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Comment by clamprecht | Hacker News Reader

Here's an interesting thought in response: (Keep in mind I know jack about rope rescue, so I'm making assumption as to what it is)

Imagine you had 100 people do a "rope rescue race". Half of them used all the safety mechanisms (they would pass the "whistle test"). The other half didn't use any safety/redundancy (they would fail the "whistle test"), but instead relied on their skill. In the end, it's likely that a few of the high-risk ones would die. But it's also likely that many of the high-risk ones would survive, and also that they would be the winners of the race. The safer, lower risk ones would eventually get there, but far behind the high risk ones.

Startups are the high-risk ones.

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That's psychotic.

I don't rope rescue, but I sure do rock climb. You can rock climb with ropes or without. Ropes = a large safety margin, and the majority of people who climb, utilize them, as part of their safety system. Unless you're pushing your own grade level, the actual safety system isn't actuated - you're just using it "just in case" (like, "just in case you fall from a cliff, 500 feet up - gee it's nice I'm tied to something).

There are also those who climb without ropes. Perhaps you've heard of some of them [0], and most likely, because they actually climb without a rope. High Risk. Your idea of startups, let's say.

But that's just what the public sees. The free soloist has to be absolutely comfortable to go without the safety margin of a rope. Because of that, the majority of their climbing is done, still with a rope. When they go ropeless, the climbs they do are much, much easier. Yes, the risk is there, but also there is the understanding, clearly, what the risk is really about.

The death rate of climbers that are unwilling to ever use a rope, because they find that high risk = high reward would be close to 100%. But those who do survive are not going to be doing too well - they're never going to progress.

So, perhaps startups have this illusion of high risk, but maybe also they're also kidding themselves. They're burning through their lives, and offloading the real risk onto their safety systems - whoever is putting up the money. And they can do that (the investors), as they've diversified their portfolio enough that risk is spread around.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR1jwwagtaQ

Reminds me of this: Make the climb like the child did - without the rope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXxw-zXRqOs

The rope makes you weak!

The same movie also lets the protagonist heal from a incapacitating spinal injury in a dusty pit -

So I'm not sure if this is a pro- or anti-rope statement :)

The analogy breaks right at the start, start-ups are not 'fatal' in the same sense that rock-climbing is fatal. So the GP is right, the race really would be won by those willing to cut corners and sacrifice safety and procedure even though statistically quite a few of those would end up 'dead' for those exact same reasons with possible fall-out for their end-users as well (hacked, data loss and so on).

The strategy widens the bell curve and lowers it, whereas the rock-climbers try very hard to narrow it to where there are no outliers and everybody makes it to safety.

Imagine a strategy where every start-up would survive in the long term, there would be very few outliers in such a situation and that's why start-ups that are comfortable with some risks at the expense of safety but a huge increase in productivity will be more likely to be amongst the winners than those that play it safe all the time.

I don't think this is a huge problem anyway because very few people doing start-ups are risk averse.

I can't say I agree with this analogy, unless we assume that the course is a race, which isn't true for most climbs.

You raise a good point. It's not a matter of caution and being double careful. The point of the essay is the drive towards self sufficiency, and being realistic about how investor expectations change in successive rounds.

Perhaps: don't think there's a rope backing you up if it isn't there.

> Perhaps: don't think there's a rope backing you up if it isn't there.

If you use the metaphor of rock climbing, you'd actually rehearse your route with ropes/safety system, before you would ever try the route without. When the stakes are so high that it's you're life you're gambling with, is it really worth it for most to go so blind out there?

It's either that, or you go without a rope, when the difficulty is far below your limit (in other words, you have amassed a lot of experience)

In the scope of software engineering I disagree.

For software, the rope is the engineering. Whenever I need to move fast in a production environment I make damm sure my software is as good as I can make it because I know something will come and bite me in the ass otherwise. I know patience and carefull design makes me fast in the long run. I've done projects in short span and they were successfull precisely because of the quality I put in the code, and aggressive application of YAGNI.

Note: good here means understandable and simple, not some god awful super-elegant object abstraction scheme.

It might seem people with cowboy coding skills do well but it's only an illusion - they have faced as many bugs but they just code around them or do a quick fix.

The result from the latter is unmaintainable spaghetti.

Been there. It was a death spiral. The investors (which where customers, too) always wanted more features (of which not half of them made sense) so the directive given was just throw something at them that remotely resembles that requested feature to get the money. In the end the product was very unappealing and way too complex to sell to anyone else than this particular investor/customer. And as I heard recently they hired two more sales people in order to fix that. So what I'm trying to say is that not only you have to make sure your code base has a certain level of quality (fsloth's point) but this goes also for the product.

I totally agree that going slower is faster.

I disagree that the problem is cowboy coding. I'd identify the rope as carefully understanding the actual goals of the software and the way it functions in the world. Good engineering teams going "ropeless" rarely fuck up in a technical sense. I've been writing software long enough that my engineering judgement is usually pretty solid. Where they fuck up is building tons of extraneous functionality with the extra capacity, losing touch with what their software actually does in the world.

It very much depends on the situation. In an engineering environment (industrial control, regular applications, aerospace and so on) slower really is faster. But in a SAAS prototyping race with a whole bunch of like-minded characters those who cut corners may very well win the race. This is frustrating to those of us (including me!) who would rather do a proper job but the 'cowboys' seem to be both getting the funding and seem to be statistically doing better at success in the longer term. Of course plenty of the cowboys die with self inflicted bullet holes but the press does not seem to care and neither do investors. It's there on every level from 'go big or go home' to 'don't be scared to break stuff' to 'oh, we went bust, sorry customers, we'll try better next time'.

So it follows:

If you are betting on the outcome, then put your money on a smallish group, call it 10, of the ropeless competitors.

If you are competing, make sure you have a rope, because coming 20th or 30th is a much better personal outcome than possibly dying.

In a nutshell this is the conflict of interest between founders and investors, even though quite a few founders would rather have a 1:10 chance of a huge success than a 1:2 chance of a medium one.

eh, the thing about margins of safety is that when done properly, they let you recover from mistakes, which lets you take risks more often. I see a break-even business as a 'save point' almost - you can go and put effort then into this or that or the other that might or might not work out, but as long as you've got the break even business paying everyone's rent, you fall back to a place where you still have all your infrastructure ready to go for your next try.

If your company is 'default dead' as it were, a schedule slip (a slip past the end of your runway, that is) means, at best, bankruptcy and starting over.

And really, you want some safety built into that too- if you screw up your taxes, or screw up your corporation badly enough, failure can mean personal bankruptcy, or if it is a tax matter, something much worse than personal bankruptcy.

This is a good analogy in one sense, but I think the probabilities in your example are reversed from the startup case: for high-risk startups, only a few survive, but they're the winners.

And of course, that's what makes them better on average for investors (who spread risk across their portfolio) than for founders, who have all their eggs in one basket.

As pg says here, as a founder, you want to survive.

I'm not sure if that's an apt metaphor because the consequence of failure is much, much lower on the startup side.

If failing at a startup means you'll never have another chance to succeed, I bet the norms for risk tolerance would be entirely different than what's in the landscape today.

Your premise is based on the assumption that those who win in the marketplace are those who move fastest, not those who have the better product, or make something people love.

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