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I'm honestly more interested in studying the most ineffective founders. We spend too much time focusing on survivors, when I feel like the best learning comes

• boringg 4y ago
  I'd bet it's fundamentally misunderstanding the market that they go into. So many companies/founders rip the same playbook and go headstrong into a market without understanding all the nuances. That's obviously a gross oversimplification but if I was to choose the number 1 reason that's my guess.
• aleksiy123 4y ago
  Probably a good point. Like that anecdote about the studying the WW2 planes that went down vs the ones that made it back to see where to add more armour.
  • theptip 4y ago
    To be fair, in that anecdote you are extracting meaningful information just from observing the literal survivors, which sort of points in the opposite direction to the GP’s point. I’d say examining survivors is useful and can provide information, but you need to be careful to correct for survivorship bias. But that’s not to say you cannot gain any information from examining cohorts of survivors. I think most people probably under-correct for survivorship bias so it’s good general advice to highlight it.
    • ip26 4y ago
      The insight of the plane story is turning it around, though, to indirectly study the failures (which were not available for study) “What is it the successful planes do? Well, they didn’t get shot here (points)”
• marcus_holmes 4y ago
  Simple science: you need a control group. The whole "25 things that successful people do" completely ignores the entire question of whether unsuccessful people also do those things, and therefore whether those things have anything to do with success. Survivor bias is so prevalent in any thinking about "what makes someone successful?" that yes, it would be much more effective at this point to consider "what makes someone unsuccessful". I'm willing to bet that the things we consider to be signs of success are actually table-stakes, in that both successful and unsuccessful founders do them, and the thing that actually marks the difference between successful and unsuccessful founders is luck.
  • systemvoltage 4y ago
    I’m gonna go even further and say that using statistics and quantifying any of this is a futile effort. There are too many variables and noise-factors to make any sense in statistics. Every company is unique and problems are different and in different domains at different external conditions. Statistics would just be a sample size of 1 and std dev of infinity.
  • time_to_smile 4y ago
    > Simple science: you need a control group. While controlled experiments are the ideal for hypothesis testing, as someone who does stats for a living it's worth point out observational studies do exist. Entire fields, such as anthropology, depend entirely on observational statistics. The field has also come a tremendously long way in recent years with lots of very useful tools coming out of the Bayesian community (applying proper priors, multi-level modeling, inference on more complex models) and the causal inference community. McElreath's Statistical Rethinking is a great text that deals mostly with what I would consider the current state of the art in observational techniques. Highly recommended if isn't already on your bookshelf.
    • marcus_holmes 4y ago
      I get that, but just studying one sample of the population, deliberately ignoring any other grouping in that population, and then drawing conclusions for the entire population, is still ludicrous.
• andreilys 4y ago
  “All Happy families/founders resemble one another, but each unhappy family/founder is unhappy in its own way.”
• omarhaneef 4y ago
  Looking at the data, they seem to compare what effective[1] founders do more frequently than ineffective founders, so they do compare the two. The study sort of includes these % gaps in practices of most and least effective founders. [1] effective here is subjective and reported. They have a discussion of why they don't use other metrics like company valuations and it boils down to that data is harder to collect I think
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jayd16 4y ago
  Maybe not the most ineffective but it would probably be good to rank factors by most likely to sink your business.
• binbag 4y ago
  They looked at both and compared them.
• theptip 4y ago
  My intuition is that there are an infinite number of ways to fail, and the number of ways to succeed are much more scarce. So it’s good to study both, but studying success is often more informative. You definitely want to be intimately aware of the common failure modes. I’d be very surprised if lots of failing companies are doing the _exact_ same as the most successful ones. Maybe cargo-culting all of the things, or actually doing _most_ of the same things but missing one necessary thing. There is an element of luck to it for sure, but the intangibles like business strategy, product market fit iterative discovery, hiring, managing, developing people, are all quite hard to pin down in pithy summaries. The best startups get these right either by meta-level luck of happening to have the right skill set for the problems they ended up facing (vs. rolling a natural 20 on a skill check with the same stats as other founders) or by actually working harder on acquiring the skills that they most need to develop. But doing these (hard, time-consuming) things well is uncommon.
  • austinjp 4y ago
    > My intuition is that there are an infinite number of ways to fail, and the number of ways to succeed are much more scarce This may well be true, but the factors for success are hyper-sensitive to the context of the time with a hefty dash of randomness thrown in. By the time we've observed the factors, the circumstances have changed so they're not entirely repeatable. Sticking to the formula may work, or may lead to wildly different results. But altering the formula is just as unpredictable. Context is critical.
• bko 4y ago
  I don't think that's why lists like this aren't useful. A simple test would be imagine the reverse were true. For instance, here is the effective traits from the article. - Treat people like volunteers vs treat people like paid employees - Protect the team from distractions vs distract your team - Minimize unnecessary micromanagement vs introduce unnecessary micromanagement - Invite disagreement vs squash all disagreement - Preserve interpersonal equity vs treat people arbitrarily - Keep pace with expertise vs ignore whats going on around you - Overcome discouragement vs succumb to discouragement The ineffective founds list would probably be something similar, like "be a dick", "ignore your colleagues", "be volatile", etc.
  • saiya-jin 4y ago
    I am 100% sure plenty of failed founders do all this and much more. I understand the logic and emotions where this wish list comes from, but reality tends to be more complex. People, and companies change. Ie being a dick at right moment may allow you to push through situation that would make weaker / more moral ones fail. And about gazillions of other possible examples that may be counterintuitive.
  • zh3 4y ago
    This is a great technnique, and is particularly effective when working out if someone (especially a politician) is saying something meaningful. "We will strive to make people happier and more productive". Who would say they strive for the opposite?
  • arcturus17 4y ago
    “Treat people like volunteers” is such a double-edged concept though. Many of the catastrophic founders I’ve seen treat people like volunteers - in that they think passion will overcome piss-poor retribution and working conditions. It’s easy to think about “treating people like volunteers” when you’ve sorted out how to pay them at least close to market rates. Then yea, seek how to inspire them… But first, you may be better served if you treat them like professionals.