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Isn't this terrible advice? It's basically saying "be OK with things not getting fixed". I've always heard of Yak shaving as essentially necessary steps in ord

Isn't this terrible advice? It's basically saying "be OK with things not getting fixed". I've always heard of Yak shaving as essentially necessary steps in order to actually resolve issues. It's absurd that one needs to shave Yaks but necessary to complete projects. Isn't being a founder actually Yak shaving? Dealing with the weird abstract minutiae that are needed to make a business run? If the advice had been to find creative ways to resolve dependencies, that would be one thing, but the point of this post seems to be "just fail".

mooreds 3y ago
> "be OK with things not getting fixed" Actually, I think the job of an early stage founder is to fix things just enough. You don't want them to be broken, but being okay with them being far short of perfect is what is needed to survive. As far as employees, they too must decide how deep to go to fix a bug or add a feature. As a hyperbole, a naive employee might rewrite a functioning java program in rust to "fix it", taking far longer than correcting logic in the existing program would. Source: have been both a founder and employee
- abetusk 3y ago
  Ah, ok, so that's the good faith reading. It's not "don't fix things" it's to triage issues that do need to get fixed. That is, don't give in to competitionist tendencies or "fixing things right", but to fix them well enough and to make sure to prioritize well. That makes a lot more sense, thanks. The article didn't really say this all that clearly.
crq-yml 3y ago
It's advice about prioritizing. You can go in any direction with work tasks and end up yak shaving, but if you are trying to "make the machinery move" as a founder would, you cannot go deep into that yet. You have to first clarify the larger Venn diagram of what you're solving and address just the stuff that has strong overlap. There are a lot of those problems as well.
blackoil 3y ago
Most advice to founders is terrible because it is such a low success area with a million unusual ways to fail that one advice won't work for all. You may prioritize wrong spending efforts on Yak Shaving while your competitor eats your business, or you may be focused on delivering without worrying about quality that when a competitor comes with a quality product, they toss you out. A good example of 2nd is Windows Mobile, when iPhone launched and was being wowed upon a simple act would have been to copy key features/touch UI and capture the market. They had a year or two window before iPhone would be competitive. But CE and MS UI frameworks were dumpster fire compared to BSD/Linux that competition was based on and that it took 5 attempts to get something decent out and they had lost it all. If in early 2000s had MS did Yak Shaving to ensure CE is good, they would have few more trillions in that market cap.

mooreds 3y ago

> "be OK with things not getting fixed" Actually, I think the job of an early stage founder is to fix things just enough. You don't want them to be broken, but being okay with them being far short of perfect is what is needed to survive. As far as employees, they too must decide how deep to go to fix a bug or add a feature. As a hyperbole, a naive employee might rewrite a functioning java program in rust to "fix it", taking far longer than correcting logic in the existing program would. Source: have been both a founder and employee

abetusk 3y ago
Ah, ok, so that's the good faith reading. It's not "don't fix things" it's to triage issues that do need to get fixed. That is, don't give in to competitionist tendencies or "fixing things right", but to fix them well enough and to make sure to prioritize well. That makes a lot more sense, thanks. The article didn't really say this all that clearly.

crq-yml 3y ago

It's advice about prioritizing. You can go in any direction with work tasks and end up yak shaving, but if you are trying to "make the machinery move" as a founder would, you cannot go deep into that yet. You have to first clarify the larger Venn diagram of what you're solving and address just the stuff that has strong overlap. There are a lot of those problems as well.

blackoil 3y ago

Most advice to founders is terrible because it is such a low success area with a million unusual ways to fail that one advice won't work for all. You may prioritize wrong spending efforts on Yak Shaving while your competitor eats your business, or you may be focused on delivering without worrying about quality that when a competitor comes with a quality product, they toss you out. A good example of 2nd is Windows Mobile, when iPhone launched and was being wowed upon a simple act would have been to copy key features/touch UI and capture the market. They had a year or two window before iPhone would be competitive. But CE and MS UI frameworks were dumpster fire compared to BSD/Linux that competition was based on and that it took 5 attempts to get something decent out and they had lost it all. If in early 2000s had MS did Yak Shaving to ensure CE is good, they would have few more trillions in that market cap.