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Perhaps it is time that we permanently retire the misguided Silicon Valley maxim "fake it till you make it". And along with that, maybe revisit the wisdom of ot

by hliyan 7y ago

Perhaps it is time that we permanently retire the misguided Silicon Valley maxim "fake it till you make it". And along with that, maybe revisit the wisdom of others such as "fail fast".

jmknoll 7y ago
I’m not sure, I think “fail fast” could have benefited Theranos if they had seen the early failure of their machines and iterated on them rather than attempted to cover up the fact that they didn’t work.
- ericlewis 7y ago
  Can’t cover up what you don’t see...
  - sdan 7y ago
    Well if you made a relatively dangerous product but don’t release it to the public, that shouldn’t be a problem... right?
np_tedious 7y ago
What's wrong with "fail fast"? An honest Theranos that failed far sooner would've done little harm. "Fail fast" is about trying new things quickly and, here's the key, getting out when they start looking bad.
- damian2000 7y ago
  Totally agree - Theranos went on for something like a decade without any evidence they had made any sort of process breakthrough or innovation. The whole company was built on lies and bullshit. The co-founder dude who put up the initial money made that money by speculating on the dot com boom of 1999/2000 and getting out before it bust.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
  That's why he(she?) wrote "revisit". As in, let's get back to it, let's see why it could have been good.
- mkagenius 7y ago
  I don't know but people have made that saying with probably one data point and people like us want some one shot solution to every problem we have in life and that's why such quotes gather momentum. In reality these do not have any substance at all. You fail fast or fail slow, each have its advantages and disadvantages, sometimes severe, I wouldn't want to hurry and fail in my nuclear energy startup. So please take everything with huge grain of salt when it comes to preaching from the (confirmation) biased peoples.
- hliyan 7y ago
  Nothing inherently. Except that most great discoveries/inventions were made by people who were convinced about the fundamental validity of their idea and persevered over many iterations (rather than pivoting). Consider how many years the incandescent light bulb would have been delayed had Edison (or Swan or whoever you want to credit) had failed fast with the filaments. To me, fail-fast is a very VC-centric philosophy. It's perfectly valid if your end goal is return on investment. But if your goal is to "build something", perseverance is generally a better strategy.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    If your goal as a society or whatever is to "build something" having many members who persevere is better. But on an individual basis, it usually isn't, because you'll probably fail. There's a tension between individual rationality and group rationality.
  - np_tedious 7y ago
    > Consider how many years the incandescent light bulb would have been delayed had Edison (or Swan or whoever you want to credit) had failed fast with the filaments. But he did try a lot of different filament materials. It would've been really dumb to think he was going to somehow get cotton or whatever wrong material correct if he just stuck with it. Instead he had procedures and a framework to try a lot of candidates and iterate quickly. I get this argument might not be exactly fair because I can twist it to nearly anything. But that's how maxims like "fail fast" or "haste makes waste" or "a stitch in time..." works. They still have value
- Traster 7y ago
  The problem with "Fail fast" as with many of these slogans is that people don't mean them. You can trust me, because my ethos is fail fast, so you know that this project must be good because I wouldn't be working on it if it weren't. It's a virtue signal. You could easily reframe "Fail Fast" as "Give up easily"- and no one thinks that's a really good thing. Similarly "Move fast and break things" could easily be restated as "Don't think about the consequences of your actions". These are not actually good strategies, they're virtue signals that founders use to tell investors that we've got the "Silicon Valley" ethos that bought you Facebook/Google/etc.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    Most people don't succeed, so in trying to replicate success, the key must be something non-obvious and counter-intuitive. So people are always going to look for possibilities that are superficially and obviously terrible approaches, but which look like they might be the secret of success if you squint the right way. It's not merely that these particular slogans are bad and should be eliminated, it's that the nature of the game leads people to look for and invent such things, and if we all agreed not to ever say these things again, new ones would arise. I don't think there is a general solution.
- iamasoftwaredev 7y ago
  AN honest Theranos would never have existed as a company. People still laud Uber for illegal behaviour.
megablast 7y ago
Why? Because of a few bad eggs? Maybe we should retire driving? 40,000 dead every single year in the USA, and over 2 million injured or disabled. According to your logic?
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  > 40,000 dead every single year in the USA, and over 2 million injured or disabled. I wish this made the headlines more. But it doesn't because it isn't new, exciting or controversial :( Maybe it needs a better name, like HeartBleed?
- antonvs 7y ago
  Right, but we don't encourage people to "drive fast, crash often," say. Also "fake it till you make it" wouldn't work very well for driving either.
- asveikau 7y ago
  You forgot car culture's contribution to the obesity epidemic, climate change, etc. So yeah. Let's reduce driving. Good call.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  Actually yea, we should be doing absolutely everything possible to get cars off the road.
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  Imagine those numbers for any other thing. We'd have the military out on the streets to stop the slaughter, the HQs of those evil forces raided, their finances cutt of and their 'leaders' brought to a court of justice facing multiple life sentences.
  - HSO 7y ago
    You mean like opioid manufacturing and distribution or American food industry (disgusting, sorry)?
- 7y ago
chongli 7y ago
It's one thing to "fake it till you make it" with some silly web app. It's another thing entirely when you're taking a ton of investor's money to develop a product that impacts people's health (and then you lie to everyone about the fact that it has no chance of working).
paxys 7y ago
Theranos was a supposed Silicon Valley "darling" that couldn't actually convince any Silicon Valley VC firms to invest in it. It was given its credibility and lofty valuation by Betsy DeVos, The Waltons, Rupert Murdoch, The Cox Family, Carlos Slim, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, James Mattis and more. I'd personally call that a Silicon Valley success story.
- adventured 7y ago
  > couldn't actually convince any Silicon Valley VC firms to invest in it There were three in fact. Tim Draper invested the first money into Theranos due to a family connection to Holmes. His firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, put early money into them. ATA Ventures and Tako Ventures (Larry Ellison) also invested into them.
traderjane 7y ago
The culture of "fake it till you make it" is sustained by the inability to tell real from fake; scammers are sustained by those who believe. Bad politicians are sustained by "bad" voters. Bad business practices are sustained by undiscerning customers. Advertising is sustained by people who modify purchasing behavior based on ads.
TrackerFF 7y ago
IMO, it boils down to greed and stupid-ish money. VC in itself is inherently risky business, and everyone involved know that it's a 1 in every XX funded startup success story. Because you have wildly successful companies like FANG, investors get all crazy and irrational when they see startups with the momentum and PR like Theranos had. Even if they're tech or scientific literate, they may suspend their disbelief, just in case the startup is a financial hit. I have little sympathy for investors that decide to invest in things thy don't know about, but eve less for investors that knowingly invest in unsound tech, just for a big IPO payout - but then cry fraud when it all falls apart. The "fake it till you make it" image is unfortunately needed to get the big bucks. In order to get funded, you need to act as if you're going to change the world, and convince investors that your product is going to be one of the leading, if not _the_ leading products in the market - doesn't mater if your startup is legit or bogus. This culture unfortunately makes it easy for fraudsters to blend in - but they're just playing the game as designed. It boils down to investors wanting 100x - 1000x returns on relatively small investments. And you don't get that kinds of returns unless the company / startup is of national or global size. To tackle and grow something to that size, you need to convince someone that you're capable of doing so. No-one invests in people that appear to be doubting or lacking confidence. They root for young "super genius" founders that tick off all the right boxes
algaeontoast 7y ago
Maybe the new maxim should be "Fast and Felonious"

