I came here to basically say this about running a company- but your comment was a better launching point.
As someone who has run several companies over the last 25 years and has read and or tried nearly ever "method" mentioned... Im now running a company where Im abandoning everything and just going at with skill and fearlessness... and no funding. It feels freeing, and we are growing.
Marketing is especially the key element here, and there is and never will be a permanent science of effective marketing. Culture is always changing and what gets attention today is blasé tomorrow.
In contrast, for a company that can't be started by a single app developer - getting out of the building won't help. Nobody in the space worth talking to will talk to you, for starters.
What do I know, I don't run a billion dollar startup. But there's a valuable "necessary but not sufficient" insight to all good advice. The lean startup IS good advice. The best I can do with your argument is "getting out of the building is no longer sufficient".
Sure. But it doesn't make the entire arch of how we got here "wrong". And yes, all companies were started with a few people, a few customers. So that's why there's nothing much here to see for me, other than defeatist sentiment.
Seriously, how do you even realistically approach taking on ASML. They spent decades and billions of (investment) dollars to do insane moonshot research and it paid off. But it also closed off the door behind them.
Entire countries (Russia, China, ...) have been trying to reproduce it. They have not succeeded yet.
Reproducing an ASML machine is a piece of cake. Okay, not a piece of cake but definitely doable. The problem is that you cannot sell your reproduction in rich countries because the US government will threaten you with sanctions and US companies will screech "patents!".
... An argument that may not convince China and Russia, who have a track record of ignoring it - I doubt it is a significant reason why they have not achieved semiconductor manufacture tooling parity.
ASML market cap is ~500B. Meta market cap is ~1.5T.
i'm no facebook fan but it was started by a dude in a dorm room.
So I think saying "well those times are gone now" is defeatist.
(fwiw i personally have no interest in building a trillion dollar company from my basement, just talking philosophy here)
I can see that going very well.
Startup advice, as i understand it, is about innovation: expanding the pie. I sound like a VC shill. Don't mean to be, i know it's riddled with rich people passing money around pretending like value is being created.
It's just I don't get what's so wrong with the HN crowd here trying to be better at building a successful company?
The most valuable companies are expected to be the largest, and, as a result, the most inefficient hence the easiest to overtake.
FWIW, can't believe I'm replying to literally "throwaway random number" but Capitalism isn't my cup of tea. I rode around on a bicycle for the last decade.
But it's what we've got.
Taleb does the math as well IIRC, assuming there are x hundred thousand extreme risk takers, and outlier “correct bets” are y% chance, then you will have a surprisingly high number of people with a long series of “correct” bets behind them looking like business geniuses, from pure chance & basic statistics.
There’s a skill issue there. I know a founder who’s able to get people to talk to him. As a result, his startup had F500 customers almost from the beginning.
But that’s the kind of thing that no amount of documented strategy and tactics is ever doing to be able to teach. I’ve watched it happening, but I can’t do it.
For me, this is where it breaks. There are two assumptions that the author must be challenged on.
1. Enough people know about these methods
2. Of those people enough use the methods properly
Judging from my own experience I can’t confirm neither of these. Even those people that know the approach rarely have the rigor to treat startups as a series of experiments. Ego plays a large part.
Here is the key principle.
Suppose that your odds of startup success are dominated by competition with other would-be startup founders. For example you compete for funding, good ideas, competent employees, and markets. If so, then the odds of success are set by the dynamics of that competition. In which case widespread access to effective advice on running startups does not improve the odds for a random founder succeeding. They just raise the quality of competition.
Think of it as being like a boxing tournament. If you learn how to box better, your odds of winning the tournament go up. If others learn to box better, your odds of winning the tournament go down. And even if everybody learns how to box better, we see the exact same number of winners.
Whether or not startups actually work this way is an empirical question. Based on a bunch of different data points, he argues that startups really do seem to work this way. And so the spread of good advice on running startups can't improve the odds of a random startup succeeding.
Seems like all the other 9 that died insist on telling the one that survived that they were somehow wrong.
For sure, I do get that one can "do everything right" and still fail, I get that point, I get that there is no formula. But it seems like people want the reverse to be true: that everyone successful is only a lucky buffoon.
I don't think this article is very good, at all.
Most businesses fail because they solve for the easier bit (product) and then have no idea about the rest.
Heroin addicts want to buy heroin.