Signs that a startup is focused on stuff that doesn’t matter
groovehq.com
groovehq.com
You can tell a startup is focusing on the wrong thing when: They're using the 'newest', most obscure, programming language or frameworks available because it's the 'best' for some unscientific reason.
Instantly I hear the argument "Yah, but if we need to scale, we don't want to re-write." Ok, you're going to rewrite anyway. Right now your problem is producing quality code that additional people can onboard themselves with. Chances are you can produce something very practical using plain GET/POST operations and gradually add more interactivity on the client side if you prove your product out.
The stem of my rant is this: Recently I was thinking about picking up some side work for extra $. The company I was interviewing with described their front end team as struggling to keep pace and needed some temporary help. The product is under NDA, so let's just say it's a shared calendar. Their stack was insane: 18 different javascript frameworks, required a certain version of Node.js to "compile" to ES6, then another to run it in your browser, and the stylesheets were written in some other obscure language. In the second interview, I told the product manager I think he's been had: the reason your front end team is struggling is because they're not being practical, they're busy with shiny toys. He said he had a feeling, but given his situation he didn't have much of a choice but to continue. He thanked me for being honest and said he understood if I wasn't interested anymore.
Anyway, there's a lot of really "cool" stuff to get distracted by as developers. I think a lot of us need to sober up and really meditate on the phrase "do the simplest thing that could possibly work".
The rule of thumb is if someone is using a more complicated stack than me then they're foolishly overengineering their app and if they're using a simpler stack than me then they're unsophisticated novices.
People just adding cool toys not because they need it but because it is "cool" or "new".
Why do we need to "compile" our JS which just adds to our development time and then we have to dedicate time to debugging these when they break.
I like ES6 but sometimes I question whether it is worth the trouble.
Then you need to debugger your code, compiled code, sourcemap files, compiler, compiler options, the layer and layers of configuration JSON scripts and mobile browser.
Yes, transpiling es6 -> es5 is adding another layer of complexity to your codebase, another thing that could potentially go wrong, but the reality is that the development gains we get from being able to use es6 are far more important than a small chance of a problem. It works well enough that you don't even think about it after leaving webpack in watch mode.
Especially since ES6 is being converted to ES5 at the end of the day.
My team has been using it for most of this year now and we've had no problems so far.
es6 has become pretty well supported by modern browsers, so maybe after a year or so, we'll just be calling it "javascript" and running it without babel. I expect everyone to continue to transpile, though, to get newer features as they come, as the plan for ES is to release new language updates on a yearly basis.
This seems like you're deliberately trying to make things sound way more complicated than they actually are. If there is a bug in the code on a certain platform, you examine the bug on that platform and add the appropriate feature detection code to fix it. There is no need to debug the compiler and every other tool in your stack, it all compiles to javascript at the end of the day and assuming you're not running a minifier in development, 99% of platform specific bugs are readily apparent and almost certainly the developer's fault (i.e. not the tool's fault)
After with, do your team do automated regressive tests the oauth support and all other functionalities on all the regular browsers and mobile browsers?
+ Older version browsers?
+ Older browsers in older version of Linux, Mac, Windows?
+ Browsers with plugins such umatix, unblock origin, noscript that blocks scripts from your own domains + other domains?
Also that for the 10 other 'not any extra trouble' things
Until of course something breaks. Or is not giving you the result you wanted.
Or you need to urgently again and one of the hundred requires you need got a new bug or npm is out.
Sure, some people only want to work with new things because they are novel. That's human nature.
However, that's not all of it. Many people strive for new tools not simply because they are new, but because they are better in some way. Of course, I understand that some people over-estimate how much better the "new" technology is, in practice. Transitions take time.
A side note: most "new" things are often based on combinations of "old" things. One of the big problems with some "new" tools isn't simply that they are "new" -- it has to do with their maturity. Applied person-hours, working on representative problems, helps shake out problems or edge cases with various technologies.
Take Clojure, for example. I reject the notion that calling it "new" or "old" is particularly useful. When it was released, it was based on many iterations of Lisp and the JVM. Clojure has been very stable.
Some people underestimate the importance of tooling and the ecosystem. Or they may underestimate integration; e.g. in the case of a new language, does it have a solid C or Java native interface?
* "18..." -> JS Libraries?
* "certain version..." -> TypeScript / Babel?
* "another to run" -> CommonJS / SystemJS?
* "stylesheets were written" -> SASS / SCSS?
Bleeding edge syndrome is definitely a problem in technology but the opposite can be too. Not leveraging technologies that increase productivity and performance can be just as impactful. I'm not implying that you're doing that.
https://medium.com/@wob/the-sad-state-of-web-development-160...
Had to laugh at that!
In the recent Westworld episode (S01E05), the lab tech was trying to program the bird's AI and his file was called "New Script.wws", where .wws is apparently "west world script".
Look here: http://i.imgur.com/oG9xM8o.png
Immediately, the thought crossed my mind, "Must be fucking JavaScript! No wonder the AI will soon start killing the humans" :-)
In my faux outrage, I went into theoretical scenarios of how exactly JS caused SkyNet. To be fair, once my flash of righteousness passed, I took a closer look and .wws looks nothing like JS. Also, there seems to be C or C++ on the LHS.
I still bet WWS is some kind of duck-typed shite that relies on the cult of TDD to keep the robots' behaviour safe.
checkNoKillMode(str). "Look, all my tests pass. We have 100% coverage".
