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I read this post so many times when I was working on my startup (https://first.io https://first.io). I particularly love this quote: "Startups rarely die in mid

I read this post so many times when I was working on my startup (https://first.io https://first.io). I particularly love this quote: "Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!" In fact, I even had it as a banner on my desktop for a while: "JUST KEEP TYPING!"

Uehreka 7y ago
Not a startup, and not necessarily dying, but here’s a personal anecdote of mine that goes against this: In 2016 I was working on a UX team, making improvements to components that were used across the entire front-end of the new platform we were building. One spring afternoon I was working on a new hierarchical selector widget while a quarterly executive town hall was playing on the projector in our team room. Midway through writing an AngularJS directive, our head of product surprise announced that we were pivoting and that the platform we had been building for the past year was going to be mostly thrown out. I basically closed my editor and never touched that component again. The upshot here is that in startups or big companies, change can come very suddenly. And when big problems with a strategy are only known to those at the top, it makes the sudden changes even more surprising for those down the ladder. If you’ve got a bad board, you might find out about a change that you need to make the day that you need to make it.
codingdave 7y ago
I do wonder if pg would write that again in 2019. We've seen many startups die while charging forward before finding product/market fit. Talking to customers comes before typing.
bennyelv 7y ago
It's a pretty meaningless piece of advice if you're not going to be able to pay your rent/mortgage this month because the funding has run out.
fzeroracer 7y ago
It's interesting, because 'just keep typing' is often among one of the worst bits of advice you can give a software engineer. More code doesn't mean good code, nor does repeatedly slamming your head against a problem work towards actually solving said problem. I think a lot of what I see in this post is a mixture of survivorship bias/selection bias. We want to believe that the reasons startups succeeded was because they just kept trying, while not seeing the many that did die mid keystroke due to any number of reasons.

Uehreka 7y ago

Not a startup, and not necessarily dying, but here’s a personal anecdote of mine that goes against this: In 2016 I was working on a UX team, making improvements to components that were used across the entire front-end of the new platform we were building. One spring afternoon I was working on a new hierarchical selector widget while a quarterly executive town hall was playing on the projector in our team room. Midway through writing an AngularJS directive, our head of product surprise announced that we were pivoting and that the platform we had been building for the past year was going to be mostly thrown out. I basically closed my editor and never touched that component again. The upshot here is that in startups or big companies, change can come very suddenly. And when big problems with a strategy are only known to those at the top, it makes the sudden changes even more surprising for those down the ladder. If you’ve got a bad board, you might find out about a change that you need to make the day that you need to make it.

codingdave 7y ago

I do wonder if pg would write that again in 2019. We've seen many startups die while charging forward before finding product/market fit. Talking to customers comes before typing.

bennyelv 7y ago

It's a pretty meaningless piece of advice if you're not going to be able to pay your rent/mortgage this month because the funding has run out.

fzeroracer 7y ago

It's interesting, because 'just keep typing' is often among one of the worst bits of advice you can give a software engineer. More code doesn't mean good code, nor does repeatedly slamming your head against a problem work towards actually solving said problem. I think a lot of what I see in this post is a mixture of survivorship bias/selection bias. We want to believe that the reasons startups succeeded was because they just kept trying, while not seeing the many that did die mid keystroke due to any number of reasons.