6 ms·

Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics

46 points by rjyoungling 6y ago

OliverGilan 6y ago
> To validate your hypotheses as quickly as possible with as little money as possible and the try and create experiments with asymmetrical risk. > Because the world is so complex, you’ll often have an answer faster by just building some prototype of the hypothesis you want to test. > If it catches on, you can always scale later. I think one of the coolest real-world examples of this in practice is how Facebook runs thousands of mini-experiments with different users. Facebook is known for having one of the best data science departments in the world and when they want to change or add a feature of the website they do it for a small subset of users and see what the response is like. If the users seem to like it they can repeat the experiment with a larger subset of users. If the users don't like the change there's no big risk because only a few users were exposed. Contrast this to how Snapchat completely changed their UI for nearly every user all at once and got a ton of negative feedback for it. That was a complete UI overhaul which is different than FB and their hundreds of mini-changes but the idea is similar.
- FeeJai 6y ago
  > That was a complete UI overhaul which is different than FB and their hundreds of mini-changes but the idea is similar. The problem with facebook's approach is that you can get stuck in local optima and it might be hard to break out. That is why Facebook has done some big changes in the past as well, not just incremental improvements
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - rjyoungling 6y ago
    Yeah, I think that's a fair point. It's probably a good idea to introduce a little chaos into the order, and try things that don't make sense. Difficult to do though in huge companies. Which is why most disruptive innovation ends up being acquired by those companies rather than created by them. On way to address that issue seems to be to allow a separate arm to essentially act as a startup, preferably far away from the main company.
- Geee 6y ago
  If their approach worked, Facebook would actually be good.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Good for whom is the question. I suspect they’re quite good for what they’re seeking.
  - xwolfi 6y ago
    I mean, they can probably give you a toothpaste advertisement the day before you run out, in this regard it's good for its official purpose. You may think it should better the world by challenging obtuse viewpoints and spreading truth but that s asking a lot for a marketing platform. You wouldnt ask that of JCDecaux panels on your bus stop, right?
- rjyoungling 6y ago
  Author here. Love that! Thanks for sharing that example.
- mint2 6y ago
  Micro optimizations are a good way to find and stay in a shifting local optima of just the KPIs you track and get trapped there while missing the big picture.
FeeJai 6y ago
This reminds me of a CNN video I saw today [1]. Maybe this is what makes the difference between statisticians trying to predict the election and the method used by "Trafalgar Group" who try to understand each states regulations and specifics to make rule based predictions, instead of extrapolating from a big pool of data. In two days we will know who was right. [1] Pollster who predicted Trump's 2016 win makes 2020 prediction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BOhRCeoMzM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BOhRCeoMzM
- rjyoungling 6y ago
  I was not aware of that (dutch citizen). Thanks for sharing, that's extremely fascinating. I'll look into it.
_Microft 6y ago
Has anyone discovered a way to bring the content into a form that is halfway bearable to read? Neither zoom nor reader mode of Firefox helps. Edit: before you spend time trying this: it does not have a proper printing stylesheet either.
- LeonB 6y ago
  I’ve only seen it on mobile and it seems fine there. So consider narrowing your browser window? But I’m not sure what the specific issue is.
- peterburkimsher 6y ago
  I tried putting it through Archive, which can be useful for some sites, but I agree it doesn't fix the CSS. https://archive.is/8qeJD https://archive.is/8qeJD
  - rjyoungling 6y ago
    How can I improve the CSS for you?
- rjyoungling 6y ago
  Author here. Could you let me know what's wrong so I can fix it. It looks solid on my end unfortunately.
  - projektfu 6y ago
    My issue on the iPhone SE 2 was an obnoxious overlay that hid its close button.
    - rjyoungling 6y ago
      That's annoying. Was it the pop up, or the red hello bar?
      - projektfu 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
justiceforsaas 6y ago
The basic premise of this article seems to be that, yes, entrepreneurship is not physics, mainly because human behavior is harder to model than things like motion and forces. So the TLDR (according to the author) is: "The point is not to ‘not fail’, the point is to fail quickly and fail often in non-lethal ways so you have pragmatic, real-world knowledge to help you guide your decisions." I liked the part where they also talk about "asymmetrical risk" and creating experiments where you may risk 10% of your capital, but if that thing works, it will double your business. I think this applies to all aspects of entrepreneurship, not just building the product. For example, I write about acquisition channels that consistently work for founders [1] and found the most successful ones place "small bets" that can potentially have "big results". Like mentioning their idea in a FB community where they could get 1000s of potentially interested people. Time invested: 10 minutes. Results: 1000+ potential users. Not bad. Nassim Taleb also talks about this "asymmetrical risk" concept [2] and a lot of his "Antifragile" book was about it. I'm really curious who originally came with this concept (it seems to go by different names, the OP calls it "asymmetrical risk", Taleb calls it "convexity), and it seems the first person who came up with it was someone from the finance industry decades ago. [1] https://firstpayingusers.com https://firstpayingusers.com [2] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/articles/2013/07/16/nassim-nicholas-taleb-to-prevail-in-an-uncertain-world-get-convex https://www.advisorperspectives.com/articles/2013/07/16/nass...