Yeah, except when str == '', in which case it evals to false. Of course, there's no test case for that.
> checkNoKillMode(str). "Look, all my tests pass. We have 100% coverage".
> Yeah, except when str == '', in which case it evals to false. Of course, there's no test case for that.
So much this.
My theory is that there are many front-end designers that only know html, javascript, and css, and suggested javascript on the back-end, because they don't know any other language.
I've been a part of many of the javascript framework communities like Ember.js over the years and it's filled with designers, not developers.
But it also depends on your optimizations. If you are a small company, you want to focus on having a small footprint because server space costs more to you.
Large companies don't care about server space costs, because it's negligible compared to the cost of a developer salary and benefits. So, they would rather use a large and bloated framework that helps with productivity because less lines of code need to be written.
I've worked at a few large corporations that didn't get that much traffic. They all used enterprisey, inefficient, and bloated frameworks. Nobody really noticed because they could just throw some more hardware at it and the traffic to the site was fairly low.
I think this is a result of all of the tooling and automated building that's "necessary" to cludge everything together.
ES6 features and TypeScript are great, for many reasons, but they don't work immediately in the browser. You need precompiling and something like CommonJS or SystemJS to handle importing libraries not defined in HTML. SASS/SCSS really improves stylesheets, tremendously improves them, but you need to...precompile. Finally, JS heavy apps turn into a hodgepodge of JS, CSS, and HTML that just doesn't really...sit well, so most people will use tooling to establish some sense of ordering.
That last step is both a boon and a curse. Automating the process makes development very easy and saves a lot of time. That tooling is also inherently complicated to an outsider and is a large, ugly barrier to entry.
One of the major problem front end development seems hacky is the browser quirks and developer's wish to get more out of browsers for which they were not designed for.
Or they are using $(Obscure new Functional Programming thing) which makes Haskell look like VB in ease of use and only two people on the team know how to use it (kind of)
Or using (invented here thing that could be replaced by regular DB/other existing system) but since it was one of the founders that did it nobody is allowed to touch it or fix bugs
Needless to say, I wrote zero lines of code during those two weeks, and the company shut down shortly after that.
At the very least they needed to hire a Haskell dev, not a JS dev, even if the language itself was JS.
Let's say that I'm a startup CEO and don't have a lot of money, but want to hire great engineers. I'm competing with giants with a lot of money, so I'm trying to offer everything I can - and all I really have is creative freedom. And if engineers choose to use it to learn new frameworks and in general, get a little crazy, it's fine by me, as long as it keeps them happy and not looking for greener pastures.
These types of developers are always looking for greener pastures. No fault of their own. They should be. If all you "really have is creative freedom" you can't compete with the bigger guys who provide that + higher pay + equity + perks.
It would be better to choose a tech stack that is best for your company and attract talent that actually wants to work on what your startup is doing vs playing with the latest shiny thing.
You could offer them money, or equity, or perks, but the kinds of people you really want would happily take a QoL and pay cut for more stimulating work -- the kind of work that puts them at the forefront of their field -- the kind of work they could write blog posts and give conference lectures about. So you offer them creative freedom, let them pick their own stack, let them use the new trendy framework, let them set up a fancy build and deployment pipeline even though you're a small shop, let them use their favorite language that they never get to use outside of personal projects. Let them solve your boring problems in fancy, clever, maybe a little over-engineered, but fun ways that also make you, the business, look like you're up to date, modern, and ahead of your competition.
I am not at all opposed to using new and shiny. I use new frameworks, etc. in my business often but there is a balance. I generally stick to boring and proven for business crucial stuff (especially back-end) and new/shiny for not so crucial. OR sometimes a new framework is the best decision for the business. In that case, that framework wins.
I guess I feel as a business owner, I have a responsibility to do what is right for the business and our customers. If a developer doesn't want to work on what is right for the business or our customers, I don't want that developer.
What's funny to me is that I've had a track record of leading and building core parts of successful applications used by millions of people. Yet, when I go to interviews, often they don't seem to care about my successes. And, to them, my methods look ancient. And, they express disbelief when I ask for $200k (a paltry sum compared to how much time and money that they'll spend).
I don't think he was talking about technical details, he was merely trying to emphasis on the importance of ignoring trivial things that might not mean (at an early stage esp.,) as much as one might think... And I'd agree..
At an early stage one should have google like garage office and just stay focused... focused.
twitter isn't facing problems due to less revenue.. but due to abundance of the expenses.... just gave a very broad example to make the point.
But If they are doing things that are destroying value then are they so great? Or maybe they are great but not a good fit for you. I.e. they need a Google not a Crud Inc.
You might have been able to turn things around for the company with your experienced view.
I'm not sure where you get that idea that boring technology is a minority opinion. Your conservative approach favoring mature technology is a sentiment expressed by the majority and brought up repeatedly on HN as a highly upvoted point of pride. Examples:
577 points: Choose Boring Technology : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9291215
553 points: Happiness is a Boring Stack : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12788804
I have seen zero articles upvoted to the front page that make a case for using the latest whizbang tech stack for an "unscientific best reasons". (E.g. Rust is new ... but the front page articles on it are usually tutorials, proof-of-concept comparisons to C++, or something about DropBox using it in limited spots where Golang's memory footprint was unacceptable. I haven't seen any frontpage article proselytizing its use as a tech strategy to help a startup succeed or scale out.)
If this wasn't a phenomena then the posts you linked seem kinda pointless.
That may actually happen but it's not relevant to my point.
