5 ms·

All the Startup Advice You Read is Wrong

47 points by nqureshi 13y ago

jmathai 13y ago
Luck: Success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions. The most important thing you can know about startups is that it's a game of luck. You can control certain aspects of luck by being at the right spot at the right time, knowing the right people and keeping your startup alive. But in the end it's largely luck and contrary to popular belief it can't be reverse engineered. Basically: location, connections and timing. What's better than reading blog posts about start up advice is finding some founders that have been successful and others that are in the same boat as you and talking with them regularly. You can be lacking in all 3 categories and still be successful. But it's going to be much harder and the odds are stacked against you even more. You can be proficient in all 3 categories and still fail.
- vignesh_vs_in 13y ago
  I completely disagree with you. i don't see that as luck, i see that as probability. You can increase your chance of success by being at the right place and time. The probability success also depends on the founders. So, even if in the surface it seems like luck only matters, u can turn the odds in your favor. Every company/idea has a chance to succeed(different levels) or fail, and if we keep the idea as constant, people are the only variables in the equation.
  - jmathai 13y ago
    We're calling the same thing two different names. Luck is probably a misnomer but I think it captures the essence very well. I agree that you can influence your success but the degree to which you can do that is pretty small for most founders.
    - prof_hobart 13y ago
      The problem with the word "luck" is that it can easily be taken to mean that success is entirely random - any idea, at any time, executed in any manner has an equal chance to succeed. And that's not really true. I doubt very much that this is what you are saying, but it's an easy interpretation to make. Whereas the word "probability" still implies a level of randomness that is totally out of your control. However good, and however well executed, you idea is - there's a million and one unforeseen things that could destroy your business. But that doesn't mean that you ideas and your execution don't have an impact on your likelihood of succeeding. Compare the game of backgammon to snakes and ladders. Both have dice in them, which introduces a level of randomness. But while I would describe snakes and ladders as entirely a game of luck (your success in the game depends 100% on the roll of the dice), I would describe backgammon as a game of probablilities - if the dice keep going against you, you're going to lose. But there's an awful lot of skill in reducing the odds of the dice being able to go against you.
      - jmathai 13y ago
        Agreed. Luck is/was the wrong word to hinge my comment on.
    - anoncow 13y ago
      Probability is luck for a single event and simple mathematics for an infinite number of events.
  - acjohnson55 13y ago
    To me, probability is hard and unblinking. It's like the roulette wheel--nothing you can (legally) do changes the odds. Luck has an element of humanness to it. Keep working at it, and you'll eventually get lucky, and such. I think it combines the concept of uncertainty with the actions you take in hopes of a good outcome. Of course, not all actions are meaningful in increasing your chance of success. Truly lucky people are constantly seeking advantage, not wasting time with superstition.
- bryanlarsen 13y ago
  “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” - Seneca
- shpxnvz 13y ago
  "There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe." Heinlein captured the essence succinctly. Luck is nothing more than a label people use to describe probabilities they have not planned for.
Udo 13y ago
Yes, there is a lot of cargo culting going on. People tend to put a lot of stock in the pecularities of successful companies and influential people in a (misguided) effort to imitate them. A better way to copy success would probably be to do some dry analysis, as compared to another round of "5 habits of highly successful people" or "what would Steve Jobs do". But I would like to argue that the best thing to do is probably to follow your own visions and constantly debug what doesn't work. I believe the myth of the A player is also part of that particular cargo cult. Most competent people don't fit into a single category. Competence isn't a global integer value. An employee's ability to contribute depends on many factors and can change dramatically with the situation. Companies claiming to "hire only A players" are not getting this.
- msglenn 13y ago
  The A player rhetoric makes it easy to discard an employee without reflecting on how your actions as a company might be affecting that person's performance. The blame for poor performance immediately falls to the employee. Sometimes the employee truly isn't going to work. But if you're a startup and you have someone who buys the vision of the company, fits the culture but doesn't exactly fit the role, it may pay to reevaluate the specifics of the job in light of the skills you know that person has. So maybe it's not just about getting rid of the idea of the A player, but reconsidering whether the A player has to come into your company ready made.
vignesh_vs_in 13y ago
point 2 agreed. Its better to hire B player who love your idea than hire A players who thinks your idea is interesting.
- omegant 13y ago
  So true, but also I think that A-B players can be a bit too general. I've found that there is people that will execute flawlesly but only when they know exactly what to do, while others are able to fill gaps of your idea and execute with just general guidelines. The later are the ones you need when your team is small (A or B players), but you'll need more of the former when you get traction, market fit and your organization grows.
msglenn 13y ago
Might I suggest a third reason: Maintaining your sanity. Not just in terms of remembering that there are other people out there struggling alongside you in the entrepreneurship game, but also in giving you a modicum of control over your next steps. While I don't believe success is completely up to luck, a lot of the when and how is completely out of your hands. Reading on startups often gives me concrete, actionable advice. This ties into Ev's first point but it's not just the ideas, it's the feeling that I have a key, non-random role to play every step of the way. If you're the type of person who needs the world to be a certain way to be happy, knowing that you have a chance to make it that way keeps you on the right side of crazy.
beat 13y ago
Startup advice ! = How Google did it. I read a ton of startup advice, but I consciously filter out the corner cases like Google and Facebook. I'm a lot more interested in how the thousands of less famous companies have succeeded (or failed).
lquist 13y ago
How about the least-controversial and most common advice ever given: “Only hire A players.” Here’s when that doesn’t apply: When you can’t hire A players. Unless if your company is terrible, the problem will never be that you can't hire A players, it will be that you can't find them fast enough. That said, the compromise in waiting for only A players will appear to be to slow growth. In my opinion, though, the quality of people is so important to an organization's long term success that what will look like a compromise will actually be a tradeoff between short term growth and long term growth.
- bitwize 13y ago
  Problem is, A players want to work pretty much anywhere else but where the vast majority of software gets developed. How are all the banks and insurance companies going to keep their IT systems ticking over if they only hire A players who would rather be working for Google, Valve, Basho, etc.?
  - coldcode 13y ago
    How do define an A player? Seems like a rather vague idea to base your business on.
- vidarh 13y ago
  Unless we clearly define "A player" this is a tricky discussion to have. What is clear, though, is that no matter what threshold you choose, there is likely to be businesses that can't afford a sufficient salary to attract people above that threshold, or doesn't have sufficient status compared to other places. And what about all the jobs the "A players" don't want to do and/or are over-qualified for? A company that only hires the best and brightest will massively overpay for a workforce in which a substantial percentage will feel their talent is wasted on stuff that could be handled by someone with less experience.
- nrivadeneira 13y ago
  Many times with startups, "having to wait" can be equivalent to "can't". Startups have limited runway and the time it takes to hire that A player may just extend past the end of that runway.
x7r4wur57 13y ago
The funny thing is that the article at the bottom suggested for read was "Formula for Entrepreneurial Success" by Ev Williams.
RivieraKid 13y ago
Why have there been so many medium.com links on HN lately? Is this marketing or just a natural result of medium's growth?
- jeremyjh 13y ago
  Just a wild guess: people are submitting and up-voting lots of these links.
grimtrigger 13y ago
I think the most important bias is "novelty bias". Lots of people want to convince you they have a unique thought process so they can sell some books or interest investors or position themselves as a "thought leader". Nothing wrong with this in theory, but in practice I assume people are speaking with far more confidence than they should have.
- epochwolf 13y ago
  > Nothing wrong with this in theory Oh, I think there's plenty wrong with this theory. There is very little that's new in the world. People aren't as special as they think or are taught. :)