by hliyan 7y ago

Perhaps it is time that we permanently retire the misguided Silicon Valley maxim "fake it till you make it". And along with that, maybe revisit the wisdom of others such as "fail fast".

jmknoll 7y ago

I’m not sure, I think “fail fast” could have benefited Theranos if they had seen the early failure of their machines and iterated on them rather than attempted to cover up the fact that they didn’t work.

ericlewis 7y ago
Can’t cover up what you don’t see...
- sdan 7y ago
  Well if you made a relatively dangerous product but don’t release it to the public, that shouldn’t be a problem... right?

np_tedious 7y ago

What's wrong with "fail fast"? An honest Theranos that failed far sooner would've done little harm. "Fail fast" is about trying new things quickly and, here's the key, getting out when they start looking bad.

damian2000 7y ago
Totally agree - Theranos went on for something like a decade without any evidence they had made any sort of process breakthrough or innovation. The whole company was built on lies and bullshit. The co-founder dude who put up the initial money made that money by speculating on the dot com boom of 1999/2000 and getting out before it bust.
Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
That's why he(she?) wrote "revisit". As in, let's get back to it, let's see why it could have been good.
mkagenius 7y ago
I don't know but people have made that saying with probably one data point and people like us want some one shot solution to every problem we have in life and that's why such quotes gather momentum. In reality these do not have any substance at all. You fail fast or fail slow, each have its advantages and disadvantages, sometimes severe, I wouldn't want to hurry and fail in my nuclear energy startup. So please take everything with huge grain of salt when it comes to preaching from the (confirmation) biased peoples.
hliyan 7y ago
Nothing inherently. Except that most great discoveries/inventions were made by people who were convinced about the fundamental validity of their idea and persevered over many iterations (rather than pivoting). Consider how many years the incandescent light bulb would have been delayed had Edison (or Swan or whoever you want to credit) had failed fast with the filaments. To me, fail-fast is a very VC-centric philosophy. It's perfectly valid if your end goal is return on investment. But if your goal is to "build something", perseverance is generally a better strategy.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  If your goal as a society or whatever is to "build something" having many members who persevere is better. But on an individual basis, it usually isn't, because you'll probably fail. There's a tension between individual rationality and group rationality.
- np_tedious 7y ago
  > Consider how many years the incandescent light bulb would have been delayed had Edison (or Swan or whoever you want to credit) had failed fast with the filaments. But he did try a lot of different filament materials. It would've been really dumb to think he was going to somehow get cotton or whatever wrong material correct if he just stuck with it. Instead he had procedures and a framework to try a lot of candidates and iterate quickly. I get this argument might not be exactly fair because I can twist it to nearly anything. But that's how maxims like "fail fast" or "haste makes waste" or "a stitch in time..." works. They still have value
Traster 7y ago
The problem with "Fail fast" as with many of these slogans is that people don't mean them. You can trust me, because my ethos is fail fast, so you know that this project must be good because I wouldn't be working on it if it weren't. It's a virtue signal. You could easily reframe "Fail Fast" as "Give up easily"- and no one thinks that's a really good thing. Similarly "Move fast and break things" could easily be restated as "Don't think about the consequences of your actions". These are not actually good strategies, they're virtue signals that founders use to tell investors that we've got the "Silicon Valley" ethos that bought you Facebook/Google/etc.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  Most people don't succeed, so in trying to replicate success, the key must be something non-obvious and counter-intuitive. So people are always going to look for possibilities that are superficially and obviously terrible approaches, but which look like they might be the secret of success if you squint the right way. It's not merely that these particular slogans are bad and should be eliminated, it's that the nature of the game leads people to look for and invent such things, and if we all agreed not to ever say these things again, new ones would arise. I don't think there is a general solution.
iamasoftwaredev 7y ago
AN honest Theranos would never have existed as a company. People still laud Uber for illegal behaviour.

