe not paying payroll tax is not going to end well. The theoretical basis is simple, clear, well-reasoned, and supported by strong evidence in adjacent realms (i.e. the IRS takes taxes taxes pretty seriously). Whereas the prior on the validity of something like "early-stage founders should live with their customers" is much weaker. Even though the advice for each presented example is based on sample size n=1, the resulting belief can and should be quite different depending on your prior. The real meta-advice is to be able to understand and evaluate your prior for any given piece of advice you receive. This mostly comes down to thinking rationally, being knowledgeable, and critically considering each piece of advice for whether it's worth heeding or not. Which is not so far from the author's message I think ("figure everything out yourself", "I don't mean to say don't take any advice"). (Obligatory shout-out to Bayes Theorem)
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    > Whereas the prior on the validity of something like "early-stage founders should live with their customers" is much weaker. There's a pretty strong theoretical reason for that as well: startups succeed because they make something customers want; the more time the person making product decisions spends with times with customers, the more information they can gather about what the customers want; and the more the customer trusts and has a rapport with the founder, the more willing they'll be to share candid feedback. There are some practical problems that make living with your customers a little problematic if you're not Brian Chesky, namely that they may not want another roommate, you may not want a roommate, they or you may already have a family, or you might just get on each others' nerves. But if you extend the general principle to "spend a lot of time with your users" (and being able to extend to a general principle is a big advantage of having theoretical reasoning), there are a lot of other companies that have found similar success. Facebook was another one where the founder literally lived with his first users. Google, for all intents and purposes, lived with their first users (it's grad school, after all). DropBox, Reddit, and Instacart were their first users. Apple, Stripe, Clerky, Twitch, etc. were in regular contact with their first users.
    - Retric 7y ago
samtheprogram 7y ago
> Do you think Brian Chesky of Airbnb heard that strategy from a friend? I'm pretty sure he heard it from Paul Graham.
- hiccuphippo 7y ago
  I'd be more interested in learning of what other startups used the same strategy and failed anyway. Ultimately luck is a large portion of success.
ThomPete 7y ago
The problem with startup theory is, that the theory that actually works is mostly the "don't do this". Only once in a blue moon does they prove to be wrong, but they are also the least valuable as many of the are quite obvious. The part of startup theory most people are interested in "the do's", most of the time doesn't work as they are highly contextual.
downandout 7y ago
From the article: ”Do you think Brian Chesky of Airbnb heard that strategy from a friend? Hell, do you even think that freeriding off of Craigslist was their reason for success?” Yes, freeriding off of Craigslist was the reason for their early success, without which their later success was not possible. Having a good model means absolutely nothing without some ability to market it, especially in the marketplace space. Initial momentum is what causes these businesses to either succeed or fail. The idea of using free ways to get your startup initial momentum is absolutely not BS.
- shafyy 7y ago
  > The idea of using free ways to get your startup initial momentum is absolutely not BS. Agree, and that's also not what I said :-)
  - downandout 7y ago
    That’s how I read it in the context of your premise. You seemed to be mocking the notion that Craigslist was a vital part of their success. I am not sure how else to interpret “....Hell, do you even think that freeriding off of Craigslist was their reason for success?”
    - shafyy 7y ago
      I'm saying that they would have been successful with or without this marketing tactics. I am not saying that startups shoulnd't use free marketing opportunities.
      - vikramkr 7y ago
        Exactly, which means you're saying that this wasn't a vital part of their success, while the other commenter is saying the opposite, so I don't think you agree with the argument that doing things that don't scale is a critical part of their success right? Unless I'm misreading something.
hinkley 7y ago
I have had a couple of managers over the years who had dreams of writing a book, and with the exception of one, they were all mostly wrong about the secrets of their success. They didn't have any awareness of how their team and especially their leads supported them. Responses varied from humor to hurt feelings. Ask the people who work for them why the team was successful. They'll probably have very different opinions.
- monocasa 7y ago
  Would you mind expanding on their respective theses? I can see a lot of value in looking at these in a anti-pattern kind of way.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    You know, it's funny for all of things I can enumerate on 'how not to do something', there are some pretty big areas where I either don't keep score or tear up the scorecard the moment I don't work there anymore. In this case probably the latter. The guy I said did have it figured out? I'd like to retract that. He wanted to think of the process of moving stories from the backlog to done as a physics problem. As managers go he was fairly emotionally sophisticated, but that was his big blindspot. Some of the others had elements of 'mushroom management' (keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit), and a lot of quick fix-feeling techniques. Those can be helpful in small doses, as long as someone else is beating a drum for technical excellence (not perfectionism, but get stuff done, keep it done, and keep getting stuff done).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- rockinghigh 7y ago
  Any examples where you think they were wrong?
WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
It's not all b.s. but it's hard to sort the good from the bad. It's impossible to test out theories so you have to try lots of possibilities and hope for the best. There are 2 basics that are part of every successful projects: hard work and luck. Anything else you have to evaluate and decide whether it's worth the risk in time and resources.
dcolkitt 7y ago
> Do you think Musk copied that strategy from the business school he never went to. Elon Musk did his undergrad at Wharton. I guess the statement might be true if you mean "business school" to strictly mean a graduate MBA program. But Musk definitely took business classes that would have been nearly identical to those taken by MBAs.
- vikramkr 7y ago
  I was a bit confused by that line. He wasn't even a dropout, he got a business degree along with his physics degree, and "start with a premium market and move to bigger less premium markets" sounds like the sort of case study that could definitely be taught in a business lecture. I doubt that he copied any strategies from his business classes but this particular example is hardly implausible.
- shafyy 7y ago
  He has an economics and physics degree, not business. Did he take business classes and read business books? Probably. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    It's a business degree. The undergrad wharton degree just happens to be called a B.S. in economics, but there's only a few economists classes in it, it's entirely a business degree with business concentrations and so on. I think he concentrated (like a major) in entrepreneurship but I might be wrong on that.
  - c3534l 7y ago
    Wharton is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania. He went to business school and got and completed all the same business requirements everyone else has to take. I studied accounting at university along side finance, business administration, supply chain, and economics students. I'm sure there are plenty of schools who offer a degree just called "business," but most people have a specific business degree. I'm looking at the degree requirements right now, it's all the same stuff everyone has to take: marketing, management, logistics, stats, finance. Unless things were really different back then, an economics degree from Wharton is definitely a business degree.
tmemth 7y ago
> Or “Airbnb growth hacked Craigslist to link to their own website. And did you know that the founders lived with their users. You should do that, too!”” I was told by a founder that I was a first time founder (I am not) because I didn’t believe this strategy works anymore. He was basically mocking me for being so stupid to not know now growth hacking like this works. And all the time I was thinking at the back of my head about how dogmatic his thinking was. What works 10 years ago doesn’t mean it still works today. Copying other people’s strategy is the worst way to run a startup. By the time you have heard it, another 100 people probably heard it too and doing the same thing. I agree with the post. Think for yourself. And definitely don’t talk down to other founders thinking you know better. Especially if you haven’t succeeded.
- shafyy 7y ago
  Agree. Recently listened to a podcast with Jason Fried where he made this point exactly. It's this IndieHacker episode here: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/105-jason-fried-of-basecamp https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/105-jason-fried-of-base... Edit: Corrected link
  - gringoDan 7y ago
    Can you update this link? Looks like you just linked back to this thread's URL.
    - shafyy 7y ago
      Just did, thanks
smallgovt 7y ago
