Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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"More than just the quality, I was amazed by the toughness of the founders. These guys (and gals) were not the young, sheepish, technical founders you’d expect. These guys are operators – savvy, confident, operators."

Stereotype much?

In general this sort of post is vapid bullshit. Success in business comes from:

1) Having a product or service that people want.

2) Having a way to let people know that you have it and persuade them to try it or purchase it.

3) Having a way to deliver that product or service that costs less than the amount you take in as payment.

That's it. Everything else is bullshit, including whether or not the founders are "sheepish" or are "operators."

Business is actually very superstitious. There are so many factors that go into success in business that it makes rational analysis from hard data or from first principles hard, so people fall back on superstition. A lot of this superstition revolves around this almost mystical notion of having "what it takes," which tends to reduce to some notion of alpha maleness combined with luck.

I actually had an investor type tell me once that one of the things he looks for in potential founders is a "prominent jaw line." It was the funniest fucking thing. I am not making this up. Very very hard not to laugh out loud...

It reminds me of the Superbowl winner who wears the same pair of socks that he won the Superbowl in for every final game he plays... without washing them of course. Correlation != causation.

Superstition always causes people to make bad decisions. The big one I see in business is that amazing amounts of money gets thrown at superficial correlates of success and at empty cargo cultist alpha male types. Ever wonder how CueCat got funded? Why, it was going to <buzzword buzzword buzzword> and the founder I'm sure had a square alpha male jaw line and was very assertive.

It's ironic that you describe Rich's post as "vapid bullshit" because the problem I see in your comment is that you give such a uselessly facile answer.

Yes, sure, all you have to do to make a successful company is make something people want and charge for it. In the same way that all you have to do to climb Everest is keep walking uphill till you can't anymore.

The real issue here is that doing these things is in practice very hard, at least the way startups have to do them. Doing them at the level of a service business like, say, a sandwich shop, is easy. Doing them at the sort of scale required in a startup is so much harder that in practice few can bear it.

We have a huge amount of data about this after funding over 200 startups. We think constantly about the problem of how to predict which startups will succeed. And nothing is so clear as that toughness is the deciding factor.

Is the toughness you're referring to the same kind of toughness portrayed in Hollywood and Schoolyards? So much of toughness and machismo is posturing. Do successful founders aggressively take control of every conversation and confrontation? Do they project formidability, authority, vision and power? Or do they cultivate the quiet, persistent confidence of a stoic? Or do you find tough souls who react deeply and emotionally to trying situations, but are always able to rally themselves, and renew their pursuits with redoubled efforts, their emotional trials only tempering their resolve?

Toughness comes in different qualities and colors. Do which do great founders wear?

Resilience. They can endure misfortunes without becoming discouraged.

This does resonate with me. Thank you.

So do you consider it a plus if a founder is a marathon runner?

Elaborate about "toughness" then. Maybe it could be a good essay topic. Toughness is such an opaque term... to continue with your analogy, I'm sure "strength" is a deciding factor in successful mountain climbers. But that's so coarse grained and opaque. I don't see much "meat" there.

Do you mean some mixture of perseverance, ability to make decisions, and willingness to take a few lumps? Or do you mean narcissism and alpha male characteristics?

http://paulgraham.com/relres.html

I've read that, and that's much, much better.

I went back and re-read the blog post, and I can sort of see how I might have been misinterpreting it a little. But I still dislike "toughness," and I think using that term invites the sort of misinterpretation that we're seeing here. Here's why.

I have met quite a few folks in business who seem to think... well... they would never use this term or say it like this, but they basically think that it takes a sociopath or someone with narcissistic personality disorder to start a successful business.

I've seen several examples of this in action... of people who put up with or even fund downright abusive off-the-charts-narcissistic personalities because they were convinced that those are the sorts of people who will be successful.

The thing is: this doesn't match what I've seen in terms of actual success. Granted, I don't have 300 examples. I have about five. But what I've seen is that success is determined by good market research, good analytics, iteration, perseverance, intelligence, and a bit of luck. There are lots of factors, but those seem to be the big ones.

In the narcissistic world of startups, the term "toughness" is going to bring to mind narcissism and sociopathic behavior. There are just too many bad examples. Use another word, like "perseverance" or "resourcefulness" and your point will be better taken.

It sounds like you have confused "tough" with "asshole". Common mistake.

Actually the point I was making is that people routinely do the opposite. They confuse asshole with tough.

> Doing them at the level of a service business like, say, a sandwich shop, is easy.

As someone who runs a service business, and who spends a lot of time working closely with a large number of people who also run service businesses ... I'd really like to know if your opinion here is based on any actual facts.

Traditional businesses have to deal with local ordinances and licenses, real estate, advertising & marketing, and one-on-one customer relations, all with higher expenses and lower potential revenues. They are wickedly susceptible to both local and national economic trends; when customers stop spending money or coming in the door, it's very, very hard to get them to come back. "Startup" businesses more often have these wonderful markets of millions of customers; if half of them walk away, you can still have a viable business.

And of course, startups have things like YCombinator (and TechStars, and...) that are putting a lot of effort into helping them be successful. Traditional businesses? Their best bet is their local SBA, and those guys are not helpful at all.

Hell, I just brought on another person to manage my service business so that I can begin to ease out of the nightmare of running that thing and slip into the wonderful world of coding all day.

Many profitable SaaS and info product businesses are much, much easier to start and run than a sandwich shop. More profitable, too.

It's in your best interest to promote the 'heroic' model of startups, that don't charge but grow huge and sell -- a hopeful one-time sale model -- rather than incremental sales like I do.

If the top of the mountain is earning a lot of money from your business, there are still different ways to reach that peak. Every mountain has multiple faces.

Some faces are easy and well-known, like creating a product that creates business value, and then capturing that value by charging. Other faces are considered "ballsy" because they are so difficult -- the model of growing big while free, and then the one-time liquidity event.

The easy face can still get you to the top, and, bonus - it's easy!

Your list of requirements for success is about as useful as telling someone that you need to go to college to get a degree. Its actually pretty vapid. It overlooks the ability of overcoming adversity to achieve all those things.

Your overlooking all the tremendously difficult and gutsy things you have to make a business sucessful: 1. Quit a well paying job which affords your family food,shelter and clothes. 2. Work 14 hours a day on a service that people may not buy even though they have given you letters of intent that they will. 3. Partner and work with people (devs, designers, customers) who you've known for less than the guy who works at your favourite pizza place. 4. Work on something which at the end of the day might be useless because the whole industry could change. (Launching a new mp3 player on the same day as the ipod) 5. Cold call hundreds of potential customers of which 90% will slam the phone on you. 6. Work with no health insurance (if you dont get funding) to save money for your startup.

I dont think you could even think of attempting a "real" money making startup unless you have brass balls.

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