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I don't mean to be too harsh on a well-intended project, but the startup genome reminds me of Feynman's Cargo Cult Science: In the South Seas there is a cargo
by ced 15y ago
I don't mean to be too harsh on a well-intended project, but the startup genome reminds me of Feynman's Cargo Cult Science:
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
http://www.gasresources.net/Cargo%20Cult%20Science%20-%20by%20Richard%20Feynman.htm http://www.gasresources.net/Cargo%20Cult%20Science%20-%20by%...
There's a reason why scientists use controlled studies to disentangle causal effects from mere correlation. I'm sure there is some value in the startup genome for people with the right mental framework, but I would be careful about interpreting the data as "guidelines for success".
- todayiamme 15y agoIf you think about it isn't the success of YC and other venture firms predicated upon doing something roughly the same?
- ced 15y agoIn as much as you're trying to predict which startup will succeed, the data from the genome project is perfectly acceptable. The problem comes when you decide "I will do X because that's what successful startups do." If you don't understand why they do it, then it's a cargo-cult. But maybe... Maybe imitating successful people is the best you can do when you don't know what you're doing? You have a point, and I softened up the language in my post.
- danielharan 15y agoMaybe imitating successful people still leads to success, even though you have no idea why it does. Hell, maybe they're imitating their mentors too.
- Alex3917 15y ago"Maybe imitating successful people is the best you can do when you don't know what you're doing?" I've done this before with good results. I think the ideal strategy is to pick someone better than you, imitate them, and then once you surpass them to pick a new person to imitate, and so on. It's only after imitating five or six different people that you're able to develop your own theories, which is ultimately necessary if you want to reach true mastery.
- davidw 15y agoI don't know... I've been walking around in a polo shirt and shorts and my millions still haven't materialized :-)
- todayiamme 15y agoThank you for doing that. It's just really rare that people admit their mistakes and actually challenge their assumptions. None of us are right all the time, but we love pretending otherwise. So, thank you. To tell you the truth I don't agree with any of this. I think that we're dealing with human beings and you just can't find data on this. What you're searching for is a set of emotional traits that leads to this sort of behaviour, but identifying those traits is something really, really hard (try identifying the traits behind Endymion by Keats. We all know it when we feel it, but can we identify it down to certain x variables of y quantities [whatever they may be]? I really don't think so]. Defining them is harder still ( i.e. narrowing them down to 1 pint of magical substance A + another quart of shiny liquid B + a sword that has been dipped into the holy grail...). So, in my mind all you can do is learn and try. Try again. I hope that this makes sense.
- edanm 15y agoJust because YC invests successfully doesn't mean this research will be good. It's possible that finding common traits to successful entrepreneurs is achievable, but just wasn't achieved by this team. NOTE: I'm just pointing this out. I haven't read the report, and even if I had, I still wouldn't be even close to qualified to talk about whether it is valid or not.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- syllogism 15y agoThis is a small focus-group study that reports qualitative conclusions. It's not like they're trying to calculate statistical significance or something. It's aimed to be a better version of the "folk wisdom" that pops up on sites such as these. Focus group studies have value. They're a kind of evidence that pushes weakly across a very broad front. Controlled studies are a scalpel: they produce high-confidence answers to very specific questions. Sometimes instead you need an axe. You don't know what specific question to ask, and sitting there doing controlled studies with no real clue about what's going on isn't going to be productive. I'll put it this way: when you don't know much about a subject, there's an almost limitless number of hypotheses to consider. It doesn't make sense to prematurely promote one of those to the status of "working theory" and start doing properly controlled studies to test it. You have no real reason to believe it in the first place.