5 ms·

Founding is a snowball

113 points by bryantwolf 8mo ago

paulryanrogers 8mo ago
Seems to stretch an one analogy in too many different directions. I guess the point of losing control is the most true.
- fatheranton 8mo ago
  [dead]
- bryantwolf 8mo ago
  What parts felt too stretched? Or just as a composition would you have preferred I narrow it down? I thought it was fun that it goes a little overboard. To me it felt like doing so captured just how much these journeys can change over time. I tried to focus on 3 main bits: Early exploration, problems between people, and then how much is ultimately in or out of your control
DiscourseFan 8mo ago
Way too much AI-generated content in this post
- outlier99 8mo ago
  Pangram says fully human written https://www.pangram.com/history/02d6eff5-f782-4978-9e60-bb02d0466544/?ucc=gcJNTeQdxsV https://www.pangram.com/history/02d6eff5-f782-4978-9e60-bb02...
  - DiscourseFan 8mo ago
    So the art isn't AI generated either? Idk why people trust these "AI checker" sites when they have been shown time and again to be inaccurate at best, often defamatory at worst.
    - bryantwolf 8mo ago
      I too am skeptical we’ll really be able to catch everyone. By making public tools we just create evals to beat the tools etc. Still, right now I think we can tell, so I focused on making sure they were my words, but I let an llm help edit and I think it honestly made it much more readable
- MoltenMan 8mo ago
  I don't think this post reads as AI at all. It has none of the tell-tale signs either (em dashes, common constructions like 'not just ____ but ____, bullet points, headers, etc.)
  - FreakLegion 8mo ago
    The images are AI-generated. This makes them automatically bad in some people's view, but I think they're reasonably fitting here. With a little bit of work (e.g. attention to consistency between frames, blending into the site background) they could even be good.
    - bryantwolf 8mo ago
      I’d love some thoughts here on the consistency. I thougt I actually did pretty well! But I can see how I might be blind to mind own work here. What ruined it for you?
      - FreakLegion 8mo ago
        You did do pretty well! I don't think the final result was ruined at all. Not many people will notice things like his pants only being brown in the first image, or their eyes only having whites in the third image, or his jacket sometimes having a hood and sometimes not. Compared to what we see on most blogs, even patio11's, this is capital-A Art.
        bryantwolf 8mo ago
        I actually thought a lot about the eye whites! He didn’t look nervous enough without them
      - tylerhou 8mo ago
        The art’s aesthetic, which resembles Calvin and Hobbes, is disrespectful to its creator, Bill Watterson’s. Bill spent a lot of energy fighting commercialization of his work, arguing that it would devalue his characters and their personalities. I don’t know what is cheaper than using an AI model to instantly generate similar art, for free.
- YiBiwtiy 8mo ago
  [dead]
SafeDusk 8mo ago
If I were to add, "winter" is the best time to find snow, and there is enough snow for everyone.
- Towaway69 8mo ago
  In some large western cities, snow has a second meaning. Taking that meaning and the VC money required for the inflationary marketing, is probably closer to reality.
bryantwolf 8mo ago
Hey hacker news! I wrote this and I’m glad it connected with folks. To answer a few of your comments: Writing is all mine but I had Claude proofread it, in addition to some close friends. Honestly it pointed out some great weaknesses in the original draft. The art is all nano-banana through a tool called flora ai. I’d love to work with a human illustrator for something like this. I can draw, but I can’t paint and there’s an aesthetic here I think it handles better than I would have. Man, it’s amazing that I can get something out there that expresses a vision all by myself. If this were a revenue generating project like an actual children’s book or something I’d love to work with someone that could bring it to life a bit more.
- perfmode 8mo ago
  The end result is quite stunning. quite beautiful. Thanks for taking the time to create it.
  - bryantwolf 8mo ago
    Thank you for saying so. I’m glad it connected with you
- tecoholic 8mo ago
  This is one of my favourite styles of illustration and I really wanted to know the source. I read so many children’s books for my son and sometimes I take books from the library just for this clean style. I know it wouldn’t have happened easily with Nano. Banana to keep things consistent across multiple images. I haven’t tried recently, but image generation gets progressively worse (darker and off base) as you generate multiple of them. So kudos for the amazing art. As someone who had an interest in drawing as a child and have bought trackpads and tablets, but never had the time & developed the skill to actually create the things that I imagine, I completely understand what you did. I know some people are going to be upset at model generated illustrations. But I think the alternate is probably, no illustrations. There’s a lot of unnecessary AI image slop all around and most add no value or worse makes you just avoid reading the content by their awfulness. This was done really well and I am not sure I would have read it fully without it.
with 8mo ago
The metaphor is broken. The snowball grows passively over time naturally, but being a founder requires you to actively create value in your startup. Snow doesn't choose to stick to your ball based on PMF, and the entire piece romanticizes grinding without once mentioning customers, revenue, or whether you're solving a real problem people will pay for. I think it's dangerous sentiment to say if you create a snowball (startup) and just keep pushing it forever it is guaranteed to grow to something large. Some might say "duh, of course", but I still think a lot of people don't understand this.
- bruce511 8mo ago
  Yeah, but its a metaphor of the creation process. It's perhaps a bit on the light side when it comes to obstacles, but it's not a bad metaphor of the business creation journey. I would perhaps point out this is not a VC business journey, that snowball looks very different. And sure, the business starts in a easy environment (lots of snow on the ground) but the idea of starting alone resonates. And it leaves out the sun. That pesky sun which melts the snow causing 9 out of 10 snowballs to melt. The sun, which melts the snow around you even as you struggle to push. Your direction is meaningless if you insist on pushing away from the snow.
- methyl 8mo ago
  > The snowball grows passively over time naturally Only if you push it down the mountain. Then it’s also susceptible to crashing and breaking down. Normally what you do is you have to push the snowball manually. The bigger it gets, the more people you need to push it in a coordinated manner. I think it’s excellent metaphor.
- bryantwolf 8mo ago
  You’re entitled to your opinion, but I don’t think that’s what I wrote.
- antonvs 8mo ago
  > I think it's dangerous sentiment to say if you create a snowball (startup) and just keep pushing it forever it is guaranteed to grow to something large. You first have to find somewhere that involves pushing it mostly downhill instead of uphill. Otherwise this turns into the tale of Sisyphus.
Johnny_Bonk 8mo ago
Reminds me of Saras Sarasvathy's 2001 effectuation paper (https://www.jstor.org/stable/259121 https://www.jstor.org/stable/259121)
YiBiwtiy 8mo ago
[dead]
cmishra 8mo ago
A single metaphor cannot describe all aspects of company building. That being said, this is definitely one that's particularly optimistic, particularly low-ego, centered around a curiosity one has with the world. That I like quite a bit.
riazrizvi 8mo ago
Beautiful
fkdk 8mo ago
Seeing a borderline hustle culture article illustrated with AI slop in the style of Bill Watterson, who famously opposed commercial exploitation of his work, is deeply saddening.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
jsattler 8mo ago
Great story, thanks for sharing. Besides the part where it says "Other people will see its glory and join their smaller snowballs into it.", it sounds a bit like marriage too.
jongjong 8mo ago
Founding is a lie.
RGamma 8mo ago
Pushing snowballs is a cute sentiment, albeit an incomplete metaphor, but it is also quite romanticized as depicted here. I get that it is about cooperation, "pushing" and growing the size and impact of organizations, but applied to the wider world it quickly becomes complicated; the snowballs interact. Everyone is pushing multiple snowballs over complex terrain. For many their snowballs are melting as they roll them, sometimes actively counteracted by institutions or higher powers. And don't forget that huge snowball we all roll around on, called earth, because it's losing snow...