>> Do you think Musk copied that strategy from the business school he never went to? Do you think Brian Chesky of Airbnb heard that strategy from a friend? Maybe not, but that doesn't mean talking to other successful founders isn't extremely helpful. The best founders have multiple great ideas and not enough time to execute on them. If you want to increase your success rate, you should use feedback from other successful founders to decide which great idea to invest your time in.
- vikramkr 7y ago
  Also, musk could totally have learned that strategy when he was in bschool, and chesky could totally have gotten the idea from a friend. Those are hardly implausible situations.
  - shafyy 7y ago
    I agree, I don't now that for a fact. It's more a form of rhetoric to trigger interesting discussions. Seems to work ;-)
    - vikramkr 7y ago
      Sure, but it wasn't phrased as an open ended question, it was framed as rhetorical questions with a given answer that are evidence for your conclusion. I'm confused by the "bschool he never went to" bit as well. I'll grant that it sparks an interesting discussion, but I don't think that it does much to support your thesis as evidence.
      - shafyy 7y ago
        I'm not writing an academic thesis. It's just my opinion in a short blog post. Deal with it :-)
        vikramkr 7y ago
        Not exactly sure what there is to deal with here, and it's certainly not easy to have an interesting discussion about a topic if you decide that it's not worth trying to argue your point instead of telling the other person to "deal with it" when they ask for clarification about what some of your points mean or point out things that would make your argument stronger if addressed
floki999 7y ago
So true. Everyone and her grandmother is an armchair startup expert these days. WTF is a startup anyway. I’m building a new for-profit business enterprise, not a social i-have-one-too startup. Call it what it is.
ufmace 7y ago
I'd agree that it's rarely a good idea to directly copy any other startup. It's probably good to hear many of their stories of success - maybe a few pieces of one or two will give you a great idea, or at least tend to make you think in the best ways.
- shafyy 7y ago
  That's exactly the point of my post!
- std_throwaway 7y ago
  Take a working idea, find out why it's working, find out how to make it better, try it out. It doesn't make sense to only copy a working idea without understanding why it's working because your copy will be slightly worse. While you might have some success you won't take the big share. You must find a weakness in the original idea or the execution or the location or anything else. If you have a solid point where you can improve you have a chance. Don't be afraid of stealing ideas and making them better.
std_throwaway 7y ago
It's hard to test theories when the underlying system constantly changes like it does in economics. Something that works today might not work tomorrow. A theory that looks sound when applied to yesteryears data might stop working before the sun rises. When many others try to apply the same tricks that made you successful the cake on that table might suddenly be divided into so many pieces that everybody will go home hungry. You must find a new table with a new cake but old data and old theory doesn't help much with that because someone else is already there. You need to think fresh and unconventional or you need to squeeze blood out of stones harder than anybody else. Physicists have it easy in comparison. One of the basic truths of natural science is that the laws of nature are independent of the observer and time and experiments can be repeated as many times as you like with the same results.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  >experiments can be repeated as many times as you like with the same results That is not actually true, there is a lot of randomness, and in quantum mechanics the randomness is fundamental. The real secret of the natural sciences is that good physicists never publish if they know they don't know the answer. It took hundreds of years of that policy before the narrowly applicable theories blossomed into the general laws of the universe. If the focus was determining the general laws of the universe from the start no progress could have been made: Newton could have guessed at the laws of motion, but without the specific and painstaking celestial observations preceding him nobody would have known he was right. Economists could enjoy a similar success, but it would be at the expense of 400 years of saying only things that policymakers thought were obvious, while refusing to answer useful questions. There are plenty of "very true" theories in economics, but they often aren't broad enough to answer the questions about economics that the fate of nations ride on. However 400 years from now those narrow but well-tested theories will be the foundation of the true general economics and all the rest will be forgotten.
  - std_throwaway 7y ago
    Sure, there is randomness but in normal cases you can apply statistics to describe it reasonably well. The results are not 100% sure but 99% or 99.99999% or whatever you need. It's not that the laws of gravity stop working entirely over night. Newtons theory wasn't perfect and Einsteins theory isn't perfect but it describes what happens in nature very very well for billions of years.
bovermyer 7y ago
When I was in my twenties, I was part of the early "life coach blogger" culture. Now that I'm almost in my forties, I realize everything I wrote back then was bullshit. Earnest, but bullshit nonetheless. I'm much more cynical, but I'm also much more likely to just do what seems right and figure out the rest as I go. I don't read "best practices" or advice articles anymore. This is not to say that there is nothing to be gained from such sources; just that the likelihood of it being useful or accurate given my particular context is small. In this, my attitude is much closer to where it was in my teens and childhood, where I just had to figure everything out on my own.
- std_throwaway 7y ago
  Mastery is when you not only know the rules but also know which rules you can ignore in your particular situation.
  - drclau 7y ago
    "The Code is more what you call guidelines, than actual rules."
  - quirkot 7y ago
    “By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well. This is one of the ends for which they exist.” ― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style
- kd5bjo 7y ago
  I’ve read a lot of time management/productivity books, and there seem to be only two things all of the authors agree on: write stuff down, and continuously tweak your system. The latter is usually mentioned offhand in the preface, as the author wants to deliver a fait accompli instead of just some tips and tricks.
  - ionforce 7y ago
    Can you elaborate on "write stuff down"?
amoorthy 7y ago
I'm surprised this blog post made the first page of HN given its lack of sources or analysis. Maybe a good discussion can come on one example startup advice from YC: do things that don't scale. I think this is really sound in that they're saying "get product-market-fit with some segment of users." i.e. know that there's demand for your product/service even if it's pretty manual to deliver early on. Then see how to automate. Because most product/services aren't materially better than existing options and so you never get product-market-fit even when it's entirely manual and customized to the user. As a founder I've been guilty of building first because it's fun. I saw what I wanted in user research and built a whole app accordingly. It failed. Would've been better to start with a smaller attack surface (email newsletter) and once we found success to then scale. The interesting thing is I knew of the advice "do things that don't scale" beforehand. But until I failed I didn't know why it mattered and how to apply it. Net: applying advice is harder than evaluating if the advice is good or bad. You want to have enough time to fail a lot and then appreciate the wisdom of startup advice :-)
- shafyy 7y ago
  I'm surprised myself. But I guess it's right in the target group. "Do things that don't scale" is good advice, I agree. But maybe the reality is more "Do ALSO things that don't scale", and then it becomes much more obvious and irrelevant, doesn't it?
  - amoorthy 7y ago
    Sorry shafyy. I don't understand why the addition of "ALSO" chnages the statement. Sorry for being dense.
    - shafyy 7y ago
      My point is they're not saying "ONLY do things that don't scale". It's more like, "from time to time, ALSO do things that don't scale". Which, as I said, I think is good advice, but also pretty common sense.
      - 7y ago
AznHisoka 7y ago
Reminds me of the book "Good To Great". The author took a bunch of successful companies, and found patterns that they all had in common. But just because all these companies did X, didn't mean that made them successful. It could've been because of survivorship bias. So yes, most business/startup advice is curve overfitting, imo.
- ci5er 7y ago
  I don't recall "Good to Great" coming to this conclusion - it was the later critical pieces. (Poor guy - it was a lot of analysis!) IIRC, the book "First, Break all the Rules" actually challenged the "Good to Great" methodology a bit on this point. (The other point, IIRC, was that first you have to find the right questions, before the right answers can be considered).
krm01 7y ago
I think having lots of data points is the only way to give proper advice about Startups. YC has given outstanding startup advice from a specific SV perspective. I've been running a UI/UX design firm for the last 10 years, working with small unknown bootstrapping founders, up to well funded and awesome companies founded by super stars like Elon Musk and others. Though this was never my intent, over the years we've collected so many datapoints that alongside our design work we tend to advice and steer the companies we work with into directions we think the company should go. All backed by real examples from previous experiences. Being in positions where you work with a lot of companies over a longer period of time, I think, is the best way form thoughtful startup advice.
- shafyy 7y ago
