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It is a fun read on Godel no doubt - but I think when it comes to startups things can be phrased in a more straight forward manner. > What is that magic wellsp
by recuter 14y ago
It is a fun read on Godel no doubt - but I think when it comes to startups things can be phrased in a more straight forward manner.
> What is that magic wellspring of value that year after year creates these huge opportunities out of nowhere?
Complexity is unidirectional. People move on, rationale is lost, and increasingly the bulk of institutional knowledge grows to be dogma. We do it this way because we've always done it this way.
Additionally, head counts don't naturally go down, people don't automate themselves out of a job and neither do they take kindly to being automated. Change becomes bad.
> Lets imagine, for a second, a time traveler from the future appears in front of Bill Gates in 1999 and utters something like: “I’m from the future! You should sell keywords to match search queries!”"
I am sure there were people within Microsoft who said that very thing around 1999. Also, Google employees lobbied for a social networking product to Larry & Sergey in 2003 and the result was Orkut.
The reason Microsoft didn't rise up to the occasion and grow to dominate search and Google did not seize the social opportunity the first go around is not because these things were unknowable to them under the formalized systems that governed their businesses at the time as the author suggests.
It is not a lack of information. It is more Kafkaesque. Employees had the knowledge and couldn't freely execute on it -- organizational complexity kills joy.
The advantages of working for a large corporation evaporate when you want to work on a risky new idea outside of the company wheelhouse. If anything, they becomes disadvantages.
You are just as likely to succeed independently, have more fun doing it, and keep much more of the windfall. So why not jump ship?
- lordmax 14y ago> Also, Google employees lobbied for a social networking product to Larry & Sergey in 2003 and the result was Orkut. i think its good example of not "good enough" formalization. Afaik Orkut had a lot of operational freedom to do what he wanted with Orkut. it just nobody (the whole pool being semi-dead friendster at that point) had the answers what is actually important to build a socnet. Today we have 20/20 hindsight its absolutely terrible to have runaway adoption in 3rd world country that doesn't speak english... yet thats one of the axioms we learned "the hard way". And obviously that increased formalization (whats working, whats not) was helping Mark a lot when doing next iteration.
- recuter 14y agoThe premise of your article is that startups live beyond the areas where existing enterprises have applicable knowledge - That is an equalizer. But as you say, they still have to search and try very hard, they prevail because they try harder (and get lucky eventually) not because they are the only ones with the good sense to try. What I'm trying to say is that Orkut was less passonate about it and had his creativity and motivation stifled compared to Mark. Mark obsessed over his project and had everything to gain. Orkut on the other hand - What advantage was there for him in building his project from within Google? None. And not much to gain, just a promotion. If he really had his heart in it why not go it alone? He didn't, so he did not.
- pretoriusB 14y ago>What I'm trying to say is that Orkut was less passonate about it and had his creativity and motivation stifled compared to Mark. Mark obsessed over his project and had everything to gain. Orkut on the other hand - What advantage was there for him in building his project from within Google? None. And not much to gain, just a promotion. You can be very much obsessed even in building something within Google. Obsession and passion are not measured in money. By your logic the creators of Unix weren't obsessed with it, because "what did they have to gain (from AT&T)? Just a promotion". I'd say being passionate in the specific thing we're discussing (Facebook vs Orkut) doesn't mean a thing. What exactly that more advanced Mark HAD to show for his passion? Yes, he has the far far better business now, but where was the passion factor at play in making a better offering THEN? What I see is business opportunities and mistakes in Orkut vs Facebook. Not any engineering (or other) passion that resulted in a visibly better product.
- lordmax 14y agoi think largely along the same lines. Orkut done tremendous job with what he had at the time. The only (highly dubious) claim we can make why Orkut did not succeed right away its because it was treated as side-project by Google, rather then throwing 100s of people on it right away to develop it better, and to compensate for early mistakes like Brazil stealing early audience and pushing local users away from the community. Yet thats kinda the key point of the essay: the act of knowing how big/important social networking is requires somebody first to formalize that knowledge. imho Google was very good corporate host to let Orkut experiment so much as he did. It just wasn't enough.