Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

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You can distill this article into two key insights:

1. Find great people to believe in your vision. Without the two amazing coders to help him, he wouldn't have made much headway in the project at the beginning. To be able to convince brilliant developers to quit their job, sell their house, and move across the country takes an incredible visionary to convince such a skeptical demographic as the brilliant developer.

2. Get people to buy the thing you want to sell before you make it. He had $150,000 from a wealthy financier before he had a product to show for it. To be able to secure capital and then worry about delivering on it is a much more tenable problem to solve than trying to build a business without some sort of capital to live off of while you develop it.

There's a third really important insight here: "Know thy product area." The author of the article may not have known anything about software, but he definitely knew a lot about call centers, as did the coders who were working with him.

Isn't this the Theranos business model?

I think the difference for me here was that they took money to create a known solution to a known problem. Theranos, on the other hand, seemed to have claimed to have already had a solution, when in reality they were pursuing an unknown solution to a hazy problem.

(And by "hazy problem" here I basically mean that Theranos is pursuing something that sounds like a problem (medical testing) but is actually a large number of only somewhat related problems. For me, going after a known problem would have been picking one test, or a small number of them and then nailing that before expanding to adjacent problems.)

The difference is between implementation/engineering, which is what most software companies are doing, and invention/science, which is what Theranos is trying to do. It's OK not to build something before selling it if you know that it's possible to make it, but just haven't done it yet because it would take time/money you don't have. It's not OK if you don't even know if it's possible.

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