  While data points do help, impactful startups often change the paradigm and how things are done. So, again, I don't think relying too much on emperical data points is good for founders. If you do, you'll rarely do something interesting and new.
  - krm01 7y ago
    As I mentioned, data-points can help steer in the right direction. I'm definitely not talking about disruption or changing paradigms. The same way a YC can't guarantee each startup will disrupt an industry. All they can do is help make something good, go to great faster.
    - shafyy 7y ago
      Agreed.
  - ska 7y ago
    > If you do, you'll rarely do something interesting and new. And if you don't you'll also rarely do something interesting and new. It's not as fun to talk about, but most startups will not be particularly impactful and exceedingly few actually change any paradigm. And that's ok too. I guess I'm saying if you are trying to find general advice based on analysis of outliers, it may not work well.
grumpy8 7y ago
The other side of the coin is after you've built a few startups, you see the same pattern coming up again and again. Part of being creative is to know where to focus your attention (I.e. figuring out PMF) rather than wasting cycles on problems with clear solutions.
Ma8ee 7y ago
I can't help thinking of this wonderful talk about how to win the lottery: https://youtu.be/l_F9jxsfGCw https://youtu.be/l_F9jxsfGCw
- downandout 7y ago
  That's actually a pretty great video. The tldw version: advice on how to buy more lottery tickets is useful; advice on how to win the lottery is not.
dang 7y ago
I think Paul Buchheit said it best in 2007: https://blog.daryn.net/post/32264049/paul-buchheit-limited-life-experience https://blog.daryn.net/post/32264049/paul-buchheit-limited-l... and http://redefine.dyndns.org/~andyr/blog/archives/2007/03/notes-from-star-1.html http://redefine.dyndns.org/~andyr/blog/archives/2007/03/note... But see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70808 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70795.
- shafyy 7y ago
  Damn right.
JackFr 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history "The term is also used extensively in the history of science to mean historiography that focuses on the successful chain of theories and experiments that led to present-day science, while ignoring failed theories and dead ends."
quartz 7y ago
I feel like this post mistakes advice for directive. Most of the great founders I've encountered are excellent pattern-matching engines who can absorb large quantities of advice and then re-apply it within their personal contexts rather than rejecting it outright, ex post facto or not. No you probably don't need to live with your users, but yes you should probably spend significant time with them doing the thing your company is trying to help them do better. Putting advice to work is more than regurgitation... then again, if your company's goal is to normalize short-term living with strangers well then yeah, you probably should live with a few.
squirrelicus 7y ago
Emulating successful startups is folly. It's the myriad failures that you will never learn about that you should be concerned with. I'll just leave this here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  this. So much. Copying the success stories makes no sense unless you also understand how other people following the same strategies failed. You have to study the failures in order to understand the successes.
stephc_int13 7y ago
I think the same about most management theory, most of the corporate bs can be categorized as a form of Cargo-Cult. Look how well they did doing that, let's copy them without understanding the context or anything below the surface of the things.
ryandrake 7y ago
So much crappy business advice suffers from Survivorship Bias [1]. “Companies A, B, and C did X and succeeded. Companies D, E, and F did not do X and failed. Therefore, X leads to success.” Ignoring how many companies also did X but failed too. The book “Good to Great” contains nothing but Survivorship Bias and is adored by Business Schools. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias (excuse the mobile link)
joneckhardt 7y ago
Much of the empirical work published in academic journals on startups is not ex post.
joneckhardt 7y ago
Much of the empirical academic literature on entrepreneurship and startups does not suffer from ex post rationalization.
TrackerFF 7y ago
Startup (and business) theory is really pretty simple: 1) Identify problem 2) Come up with, or look up for existing solutions 3) Develop, iterate 4) Identify and get some competitive edge 5) Keep pleasing clients Of course, there's a ton of things underneath all this, like marketing, funding, or simply being lucky with timing. The copy-cat method is probably the most legit, and battle-tested method. I.e, simply just copy some existing product or solution, with a known market. The entrepreneurship scene preaches originality and novel idea to hopeful founders, but to me, it always ends up with a race for who can do something better than their competitor. I've noticed that in many countries outside US, especially western Europe, some of the largest startups are those that play-by-play copy successful US startups, probably hoping to get acquired once the US startups start expanding to said countries.
rvn1045 7y ago
The thing is though that you've probably read so much startup advice that your sick of it and know a lot of it and dont find any value in it anymore. you've reached a tipping point where you done reading about this shit and just want to build stuff. but if you dont know anything about startups or business or whatever its still probably useful to read about it.
AlexDragusin 7y ago
Make something people want + Do something you love = All you need to know. Enjoy.
bikamonki 7y ago
Yes, all future success stories will play out differently. And no, we have identified patterns accross many past successful cases so we think we can risk theorizing some formulae and advice. Top of my mind: - Build something really wanted/needed - The A Team - Timing - Early/easy access to funding And whether you like it or not: luck!
vortico 7y ago
I agree that most anecdotal startup advice is BS, which is why I barely pay attention to it. What I'd like more of is textbook-like material offering terminology and detailed case studies. Simply knowing the common name for something (e.g. marketing terms like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good) or the usual process of how things work (like a typical schedule of the process for accepting angel funding) is far more useful than advice that seems like darts thrown at a dartboard.
zby 7y ago
The primary social function of giving advice is a domination game (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/03/advice-shows-status.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/03/advice-shows-status.ht..., http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/01/advice-isnt-about-info.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/01/advice-isnt-about-info...) - that's why there is a lot of shitty advice. That does not mean there are no good business theories that cover startups. Some of them are scientific theories with all the required rigour - but not all theories need to be properly scientific to be useful, in our daily life we live with lots of ex-post theories, they are not perfect but are still useful. By the way I am the author of one non-scientific startup theory myself https://medium.com/hackernoon/aggregators-bffd36063a72 https://medium.com/hackernoon/aggregators-bffd36063a72 and I hope it can be useful:) There are also useful advice. It is good to read them, evaluate, adjust them you your circumstances, etc. In the end you need to decide for yourself, but they show you the possibilities.
- jack_pp 7y ago
  While those overcomingbias articles are nice and true they only offer a limited perspective. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/03/advice-shows-status.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/03/advice-shows-status.ht... : "High-power participants in the study ignored almost two-thirds of the advice they received" - in almost any "game" (or situation that can be modeled by game theory) it may be wise to test the advice of even the best expert you are given. Maybe ignoring advice isn't irrational but actually optimal in order to truly learn or even advance on the current optimal solution to any given situation and maybe the high-powered participants intuitively know this and that's why they're high-powered in the first place. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/01/advice-isnt-about-info.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/01/advice-isnt-about-info... : advice giving and receiving is based on respect but it also builds trust and connection. Why would I build trust with someone who is getting out of the game when I can get advice from any number of people in the game which have similar amounts of wisdom and experience? I get the wisdom and I have a better chance of getting good opportunities from the person in the game whereas I can only get wisdom from the retiree.
- bigred100 7y ago
  I hate this interpretation of everything as status games. It seems like a great way to drive yourself insane and develop mental illness as you overreact to mundane situations or fail to take advice from proper authorities. I consider somebody unqualified throwing out nonsensical advice as simply kind of a moron. To elaborate: I’m convinced that most people viewing this view status as a good or at worse neutral thing, and although they may not approve of tactics they deem immoral (maybe including this one), basically have some admiration for “winning” the game. I view this as a wrong approach. The guy giving advice all the time is blinded by pride and fails to realize even the bounds of his own competence. He’s not winning anything. My opinion is that he looks like a buffoon.
drblast 7y ago