47 points by nqureshi 13y ago

Luck: Success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions. The most important thing you can know about startups is that it's a game of luck. You can control certain aspects of luck by being at the right spot at the right time, knowing the right people and keeping your startup alive. But in the end it's largely luck and contrary to popular belief it can't be reverse engineered. Basically: location, connections and timing. What's better than reading blog posts about start up advice is finding some founders that have been successful and others that are in the same boat as you and talking with them regularly. You can be lacking in all 3 categories and still be successful. But it's going to be much harder and the odds are stacked against you even more. You can be proficient in all 3 categories and still fail.

vignesh_vs_in 13y ago
I completely disagree with you. i don't see that as luck, i see that as probability. You can increase your chance of success by being at the right place and time. The probability success also depends on the founders. So, even if in the surface it seems like luck only matters, u can turn the odds in your favor. Every company/idea has a chance to succeed(different levels) or fail, and if we keep the idea as constant, people are the only variables in the equation.
- jmathai 13y ago
  We're calling the same thing two different names. Luck is probably a misnomer but I think it captures the essence very well. I agree that you can influence your success but the degree to which you can do that is pretty small for most founders.
  - prof_hobart 13y ago
    The problem with the word "luck" is that it can easily be taken to mean that success is entirely random - any idea, at any time, executed in any manner has an equal chance to succeed. And that's not really true. I doubt very much that this is what you are saying, but it's an easy interpretation to make. Whereas the word "probability" still implies a level of randomness that is totally out of your control. However good, and however well executed, you idea is - there's a million and one unforeseen things that could destroy your business. But that doesn't mean that you ideas and your execution don't have an impact on your likelihood of succeeding. Compare the game of backgammon to snakes and ladders. Both have dice in them, which introduces a level of randomness. But while I would describe snakes and ladders as entirely a game of luck (your success in the game depends 100% on the roll of the dice), I would describe backgammon as a game of probablilities - if the dice keep going against you, you're going to lose. But there's an awful lot of skill in reducing the odds of the dice being able to go against you.
    - jmathai 13y ago
      Agreed. Luck is/was the wrong word to hinge my comment on.
  - anoncow 13y ago
    Probability is luck for a single event and simple mathematics for an infinite number of events.
- acjohnson55 13y ago
  To me, probability is hard and unblinking. It's like the roulette wheel--nothing you can (legally) do changes the odds. Luck has an element of humanness to it. Keep working at it, and you'll eventually get lucky, and such. I think it combines the concept of uncertainty with the actions you take in hopes of a good outcome. Of course, not all actions are meaningful in increasing your chance of success. Truly lucky people are constantly seeking advantage, not wasting time with superstition.
bryanlarsen 13y ago
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” - Seneca
shpxnvz 13y ago
"There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe." Heinlein captured the essence succinctly. Luck is nothing more than a label people use to describe probabilities they have not planned for.

