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> The only thing they were good at was finding people with problems. It seems to me the only thing that matters. It's certainly the bulk of the matter. Your av
by adventured 7y ago
> The only thing they were good at was finding people with problems. It seems to me the only thing that matters.
It's certainly the bulk of the matter. Your average convenience store is nothing special, it's not a remarkable operation, it doesn't have geniuses running it, it has no overly interesting technology, it's not very innovative, it's not inventing the next great thing. It's doing nothing other than meeting a simple need - solving a problem - that its customers have, and frequently that's a boring, uninspiring business. There's definitely nothing wrong with that, the world functions because of tens of millions of uninspiring, boring businesses.
That is your average start-up, too. Tech founders - in my experience and observation - merely like to believe they're special and doing something exceptional versus the typical business. It's almost entirely a false sense of place in the universe, comically inflated ego (and it's why a show like Silicon Valley works so well).
- asdfman123 7y agoThat's my theory on why Theranos failed. People talk about Silicon Valley like co-founders are using raw genius to solve impossible problems. But the reason untrained twenty year olds can run startups is the problems they're solving ultimately aren't that hard. Building a web application is something people in offices do every day. Now, once those web applications start scaling up and your core product fundamentally works there are certainly hard problems to be solved, but at that point you can start hiring adults, PhDs and people with deep technical expertise. Theranos got into such hot water because you can't just jazz-hands your way out of solving deep scientific problems, like you can cover up the fact that your web application barely works (but will totally work in three months).