It's fun to read older business books like Built to Last and Good to Great that use the "let's study successful businesses to see what they do" methodology. It's fun because many of the companies featured in those books either are bankrupt today or facing some sort of existential difficulty. It's survivor bias bullshit wrapped up in feel-good propaganda and people eat it up every time. Study successful people and emulate them. Of course! How could we go wrong? Nevermind that the successful people are more likely to just be lucky or even just plain wrong about the reasons for their success. I attribute my success to hard work, getting up early, making steady progress every day, picking great people to work with, and staying ahead of the curve. Sounds great, right? But to really know if any of that matters, we have to study a large number of people who also profess to do exactly those things and see if they're way more successful than average. If they're not...well then I'm just wrong about the reasons for my own success and other factors are more important. It doesn't sell books though when your message is "in order to be successful you have to be naturally smart, tall, and attractive, work about as hard as everyone else, and be well-connected and lucky."
- lifeisstillgood 7y ago
  in order to be successful you have to be naturally smart, tall, and attractive, work about as hard as everyone else, and be well-connected and lucky." I can write a short pithy book on that one :-)
travbrack 7y ago
Kind of ironic that this is advice for startups.
rmason 7y ago
I did two startups in the nineties. There was little or no information out there and the Internet quite frankly was a brand new world. Or so we thought at the time ;<). Now there's too much information out there. Lots of it is total malarkey to be polite. If I had the choice I'd much rather have too much information than no information. I honestly believe that I would have made fewer mistakes.
roynasser 7y ago
Advice and startup theory should be taken (as any advice) from anecdotal situations... In that sense, most theory will prbably not be BS... Does it make sense to sleep with your customers if you are building a car? probably not... it may make sense if you are building something hospitality related (in case of airbnb they could have been thought of as "trying the service themselves")... Should all startup founders sleep with their customers? obviously not, but try their service? (probably!) I think this post lacks sufficient depth to be relevant
rl3 7y ago
Many years ago I read a ton of books on trading psychology. The best books—widely considered to be bibles of their field—came to the following conclusion: There's many valid approaches, and often these approaches are radically different. Regardless of whatever approach you choose, if it is to be successful, it must be both reasoned out by—and compatible with—you. I can't name a single great entrepreneur that didn't have very strong opinions, or that largely relied on outside advice. These things must come from within, and critical thinking is no exception.
compiler-guy 7y ago
"To what do you attribute your success?" "We listened to the people who gave us advice." "We didn't listen to the naysayers." One hears stories of both types.
twothamendment 7y ago
My marriage advice is always this: "Don't listen to any marriage advice except mine". I suppose if I wrote a longer version it would sound like this article.
- sombremesa 7y ago
  "Marry my wife. It worked for me!"
- tlb 7y ago
  But can you imagine starting a marriage never having heard any advice or even seen a marriage in person? You were raised by wolves, but one day you came to the village, met a girl, and now a guy in a robe says you're married. How much trial and error will it take to become a good husband? You should go acquire some wisdom by asking people. Many startup founders are basically in that situation for a dozen kinds of relationships. They've never hired, never closed a sale, never rented an office, never tried to collect a late payment, never fired someone, never raised VC money, never hired a marketing firm... Those things aren't rocket science and you can certainly learn to do any of them, but noob mistakes are expensive and you don't have a big cushion of time and money. So it's good to have someone to talk your plans over with first. A lot of advice does come down to "That's a standard problem, and here's a standard way to solve it that works fine." That's fundamentally conservative advice, but startups seem to do best if they innovate only on the few things that make them unique and just do the standard thing for everything else.
monikgandhi 7y ago
I really like this thinking, its more independent and logical. Just because the idea worked for one, doesn't mean its gonna work for all. We need to create our own paths to freedom.
solresol 7y ago
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the QUT CAUSEE study. They actually did follow a group of early-stage startups, interviewing them each year and then afterwards looked at what factors predicted success or failure. Some of their results: - changing direction as a result of customer feedback (very, very good, one of the best predictors of success) - having an accountant (good) - having one parent born overseas (helpful for some reason) - making use of Australia's research and development tax concession (very good) - knowing the name of your lawyer (bad) - accessing government services designed to help startups (very bad) - writing a business plan and sticking to it (bad) - founders having experience working in enterprises (neither good nor bad, but it slowed the process down a lot) My favourite gems that they discovered... in the Australian startup community, it appears that investors are no better at picking successes than random chance. Externally-funded companies had no difference in outcome compared to bootstrapped ones; the only difference is that they got to success or failure faster.
- i_feel_great 7y ago
  Never heard of it, although I work just up the road from the Garden's Point campus. Where can I find a summary?
  - solresol 7y ago
    https://staff.qut.edu.au/staff/per.davidsson https://staff.qut.edu.au/staff/per.davidsson
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
    https://eprints.qut.edu.au/26995/ https://eprints.qut.edu.au/26995/
- onion2k 7y ago
  ...the only difference is that they got to success or failure faster. To be fair though, that's a big difference. Wasting time on an idea that didn't work is one of my biggest regrets about my first startup. I'd like it to have failed much earlier.
vonnik 7y ago
"Ignore advice" is not good advice. Even for startups. There are so many predictable ways that founders screw up. I, personally, have committed most of them. A few of them I avoided, or stopped doing soon enough to survive, and often it was with the help of good advice. YC gives good advice: Talk to your users. Build something people want. Run lean. Those are all great for people starting out. There is a lot of knowledge much more specialized that, contained in the collective wisdom of startup operators and investors. The challenge is to vet your sources, know which advice applies to your situation, and how to implement it. Nobody can teach you how to be a good judge of character. And nobody knows your startup well enough to decide for you which advice and how. But we can all learn from others who have gone through the ringer, whether it's PG, Michael Seibel, Naval, Lemkin or others.
chiefalchemist 7y ago
BS feels heavy handed, but I sense her/his point. Paraphrasing: Stop following and look for your own magic. Yeah. Pleny of cookie-cutter knock off wannabe brands and products would benefit from such thoughts.
blrgeek 7y ago
Carnap vs Popper Popper = create hypothesis and falsify Carnap = see instances and use induction to create hypothesis Everything else they say about the scientific method is the same. Herbert Simon, in thinking of sciences of the artificial, used the Carnap method to create a ton of valuable science. It's not that post-facto is bad - carnap showed otherwise. It's about the quality of the science and the specificity of the recommendations, that lead to bs. For instance you can mitigate for survivorship bias by studying the dead as well as the living, and driving deep into the differences. But that's a lot of work! As a theory, effectuation studies the difference in decision making processes between expert entrepreneurs and corporate CEOs. The result, while similarly post-facto, is delightful. See effectuation.org - Vinod Khosla remarked it was the first useful study on entrepreneurship he had ever read.
avs733 7y ago
The issue isn't that its ex-post, it's how theory is built. There are better and more credible resources/work on this topic than a blog post. The most common terms I've seen that gets used in academic research that is critical of how theories about entrepreneurship are built are 'mythifciation' and 'reification'... e.g., https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-6486.00196 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-6486.00...
rdlecler1 7y ago
Airbnb and Tesla surely looked at other business models for success and modified or adapted it to their own. These theories can provide a framework to help people think through the problems without reinventing the wheel. On to the irony of the post: this post is giving advice “ignore advice think for yourself”. Bs.
billman 7y ago
History is written by the victors.
nabdab 7y ago
Don’t study success. The people who double their money by betting it all on black didn’t have some divine insight that you can copy, they just got lucky. But do study failure. The people who lose everything by betting it all on red did have a fatal flaw in their approach to risk that will be valuable for you to avoid or at least be well aware of. One of the obvious faliures to study is that many great teams with great ideas failed to get any funding because they didn’t walk the startup walk or talk the startup talk with potential investors, which is exactly why you should talk about copying Tesla and about growth hacking.