I'm pointing out that exabrial presented his opinion about choosing "uncool" tech as if he was a lone voice crying out in the wilderness. He's not a lone voice.
Even though exabrial ran into a project apparently enamored by shiny new toys, that doesn't take away from the fact that the overwhelming popular opinion is to just use the older stuff.
For example, every time a thread about "Javascript fatigue" comes up, the HN commenters pile on complaining about the speed of change in the ecosystem and the flavor-of-the-week framework. No thread about new tech ever has "I'm going to use this brand new week-old framework in production!" as the top voted comment -- nor is there ever an article recommending such a strategy upvoted to the front page.
>If this wasn't a phenomena then the posts you linked seem kinda pointless.
They're not pointless but they may have been triggered by a sample size of one (Dan M. writing about regrets at Etsy) or zero projects (Jason Kester writing about what he hypothetically would do). Both those blog posts can be written for audience contemplation ... but ... simultaneously not an indicator about most of us being restless programmers trying to deploy shiny toys into production.
Based on those 2 blog posts (and many others like them), and the followup comments in HN threads overwhelmingly expressing the same conservatism, I'd say exabrial doesn't realize the majority actually agree with him.
I still think this is an underestimate.
Odds are people were working on something before the meeting and stopped just a bit early to get their notes together or read that email chain or whatever. Count on at least 5 minutes but assume more like 15. And then after the meeting people collect their notes, head back to their desks, and then to read the recap after. Another 15 minutes is likely.
So that 1 hour meeting just became 1.5+ hours times 8 people.
What a waste.
Sometimes meetings are required, just like sometimes changing frameworks is required. The skill is separating the required from the bullshit.
(I didn't come up with it.)
I don't waste my time talking to people when I could be working. Personal preference, I know not everyone will agree with it.
Working on your laptop while you're in a meeting is one of the most rude behaviors possible.
If you have something more important than the meeting, decline the invite. If you're too busy, decline the invite. If you're not going to be utilized for enough of the meeting for it to be useful to you, decline the invite.
Don't be that asshole in the back responding to emails or working on some unrelated project and not listening to what's going on.
The assclown in the meeting on his laptop is generally operating at between 0 and 50% efficiency; about 25% on Google Chat and 25% in the meeting asking questions that have already been answered. Let's be generous and say 50%, but its probably less.
Now, that's 1.5 hours lost in the meeting plus preparation, but the meeting needs twice as much time to get the same done so that's 2.5 hours now times 8 people per meeting.
It's probably exponential though, since laptop people have to talk to other laptop people in the meeting at only 0.5 efficiency. So its probably more like 0.5 to the power of the number of people on their laptops.
Yes, the problem is one of poor management where the system starts working against itself.
The developers don't have laptops, so we just lose development time when we're in meetings. Although we generally get just enough work assigned to us that we can still work only 40 hours a week, so I'm not really complaining.
The programmer equivalent attitude is "this code is horrible, it's due for a total re-write." Re-factors and re-orgs are the same things, but there's few regression tests for business besides "oh crap, we lost a bunch of money all of a sudden" which is a lot closer to coding directly in production.
For example, I was stuck in a two hour support call meeting the other day, and I really only had to be passively listening to it and speak maybe four or five times briefly. I was designing puzzles in my notebook the rest of the time. They don't give devs laptops, so I couldn't get real work done.
But hey, I've been in plenty of classes back in the day when I didn't have to pay close attention and only had pen and paper to keep me entertained (I drew, wrote stories and poems, designed games and databases, etc), so it doesn't bother me too much.
There's a reason why there's a full team of BA's and they can't write up work fast enough to keep the devs busy, and I think this is part of the reason. But there isn't enough of a push to change things, and it seems like most people would rather communicate in person here instead of via email when possible.
Many varieties of rudeness are culture-specific.
No matter how popular it is to say that all meetings should only include people who will need to be 100% engaged the whole time, should only ever be attended entirely at each participant's discretion, etc, things do not always work out this way.
If I'm attending a big status meeting where I go second and only need to listen to the first and sixth updates or when my name is mentioned, guess what happens for the rest of the time?
But please, continue thinking that people are naive for not being rude.
Or maybe don't waste people's times with useless meetings or with an unfocused meeting
Or maybe don't make the meeting take longer when discussing things that could be decided quickly by fewer people or I dunno, just wasteful meeting behaviours like repeating the same thing several times...
Maybe in a sweatshop....
Yes, for lack of a more accurate measure work is generally measured in "hours spent". However, as an employer or as a client, what you actually want is not someone's wasted hours but the business value created during those hours.
Insisting on someone filling an office chair just because you paid him to do so seems petty. It's almost this liege lord kind of thinking comically displayed in Dilbert where the people you pay to play "butts in seats" are your part-time serfs to do with as you please.
It's easy to spend a hundred productive engineer-hours that eventually add up to a negative added value.
It's desirable to reduce time wastage at meetings, but it's not ok to do so by simply randomly not appearing to them - if you want many people to skip these meetings, then you have to have a solid alternative on how you'll get the info exchange.
But there wasn't anything to code yet, or if there was, that wasn't explained to him yet, so, ????
Morale: don't write code if there's no clear "what to build".
Some of the debate I'm seeing here is lacking synthesis of the tradeoffs. First, getting people to communicate is essential (a collective activity). Second, giving individuals time to work productively is essential. Some work is done best solo, some is done best collaboratively. The key is intelligently striking a balance.