- rjyoungling 6y ago
  Author here. Thanks for your kind comment. Excited to go through the resources you've provided, tomorrow. As for who came up with asymmetrical risk, great question. I'm not sure where I heard it first? I think it might have been Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures.
jswrenn 6y ago
If the concept of ergodicity introduced here intrigues you, I highly recommend reading the Nature paper "The Ergodicity Problem In Economics": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0732-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0732-0
- rjyoungling 6y ago
  Ole is absolutely incredible. Funny guy as well.
ISL 6y ago
It is difficult to believe that a business plan is useless. It provides a framework for evaluating a business and its progress. If the plan is wrong, an underlying assumption is incorrect.
- rjyoungling 6y ago
  Perhaps useless was too harsh. But the point I was trying to make is that in a situation with so much uncertainty and where the downsides are constrained, it's better to act and get real world feedback. Doubly dangerous to blindly believe in the plan and execute it well if it's flawed. You're right about your conclusion though. Trouble is, it's often only possible to tell ex-post-facto.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > It is difficult to believe that a business plan is useless. It provides a framework for evaluating a business and its progress. They all show hockey-stick growth up and to the right. Not many businesses succeed by that measure. And the goal of a lot of business plans is not to plan a business, but to plan to get funding. Big difference. And a lot of businesses pivot after realizing they were totally wrong. > If the plan is wrong, an underlying assumption is incorrect. Incorrect, or made up. Nobody has perfect information beforehand. Both Juicero and WeWork were known to be business failures from the earliest days, by people who didn't even have to read any financial reports.
  - rjyoungling 6y ago
    In fairness, silly ideas can work. Take Dyson, Nespresso, or Red Bull for example. I think it's tempting to succumb to hindsight bias. I'm sure that had Juicero succeeded and become the Apple of juicing, people would've been saying how obvious it was.
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      I thought of those. Nespresso has a restaurant-grade product that competes favorably with Starbucks at a querter of the price. Red Bull is kind of a sleep replacement/stimulant, which a lot of people needed pre-corona. Americans somehow were willing to sacrifice their sleep for their job/commute. Dyson vacuums - that I can't explain. Maybe their high prices signal them as better quality. Maybe somebody can explain that?
yumraj 6y ago
Business plans and financial models are useless, yet they are not. They force the entrepreneur to put some level of deep thought into the entire endeavor and create some sort of initial hypothesis. Even if it proves to be entirely incorrect in future, it provides a very good starting point, that you can keep iterating upon as you learn more. Most of the times you don't know what you don't know and the business plans and financial models force you to think the entire thing through and start getting a feel for what you know and what all you perhaps don't know. Edit: to be very clear, I’m not suggesting that one develops an old style 50 page business plan. I’m simply suggesting that one must have at least a basic understating of the business, the need, the opportunity, the revenue model and so on. It’s a business after all.
- rjyoungling 6y ago
  That's a fair point. Different schools of thought here... but the risk seems to be that one can overanalyse it and spend too much time fantasising about something that is fundamentally uncertain. It is context dependent though. Very different if you're building Snapchat vs. SpaceX
- ahartmetz 6y ago
  Someone summarized that as "Plans are worthless, but planning is essential" :)
  - yumraj 6y ago
    Yes, exactly..
  - projektfu 6y ago
    Eisenhower, but he claimed to be quoting someone else.
  - rjyoungling 6y ago
    Very good aphorism. Thanks for sharing.
dvt 6y ago
Apart from the God-awful layout, the article is pretty light on anything useful or actionable. > I need merely two variables [...] resulting in a simple yet accurate model. It's accurate-enough, but not accurate accurate. This is why things like quantum gravity are being researched. Maybe I'm looking too deeply into this analogy, but I think it's a really bad one. > In highly complex systems such as business, things like butterfly effects can cause massive distortions rendering our models flawed. Most businesses fail due to a lack of product-market fit. This has nothing to do with chaos theory or initial conditions. In fact, I'd say if you have product-market fit, the market tends to be very lenient of initial conditions. > In order to perfectly predict the weather, you’d need incredible amounts of data and an equally overwhelming number of data points and then somehow synthesize that into an accurate prediction. I'm pretty sure that we're still not sure if you can even actually predict the weather -- like, ever (we aren't sure if Navier–Stokes is smoothly solvable in 3D). All these physics analogies are just shallow and inaccurate. > It’s easy for the takeaway to be human behavior is difficult, business is complex, all data is meaningless, we can’t apply a scientific process at all, let’s wing it. And while there are people who lean heavily on intuition (Gary Vaynerchuk comes to mind) I believe if that’s the takeaway, the pendulum has swung too far out of whack. I'm not sure why this is "out of whack" -- to me, this seems like a perfectly valid strategy. As I get older, I value intuition more and more. There's a reason Warren Buffet's moniker is the "Oracle of Omaha."