Udo 13y ago

Yes, there is a lot of cargo culting going on. People tend to put a lot of stock in the pecularities of successful companies and influential people in a (misguided) effort to imitate them. A better way to copy success would probably be to do some dry analysis, as compared to another round of "5 habits of highly successful people" or "what would Steve Jobs do". But I would like to argue that the best thing to do is probably to follow your own visions and constantly debug what doesn't work. I believe the myth of the A player is also part of that particular cargo cult. Most competent people don't fit into a single category. Competence isn't a global integer value. An employee's ability to contribute depends on many factors and can change dramatically with the situation. Companies claiming to "hire only A players" are not getting this.

msglenn 13y ago
The A player rhetoric makes it easy to discard an employee without reflecting on how your actions as a company might be affecting that person's performance. The blame for poor performance immediately falls to the employee. Sometimes the employee truly isn't going to work. But if you're a startup and you have someone who buys the vision of the company, fits the culture but doesn't exactly fit the role, it may pay to reevaluate the specifics of the job in light of the skills you know that person has. So maybe it's not just about getting rid of the idea of the A player, but reconsidering whether the A player has to come into your company ready made.

vignesh_vs_in 13y ago

point 2 agreed. Its better to hire B player who love your idea than hire A players who thinks your idea is interesting.

omegant 13y ago
So true, but also I think that A-B players can be a bit too general. I've found that there is people that will execute flawlesly but only when they know exactly what to do, while others are able to fill gaps of your idea and execute with just general guidelines. The later are the ones you need when your team is small (A or B players), but you'll need more of the former when you get traction, market fit and your organization grows.

msglenn 13y ago

Might I suggest a third reason: Maintaining your sanity. Not just in terms of remembering that there are other people out there struggling alongside you in the entrepreneurship game, but also in giving you a modicum of control over your next steps. While I don't believe success is completely up to luck, a lot of the when and how is completely out of your hands. Reading on startups often gives me concrete, actionable advice. This ties into Ev's first point but it's not just the ideas, it's the feeling that I have a key, non-random role to play every step of the way. If you're the type of person who needs the world to be a certain way to be happy, knowing that you have a chance to make it that way keeps you on the right side of crazy.

beat 13y ago

Startup advice ! = How Google did it. I read a ton of startup advice, but I consciously filter out the corner cases like Google and Facebook. I'm a lot more interested in how the thousands of less famous companies have succeeded (or failed).

lquist 13y ago

How about the least-controversial and most common advice ever given: “Only hire A players.” Here’s when that doesn’t apply: When you can’t hire A players. Unless if your company is terrible, the problem will never be that you can't hire A players, it will be that you can't find them fast enough. That said, the compromise in waiting for only A players will appear to be to slow growth. In my opinion, though, the quality of people is so important to an organization's long term success that what will look like a compromise will actually be a tradeoff between short term growth and long term growth.

bitwize 13y ago
Problem is, A players want to work pretty much anywhere else but where the vast majority of software gets developed. How are all the banks and insurance companies going to keep their IT systems ticking over if they only hire A players who would rather be working for Google, Valve, Basho, etc.?
- coldcode 13y ago
  How do define an A player? Seems like a rather vague idea to base your business on.
vidarh 13y ago
Unless we clearly define "A player" this is a tricky discussion to have. What is clear, though, is that no matter what threshold you choose, there is likely to be businesses that can't afford a sufficient salary to attract people above that threshold, or doesn't have sufficient status compared to other places. And what about all the jobs the "A players" don't want to do and/or are over-qualified for? A company that only hires the best and brightest will massively overpay for a workforce in which a substantial percentage will feel their talent is wasted on stuff that could be handled by someone with less experience.
nrivadeneira 13y ago
Many times with startups, "having to wait" can be equivalent to "can't". Startups have limited runway and the time it takes to hire that A player may just extend past the end of that runway.

x7r4wur57 13y ago

The funny thing is that the article at the bottom suggested for read was "Formula for Entrepreneurial Success" by Ev Williams.

RivieraKid 13y ago

Why have there been so many medium.com links on HN lately? Is this marketing or just a natural result of medium's growth?

jeremyjh 13y ago
Just a wild guess: people are submitting and up-voting lots of these links.

grimtrigger 13y ago

I think the most important bias is "novelty bias". Lots of people want to convince you they have a unique thought process so they can sell some books or interest investors or position themselves as a "thought leader". Nothing wrong with this in theory, but in practice I assume people are speaking with far more confidence than they should have.

epochwolf 13y ago
> Nothing wrong with this in theory Oh, I think there's plenty wrong with this theory. There is very little that's new in the world. People aren't as special as they think or are taught. :)