8 ms·
Interesting to see how this aged. By my reckoning: 1 (Single Founder) - people just ignore this one, more or less. 2 (Bad Location) - this one became a horrif
by juped 7y ago
Interesting to see how this aged. By my reckoning:
1 (Single Founder) - people just ignore this one, more or less.
2 (Bad Location) - this one became a horrifying monster that devours everything it touches.
3 (Marginal Niche) - probably the biggest killer, then and now.
4 (Derivative Idea) - meh. People worry about this too much. Is there an unserved market?
5 (Obstinacy) - on point. Serve the market.
6 (Hiring Bad Programmers) - This one also became a horrifying monster. Graham says "In practice what happens is that the business guys choose people they think are good programmers (it says here on his resume that he's a Microsoft Certified Developer) but who aren't." Darkly hilarious in hindsight.
7 (Choosing the Wrong Platform) - meh. People use fucking backend Javascript now.
8 (Slowness in Launching) - Pretty valid.
9 (Launching Too Early) - maybe, I guess.
10 (Having No Specific User in Mind) - absolutely important. You have to be serving a market.
11 (Raising Too Little Money) - this pendulum has swung way over the other way now.
12 (Spending Too Much) - Yes. (Hiring too much. Stop trying to feel like an important funded company.)
13 (Raising Too Much Money) - Something of a subtle point, but still an important one - especially now that you can get too much money thrown at you more easily.
14 (Poor Investor Management) - of course.
15 (Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit) - I'll just note that Graham writes that Google puts users first. Hindsight!
16 (Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty) - Graham means with sales work. Very much true.
17 (Fights Between Founders) - This is why you vest, I guess. Graham was still down on founder vesting at the time.
18 (A Half-Hearted Effort) - I mean, why put in more of an effort if you have a route to fail upward?
- hef19898 7y agoGuilty of number 18, guess why it took two years between wanting to found and actually doing it. Also guilty of number one, kind of. But that is more due to family /economic situation than a lack of a co-founder. Regarding programmer and platform. There are so many cloud solutions out thereby now, unless softwareis your product, there is no need to develop it in-house. Take warehouse management and transportation management. Unless you want to built a new WMS or TMS, but build a service, just use the stuff that exists. Which make the programmer a guy able to appraise and implement said software. And like the programmer, one of the founders should be good at doing that.
- ape4 7y agoBut maybe a cloud "solution" costs too much.
- hef19898 7y agoValid point. Depends on what solution you are looking at, so. One extreme would Office, nobody would develop word, excel or outlook by themselves if that wasn't the product to be sold.
- ratww 7y agoI wouldn't draw the line of writing software at "is software the product to be sold?", but rather at "does writing software gives us a true competitive advantage?". An example: I once worked for a company that was successful in the translation space. Most freelance translators were using Word with some expensive plugins, but the company made the choice to use an app made in-house tailored to translation and that gave them a competitive advantage (faster iteration, less mistakes), so they basically replaced Word with an in-house solution. And their "product" was still the translations, not their hidden software (Of course this was back when Translation Management SaaS weren't popular). Of course I've seen the opposite happen as well: I know a SaaS company that were in the business of selling blogs and CMS software. They had built their own blogging/CMS from scratch in the span of two years, but after six months launching, they pivoted to be a Wordpress host. Whoops, looks like customers just wanted a Wordpress anyway. They're doing ok now btw. (btw: I know that's a terrible example, since they turned out to be a service company rather than a software company). Point is, writing a WMS or TMS would make sense for a non-software company if (and only if) it had completely novel ideas that would put them ahead of the competition. Of course that's a rare thing but still a good space to be explored!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- marban 7y ago19 Not leveraging / building upon an unfair advantage — Network, Contacts, Insider information, Access. 20 Listening to anecdotal stories of others just to find excuses for the failures you made in 1-19.
- baxtr 7y ago19 sounds like consulting BS 20 is just awesome!
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago> Not leveraging / building upon an unfair advantage — Network, Contacts, Insider information, Access. Lol. Pretty much by your definition all advantages are "unfair", but absolutely, yes, if you don't leverage your network and contacts you'll likely fail. But more importantly, I think if you think of "network and contacts" as some sort of shady underworld, you're already screwed. Your network is mostly people you want to work with, and more importantly people who want to work with you. Heck, one major purpose of YC is to give the benefit of an amazing network to folks that otherwise wouldn't have access.
- docuru 7y agoNice updates! Though #1 (Single Founder), in my opinion, they still care unless the founder had the previous success startup, or had a team working with him/her.
- cjbenedikt 7y agoBootstrapped, launched and sold two startups as a single founder. Launched a third one with academic cofounder . Was asked by VC "how much of a Prof is your Prof". Spot on as it turns out too much. Just saying...
- navinsylvester 7y ago> 7. Choosing the Wrong Platform > But there is a trick you could use if you're not a programmer: visit a top computer science department and see what they use in research projects Please don't shoot yourself with this suggestion. From my personal experience Academia is so distant from what is relevant or practical to the industry.