1. Spending too much time designing an "About" page, a "Who we are" page, an "FAQ" page, to present the startup and what the product will be, rather than actually developing the product.
2. Being very secretive about your very great (but generally vague) startup idea, instead of working on execution.
3. Having a product that is perpetually "almost ready" to launch but never getting around to taking care of that last 80%.
That isn't to say those pages need to be grandiose but knowing that the product is supported by more than one person is something you probably want to convey if you're looking for growth.
Get a few troublesome customers ... and you will be stuck in a lot of meetings, trying to figure out what they want, how to deal with their latest crazy requirements/deadlines, etc. The meetings are a symptom. Not the root cause.
It's the same story with "vanity benchmarks." Good benchmarks reinforce smart business choices (i.e doing business with the right people.) The way you know you're worshiping vanity benchmarks is if they keep generating traffic, leads, etc. that take you ever deeper into the valley of canceled accounts and anti-profits.
having just recently switched jobs, the single biggest cause of pain, failure, frustration, and everything else that sucks at the company I left was pursuing the wrong customers.
throwing good money after bad is a losing situation. some customers need to be allowed to quit. they're not worth keeping on.
Usually the reason is because it is hard or tedious.
I have seen others do it and I've done it myself. Someone doesn't know how code so instead they become very vocal and go to all meetings or tell everyone documentation updating or benchmarking is what is crucial and they'll focus on that.
There is of course nothing wrong with all the other tasks, but I think it is worth looking at why all of the sudden these new priorities are being pushed. Deep down everyone wants to seem important look busy, so people will always find busy work. Sometimes they find something is useful, but often it is just random stuff, just not appear idle. "How are you doing Steve, how is new database backend coming along? - Well I decided we should re-prioritize our customer accounts, and then I worked on updating all the documentation, and a meeting is coming along we should present there..."
The point is employees engage in this avoidance busy works but CxOs, managers and owners do this as well. In their case it is even more damaging because they pull in the whole company after them.
"Stop everyone, I found a cool new JS frameworks it is super reactive, we should rewrite our front end in it".
I agree about the time-wasting meetings, but not about the above, since I'm directly in that situation. You could hope to find one person to fill any two of those jobs, but all you'll get out of a 'scrappy content marketer' is a vacant position and a series of burnouts. That's hard work, where you have to invest resources to reap rewards.
Instead, identify the bundle of tasks that person did and find people who can take them on separately, and perhaps accomplish other tasks you didn't even realize your team could do.
If you were to identify every task your business needs, then you have the flexibility to direct those tasks to the right people. Further, if you're in a high-growth environment, you can continue to scale by motivating your people to fire themselves from their worst tasks and focus on their best expertise.
If your team continues to evolve in this way while your company keeps sound unit economics, then congratulations! You've solved the scaling problem.
I don't think it's unusual for an email list to be managed by one dude at an early stage tech startup.
(Which seems to be a definite truism in my observation of which businesses and teams succeed and fail).
The last two hires have been somewhere between oxygen thief and chair warmer.
TL;DR: If you are getting crappy candidates, you are likely offering too little and could tempt better candidates with a better offer.
You should checkout what competitors are paying in your location
If you're not in that neighborhood, good luck. Startups don't seem to value marketing as much as the big companies, and then they wonder why they need 4 people for one job. Offering under $100K for a Director of Marketing (sadly common in startups) is a joke.
Instead of guessing what's a fair pay wouldn't be better to pay or get paid on results - revenue you bring in. The marketing director or others in the team are close enough (in terms of agency they have on revenue) to revenue generation that this should be possible, no?
Marketing also generally has multiple touch points before a sale actually occurs. Maybe you see a Google paid result that you ignore, then a YouTube pre-roll that you tune out, and then you see their logo on a train ad during your commute. None of those result in a sale, but you finally see the company at a conference, grab some swag, talk to one of their salespeople, and become a customer. In this example, their revenue looks like it was generated by the efforts of the sales department, but in reality marketing had a lot to do with it, too.
If your company has all the right tracking in place, you can determine the path your customers took when they ultimately bought your product, provided that they bought it online. That still ignores their prior exposure to the product that helped convince them during the current session. More importantly, if you were to measure marketing performance based solely on those metrics, your marketers would have little incentive to do all of their other important functions.
One person can easily manage all of this and more very affordably with freelancers, tools, and a decent process.
Where you go wrong is when the person managing is "figuring it out on the fly."
Use canva or stencil for design, use textbroker or copypress for content at scale, all that is left is building an editorial calendar, planning content promotion, blogger outreach, all of which can be done with tools, etc...
...if you have clarity about what exactly needs to be done from ideation to promotion, its really not that hard for one person with tools and freelancers to execute on.
SalesForce spent $250K on a party pre-IPO, back in 2000.[1] Four floors of the Regency and the B-52s. Playing startup was much bigger in the first dot-com boom. This time around, everybody is working very hard. Not necessarily on the right stuff, but working hard.
5000 for a booth is a bargain even for really obscure trade shows, and it makes absolute sense for a B2B entity to be present at trade shows.
It may make sense for some B2B entities to be present at trade shows but the article is talking about early-stage companies buying trade show sponsorships. Depending on how you interpret "early-stage", I'd argue that this article is wholly accurate -- there likely is a smarter way to spend that $5,000. However, at some point you cross a line where your product is ready for the next growth stage and that $5,000 is well spent at $X Conference. At that point, $X Conference is part of your larger marketing strategy, also pointed out in the article.
