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> Any plan will certainly be wrong, so there no point wasting time making one. There's a famous Eisenhower quote that goes something like, "Plans are useless,
by indigochill 5y ago
> Any plan will certainly be wrong, so there no point wasting time making one.
There's a famous Eisenhower quote that goes something like, "Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."
The point being that any single plan is likely not to pan out because of unknowns and surprises, but by going through the process of planning, you have "cached" knowledge about your domain like what the opportunities and threats are and you can use that knowledge to adapt when the specific plan falls through.
- nouveaux 5y agoA plan is very different compared to a business plan. The type of forecasting required in a business plan is good for something predictable, like a McDonald's franchise. Can you imagine trying to forecast the first 10 years for the first version of Google's search engine? It would be ludicrous.
- exdsq 5y agoI bet they had one, Apple did https://historyengine.richmond.edu/episodes/view/5125 https://historyengine.richmond.edu/episodes/view/5125
- onion2k 5y agoThey may well have done, and plenty of other startups will have done too, and their experience of how wrong it would have been is likely to be the sort of evidence that pg has used to inform his position.
- lupire 5y agoAnd now the thread loops https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30320281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30320281