- speedgoose 7y agoIn my experience in European research, you don't get research funding if you don't work on something relevant or practical to the industry.
- xiaolingxiao 7y agoYeah this is specific to Europe, in particular Germany, where companies such as BMW would send engineers to work on a defined research project at a university, and then adopt the research if it pans out. In the US there’s far more leeway, and part of being a good PI is stealthily inserting yourself own agenda into the DOT grant proposal, and those in the DOT will give you the leeway knowing that’s “how it works”
- SeanLuke 7y agoI have the opposite opinion. US funding sources for science and engineering tend to be very government-heavy rather than industry-based; but in my experience those government grants, particularly DoD, emphasize research with specific practical ends. The obvious exception is NSF, but Europe also has similar obvious exceptions at about the same rate. The big difference between the US and Europe, however, is that universities in the US depend on grants to fund PhD students. Many (most?) European countries have national funding programs for their PhDs, which frees up both the students and their advisors to work on whatever fancies them regardless of practicality. France is particularly notorious for this. US academics do not have this luxury. In my field, by far the lion's share of impractical (Fun! I love it! But impractical) work comes from Europe.
- jorblumesea 7y agoFrom what I've seen, this is mainly a European thing. Chinese and US funding is designed to produce practical value, at least in theory.
- ilrwbwrkhv 7y agomarginal niche - avoiding competition goes against what peter thiel speaks about in zero to one (Competition Is for Losers). wonder how the two ideas square up.
- beager 7y agoI mean, they’re the differing opinions of two people who are each successful for reasons that are complex and different.
- garraeth 7y ago> 6 (Hiring Bad Programmers) - This one also became a horrifying monster. Graham says "In practice what happens is that the business guys choose people they think are good programmers (it says here on his resume that he's a Microsoft Certified Developer) but who aren't." Darkly hilarious in hindsight. Anecdotally I see a variant on this a lot. Many times I've seen programmers get hired based on pedigree. "You worked at [xyz company or on abc project] you must be an amazing programmer!"
- api 7y agoI still often see "worked at google" or variations as a credential.
- scarface74 7y agoIf I were hiring for a startup. I would avoid someone who worked at Google. I would want someone who is wide not deep and could handle the stress and juggling that is part of a small company. Google seems to have more “smart people” (tm) who don’t “get things done”.
- jyu 7y agoThe amazing programmer at xyz company on abc project may have a lot of infrastructure and support teams boosting their stats. Start ups can't afford the overhead that makes a programmer amazing. Visa versa, a start up programmer may languish in xyz company.
- s1k3s 7y agoOn the contrary, the amazing programmer at xyz company may have a lot of skills that they developed from working on a large number of different projects, systems, teams and so on, because the large company has provided them with the chances to practice all those skills.
- barrkel 7y agoRoles at large established companies are not normally like those at startups. They tend to be on smaller areas of functionality, more specialized, and with little variety unless you swap teams (and that's almost like getting a new job). Starting something new is quite rare, and if it's done, it needs to integrate into a whole bunch of existing stuff one way or another; whether it's builds, deployment, auth, database, payments, UI stack, whatever - large chunks of the design space have been explored before and are pretty much set in stone unless you have a lot of political capital to spike something new, or the company is dysfunctional and doesn't standardize on anything, so that it doesn't present consistently to its users and its developers are less swappable between projects.
- k__ 7y agoI think these points are all true, importance from bottom to top.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jes5199 7y agoyeah, the bias towards San Francisco got so strong that companies fight over every single college graduate that gets near there, inflating salaries to incredible levels, while tens of thousands of experienced engineers are underemployed in other cities. And the glut of overpaid 23-year-olds hasn’t exactly been good for making SF be a nice place to live
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- skrebbel 7y ago> 2 (Bad Location) - this one became a horrifying monster that devours everything it touches. I can't figure out whether you mean that location matters or that it doesn't. And in the first case, whether you think SF Bay Area is devouring everything it touches due to insane living costs and salary expectations, or whether being elsewhere means losing out on certain perceived network / opportunities.
- jcelerier 7y ago> It probably means the founder couldn't talk any of his friends into starting the company with him. re. 1), fun, since very young I was always told to never ever ever make a company with a friend or any kind of associate as all the experiences in/around my family of people making companies as associates failed spectacularly, while all the 1-person things worked out fine. Wonder if it's a cultural thing.
- TAForObvReasons 7y agoIt's a lot harder to have the hard discussions and make the tough decisions when friends are involved. VCs love multiple founders because it partially mitigates the bus factor and creates a pressure point for the investors to exploit
- redis_mlc 7y agoMainly they love it because free employees.
- icedchai 7y agoThe best startups I've worked for have had multiple founders. It gives you multiple points of view. The company is less likely to make a mistake. And when it does, it's less likely to stay with it. With a single founder, it's very easy to go in the wrong direction. Because the person is stubborn, won't consider the alternatives, and has no "equals" to confer with, it often stays that way... Obviously there are exceptions.