Maybe some startups sponsor but don't attend? That would be foolish.
Alternatively, spending any money on marketing before you have anything customers can actually buy or use or trial would be foolish.
But if you've got something even a little bit useful that's ready for people to try, and you plan to attend the conference, that $5,000 is a smoking deal!!!
Part of what makes a start-up hard is there aren't any processes in place nor a true north for what the company should do nor how they should do it. Coupled with people who might be new to start-ups and lack the ability to optimize which tasks they work on, I'd bet some of these bad habits develop.
Another time when these bad habits may develop is when people are fighting fires all day. They don't always have the time to reasses how and when to fix what's broken to set up the company for future success.
The rule of thumb I try to think about is "what activities have high leverage" and "will talking about or doing this change what we do or how we do it?". These two checks often help me figure out if the activity is worth doing or if it's "bullshit".
I've been through almost all 7 items that Alex Turnbull lists in the article. In the end we had to lay off our single employee (prematurely hired), close office (prematurely leased) and put in storage most of our furniture. We were forced to reconsider all we did through the new lens of this criteria: is there a paying client?
It was a bitter and, memory wise, a cringe-worthy part of my recent history. I'm in my 40s (started our startup when I was 39 - three years ago) and only really had partial experience doing independent consulting. My experience and practical references have only ever been informed from the perspective of an employee and through the paradigm of that working ethic. This, the employee thinking, was the weakest heritage I took into the startup world. As a technical software developer I am sufficiently competent, but only ever lived in an employee (sheltered) worldview. This was a fatal disposition to take into the world of startup.
I learnt a few things in the months after we restarted (circa 2015 Jan):
1. Startup owners run scared 24/7
2. Fear drives most, if not all, decisions
3. The single most import source of fear is the quitting of a secure job
4. Fear affects your technical abilities
5. Hope is the ointment for the fear
6. Subconscious drive to drown out the fear usually means propping up hope, which is usually accomplished by spending, hiring and "growing" - and by spending time with people or groups considered "safe" (out of your field to give you objective feedback!)
7. Rejection feeds fear and affects momentum of progress. So opportunities are avoided because rejection is more likely than success is.
It takes courage and an endocrine balance that favours decisions made without influence of fear. This can only happen when you lose your blind spots.
Can confirm that not all startups are like this!
1) Meetings
We have one per week and sometimes cancel that because we feel it's overkill
2) Hiring tons of people
If anything we don't hire enough because we never spend money we haven't yet earned
3) Vanity benchmarks
One benchmark - cash in the bank (if it's too little, tighten the belt, if it's too much, spend it to grow)
4) Meetups
I'm terrible at networking and should do more of these!
5) Sponsoring conferences
HA!
6) Office, business cards and so on
Don't have either... 100% remote has worked since day one... OK, just got an office (sort of, it's shared) in Bangkok but no one works there!
7) Having more conversations with people outside of your market than people in it
I am totally guilty of that one!
Please don't take any of this as a claim that we are better... I can and have leveled a thousand criticisms at how I run things... just saying, "startups" that exist way, way outside of this mold are definitely out there :)
Sure startup is a sexier way to describe a young, small business but semantics aside, this feels like "traditional" business looking for glamour. Of which I am equally guilty, donnt take this as criticism.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is if you're an aspiring business owner you don't have to go for this high-growth/external investment model. It encourages lax fiscal discipline which is the cause of these mistakes. I sometimes feel people I know who have gone through this could have learned more and earned more by bootstrapping.
Where's the confusion?
...
Does it really? I don't actually accept that, but around here at least, this is a common enough definition that you should call it out when you're going to deviate from it:
A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit."
Litigating what the correct meaning of "startup" is on HN is not productive, but we should recognize that not everyone agrees with Graham's redefinition, and therefore arguments that cite his essay are begging the question.
I disagree. It's really really really hard to build a business and make it grow. Any logical tools we can use to cut down on the space of strategies and goals worth pursuing is worth its weight in gold. Coming to more restrictive definitions of "startup" does exactly that.
More prosaically, if we don't do it ourselves, investors are just going to do it for us and leave us in the dark as to what their real criteria for funding is. We want them to be a part of the conversation because bootstrapping everything sucks. Being needlessly inclusive hurts everybody.
Cutting down on this luck factor is the problem the startup landscape is trying to solve. We can provide two things to would-be entrepreneurs, information and resources. Information can obviously be free, but resources have to be limited.
It does the industry, the collection of people providing information and resources, the most good if following the information, which they can get for free, leads easily and directly into provisioning of resources. A more transparent process makes it more democratic and a better route for real social change.
So we want to constrain the definition of words like 'startup' so that they better conform to what investors are looking for in ventures to fund. Sure, anybody can use the term any way they want, but for this community, 'everybody starting a venture is a startup' does nothing to help the would-be entrepreneurs to do the right things they need to do to get investment. It's too inclusive, it does not provide a pathway for people that want to join the community to gain real, material help with their venture. It needs to be a useful tool of exclusion.
What's instead happened is that people who pay attention to message boards like this are afflicted with a kind of snow blindness from all the random businesses that do get funded by third party investors. It is true: if you want to be funded by third parties, you will need to build a certain kind of business, and that business will look a lot like what Paul Graham defines as a startup. There's a lot of debate about whether and why this is, but the math is straightforward: if you want to take a few million dollars of O.P.M. to build a business with, you need to aim at the moon and hit it for those investors to have a viable business model.
What people who don't build businesses on O.P.M. object to is the notion that O.P.M. is the only way to start a viable company.