- rjyoungling 6y ago
  Thanks for your comment. > lay out. I've been told that in this thread. I'll try to improve. Thank you for letting me know. > Not accurate accurate True. But it would be overkill to use complex equations for 1 dimensional motion. The degree of error is negligible in that context. > markets tend to be lenient of initial conditions post PMF That's a very fascinating point, you bring up. But I'm not sure how one can separate initial conditions from PMF. PMF takes initial market conditions into account by definition. At least, if we're going by Don Valentine or Andy Rachleff's definition. > shallow, inaccurate analogy I'm not sure how to respond to that. > not sure why this is "out of whack" Perhaps I didn't express myself well enough. I was referring to fully negating any utility data might have and solely relying on intuition. My point was that there's a middle ground but it's further toward intuition than most people think in our data driven world. I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the essay. I do appreciate you reading it as well as the time you took to give me feedback. I'll try to use it in order to improve future work. Thank you.
gist 6y ago
The OP 'studies what makes companies successful'. The issue is you are only studying the lucky sperm ones (if we take that sentence at face value; maybe 'they' do) as opposed to the complete set of companies. And also you'd never be sure anyway since people are connected to people and you'd never know how a connection resulted in success (vs. some other factor). It's an art and luck it's not (as a point was made) 'science'. Now that said some thing can work to insure success or make it more likely. Take the author here. His firm has 'feynman' in their name. On HN who from what I can tell worships Feynman (I didn't even know who he was prior to HN) that will work. In another place it would have the same impact of using 'warby' in 'warby' parker. Meaning good but not stop the presses. (It's clever but some might also say it's annoying to use a cheap trick like that not the same either (it's all nuance) as calling your bagel place 'einstein bagels' (there is one or was one). I have been 'studying' (you could say) both successful and failed companies for probably longer than most HN readers have been around. Best I will say it's hard work, luck, and of course timing as the major factors. Separately they don't teach any of that when I was in of those really good business schools that people would die to go to.
- rjyoungling 6y ago
  I can assure you I didn't have Feynman in the name of my company to score some extra upvotes on HN. Not that that would even help btw. If you browse through my submission history, you'll see that most of my posts get <10 upvotes. It's interesting that you accuse my company of not taking survivorship bias into account yet here you are falling victim to retrofitting.
  - gist 6y ago
    > I can assure you I didn't have Feynman in the name of my company to score some extra upvotes on HN Ok so why do you have 'Feynman' in your company name then? And I didn't say it was for getting upvotes either. I implied (or meant to imply) that it was as a way to get attention by inventing some kind of fake association. The fact that it didn't do anything before does not mean it has no value (as a test). > yet here you are falling victim to retrofitting Explain what you mean by 'retrofitting' in this context I don't understand that meaning here. You are familiar with the use of celebrities who associate with products. The idea is that someone is more likely to pay attention and consider if they think a celebrity is involved or associated than a random person. Does not mean it will always work or that you can succeed without it. It means in many situations it will get you more than w/o it as always 'it all depends'. Paul Newman's salad dressing came out in 1982. By Paul having his name on it he got instant recognition in the press and in supermarkets. Doesn't mean people would buy it if it wasn't good but more likely to take a chance as a result of that name a shopper would stop and say 'hmm what's this'.
projektfu 6y ago
Please consider trying this: Paragraph 1: Topic paragraph, introduce topic and question. Paragraph 2: Summarize argument. Paragraphs 3-n: Topic/assertion sentence. Support assertion/argument. Last sentence may summarize support. These paragraphs should follow the overall structure but sometimes you will need more than one paragraph to support something you suggested in the second paragraph. Paragraph n+1: Review conclusion and some salient corollaries. Paragraphs n+m: Discussion of implications of conclusion. I read through paragraph after paragraph and I have no idea what your argument was, where it was going. If you have lots of single-sentence paragraphs, you're probably frustrating and confusing your reader.
- lambdatronics 6y ago
  The blog's style appears deliberate. I doubt you and I are his target audience, though. Check out this exchange: https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/comments/jl02ba/useless_inventions_is_your_product_a_solution_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/comments/jl02ba/useless_i...
  - rjyoungling 6y ago
    hmm.. that person came from a place of bad faith. Clearly, I do not shy away from productive discourse as long as it's done respectfully. But if your first comment immediately starts with name calling...
- rjyoungling 6y ago
  Thanks projektfu! That's extremely helpful feedback. I'll try to use it to improve future work.
  - bullen 6y ago
    I agree with projektfu, there are lots of good ideas that don't sum up to a punchline, I wrote a very introverted reply that "unfortunately" became a pitch, but it's more concentrated: http://move.rupy.se/file/park_engine.html http://move.rupy.se/file/park_engine.html
arbol 6y ago
I found the layout of this article too annoying to finish reading it.