megablast 7y ago

Why? Because of a few bad eggs? Maybe we should retire driving? 40,000 dead every single year in the USA, and over 2 million injured or disabled. According to your logic?

Scoundreller 7y ago
> 40,000 dead every single year in the USA, and over 2 million injured or disabled. I wish this made the headlines more. But it doesn't because it isn't new, exciting or controversial :( Maybe it needs a better name, like HeartBleed?
antonvs 7y ago
Right, but we don't encourage people to "drive fast, crash often," say. Also "fake it till you make it" wouldn't work very well for driving either.
asveikau 7y ago
You forgot car culture's contribution to the obesity epidemic, climate change, etc. So yeah. Let's reduce driving. Good call.
SomeOldThrow 7y ago
Actually yea, we should be doing absolutely everything possible to get cars off the road.
PeterStuer 7y ago
Imagine those numbers for any other thing. We'd have the military out on the streets to stop the slaughter, the HQs of those evil forces raided, their finances cutt of and their 'leaders' brought to a court of justice facing multiple life sentences.
- HSO 7y ago
  You mean like opioid manufacturing and distribution or American food industry (disgusting, sorry)?
7y ago

chongli 7y ago

It's one thing to "fake it till you make it" with some silly web app. It's another thing entirely when you're taking a ton of investor's money to develop a product that impacts people's health (and then you lie to everyone about the fact that it has no chance of working).

paxys 7y ago

Theranos was a supposed Silicon Valley "darling" that couldn't actually convince any Silicon Valley VC firms to invest in it. It was given its credibility and lofty valuation by Betsy DeVos, The Waltons, Rupert Murdoch, The Cox Family, Carlos Slim, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, James Mattis and more. I'd personally call that a Silicon Valley success story.

adventured 7y ago
> couldn't actually convince any Silicon Valley VC firms to invest in it There were three in fact. Tim Draper invested the first money into Theranos due to a family connection to Holmes. His firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, put early money into them. ATA Ventures and Tako Ventures (Larry Ellison) also invested into them.

traderjane 7y ago

The culture of "fake it till you make it" is sustained by the inability to tell real from fake; scammers are sustained by those who believe. Bad politicians are sustained by "bad" voters. Bad business practices are sustained by undiscerning customers. Advertising is sustained by people who modify purchasing behavior based on ads.

TrackerFF 7y ago

IMO, it boils down to greed and stupid-ish money. VC in itself is inherently risky business, and everyone involved know that it's a 1 in every XX funded startup success story. Because you have wildly successful companies like FANG, investors get all crazy and irrational when they see startups with the momentum and PR like Theranos had. Even if they're tech or scientific literate, they may suspend their disbelief, just in case the startup is a financial hit. I have little sympathy for investors that decide to invest in things thy don't know about, but eve less for investors that knowingly invest in unsound tech, just for a big IPO payout - but then cry fraud when it all falls apart. The "fake it till you make it" image is unfortunately needed to get the big bucks. In order to get funded, you need to act as if you're going to change the world, and convince investors that your product is going to be one of the leading, if not _the_ leading products in the market - doesn't mater if your startup is legit or bogus. This culture unfortunately makes it easy for fraudsters to blend in - but they're just playing the game as designed. It boils down to investors wanting 100x - 1000x returns on relatively small investments. And you don't get that kinds of returns unless the company / startup is of national or global size. To tackle and grow something to that size, you need to convince someone that you're capable of doing so. No-one invests in people that appear to be doubting or lacking confidence. They root for young "super genius" founders that tick off all the right boxes

algaeontoast 7y ago

Maybe the new maxim should be "Fast and Felonious"