379 points by shafyy 7y ago

tlb 7y ago

Not all ex-post theories are BS. For example, I slam my hand in the drawer and theorize, "Slamming hands in drawers hurts; one should not do it." That theory is pretty solid. It doesn't cover all the edge cases, but following it is better than not following it. There are lots of startup theories that are equally solid, despite being ex-post. I know a startup that didn't pay payroll tax for a couple years, and it ended badly. The resulting advice is pretty obvious. There are theories about how to hire, how to find customers, how to negotiate deals. These theories might not apply in every single case, but you should definitely start by knowing what worked in the past. This post picks a couple of unsupported startup theories, but it's sort of like criticizing physics for the 1% of reality it can't explain and ignoring the 99% it can.

edgarvaldes 7y ago
Maybe theories about what not to do are more solid.
- mcguire 7y ago
  Thank you for the validation! My purpose in life is to serve as an example of what not to do.
  - toss1 7y ago
    Sounds like fun! But you have a paradox. Do you demonstrate one big thing to not do and go out with a bang, winning a Darwin Award, or demonstrate many smaller (less lethal) things to not do? Which generates more net benefit for the world? Always these career choices, and what kind of advice is there on that?
- davidivadavid 7y ago
  Nah. In fact that's the whole reason "contrarianism" is a thing.
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sha_r_roh 7y ago
> "Slamming hands in drawers hurts; one should not do it." This is a fact and don't think this is what the author is trying to say. I guess he's more focused on the kind of theories which people throw around as some sort of self-evident truth, when in fact it's a personal truth which they learned through trial and error. But I guess there's a point in learning from some of these "self-evident" truths (this is more rare though)
- 8note 7y ago
  slamming your hands in drawers is also a personal experiment. I might be wearing a good set of gloves, and it won't hurt
  - ahhzen 7y ago
    There always has to be a balance between learning from other people's mistakes and making your own. However learning from the right people is important. You wouldn't use avocadoes when a recipe asks for flour but in the start-up world, everyone seems to think that what works for the well-known successes will automatically work for them. What really frustrates me (rant, rant... :)) is the notion that if I build, they will come. So so many of the start-ups I work with think that. What happened to people understanding basic business theory? Basic marketing theory would be useful but I don't hold out much hope for that!
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
not_a_cop75 7y ago
Not taking sides, but your example is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man fallacy.
- pier25 7y ago
  Is it though? The parent comment is criticizing the article for "cherry picking". That in itself is not a fallacy.
- smallgovt 7y ago
  It's not. He's directly refuting the claim made in the title of the blog post. That is: Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs. In the title, the author is seemingly making the claim that all ex-post startup advice is BS. The commenter is debunking that claim by providing sound ex-post advice.
  - neilv 7y ago
    > directly refuting the claim made in the title of the blog post. That is: Most [...] In the title, the author is seemingly making the claim that all [...]
    - CrazyStat 7y ago
      Very clever, but missing the point. Those two qualifiers refer to different classes: (1) Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs. (2) All ex-post startup theory is bullshit. Those claims may or may not be true, but there's no contradiction between the two. The title does indeed seem to implicitly claim (2), in the form of the following (implied) syllogism: Most startup theory is ex-post. All ex-post startup theory is bullshit. Therefore, most startup theory is bullshit. Or, more concisely: most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs.
      - shafyy 7y ago
        Well, since I'm here no need for the guesswork. I'm not saying all ex-post theories all bullshit. I think that most ex-post startup thoeries are bullshit.
deleted 7y ago
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chibg10 7y ago
The difference is the prior. There's strong prior reason to believe not paying payroll tax is not going to end well. The theoretical basis is simple, clear, well-reasoned, and supported by strong evidence in adjacent realms (i.e. the IRS takes taxes taxes pretty seriously). Whereas the prior on the validity of something like "early-stage founders should live with their customers" is much weaker. Even though the advice for each presented example is based on sample size n=1, the resulting belief can and should be quite different depending on your prior. The real meta-advice is to be able to understand and evaluate your prior for any given piece of advice you receive. This mostly comes down to thinking rationally, being knowledgeable, and critically considering each piece of advice for whether it's worth heeding or not. Which is not so far from the author's message I think ("figure everything out yourself", "I don't mean to say don't take any advice"). (Obligatory shout-out to Bayes Theorem)
- nostrademons 7y ago
  > Whereas the prior on the validity of something like "early-stage founders should live with their customers" is much weaker. There's a pretty strong theoretical reason for that as well: startups succeed because they make something customers want; the more time the person making product decisions spends with times with customers, the more information they can gather about what the customers want; and the more the customer trusts and has a rapport with the founder, the more willing they'll be to share candid feedback. There are some practical problems that make living with your customers a little problematic if you're not Brian Chesky, namely that they may not want another roommate, you may not want a roommate, they or you may already have a family, or you might just get on each others' nerves. But if you extend the general principle to "spend a lot of time with your users" (and being able to extend to a general principle is a big advantage of having theoretical reasoning), there are a lot of other companies that have found similar success. Facebook was another one where the founder literally lived with his first users. Google, for all intents and purposes, lived with their first users (it's grad school, after all). DropBox, Reddit, and Instacart were their first users. Apple, Stripe, Clerky, Twitch, etc. were in regular contact with their first users.
  - Retric 7y ago

samtheprogram 7y ago

> Do you think Brian Chesky of Airbnb heard that strategy from a friend? I'm pretty sure he heard it from Paul Graham.

hiccuphippo 7y ago
I'd be more interested in learning of what other startups used the same strategy and failed anyway. Ultimately luck is a large portion of success.

ThomPete 7y ago

The problem with startup theory is, that the theory that actually works is mostly the "don't do this". Only once in a blue moon does they prove to be wrong, but they are also the least valuable as many of the are quite obvious. The part of startup theory most people are interested in "the do's", most of the time doesn't work as they are highly contextual.

downandout 7y ago

From the article: ”Do you think Brian Chesky of Airbnb heard that strategy from a friend? Hell, do you even think that freeriding off of Craigslist was their reason for success?” Yes, freeriding off of Craigslist was the reason for their early success, without which their later success was not possible. Having a good model means absolutely nothing without some ability to market it, especially in the marketplace space. Initial momentum is what causes these businesses to either succeed or fail. The idea of using free ways to get your startup initial momentum is absolutely not BS.

shafyy 7y ago
> The idea of using free ways to get your startup initial momentum is absolutely not BS. Agree, and that's also not what I said :-)
- downandout 7y ago
  That’s how I read it in the context of your premise. You seemed to be mocking the notion that Craigslist was a vital part of their success. I am not sure how else to interpret “....Hell, do you even think that freeriding off of Craigslist was their reason for success?”
  - shafyy 7y ago
    I'm saying that they would have been successful with or without this marketing tactics. I am not saying that startups shoulnd't use free marketing opportunities.
    - vikramkr 7y ago
      Exactly, which means you're saying that this wasn't a vital part of their success, while the other commenter is saying the opposite, so I don't think you agree with the argument that doing things that don't scale is a critical part of their success right? Unless I'm misreading something.

hinkley 7y ago

I have had a couple of managers over the years who had dreams of writing a book, and with the exception of one, they were all mostly wrong about the secrets of their success. They didn't have any awareness of how their team and especially their leads supported them. Responses varied from humor to hurt feelings. Ask the people who work for them why the team was successful. They'll probably have very different opinions.

monocasa 7y ago
Would you mind expanding on their respective theses? I can see a lot of value in looking at these in a anti-pattern kind of way.
- hinkley 7y ago
  You know, it's funny for all of things I can enumerate on 'how not to do something', there are some pretty big areas where I either don't keep score or tear up the scorecard the moment I don't work there anymore. In this case probably the latter. The guy I said did have it figured out? I'd like to retract that. He wanted to think of the process of moving stories from the backlog to done as a physics problem. As managers go he was fairly emotionally sophisticated, but that was his big blindspot. Some of the others had elements of 'mushroom management' (keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit), and a lot of quick fix-feeling techniques. Those can be helpful in small doses, as long as someone else is beating a drum for technical excellence (not perfectionism, but get stuff done, keep it done, and keep getting stuff done).
deleted 7y ago
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rockinghigh 7y ago
Any examples where you think they were wrong?

WheelsAtLarge 7y ago

It's not all b.s. but it's hard to sort the good from the bad. It's impossible to test out theories so you have to try lots of possibilities and hope for the best. There are 2 basics that are part of every successful projects: hard work and luck. Anything else you have to evaluate and decide whether it's worth the risk in time and resources.

dcolkitt 7y ago

> Do you think Musk copied that strategy from the business school he never went to. Elon Musk did his undergrad at Wharton. I guess the statement might be true if you mean "business school" to strictly mean a graduate MBA program. But Musk definitely took business classes that would have been nearly identical to those taken by MBAs.

vikramkr 7y ago
I was a bit confused by that line. He wasn't even a dropout, he got a business degree along with his physics degree, and "start with a premium market and move to bigger less premium markets" sounds like the sort of case study that could definitely be taught in a business lecture. I doubt that he copied any strategies from his business classes but this particular example is hardly implausible.
shafyy 7y ago
He has an economics and physics degree, not business. Did he take business classes and read business books? Probably. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
- vikramkr 7y ago
  It's a business degree. The undergrad wharton degree just happens to be called a B.S. in economics, but there's only a few economists classes in it, it's entirely a business degree with business concentrations and so on. I think he concentrated (like a major) in entrepreneurship but I might be wrong on that.
- c3534l 7y ago
  Wharton is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania. He went to business school and got and completed all the same business requirements everyone else has to take. I studied accounting at university along side finance, business administration, supply chain, and economics students. I'm sure there are plenty of schools who offer a degree just called "business," but most people have a specific business degree. I'm looking at the degree requirements right now, it's all the same stuff everyone has to take: marketing, management, logistics, stats, finance. Unless things were really different back then, an economics degree from Wharton is definitely a business degree.