46 points by rjyoungling 6y ago

> To validate your hypotheses as quickly as possible with as little money as possible and the try and create experiments with asymmetrical risk. > Because the world is so complex, you’ll often have an answer faster by just building some prototype of the hypothesis you want to test. > If it catches on, you can always scale later. I think one of the coolest real-world examples of this in practice is how Facebook runs thousands of mini-experiments with different users. Facebook is known for having one of the best data science departments in the world and when they want to change or add a feature of the website they do it for a small subset of users and see what the response is like. If the users seem to like it they can repeat the experiment with a larger subset of users. If the users don't like the change there's no big risk because only a few users were exposed. Contrast this to how Snapchat completely changed their UI for nearly every user all at once and got a ton of negative feedback for it. That was a complete UI overhaul which is different than FB and their hundreds of mini-changes but the idea is similar.

FeeJai 6y ago
> That was a complete UI overhaul which is different than FB and their hundreds of mini-changes but the idea is similar. The problem with facebook's approach is that you can get stuck in local optima and it might be hard to break out. That is why Facebook has done some big changes in the past as well, not just incremental improvements
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rjyoungling 6y ago
  Yeah, I think that's a fair point. It's probably a good idea to introduce a little chaos into the order, and try things that don't make sense. Difficult to do though in huge companies. Which is why most disruptive innovation ends up being acquired by those companies rather than created by them. On way to address that issue seems to be to allow a separate arm to essentially act as a startup, preferably far away from the main company.
Geee 6y ago
If their approach worked, Facebook would actually be good.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  Good for whom is the question. I suspect they’re quite good for what they’re seeking.
- xwolfi 6y ago
  I mean, they can probably give you a toothpaste advertisement the day before you run out, in this regard it's good for its official purpose. You may think it should better the world by challenging obtuse viewpoints and spreading truth but that s asking a lot for a marketing platform. You wouldnt ask that of JCDecaux panels on your bus stop, right?
rjyoungling 6y ago
Author here. Love that! Thanks for sharing that example.
mint2 6y ago
Micro optimizations are a good way to find and stay in a shifting local optima of just the KPIs you track and get trapped there while missing the big picture.

