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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

"Simple, modest goals are most likely to succeed, and most likely to make us happy."

That's certainly true for 99% of people, but someone trying to start a startup has already declared by doing so that they are not part of that 99%.

I think for some people it's ok to have ambitious goals.

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Come on Paul -- trying for a more likely outcome of being a single-digit millionaire instead of an unlikely outcome of being a triple-digit millionaire doesn't make you "not ambitious."

I'm not saying it's bad to swing for the fences! Just that many people do out of perceived necessity.

I find that the founders who have ambitious goals rarely express them by numbers of digits, which are extremely hard to predict, but more often by how much they want to change the world. For example, the founders of Reddit, which was a disruptive innovation of the classic type, had as their slogan "freedom from the press."

I wonder if in the end the irony of having that slogan and being acquired by Conde escaped any of them. Or the irony that maybe the press is not the darkest master to which to be enslaved.

Money changes everything; People, relationships, principles, slogans, etc. to name a few.

The slogan refers to users' freedom to get information where they like, and that wasn't impaired at all by the acquisition. As far as I know, Conde Nast only once tried to dictate what was on Reddit, and that blew up in their faces.

> users' freedom to get information where they like

As far as I can tell users already had that freedom without Reddit. In fact, as a link aggregator, the most Reddit could be said to have added was a directory of that freedom. Such directories were already well and alive on sites like Digg and Slashdot (in different forms, to be sure). It's hard to see what about that is disruptive.

But, whatever, it's just a slogan.

When/what was this?

First, I think the difference between 'incremental' and 'disruptive' is sometimes less clear than people seem to think.

Cloud computing is quite similar to old style dedicated server rental with the incremental improvement of the ability to buy in small timeslices and a standard provisioning system designed for developers, rather than for sysadmins.

Reddit, I think, is an incremental improvement on technologies pioneered by Kuro5hin.org and slashdot before that. (I'm not saying it wasn't also disruptive. I can show you revenue graphs from before and after Uggedal's review of me got on reddit. It certainly was disruptive for me.)

Now, I think if you are bootstrapping, you are probably best off explaining your idea incrementally. It's easier to understand, and it doesn't sound as cheesy or as crazy. If you are explaining your idea to me (and I suspect that this applies to most people who are primarily technical, but I could be wrong) you are better off explaining your idea incrementally, because I'm more likely to understand it, and I'm less likely to dismiss you as another crazy MBA.

If you are going for VC funding, then you might want to use the language of disruption, as that is what they require. A VC doesn't want a 'slightly better' dedicated server.

A new buzzword?

If their ambitious goal was freedom, why did they sell to a publishing company?

This is what I don't get. You make something you're passionate about… and then you get rid of it. Or you get bought, with the acquisition. Into, that's right, a job! Typically with superiors!

Which was what you were fleeing from to start with.

So was their ambition a number of digits, or was it freedom?

EDIT: I've met the founders of some very high profile sales to big companies, including Google, who were incredibly miserable about doing so -- afterwards. And yet here, they are poster children for success.

Then again, as the OP has stated, some of the most disruptive technologies (such as Google and the iPod) did not set out to be disruptive. Their disruptiveness was merely a side effect of executing really well on incremental improvement. As for having changing the world as a goal, no disrespect intended to the Reddit guys, but it hasn't disrupted or changed the world of anyone I know who isn't in tech. By way of comparison, Hacker News itself has changed my world way more than Reddit.

Going off on a tangent, how often do people really want the world changed? Every time, or even one percent of the time, an ambitious startup is founded seems a tad excessive to me.

I don't see why there has to be a conflict between the two. From where I'm standing, smartbear's point is "don't try to tell people what they want" and your point is "don't be afraid to change the world". There's plenty of space where both of these are true, and I'd argue the difference is more of founder philosophy than of actual content. Reddit did not attempt to change what readers wanted. Arguably, this is why they succeeded.

I'm not arguing with you, but for the benefit of those who read your comment and don't read the article, the article's examples of "simple, modest goals" are the problems solved by companies that sold for millions, but not hundreds of millions.

I also think for some people it's ok to have ambitious goals. However, if you want to make something "disruptive" that people don't yet know they need, you absolutely must have sales skill, not just technical skill.

Yeah, but here he was telling the 1% group to have modest goals. Isn't that what YC is doing in a sense, that is :you can swing for the fences, but exiting at sub 20M is also an option. That sounds modest to me.

Yes, completely agree. However, even within the startup world, there is hierarchy of ambition. I guess Jason's post is for those people who start believing startup = disruption, which isn't 100% accurate.

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