3 ms·
Law 20 seems to express the state of most startups these days: > "A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presenta
by barishnamazov 10mo ago
Law 20 seems to express the state of most startups these days:
> "A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately."
- potato3732842 10mo agoThat's what happens when the likely success scenario is selling out to an existing company rather than growing to be a genuinely large and long lived company.
- nine_k 10mo agoThere are beef companies and milk companies, depending on the way they plan to use their cash cow. (Most VC funding is used to quickly produce a beefy market share, and sell it to those who think they can milk it, or to profitably butcher it.)
- potato3732842 10mo agoTrying to get milk out of the kind of cattle one raises for beef is a pretty good analogy for using an IPO to offload a questionable company onto the public.
- metalman 10mo agorealy like the cattle analogy, and it can be extended further, Dexter cattle are dual use cattle, and the worlds smallest breed, so increadably popular for small acerages and single family cows, so in a way the type of thing that is terrifying for big operations, as they are not monetisable at scale, but idealy suited to a distributed network that is also a peer to peer economical exchange.
- capyba 10mo agoI wish I knew more about cattle to add to the analogy but I do very much appreciate it as is.
- noduerme 10mo agoHiring salesmen to talk to other salesmen is always the sleaziest part of doing anything productive. You could say the same thing about opening a restaurant.
- __patchbit__ 10mo agoPetro Tyschtschenko is a good salesman. https://youtu.be/0-z1TaNx7TM
- martin-t 10mo agoI'd add to that: If you recognize a good design presented poorly, be the one to stand up and present it well, otherwise you will be stuck with the bad one.
- sho_hn 10mo agoThis is key to fulfilling a senior tech leadership role and substantially what people expect to pay you for, if you ever wonder what the mysterious "impact" really means.
- martin-t 10mo agoSure, but I want everybody to do it. I've seen too many times where a person presented an idea to a group, the idea was publicly shunned by the group, then later a few members of the group discussed the idea in private amongst each other as good. When I was the one who presented something poorly, I've even had people who publicly shunned it privately tell me they support the idea but the group rejects is so they reject it publicly too. This is dumb.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo agoWow are they that cuthroat? Sounds like politics not regular dev work. Must be Google I would guess :)
- kinkyusa 10mo agoI got agree must be the Google
- aleph_minus_one 10mo ago> If you recognize a good design presented poorly, be the one to stand up and present it well, otherwise you will be stuck with the bad one. I do, and I can tell you the result: you will be branded as a troublemaker.
- nine_k 10mo agoImagine that you're a highly intellectual, highly technical, and highly responsible person in control of large sums of governmental or corporate money. You don't want to waste the money, you want stellar results (in spacecraft industry, maybe literally so). Would you assign a large sum of money to a group that cannot present their design clearly, neatly, and concisely? If they are struggling even with that, would you trust them to be good at actually designing a spacecraft soundly, economically, and in a reasonable time? "If you can't explain it to a five-years-old, you likely do not understand it yourself", said one of the greatest modern scientists, who also was notoriously good at explaining things.
- pklausler 10mo agoI think that Feynman was talking about preparing a freshman-level lecture for Caltech-standard freshmen, but maybe you have somebody else in mind.
- Nevermark 10mo agoI would say: You either don't understand your subject, or don't understand your audience, if you can't explain your subject to your audience, at the highest level they can understand, coherently. The average person can understand anything ... at some level. Being able to match that level is positive evidence (but not proof) of competence. Duality: Being unable to match that level is positive evidence (but not proof) of incompetence.
- numpad0 10mo agoI suspect Feynman actually haven't been to the world of the middle-to-bottom sections of the bell curve, where that thinking becomes toxic. It only works because there's collective illusion that minority theorizations can be more correct. Absent that, or that inverted, majority becoming assumed likely more correct, not only one's explanations will be interpreted biased as likely more wrong, but acts leading to majority groups following your round-Earth hypothesis can be seen as manipulative and/or fraudulent. That kind of people(which exist) abusing versions of those lines get annoying fast.