So: sure. If you want to educate people who plan on building VC-funded companies, you're right. It's a good idea not to delude them into thinking they can take a few $MM and grow organically. They should probably follow most of the Paul Graham playbook.
But more companies should reflect about whether they want to take a few $MM to begin with. Many people would be happier if they didn't. A lot --- most, in fact --- of the companies who do take the money have fooled themselves, and are frittering away the single most valuable resource they have (their time) on companies that have less than a crap-shot chance at success. Craps works extremely well for investors. It's not so great for founders.
I'm not providing a link to a PG essay because it coincidentally agrees with my position -- there's a big orange "Y" at the top of this page, and it's not there arbitrarily. If you're having a conversation on HN about startups, there's an underlying culture which you need to be aware of. Demanding people justify a shared understanding of a term's meaning by challenging whether or not it doesn't mean something else is arrogant -- have you considered that you are ignorant of the basic terms of the discussion, as it occurs on HN?
There are other conversations where your definition might be right. That has nothing to do with this conversation.
But I've been here a long time (just like you), and my account predates Paul Graham's fatwa about startups. If he chooses to redefine other words in future essays, I reserve the right to link to the dictionary again.
My goal is not to be obnoxious, but to keep the terms of debate open for people who have a more expansive view of what online businesses can look like, and what values might be important to their founders.
Ultimately, I think PG's definition defines a useful category of businesses to think about and litigating the label we use for that category doesn't help anyone.
For reasons I don't quite fathom, discussions about business on HN seem all to be born without the part of their brains that understands business fundamentals. Almost every business can be made to scale (ironically, the more high-status the business, the trickier it is to scale, which is why you'd be better off investing in a crappy pizzeria than in Grant Achatz). You can build a billion dollar plumbing company. You can build a billion dollar accounting firm. Someone out there --- god, I hope it's actually a housecleaner --- is going to build a billion dollar housecleaning company. Do you really need the mechanics of how this works? Do the work. Get good. Hire people to do the work for you. Get good at managing them. Hire people to manage the people you hire to do the work. Repeat.
Nobody disputes whether the category of businesses Paul Graham describes is useful. It clearly is. If you plan on building a business on other people's money, it's vitally important that you understand almost everything he has to say.
What is in dispute is whether that category of business is so important that it should annex the term "startup". Plenty of businesses you would describe as startups don't obey Graham's rules at all, because they scaled up on a different schedule than A16Z wants businesses to, and did it without a single wire transfer from A16Z.
I'm not saying high-growth startups are better than other kinds of businesses. Heck, I'd very willingly advocate the view that other kinds of small businesses have better business fundamentals than tech startups.
Just because one pizzeria managed to scale doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of small businesses are not built to scale. Most small business owners think about how to grow 10-20% in the next year, not 100-200%. Heck, in my experience a lot of them are terrified of the concept of rapid growth.
Like I said in my comment, I don't really care if we use the term "startup" to refer to high-growth businesses or not. We should just all agree on a consistent set of terms and stick to that.
Otherwise you get unhelpful comments. Like I could talk about how my "startup" has reached profitability and 6 figures of revenue with only a single employee. Except this startup is my consulting business and has no business being lumped in with high-growth VC-funded companies.
I think "VC-backed startup" captures the thing Paul Graham is talking about, and I think the modifier "VC-backed" is particularly important because you want to follow the Graham playbook if you're VC-backed, but not otherwise.
You probably don't want to get me started on the growth and return potential of a consulting shop doing a regular 6 figures of revenue.
The latter isn't good evidence for the former. VC-backed startups are explicitly designed to either fail fast or grow quickly. So they simultaneously have a higher failure rate than standard small businesses and a higher rate of becoming $100M+ companies.
> I think "VC-backed startup" captures the thing Paul Graham is talking about
That's fine (and I agree that it's a more thorough definition), but I don't think it's useful to require a redefinition of a word that most people in the community already understand to mean high-growth VC-backed companies.
> You probably don't want to get me started on the growth and return potential of a consulting shop doing a regular 6 figures of revenue.
Honestly, I really really do. :) To be clear, I've had lots of success selling my time (either as a developer or, occasionally, managing a small team of contractors) but not at scaling myself.
I agree that "venture-backed startup" is a useful mental category. Pretending that it's the only category is what bugs me.
The GP's point is that definitions are important and litigating the definition of the word startup has been tried before and doesn't end up benefiting anyone.
The logic flows as such:
1. People making judgements about startups
2. Not everyone can agree what the definition of a startup is (even if the benevolent dictator has stated their opinion on the matter)
3. Therefore it's incredibly difficult to agree or disagree about judgements of startups because the underlying definition is not clear
You may claim that #3 should be pg's definition "because its HN/YC", but not all HN members agree.
It's like objecting to a discussion about angels (the investors) because the word typically refers to angelic beings, or the baseball team.
Also, you talk about raising money like it's a bad thing. Don't forget that plenty of fiscally responsible high growth companies have raised angel & VC rounds. Just because you take on less responsibility doesn't make you more responsible, as a founder & business owner.
The redefinition (a useful one for many discussions) was by pg to clarify his points in several essays - not by the Wordpress community.
It actually feels like there are two conflicting definitions.
In tech you often hear people describe companies like AirBnB, Facebook and even Google described as "startups" although they're no longer "early stage" by any means and often have already peaked their growth and surpassed investment needs (though there may still be additional investments happening).