tmemth 7y ago

> Or “Airbnb growth hacked Craigslist to link to their own website. And did you know that the founders lived with their users. You should do that, too!”” I was told by a founder that I was a first time founder (I am not) because I didn’t believe this strategy works anymore. He was basically mocking me for being so stupid to not know now growth hacking like this works. And all the time I was thinking at the back of my head about how dogmatic his thinking was. What works 10 years ago doesn’t mean it still works today. Copying other people’s strategy is the worst way to run a startup. By the time you have heard it, another 100 people probably heard it too and doing the same thing. I agree with the post. Think for yourself. And definitely don’t talk down to other founders thinking you know better. Especially if you haven’t succeeded.

shafyy 7y ago
Agree. Recently listened to a podcast with Jason Fried where he made this point exactly. It's this IndieHacker episode here: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/105-jason-fried-of-basecamp https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/105-jason-fried-of-base... Edit: Corrected link
- gringoDan 7y ago
  Can you update this link? Looks like you just linked back to this thread's URL.
  - shafyy 7y ago
    Just did, thanks

smallgovt 7y ago

>> Do you think Musk copied that strategy from the business school he never went to? Do you think Brian Chesky of Airbnb heard that strategy from a friend? Maybe not, but that doesn't mean talking to other successful founders isn't extremely helpful. The best founders have multiple great ideas and not enough time to execute on them. If you want to increase your success rate, you should use feedback from other successful founders to decide which great idea to invest your time in.

vikramkr 7y ago
Also, musk could totally have learned that strategy when he was in bschool, and chesky could totally have gotten the idea from a friend. Those are hardly implausible situations.
- shafyy 7y ago
  I agree, I don't now that for a fact. It's more a form of rhetoric to trigger interesting discussions. Seems to work ;-)
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    Sure, but it wasn't phrased as an open ended question, it was framed as rhetorical questions with a given answer that are evidence for your conclusion. I'm confused by the "bschool he never went to" bit as well. I'll grant that it sparks an interesting discussion, but I don't think that it does much to support your thesis as evidence.
    - shafyy 7y ago
      I'm not writing an academic thesis. It's just my opinion in a short blog post. Deal with it :-)
      - vikramkr 7y ago
        Not exactly sure what there is to deal with here, and it's certainly not easy to have an interesting discussion about a topic if you decide that it's not worth trying to argue your point instead of telling the other person to "deal with it" when they ask for clarification about what some of your points mean or point out things that would make your argument stronger if addressed

floki999 7y ago

So true. Everyone and her grandmother is an armchair startup expert these days. WTF is a startup anyway. I’m building a new for-profit business enterprise, not a social i-have-one-too startup. Call it what it is.

ufmace 7y ago

I'd agree that it's rarely a good idea to directly copy any other startup. It's probably good to hear many of their stories of success - maybe a few pieces of one or two will give you a great idea, or at least tend to make you think in the best ways.

shafyy 7y ago
That's exactly the point of my post!
std_throwaway 7y ago
Take a working idea, find out why it's working, find out how to make it better, try it out. It doesn't make sense to only copy a working idea without understanding why it's working because your copy will be slightly worse. While you might have some success you won't take the big share. You must find a weakness in the original idea or the execution or the location or anything else. If you have a solid point where you can improve you have a chance. Don't be afraid of stealing ideas and making them better.

std_throwaway 7y ago

It's hard to test theories when the underlying system constantly changes like it does in economics. Something that works today might not work tomorrow. A theory that looks sound when applied to yesteryears data might stop working before the sun rises. When many others try to apply the same tricks that made you successful the cake on that table might suddenly be divided into so many pieces that everybody will go home hungry. You must find a new table with a new cake but old data and old theory doesn't help much with that because someone else is already there. You need to think fresh and unconventional or you need to squeeze blood out of stones harder than anybody else. Physicists have it easy in comparison. One of the basic truths of natural science is that the laws of nature are independent of the observer and time and experiments can be repeated as many times as you like with the same results.

whatshisface 7y ago
>experiments can be repeated as many times as you like with the same results That is not actually true, there is a lot of randomness, and in quantum mechanics the randomness is fundamental. The real secret of the natural sciences is that good physicists never publish if they know they don't know the answer. It took hundreds of years of that policy before the narrowly applicable theories blossomed into the general laws of the universe. If the focus was determining the general laws of the universe from the start no progress could have been made: Newton could have guessed at the laws of motion, but without the specific and painstaking celestial observations preceding him nobody would have known he was right. Economists could enjoy a similar success, but it would be at the expense of 400 years of saying only things that policymakers thought were obvious, while refusing to answer useful questions. There are plenty of "very true" theories in economics, but they often aren't broad enough to answer the questions about economics that the fate of nations ride on. However 400 years from now those narrow but well-tested theories will be the foundation of the true general economics and all the rest will be forgotten.
- std_throwaway 7y ago
  Sure, there is randomness but in normal cases you can apply statistics to describe it reasonably well. The results are not 100% sure but 99% or 99.99999% or whatever you need. It's not that the laws of gravity stop working entirely over night. Newtons theory wasn't perfect and Einsteins theory isn't perfect but it describes what happens in nature very very well for billions of years.

bovermyer 7y ago

When I was in my twenties, I was part of the early "life coach blogger" culture. Now that I'm almost in my forties, I realize everything I wrote back then was bullshit. Earnest, but bullshit nonetheless. I'm much more cynical, but I'm also much more likely to just do what seems right and figure out the rest as I go. I don't read "best practices" or advice articles anymore. This is not to say that there is nothing to be gained from such sources; just that the likelihood of it being useful or accurate given my particular context is small. In this, my attitude is much closer to where it was in my teens and childhood, where I just had to figure everything out on my own.

std_throwaway 7y ago
Mastery is when you not only know the rules but also know which rules you can ignore in your particular situation.
- drclau 7y ago
  "The Code is more what you call guidelines, than actual rules."
- quirkot 7y ago
  “By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well. This is one of the ends for which they exist.” ― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style
kd5bjo 7y ago
I’ve read a lot of time management/productivity books, and there seem to be only two things all of the authors agree on: write stuff down, and continuously tweak your system. The latter is usually mentioned offhand in the preface, as the author wants to deliver a fait accompli instead of just some tips and tricks.
- ionforce 7y ago
  Can you elaborate on "write stuff down"?

amoorthy 7y ago

I'm surprised this blog post made the first page of HN given its lack of sources or analysis. Maybe a good discussion can come on one example startup advice from YC: do things that don't scale. I think this is really sound in that they're saying "get product-market-fit with some segment of users." i.e. know that there's demand for your product/service even if it's pretty manual to deliver early on. Then see how to automate. Because most product/services aren't materially better than existing options and so you never get product-market-fit even when it's entirely manual and customized to the user. As a founder I've been guilty of building first because it's fun. I saw what I wanted in user research and built a whole app accordingly. It failed. Would've been better to start with a smaller attack surface (email newsletter) and once we found success to then scale. The interesting thing is I knew of the advice "do things that don't scale" beforehand. But until I failed I didn't know why it mattered and how to apply it. Net: applying advice is harder than evaluating if the advice is good or bad. You want to have enough time to fail a lot and then appreciate the wisdom of startup advice :-)

shafyy 7y ago
I'm surprised myself. But I guess it's right in the target group. "Do things that don't scale" is good advice, I agree. But maybe the reality is more "Do ALSO things that don't scale", and then it becomes much more obvious and irrelevant, doesn't it?
- amoorthy 7y ago
  Sorry shafyy. I don't understand why the addition of "ALSO" chnages the statement. Sorry for being dense.
  - shafyy 7y ago
    My point is they're not saying "ONLY do things that don't scale". It's more like, "from time to time, ALSO do things that don't scale". Which, as I said, I think is good advice, but also pretty common sense.
    - 7y ago

AznHisoka 7y ago

Reminds me of the book "Good To Great". The author took a bunch of successful companies, and found patterns that they all had in common. But just because all these companies did X, didn't mean that made them successful. It could've been because of survivorship bias. So yes, most business/startup advice is curve overfitting, imo.