FeeJai 6y ago

This reminds me of a CNN video I saw today [1]. Maybe this is what makes the difference between statisticians trying to predict the election and the method used by "Trafalgar Group" who try to understand each states regulations and specifics to make rule based predictions, instead of extrapolating from a big pool of data. In two days we will know who was right. [1] Pollster who predicted Trump's 2016 win makes 2020 prediction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BOhRCeoMzM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BOhRCeoMzM

rjyoungling 6y ago
I was not aware of that (dutch citizen). Thanks for sharing, that's extremely fascinating. I'll look into it.

_Microft 6y ago

Has anyone discovered a way to bring the content into a form that is halfway bearable to read? Neither zoom nor reader mode of Firefox helps. Edit: before you spend time trying this: it does not have a proper printing stylesheet either.

LeonB 6y ago
I’ve only seen it on mobile and it seems fine there. So consider narrowing your browser window? But I’m not sure what the specific issue is.
peterburkimsher 6y ago
I tried putting it through Archive, which can be useful for some sites, but I agree it doesn't fix the CSS. https://archive.is/8qeJD https://archive.is/8qeJD
- rjyoungling 6y ago
  How can I improve the CSS for you?
rjyoungling 6y ago
Author here. Could you let me know what's wrong so I can fix it. It looks solid on my end unfortunately.
- projektfu 6y ago
  My issue on the iPhone SE 2 was an obnoxious overlay that hid its close button.
  - rjyoungling 6y ago
    That's annoying. Was it the pop up, or the red hello bar?
    - projektfu 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

justiceforsaas 6y ago

The basic premise of this article seems to be that, yes, entrepreneurship is not physics, mainly because human behavior is harder to model than things like motion and forces. So the TLDR (according to the author) is: "The point is not to ‘not fail’, the point is to fail quickly and fail often in non-lethal ways so you have pragmatic, real-world knowledge to help you guide your decisions." I liked the part where they also talk about "asymmetrical risk" and creating experiments where you may risk 10% of your capital, but if that thing works, it will double your business. I think this applies to all aspects of entrepreneurship, not just building the product. For example, I write about acquisition channels that consistently work for founders [1] and found the most successful ones place "small bets" that can potentially have "big results". Like mentioning their idea in a FB community where they could get 1000s of potentially interested people. Time invested: 10 minutes. Results: 1000+ potential users. Not bad. Nassim Taleb also talks about this "asymmetrical risk" concept [2] and a lot of his "Antifragile" book was about it. I'm really curious who originally came with this concept (it seems to go by different names, the OP calls it "asymmetrical risk", Taleb calls it "convexity), and it seems the first person who came up with it was someone from the finance industry decades ago. [1] https://firstpayingusers.com https://firstpayingusers.com [2] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/articles/2013/07/16/nassim-nicholas-taleb-to-prevail-in-an-uncertain-world-get-convex https://www.advisorperspectives.com/articles/2013/07/16/nass...

rjyoungling 6y ago
Author here. Thanks for your kind comment. Excited to go through the resources you've provided, tomorrow. As for who came up with asymmetrical risk, great question. I'm not sure where I heard it first? I think it might have been Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures.

jswrenn 6y ago

If the concept of ergodicity introduced here intrigues you, I highly recommend reading the Nature paper "The Ergodicity Problem In Economics": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0732-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0732-0

rjyoungling 6y ago
Ole is absolutely incredible. Funny guy as well.

ISL 6y ago

It is difficult to believe that a business plan is useless. It provides a framework for evaluating a business and its progress. If the plan is wrong, an underlying assumption is incorrect.