113 points by bryantwolf 8mo ago

paulryanrogers 8mo ago

Seems to stretch an one analogy in too many different directions. I guess the point of losing control is the most true.

fatheranton 8mo ago
[dead]
bryantwolf 8mo ago
What parts felt too stretched? Or just as a composition would you have preferred I narrow it down? I thought it was fun that it goes a little overboard. To me it felt like doing so captured just how much these journeys can change over time. I tried to focus on 3 main bits: Early exploration, problems between people, and then how much is ultimately in or out of your control

DiscourseFan 8mo ago

Way too much AI-generated content in this post

outlier99 8mo ago
Pangram says fully human written https://www.pangram.com/history/02d6eff5-f782-4978-9e60-bb02d0466544/?ucc=gcJNTeQdxsV https://www.pangram.com/history/02d6eff5-f782-4978-9e60-bb02...
- DiscourseFan 8mo ago
  So the art isn't AI generated either? Idk why people trust these "AI checker" sites when they have been shown time and again to be inaccurate at best, often defamatory at worst.
  - bryantwolf 8mo ago
    I too am skeptical we’ll really be able to catch everyone. By making public tools we just create evals to beat the tools etc. Still, right now I think we can tell, so I focused on making sure they were my words, but I let an llm help edit and I think it honestly made it much more readable
MoltenMan 8mo ago
I don't think this post reads as AI at all. It has none of the tell-tale signs either (em dashes, common constructions like 'not just ____ but ____, bullet points, headers, etc.)
- FreakLegion 8mo ago
  The images are AI-generated. This makes them automatically bad in some people's view, but I think they're reasonably fitting here. With a little bit of work (e.g. attention to consistency between frames, blending into the site background) they could even be good.
  - bryantwolf 8mo ago
    I’d love some thoughts here on the consistency. I thougt I actually did pretty well! But I can see how I might be blind to mind own work here. What ruined it for you?
    - FreakLegion 8mo ago
      You did do pretty well! I don't think the final result was ruined at all. Not many people will notice things like his pants only being brown in the first image, or their eyes only having whites in the third image, or his jacket sometimes having a hood and sometimes not. Compared to what we see on most blogs, even patio11's, this is capital-A Art.
      - bryantwolf 8mo ago
        I actually thought a lot about the eye whites! He didn’t look nervous enough without them
    - tylerhou 8mo ago
      The art’s aesthetic, which resembles Calvin and Hobbes, is disrespectful to its creator, Bill Watterson’s. Bill spent a lot of energy fighting commercialization of his work, arguing that it would devalue his characters and their personalities. I don’t know what is cheaper than using an AI model to instantly generate similar art, for free.
YiBiwtiy 8mo ago
[dead]

SafeDusk 8mo ago

If I were to add, "winter" is the best time to find snow, and there is enough snow for everyone.