ci5er 7y ago
I don't recall "Good to Great" coming to this conclusion - it was the later critical pieces. (Poor guy - it was a lot of analysis!) IIRC, the book "First, Break all the Rules" actually challenged the "Good to Great" methodology a bit on this point. (The other point, IIRC, was that first you have to find the right questions, before the right answers can be considered).

krm01 7y ago

I think having lots of data points is the only way to give proper advice about Startups. YC has given outstanding startup advice from a specific SV perspective. I've been running a UI/UX design firm for the last 10 years, working with small unknown bootstrapping founders, up to well funded and awesome companies founded by super stars like Elon Musk and others. Though this was never my intent, over the years we've collected so many datapoints that alongside our design work we tend to advice and steer the companies we work with into directions we think the company should go. All backed by real examples from previous experiences. Being in positions where you work with a lot of companies over a longer period of time, I think, is the best way form thoughtful startup advice.

shafyy 7y ago
While data points do help, impactful startups often change the paradigm and how things are done. So, again, I don't think relying too much on emperical data points is good for founders. If you do, you'll rarely do something interesting and new.
- krm01 7y ago
  As I mentioned, data-points can help steer in the right direction. I'm definitely not talking about disruption or changing paradigms. The same way a YC can't guarantee each startup will disrupt an industry. All they can do is help make something good, go to great faster.
  - shafyy 7y ago
    Agreed.
- ska 7y ago
  > If you do, you'll rarely do something interesting and new. And if you don't you'll also rarely do something interesting and new. It's not as fun to talk about, but most startups will not be particularly impactful and exceedingly few actually change any paradigm. And that's ok too. I guess I'm saying if you are trying to find general advice based on analysis of outliers, it may not work well.

grumpy8 7y ago

The other side of the coin is after you've built a few startups, you see the same pattern coming up again and again. Part of being creative is to know where to focus your attention (I.e. figuring out PMF) rather than wasting cycles on problems with clear solutions.

Ma8ee 7y ago

I can't help thinking of this wonderful talk about how to win the lottery: https://youtu.be/l_F9jxsfGCw https://youtu.be/l_F9jxsfGCw

downandout 7y ago
That's actually a pretty great video. The tldw version: advice on how to buy more lottery tickets is useful; advice on how to win the lottery is not.

dang 7y ago

I think Paul Buchheit said it best in 2007: https://blog.daryn.net/post/32264049/paul-buchheit-limited-life-experience https://blog.daryn.net/post/32264049/paul-buchheit-limited-l... and http://redefine.dyndns.org/~andyr/blog/archives/2007/03/notes-from-star-1.html http://redefine.dyndns.org/~andyr/blog/archives/2007/03/note... But see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70808 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70795.

shafyy 7y ago
Damn right.

JackFr 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history "The term is also used extensively in the history of science to mean historiography that focuses on the successful chain of theories and experiments that led to present-day science, while ignoring failed theories and dead ends."

quartz 7y ago

I feel like this post mistakes advice for directive. Most of the great founders I've encountered are excellent pattern-matching engines who can absorb large quantities of advice and then re-apply it within their personal contexts rather than rejecting it outright, ex post facto or not. No you probably don't need to live with your users, but yes you should probably spend significant time with them doing the thing your company is trying to help them do better. Putting advice to work is more than regurgitation... then again, if your company's goal is to normalize short-term living with strangers well then yeah, you probably should live with a few.

squirrelicus 7y ago

Emulating successful startups is folly. It's the myriad failures that you will never learn about that you should be concerned with. I'll just leave this here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

marcus_holmes 7y ago
this. So much. Copying the success stories makes no sense unless you also understand how other people following the same strategies failed. You have to study the failures in order to understand the successes.

stephc_int13 7y ago

I think the same about most management theory, most of the corporate bs can be categorized as a form of Cargo-Cult. Look how well they did doing that, let's copy them without understanding the context or anything below the surface of the things.

ryandrake 7y ago

So much crappy business advice suffers from Survivorship Bias [1]. “Companies A, B, and C did X and succeeded. Companies D, E, and F did not do X and failed. Therefore, X leads to success.” Ignoring how many companies also did X but failed too. The book “Good to Great” contains nothing but Survivorship Bias and is adored by Business Schools. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias (excuse the mobile link)

joneckhardt 7y ago

Much of the empirical work published in academic journals on startups is not ex post.

joneckhardt 7y ago

Much of the empirical academic literature on entrepreneurship and startups does not suffer from ex post rationalization.

TrackerFF 7y ago

Startup (and business) theory is really pretty simple: 1) Identify problem 2) Come up with, or look up for existing solutions 3) Develop, iterate 4) Identify and get some competitive edge 5) Keep pleasing clients Of course, there's a ton of things underneath all this, like marketing, funding, or simply being lucky with timing. The copy-cat method is probably the most legit, and battle-tested method. I.e, simply just copy some existing product or solution, with a known market. The entrepreneurship scene preaches originality and novel idea to hopeful founders, but to me, it always ends up with a race for who can do something better than their competitor. I've noticed that in many countries outside US, especially western Europe, some of the largest startups are those that play-by-play copy successful US startups, probably hoping to get acquired once the US startups start expanding to said countries.

rvn1045 7y ago

The thing is though that you've probably read so much startup advice that your sick of it and know a lot of it and dont find any value in it anymore. you've reached a tipping point where you done reading about this shit and just want to build stuff. but if you dont know anything about startups or business or whatever its still probably useful to read about it.

AlexDragusin 7y ago

Make something people want + Do something you love = All you need to know. Enjoy.

bikamonki 7y ago

Yes, all future success stories will play out differently. And no, we have identified patterns accross many past successful cases so we think we can risk theorizing some formulae and advice. Top of my mind: - Build something really wanted/needed - The A Team - Timing - Early/easy access to funding And whether you like it or not: luck!

vortico 7y ago

I agree that most anecdotal startup advice is BS, which is why I barely pay attention to it. What I'd like more of is textbook-like material offering terminology and detailed case studies. Simply knowing the common name for something (e.g. marketing terms like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good) or the usual process of how things work (like a typical schedule of the process for accepting angel funding) is far more useful than advice that seems like darts thrown at a dartboard.

zby 7y ago

The primary social function of giving advice is a domination game (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/03/advice-shows-status.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/03/advice-shows-status.ht..., http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/01/advice-isnt-about-info.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/01/advice-isnt-about-info...) - that's why there is a lot of shitty advice. That does not mean there are no good business theories that cover startups. Some of them are scientific theories with all the required rigour - but not all theories need to be properly scientific to be useful, in our daily life we live with lots of ex-post theories, they are not perfect but are still useful. By the way I am the author of one non-scientific startup theory myself https://medium.com/hackernoon/aggregators-bffd36063a72 https://medium.com/hackernoon/aggregators-bffd36063a72 and I hope it can be useful:) There are also useful advice. It is good to read them, evaluate, adjust them you your circumstances, etc. In the end you need to decide for yourself, but they show you the possibilities.

jack_pp 7y ago
While those overcomingbias articles are nice and true they only offer a limited perspective. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/03/advice-shows-status.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/03/advice-shows-status.ht... : "High-power participants in the study ignored almost two-thirds of the advice they received" - in almost any "game" (or situation that can be modeled by game theory) it may be wise to test the advice of even the best expert you are given. Maybe ignoring advice isn't irrational but actually optimal in order to truly learn or even advance on the current optimal solution to any given situation and maybe the high-powered participants intuitively know this and that's why they're high-powered in the first place. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/01/advice-isnt-about-info.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/01/advice-isnt-about-info... : advice giving and receiving is based on respect but it also builds trust and connection. Why would I build trust with someone who is getting out of the game when I can get advice from any number of people in the game which have similar amounts of wisdom and experience? I get the wisdom and I have a better chance of getting good opportunities from the person in the game whereas I can only get wisdom from the retiree.
bigred100 7y ago
I hate this interpretation of everything as status games. It seems like a great way to drive yourself insane and develop mental illness as you overreact to mundane situations or fail to take advice from proper authorities. I consider somebody unqualified throwing out nonsensical advice as simply kind of a moron. To elaborate: I’m convinced that most people viewing this view status as a good or at worse neutral thing, and although they may not approve of tactics they deem immoral (maybe including this one), basically have some admiration for “winning” the game. I view this as a wrong approach. The guy giving advice all the time is blinded by pride and fails to realize even the bounds of his own competence. He’s not winning anything. My opinion is that he looks like a buffoon.