rjyoungling 6y ago
Perhaps useless was too harsh. But the point I was trying to make is that in a situation with so much uncertainty and where the downsides are constrained, it's better to act and get real world feedback. Doubly dangerous to blindly believe in the plan and execute it well if it's flawed. You're right about your conclusion though. Trouble is, it's often only possible to tell ex-post-facto.
redis_mlc 6y ago
> It is difficult to believe that a business plan is useless. It provides a framework for evaluating a business and its progress. They all show hockey-stick growth up and to the right. Not many businesses succeed by that measure. And the goal of a lot of business plans is not to plan a business, but to plan to get funding. Big difference. And a lot of businesses pivot after realizing they were totally wrong. > If the plan is wrong, an underlying assumption is incorrect. Incorrect, or made up. Nobody has perfect information beforehand. Both Juicero and WeWork were known to be business failures from the earliest days, by people who didn't even have to read any financial reports.
- rjyoungling 6y ago
  In fairness, silly ideas can work. Take Dyson, Nespresso, or Red Bull for example. I think it's tempting to succumb to hindsight bias. I'm sure that had Juicero succeeded and become the Apple of juicing, people would've been saying how obvious it was.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    I thought of those. Nespresso has a restaurant-grade product that competes favorably with Starbucks at a querter of the price. Red Bull is kind of a sleep replacement/stimulant, which a lot of people needed pre-corona. Americans somehow were willing to sacrifice their sleep for their job/commute. Dyson vacuums - that I can't explain. Maybe their high prices signal them as better quality. Maybe somebody can explain that?

yumraj 6y ago

Business plans and financial models are useless, yet they are not. They force the entrepreneur to put some level of deep thought into the entire endeavor and create some sort of initial hypothesis. Even if it proves to be entirely incorrect in future, it provides a very good starting point, that you can keep iterating upon as you learn more. Most of the times you don't know what you don't know and the business plans and financial models force you to think the entire thing through and start getting a feel for what you know and what all you perhaps don't know. Edit: to be very clear, I’m not suggesting that one develops an old style 50 page business plan. I’m simply suggesting that one must have at least a basic understating of the business, the need, the opportunity, the revenue model and so on. It’s a business after all.

rjyoungling 6y ago
That's a fair point. Different schools of thought here... but the risk seems to be that one can overanalyse it and spend too much time fantasising about something that is fundamentally uncertain. It is context dependent though. Very different if you're building Snapchat vs. SpaceX
ahartmetz 6y ago
Someone summarized that as "Plans are worthless, but planning is essential" :)
- yumraj 6y ago
  Yes, exactly..
- projektfu 6y ago
  Eisenhower, but he claimed to be quoting someone else.
- rjyoungling 6y ago
  Very good aphorism. Thanks for sharing.

dvt 6y ago

Apart from the God-awful layout, the article is pretty light on anything useful or actionable. > I need merely two variables [...] resulting in a simple yet accurate model. It's accurate-enough, but not accurate accurate. This is why things like quantum gravity are being researched. Maybe I'm looking too deeply into this analogy, but I think it's a really bad one. > In highly complex systems such as business, things like butterfly effects can cause massive distortions rendering our models flawed. Most businesses fail due to a lack of product-market fit. This has nothing to do with chaos theory or initial conditions. In fact, I'd say if you have product-market fit, the market tends to be very lenient of initial conditions. > In order to perfectly predict the weather, you’d need incredible amounts of data and an equally overwhelming number of data points and then somehow synthesize that into an accurate prediction. I'm pretty sure that we're still not sure if you can even actually predict the weather -- like, ever (we aren't sure if Navier–Stokes is smoothly solvable in 3D). All these physics analogies are just shallow and inaccurate. > It’s easy for the takeaway to be human behavior is difficult, business is complex, all data is meaningless, we can’t apply a scientific process at all, let’s wing it. And while there are people who lean heavily on intuition (Gary Vaynerchuk comes to mind) I believe if that’s the takeaway, the pendulum has swung too far out of whack. I'm not sure why this is "out of whack" -- to me, this seems like a perfectly valid strategy. As I get older, I value intuition more and more. There's a reason Warren Buffet's moniker is the "Oracle of Omaha."

rjyoungling 6y ago
Thanks for your comment. > lay out. I've been told that in this thread. I'll try to improve. Thank you for letting me know. > Not accurate accurate True. But it would be overkill to use complex equations for 1 dimensional motion. The degree of error is negligible in that context. > markets tend to be lenient of initial conditions post PMF That's a very fascinating point, you bring up. But I'm not sure how one can separate initial conditions from PMF. PMF takes initial market conditions into account by definition. At least, if we're going by Don Valentine or Andy Rachleff's definition. > shallow, inaccurate analogy I'm not sure how to respond to that. > not sure why this is "out of whack" Perhaps I didn't express myself well enough. I was referring to fully negating any utility data might have and solely relying on intuition. My point was that there's a middle ground but it's further toward intuition than most people think in our data driven world. I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the essay. I do appreciate you reading it as well as the time you took to give me feedback. I'll try to use it in order to improve future work. Thank you.