Outside it often feels like the label applies to any small service or tech company that was recently founded, period. This is certainly what a lot of "startup" events cater to. And of course there are plenty of companies that would be "startups" in the Bay area sense but failed to find investors and instead ended up bootstrapping and becoming profitable.
I'm a little curious about this, what do you mean? It sounds like you run pretty lean; why get an office if nobody works there?
We have one per week and sometimes cancel that because we feel it's overkill
Needing to have meetings isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you're making things that don't need many decisions to be made, and everyone agrees on the best approach, then meetings are completely pointless, but if everyone agrees then you're probably not pushing any limits. People have differing opinions at the edges, not about the boring well-trodden middle.
People literally do in SF/SV... Remember 'The Melt'
They haven't even launched yet, and they have 9 people, and more working remotely. They also all have branded team swag.
The company I work for is mostly bootstrapped, we've been around for about 3 years now and we still don't have swag, and have only 7 employees (most of whom are sales and support, because we're in a market that requires a lot of human interaction for sales).
We've been coding for a few months now and don't even have a website. Business cards? hahaha.
Product + market fit comes first, everything else next.
I've done the bootstrapped startup. I'd change that line, simplify it.
Sales comes first, everything else next.
What was other people's experience like?
However, since the stock market was doing so badly, it was the beginning of the moment where a _lot_ of money started looking for somewhere else to go. So if you were of the wherewithal to go out and make a startup, it was a great time to be looking for funding.
So it depends a lot on who you ask. I will say, though, that real estate started taking off in ~2011, so it was more than a month of panic, but I would guess that in 2011-2013 or so SF was far and away the strongest local economy in the US.
Other than that, not even a hiccup. At that time, we were in Chicago and NYC, but not in the Bay Area. However, a pretty big chunk of our client base was in SFBA, and I don't remember that part of the business skipping a beat.
After a dozen years in a startup what will most of these Have $$$ wise.
There were no startups in the '80s for an average comp sci grad like me. After a dozen years working at hugeo monopoly I got ~200k (by doing nothing except vest) once departure occurred. Is it more for the current batch of startup workers after 12 years or so?
Is it even still possible to use the word "journey" in this context without it dripping with snarky ironic reference to "Our Incredible Journey" [1], with the obvious implication that a start-up is doomed to sell out and shut down and screw all their customers? That the actual "journey" being taken is the wild goose chase of the unwitting customers being led down the garden path? [2]
[1] https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com
[2] http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2013/02/27/our-incredible...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Journey_(film)
I've been a part of a startup where we were growing our core product at a reasonable rate and having success. But some of our customers kept throwing certain buzzwords at us, "Millennials" being the most oft repeated one. As a result, our founder pivoted hard to a new product targeting that buzzword. The consequences have not been ideal. Another buzzword that is currently threatening to derail us again is "bots."
Buzzwords or trends are something big companies can afford to waste thousands or even millions of dollars chasing aimlessly (often for no real return). A startup cannot. Startups need to have a clear vision of a single product and pursue it relentlessly until they are in the black.
When our customers throw buzzwords at us they aren't expressing a need. Reacting to it as such is often self destructive.
Watsi's founder talked a fair bit about this in his Startup School presentation (which is excellent, BTW):
and non-profit companies have the signal of "someone is willing to donate money to pay me to do this for someone else"
Fortunately as an engineer in the SF Bay Area I have a lot of choice in the matter. Have fired myself from clients whose biggest client was Monsanto[1] and its ilk. Not my cup of tea.
[1] I oppose their business and patent practices, I'm fine with gmos. In case anyone wanted to reply with something silly and start a flamewar.
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK -- Sir, are you OK in there? He's been in there all night. I should call the sherif.
If the conference audience is a perfect fit, and you feel your company/product is far enough along to leverage the exposure, it could make total sense to pay for a booth/sponsorship.
If you don't have $5k to spend on marketing, or it's too early for it to be effective, that's a different story.
But if you do, then compare spending the same amount on AdWords (or other marketing/lead-gen channel X) and see if the math works out.
You wouldn't believe how many idiots are cosplaying scientists, leave alone all these hipsters cosplaying intelligence..
In general, it boils down to the social advantage of displaying "success" and "competence" - socially constructed markers.
But there is a beautiful principle in biology - the "signals" must be honest and costly, impossible to cheat - one cannot cosplay parasite resistance, superior foraging ability, or good genes in general. One cannot cosplay youth and health. All these celebrities are ridiculous.
Hipsterism is cheap cosplay of intelligence. Founders cosplay special talents and abilities they does not possess. Nothing to see here.
I'm with an international corporation. This week alone, I'm averaging about 2 hours of meetings per day. I was expected to attend an "optional" networking event last week. Since it was "optional", I didn't go. If and when that negatively affects me, I'll know it's time to go job hunting. I can see from one end of this floor to the other, because open office floor plan is best office floor plan.
I have a different experience. Meetings aren't the problem. Getting 2+ people together is important. The problem is how the interaction happens and the costs and benefits involved. No one said that leadership or communication is easy. Building collective will is both an art and a science.
I say this: don't blame meetings. They are necessary. Learn to run better meetings.
We have even codified it into a named activity in the software development process, bike shedding
1: identify/invent __problem__
2: create! solution
3: sell! solution
4: save __profits__
5: goto 1Most self named startup that are as much a startup the new baker around the corner feel self entitled to be fuzzy about earning money.