drblast 7y ago

It's fun to read older business books like Built to Last and Good to Great that use the "let's study successful businesses to see what they do" methodology. It's fun because many of the companies featured in those books either are bankrupt today or facing some sort of existential difficulty. It's survivor bias bullshit wrapped up in feel-good propaganda and people eat it up every time. Study successful people and emulate them. Of course! How could we go wrong? Nevermind that the successful people are more likely to just be lucky or even just plain wrong about the reasons for their success. I attribute my success to hard work, getting up early, making steady progress every day, picking great people to work with, and staying ahead of the curve. Sounds great, right? But to really know if any of that matters, we have to study a large number of people who also profess to do exactly those things and see if they're way more successful than average. If they're not...well then I'm just wrong about the reasons for my own success and other factors are more important. It doesn't sell books though when your message is "in order to be successful you have to be naturally smart, tall, and attractive, work about as hard as everyone else, and be well-connected and lucky."

lifeisstillgood 7y ago
in order to be successful you have to be naturally smart, tall, and attractive, work about as hard as everyone else, and be well-connected and lucky." I can write a short pithy book on that one :-)

travbrack 7y ago

Kind of ironic that this is advice for startups.

rmason 7y ago

I did two startups in the nineties. There was little or no information out there and the Internet quite frankly was a brand new world. Or so we thought at the time ;<). Now there's too much information out there. Lots of it is total malarkey to be polite. If I had the choice I'd much rather have too much information than no information. I honestly believe that I would have made fewer mistakes.

roynasser 7y ago

Advice and startup theory should be taken (as any advice) from anecdotal situations... In that sense, most theory will prbably not be BS... Does it make sense to sleep with your customers if you are building a car? probably not... it may make sense if you are building something hospitality related (in case of airbnb they could have been thought of as "trying the service themselves")... Should all startup founders sleep with their customers? obviously not, but try their service? (probably!) I think this post lacks sufficient depth to be relevant

rl3 7y ago

Many years ago I read a ton of books on trading psychology. The best books—widely considered to be bibles of their field—came to the following conclusion: There's many valid approaches, and often these approaches are radically different. Regardless of whatever approach you choose, if it is to be successful, it must be both reasoned out by—and compatible with—you. I can't name a single great entrepreneur that didn't have very strong opinions, or that largely relied on outside advice. These things must come from within, and critical thinking is no exception.

compiler-guy 7y ago

"To what do you attribute your success?" "We listened to the people who gave us advice." "We didn't listen to the naysayers." One hears stories of both types.

twothamendment 7y ago

My marriage advice is always this: "Don't listen to any marriage advice except mine". I suppose if I wrote a longer version it would sound like this article.

sombremesa 7y ago
"Marry my wife. It worked for me!"
tlb 7y ago
But can you imagine starting a marriage never having heard any advice or even seen a marriage in person? You were raised by wolves, but one day you came to the village, met a girl, and now a guy in a robe says you're married. How much trial and error will it take to become a good husband? You should go acquire some wisdom by asking people. Many startup founders are basically in that situation for a dozen kinds of relationships. They've never hired, never closed a sale, never rented an office, never tried to collect a late payment, never fired someone, never raised VC money, never hired a marketing firm... Those things aren't rocket science and you can certainly learn to do any of them, but noob mistakes are expensive and you don't have a big cushion of time and money. So it's good to have someone to talk your plans over with first. A lot of advice does come down to "That's a standard problem, and here's a standard way to solve it that works fine." That's fundamentally conservative advice, but startups seem to do best if they innovate only on the few things that make them unique and just do the standard thing for everything else.

monikgandhi 7y ago

I really like this thinking, its more independent and logical. Just because the idea worked for one, doesn't mean its gonna work for all. We need to create our own paths to freedom.

solresol 7y ago

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the QUT CAUSEE study. They actually did follow a group of early-stage startups, interviewing them each year and then afterwards looked at what factors predicted success or failure. Some of their results: - changing direction as a result of customer feedback (very, very good, one of the best predictors of success) - having an accountant (good) - having one parent born overseas (helpful for some reason) - making use of Australia's research and development tax concession (very good) - knowing the name of your lawyer (bad) - accessing government services designed to help startups (very bad) - writing a business plan and sticking to it (bad) - founders having experience working in enterprises (neither good nor bad, but it slowed the process down a lot) My favourite gems that they discovered... in the Australian startup community, it appears that investors are no better at picking successes than random chance. Externally-funded companies had no difference in outcome compared to bootstrapped ones; the only difference is that they got to success or failure faster.

i_feel_great 7y ago
Never heard of it, although I work just up the road from the Garden's Point campus. Where can I find a summary?
- solresol 7y ago
  https://staff.qut.edu.au/staff/per.davidsson https://staff.qut.edu.au/staff/per.davidsson
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  https://eprints.qut.edu.au/26995/ https://eprints.qut.edu.au/26995/
onion2k 7y ago
...the only difference is that they got to success or failure faster. To be fair though, that's a big difference. Wasting time on an idea that didn't work is one of my biggest regrets about my first startup. I'd like it to have failed much earlier.

vonnik 7y ago

"Ignore advice" is not good advice. Even for startups. There are so many predictable ways that founders screw up. I, personally, have committed most of them. A few of them I avoided, or stopped doing soon enough to survive, and often it was with the help of good advice. YC gives good advice: Talk to your users. Build something people want. Run lean. Those are all great for people starting out. There is a lot of knowledge much more specialized that, contained in the collective wisdom of startup operators and investors. The challenge is to vet your sources, know which advice applies to your situation, and how to implement it. Nobody can teach you how to be a good judge of character. And nobody knows your startup well enough to decide for you which advice and how. But we can all learn from others who have gone through the ringer, whether it's PG, Michael Seibel, Naval, Lemkin or others.

chiefalchemist 7y ago

BS feels heavy handed, but I sense her/his point. Paraphrasing: Stop following and look for your own magic. Yeah. Pleny of cookie-cutter knock off wannabe brands and products would benefit from such thoughts.

blrgeek 7y ago

Carnap vs Popper Popper = create hypothesis and falsify Carnap = see instances and use induction to create hypothesis Everything else they say about the scientific method is the same. Herbert Simon, in thinking of sciences of the artificial, used the Carnap method to create a ton of valuable science. It's not that post-facto is bad - carnap showed otherwise. It's about the quality of the science and the specificity of the recommendations, that lead to bs. For instance you can mitigate for survivorship bias by studying the dead as well as the living, and driving deep into the differences. But that's a lot of work! As a theory, effectuation studies the difference in decision making processes between expert entrepreneurs and corporate CEOs. The result, while similarly post-facto, is delightful. See effectuation.org - Vinod Khosla remarked it was the first useful study on entrepreneurship he had ever read.

avs733 7y ago

The issue isn't that its ex-post, it's how theory is built. There are better and more credible resources/work on this topic than a blog post. The most common terms I've seen that gets used in academic research that is critical of how theories about entrepreneurship are built are 'mythifciation' and 'reification'... e.g., https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-6486.00196 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-6486.00...

rdlecler1 7y ago

Airbnb and Tesla surely looked at other business models for success and modified or adapted it to their own. These theories can provide a framework to help people think through the problems without reinventing the wheel. On to the irony of the post: this post is giving advice “ignore advice think for yourself”. Bs.

billman 7y ago

History is written by the victors.

nabdab 7y ago

Don’t study success. The people who double their money by betting it all on black didn’t have some divine insight that you can copy, they just got lucky. But do study failure. The people who lose everything by betting it all on red did have a fatal flaw in their approach to risk that will be valuable for you to avoid or at least be well aware of. One of the obvious faliures to study is that many great teams with great ideas failed to get any funding because they didn’t walk the startup walk or talk the startup talk with potential investors, which is exactly why you should talk about copying Tesla and about growth hacking.