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"Having such detailed feedback wouldn’t require diving into the data, but having someone spend an hour stress-testing my thinking and assumptions would have bee

"Having such detailed feedback wouldn’t require diving into the data, but having someone spend an hour stress-testing my thinking and assumptions would have been gold dust and could have prevented a lot of effort wasted." Hrm... I get asked (on occasion) to do this sort of 'stress test' on someone's idea - and usually they don't want to hear the negatives anyway. Sometimes it can morph a not-great idea in to a better/great one, but sometimes the reality is "this should be dropped". I wonder if the author had actually received some of that hyper-critical thinking on dinnr earlier, and the feedback was "this is bad, don't do it", if he'd still pressed on or not.

kjs3 12y ago
Absolutely, and mirrors my experience. It seems the more the stress test shows big flaws in the idea, the more the founders want to retrench down to "you just don't understand how great our idea is and how infallible we are". At some level, it's the fundamental nature of entrepreneurship to soldier on when everyone counts you out, but more often than not, fundamentals are fundamentals and maybe you should pay attention to them.
tchock23 12y ago
I see this all the time with the startup founders I work with. It's a version of the IKEA effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect). Many founders (myself included) find it difficult to scrap an idea they have created and are emotionally attached to, even after seeing strong evidence to the contrary. I often wonder if YC has seen better results from teams that were accepted without an idea (granted, it's likely a much smaller sample size to work from). I wonder if that somehow makes them less susceptible to this tendency for founders to place a disproportionately high value on the quality of their idea(s), allowing them to focus more broadly on markets and identifying real problems to solve.

kjs3 12y ago

Absolutely, and mirrors my experience. It seems the more the stress test shows big flaws in the idea, the more the founders want to retrench down to "you just don't understand how great our idea is and how infallible we are". At some level, it's the fundamental nature of entrepreneurship to soldier on when everyone counts you out, but more often than not, fundamentals are fundamentals and maybe you should pay attention to them.

tchock23 12y ago

I see this all the time with the startup founders I work with. It's a version of the IKEA effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect). Many founders (myself included) find it difficult to scrap an idea they have created and are emotionally attached to, even after seeing strong evidence to the contrary. I often wonder if YC has seen better results from teams that were accepted without an idea (granted, it's likely a much smaller sample size to work from). I wonder if that somehow makes them less susceptible to this tendency for founders to place a disproportionately high value on the quality of their idea(s), allowing them to focus more broadly on markets and identifying real problems to solve.