A baker is like a startup, it requires freaking investment, it requires innovation, it requires to adapt to a market where distributions bake frozen «high value» (frozen) bread at 50% of the costs.
But a baker will always know how he/she makes money, how much investments are needed, that they must have a plan to reimburse debts, a point of equilibrium, a knowledge of operational costs and a clear position on the market in front of competition.
That is why I am trying to get hired by the baker around the corner, I feel more entrepreneurship in this guy than most MBA in suits and tie that plays with others money and lives without a real sense of responsibility or professionalism.
What? I can imagine the rate might be as high as 100%. That's hardly "unimaginable".
I am not trying to be merely annoying or pedantic here. I simply want authors to tighten up their writing and exaggerate less. With an exaggeration like that, I stop reading.
I think you just saved me time reading the article and further HN comments. In fact, I feel so much time was saved, I used some of it to write this.
I'm serious.
The sign that I saw most prominently was operational instability. The application would have performance and sometimes uptime issues; these issues were predictable but time and effort was spent on things other than beefing up infrastructure to make that happen.
When moving off of GMail takes higher precedence than creating an Highly Available web server setup, you know that's a sign that things aren't prioritized well.
Developing a business plan that depends on a web-based product to succeed, then, instead of focusing on developing the product, hiring a bunch of assistants and reps to do the product's job by hand. You hear the words "concierge," "curated," and - worse - "bespoke" thrown around a lot when this is going on.
The actual product development ends up getting bogged down in a lot of the things that article discusses. My impression is also that there's often an overly-ambitious tech stack for what amounts to a CRUD app with a few feature tweaks.
people have nervous breakdowns and worse from running startups so make sure you're in a good spot financially to even do it
everything u do creates value. that sexy button your designer just spent two days on cost the company $2600 hope it was worth it.
that bug you left unfixed for a few releases now takes a whole weekend to fix and now one of your developer burns out and quits uh oh costs you $50000.
everything has very very exact price tag. add up all the missteps and the successes and get the final outcome
I've no interest in the "startup" model, We work out of a very cheap office in a council (local gov) building and we run cheap!, total business costs (inc rent, internet and phone) run around £450 a month for both businesses (the dev shop and business partners design business), We have a local startup hub that would cost that for a couple of hotdesks, it's crazy.
How did you arrange that?
Lots of councils here in the UK own office buildings and rent them out, We get two big rooms as a single office for ~340 a month which includes 24/7 access everything but phone/internet basically.
You can see the size of my side http://imgur.com/a/H7fxb in the bottom image, that desk is 8ft long, the other side is even bigger (maybe 60% bigger) but I didn't want it because it's too bright.
Would you mind saying which council this is?
They are managed by the NPS group one of those, privatise the public sector deals.
Though out building lease was just taken over by a non-profit setup to help younger people get started in business, so far they've been amazing at getting an old building up to spec :).
Hull is a bit of a basket case economically but its on the up and would be a good place to run a startup if you want cheap good offices and insane broadband, I have 250Mbps at home!
Not everyone is in a position to accept such a proposition, but with a reasonable amount of perspective and emotional distance, it can be a really good thing for some people.
I'd be happy with something that makes a comfortable living and crucially genuinely helps people, I'd consider that a success and its better than playing the unicorn lottery, plus in the UK the SV attitude of throwing money at everything simply doesn't exist anyway.
Sometimes I think it's because of marketing reasons or as an alibi for certain decisions because "that is how they do it in startups". Although we only do the meetings stuff, the benefits we don't have.
So when exactly is a company not a startup anymore ?
Why can't this just be real businesses who are making mistakes, which could or could not be fatal?
One obvious reason it's different is the number of people who now have the explicit goal of doing a startup. They don't know what they want to do, but gosh golly they're sure they want to be startup founders.
This is different than, say, 2003. Or 1995. Then, basically nobody wanted to "do a startup". Starting a company was not generally seen positively. It was hard to do, it took many years to get anywhere, it was likely to fail, and you could end up broke. So the people doing it really wanted to launch a particular product, solve a particular problem. They were people with a specific burning vision that they wanted to make real.
But now you'll talk to people who see it as just another career choice. They're going to go to grad school or do a startup. They'll join an investment bank or do a startup. Their idea, their burning passion? They don't have one. But they want to be a founder! Maybe!
What that means, of course, is they want to appear a founder. It's basically like playing dress-up. Except at $1m+ per year of other people's money. That's why the failure mode involves things that look like business but are anathema to serious founders: lots of meetings (where, yay, everybody listens to you because you're the founder), lots of headcount (because that's what grown-up businesses have), vanity metrics, fancy office space, etc, etc.
To people really in business, "too many" has a pretty clear baseline: the absolute minimum you need to get shit done, to make and sell your product. That's why HP started in a garage. Every dollar you spend on vanity is a dollar you you aren't spending on something that matters to your customers.
That article and these comments were written by a bot. It's all spam.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/11/02/...
books will be written, talks will be held.
and anyone outside tech will continue to look in bewilderment as to what the fuck is going on here.
I don't really think attending meetups are an issue, tbh. Are there startups that force employees to repeatedly go?
And that’s okay; it doesn’t mean that you’re going to fail in business
Yes it does, and you deserve it so that someone more capable can come along. </rant>
Titles that use superlatives and evoke indignation are on the baity side, so we changed it to the subtitle, with "you" replaced by the more neutral "a startup".
On topic - IMHO articles like these should be more frequent. I dislike 'startup culture'. They should build a business first (or at least have monetization strategy) and party later.