gist 6y ago

The OP 'studies what makes companies successful'. The issue is you are only studying the lucky sperm ones (if we take that sentence at face value; maybe 'they' do) as opposed to the complete set of companies. And also you'd never be sure anyway since people are connected to people and you'd never know how a connection resulted in success (vs. some other factor). It's an art and luck it's not (as a point was made) 'science'. Now that said some thing can work to insure success or make it more likely. Take the author here. His firm has 'feynman' in their name. On HN who from what I can tell worships Feynman (I didn't even know who he was prior to HN) that will work. In another place it would have the same impact of using 'warby' in 'warby' parker. Meaning good but not stop the presses. (It's clever but some might also say it's annoying to use a cheap trick like that not the same either (it's all nuance) as calling your bagel place 'einstein bagels' (there is one or was one). I have been 'studying' (you could say) both successful and failed companies for probably longer than most HN readers have been around. Best I will say it's hard work, luck, and of course timing as the major factors. Separately they don't teach any of that when I was in of those really good business schools that people would die to go to.

rjyoungling 6y ago
I can assure you I didn't have Feynman in the name of my company to score some extra upvotes on HN. Not that that would even help btw. If you browse through my submission history, you'll see that most of my posts get <10 upvotes. It's interesting that you accuse my company of not taking survivorship bias into account yet here you are falling victim to retrofitting.
- gist 6y ago
  > I can assure you I didn't have Feynman in the name of my company to score some extra upvotes on HN Ok so why do you have 'Feynman' in your company name then? And I didn't say it was for getting upvotes either. I implied (or meant to imply) that it was as a way to get attention by inventing some kind of fake association. The fact that it didn't do anything before does not mean it has no value (as a test). > yet here you are falling victim to retrofitting Explain what you mean by 'retrofitting' in this context I don't understand that meaning here. You are familiar with the use of celebrities who associate with products. The idea is that someone is more likely to pay attention and consider if they think a celebrity is involved or associated than a random person. Does not mean it will always work or that you can succeed without it. It means in many situations it will get you more than w/o it as always 'it all depends'. Paul Newman's salad dressing came out in 1982. By Paul having his name on it he got instant recognition in the press and in supermarkets. Doesn't mean people would buy it if it wasn't good but more likely to take a chance as a result of that name a shopper would stop and say 'hmm what's this'.

projektfu 6y ago

Please consider trying this: Paragraph 1: Topic paragraph, introduce topic and question. Paragraph 2: Summarize argument. Paragraphs 3-n: Topic/assertion sentence. Support assertion/argument. Last sentence may summarize support. These paragraphs should follow the overall structure but sometimes you will need more than one paragraph to support something you suggested in the second paragraph. Paragraph n+1: Review conclusion and some salient corollaries. Paragraphs n+m: Discussion of implications of conclusion. I read through paragraph after paragraph and I have no idea what your argument was, where it was going. If you have lots of single-sentence paragraphs, you're probably frustrating and confusing your reader.

lambdatronics 6y ago
The blog's style appears deliberate. I doubt you and I are his target audience, though. Check out this exchange: https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/comments/jl02ba/useless_inventions_is_your_product_a_solution_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/comments/jl02ba/useless_i...
- rjyoungling 6y ago
  hmm.. that person came from a place of bad faith. Clearly, I do not shy away from productive discourse as long as it's done respectfully. But if your first comment immediately starts with name calling...
rjyoungling 6y ago
Thanks projektfu! That's extremely helpful feedback. I'll try to use it to improve future work.
- bullen 6y ago
  I agree with projektfu, there are lots of good ideas that don't sum up to a punchline, I wrote a very introverted reply that "unfortunately" became a pitch, but it's more concentrated: http://move.rupy.se/file/park_engine.html http://move.rupy.se/file/park_engine.html

arbol 6y ago

I found the layout of this article too annoying to finish reading it.