Towaway69 8mo ago
In some large western cities, snow has a second meaning. Taking that meaning and the VC money required for the inflationary marketing, is probably closer to reality.

bryantwolf 8mo ago

Hey hacker news! I wrote this and I’m glad it connected with folks. To answer a few of your comments: Writing is all mine but I had Claude proofread it, in addition to some close friends. Honestly it pointed out some great weaknesses in the original draft. The art is all nano-banana through a tool called flora ai. I’d love to work with a human illustrator for something like this. I can draw, but I can’t paint and there’s an aesthetic here I think it handles better than I would have. Man, it’s amazing that I can get something out there that expresses a vision all by myself. If this were a revenue generating project like an actual children’s book or something I’d love to work with someone that could bring it to life a bit more.

perfmode 8mo ago
The end result is quite stunning. quite beautiful. Thanks for taking the time to create it.
- bryantwolf 8mo ago
  Thank you for saying so. I’m glad it connected with you
tecoholic 8mo ago
This is one of my favourite styles of illustration and I really wanted to know the source. I read so many children’s books for my son and sometimes I take books from the library just for this clean style. I know it wouldn’t have happened easily with Nano. Banana to keep things consistent across multiple images. I haven’t tried recently, but image generation gets progressively worse (darker and off base) as you generate multiple of them. So kudos for the amazing art. As someone who had an interest in drawing as a child and have bought trackpads and tablets, but never had the time & developed the skill to actually create the things that I imagine, I completely understand what you did. I know some people are going to be upset at model generated illustrations. But I think the alternate is probably, no illustrations. There’s a lot of unnecessary AI image slop all around and most add no value or worse makes you just avoid reading the content by their awfulness. This was done really well and I am not sure I would have read it fully without it.

with 8mo ago

The metaphor is broken. The snowball grows passively over time naturally, but being a founder requires you to actively create value in your startup. Snow doesn't choose to stick to your ball based on PMF, and the entire piece romanticizes grinding without once mentioning customers, revenue, or whether you're solving a real problem people will pay for. I think it's dangerous sentiment to say if you create a snowball (startup) and just keep pushing it forever it is guaranteed to grow to something large. Some might say "duh, of course", but I still think a lot of people don't understand this.

bruce511 8mo ago
Yeah, but its a metaphor of the creation process. It's perhaps a bit on the light side when it comes to obstacles, but it's not a bad metaphor of the business creation journey. I would perhaps point out this is not a VC business journey, that snowball looks very different. And sure, the business starts in a easy environment (lots of snow on the ground) but the idea of starting alone resonates. And it leaves out the sun. That pesky sun which melts the snow causing 9 out of 10 snowballs to melt. The sun, which melts the snow around you even as you struggle to push. Your direction is meaningless if you insist on pushing away from the snow.
methyl 8mo ago
> The snowball grows passively over time naturally Only if you push it down the mountain. Then it’s also susceptible to crashing and breaking down. Normally what you do is you have to push the snowball manually. The bigger it gets, the more people you need to push it in a coordinated manner. I think it’s excellent metaphor.
bryantwolf 8mo ago
You’re entitled to your opinion, but I don’t think that’s what I wrote.
antonvs 8mo ago
> I think it's dangerous sentiment to say if you create a snowball (startup) and just keep pushing it forever it is guaranteed to grow to something large. You first have to find somewhere that involves pushing it mostly downhill instead of uphill. Otherwise this turns into the tale of Sisyphus.

Johnny_Bonk 8mo ago

Reminds me of Saras Sarasvathy's 2001 effectuation paper (https://www.jstor.org/stable/259121 https://www.jstor.org/stable/259121)

YiBiwtiy 8mo ago

[dead]

cmishra 8mo ago

A single metaphor cannot describe all aspects of company building. That being said, this is definitely one that's particularly optimistic, particularly low-ego, centered around a curiosity one has with the world. That I like quite a bit.

riazrizvi 8mo ago

Beautiful

fkdk 8mo ago

Seeing a borderline hustle culture article illustrated with AI slop in the style of Bill Watterson, who famously opposed commercial exploitation of his work, is deeply saddening.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

jsattler 8mo ago

Great story, thanks for sharing. Besides the part where it says "Other people will see its glory and join their smaller snowballs into it.", it sounds a bit like marriage too.

jongjong 8mo ago

Founding is a lie.

RGamma 8mo ago

Pushing snowballs is a cute sentiment, albeit an incomplete metaphor, but it is also quite romanticized as depicted here. I get that it is about cooperation, "pushing" and growing the size and impact of organizations, but applied to the wider world it quickly becomes complicated; the snowballs interact. Everyone is pushing multiple snowballs over complex terrain. For many their snowballs are melting as they roll them, sometimes actively counteracted by institutions or higher powers. And don't forget that huge snowball we all roll around on, called earth, because it's losing snow...