The key to building an idea seems to be blind faith
nextcept.com
nextcept.com
This kind of "insanity" is the precursor to the relentless determination one needs when leading a scrappy team of underdogs. Pragmatism and level-headedness sound good on paper, but borderline irresponsible risk-taking is what, at the end of the day, gets rewarded. There's no way to convince anyone -- potential employees, co-founders, investors -- without a cult-like aura. If you'll allow me some hyperbolic flair, startup founders are prophets.
On one hand, VCs like YC need founders to build companies in order to get excess returns for their LPs.
On the other hand, founders still need to take excessive risks to start a company. Then they need to execute against incredible odds.
I say this as someone who left my job in 2014 to start a company. 14 months later it was over and I'd say that I set myself and family back substantially in the process from both a loss of cash to also a slower career path.
I don't regret the decision, but it does take excessive risk to launch.
Obviously, when you interview those who hit a jackpot, they will tell: buy more tickets! Believe blindly in your luck! This is what worked for them.
The trick is that you don't interview much those who kept failing, either by following the scenario, or by deviating from it. They are more numerous but less interesting.
Definitely, running a startup is not pure lottery, execution matters a lot. It's more like poker: a good player will win more often, but you always can do everything right and still lose.
> "Live in the future, then build what's missing."
http://paulgraham.com/swan.html
> "The fact that the best ideas seem like bad ideas makes it even harder to recognize the big winners."
I have lived this multiple times and I have delivered working products (why one of them is in production at Amazon but deprecated because of internal politics). For there is an inescapable political/sales dimension to this that separates a good execution from a successful good execution.
I am beginning to give up on the latter. I would love to know how to close the gap here but I suspect I will retire before that happens. One only gets a finite number of shots to succeed and the magazine is close to empty in my case.
Well, no. No one is saying that blind faith is sufficient, and that a good outcome necessarily follows.
Blind faith is necessary, along with many other things, and even then there's no guarantee of success.
This does not require blind faith. This requires a degree of empathy to the frustration that their staff is undergoing but for which they don't have the leadership to address, and I guess some faith that you can build it for them, but definitely not blind faith because the evidence is staring you in the face.
I'm kind of sick of living in the future personally. I wasted way too many years on that. YMMV.
It is likely that you misunderstood PG. He is merely saying that even with all the work, you won't always be right in picking an idea. However, this does not imply that you should put no work on it and start acting on blind faith. In fact I am pretty sure YC does not fund teams who haven't spent at least some time analyzing their idea.
If you want to hire at a startup, check for a mad-prophet-yes, but also check wether he rules unchecked- as in - is there someone to stand up to him execution wise. Otherwise, the good start idea might be sunk by lots execution novelties. Usually, after the first great leap is done, there is also a silent take over by someone who is better able to manage "dull" execution of standard tasks, necessary for the novel idea.
Blind faith is a bad idea. You want to start with an idea and become its biggest enemy for a few weeks. You need to attack it from all angles, talk to potential customers and try to find reasons why it would not work and why you wouldn't want to spend the next 5-10 years of your life building it. If after several weeks you still cannot prove that you have a bad idea then congratulations you have a good idea candidate.
Luck is still going to play a big role in your success but at-least you have a sound starting point.
I mean you gotta have some insight and rationality to avoid making another pet rock, but it's not hard to find potential flaws. The op above sounds like an engineer commenting on how to be a ceo.
Why should it have failed? What did the engineers and salespeople at SpaceX do about those reasons?
A) Throw their hands up and decide they weren’t worth investigating solutions to them
B) Plow forward and completely ignore them
C) Study the problems to understand the conditions that would make them irrelevant
D) Study the problems, decide the only way out of them was through solving them, and then apply their skills and time to doing so
E) both C and D
————
There is this idea I keep seeing. I’ll call it, “Impossible is Nothing”. Where you ignore roadblocks just plow forward blindly in spite of them and overcome them through force of will. But magic doesn’t exist. Things don’t get built because someone shouted loud enough. Things get built because people saw the potential problems and then
1) Exercised judgement to evaluate if the problems were real.
2) If so, applied skill to uncover their details and solve them.
If you decide to skip step #1 and just blindly have faith that the problem isn’t real, then it still stands in your way and still causes you to fail.
Blind faith would have led Drew to ignore the comment out-of-hand and stay focused on plowing forward. (Or try to anyway. Some people don’t know how to avoid distraction when they’re trying to suppress suspicions that they are going down the wrong path.)
They had built PageRank for BackRub that proved to be superior in almost every way to the dominant way search engines were built. The dominant way also had a glaring flaw that skewed search accuracy — keyword spam.
In a way, they saw themselves as been on a mission to rectify the anomaly in how search results were currently being computed by demoing to investors just how better their search results were compared to the competition, and in the end, with their help, they managed to succeed.
With technologies pushing the edge of research, N is typically very small, and being headstrong and willing to take risks and experiment is an essential skill. At some point, you alone are a large enough fraction of N that all of humanity is essentially depending on you to take the risk. If you don't then it might be a very long time until someone equally as capable will.
From your perspective, his projects might look like blind faith. But from Elon Musk's perspective, he felt he had a better understanding of the viability of those projects to undertake them -- he knew or had a vague idea of which levers to pull that hadn't been pulled in a certain way before, or perhaps new levers had appeared that hadn't been noticed by experts in the field.
This is why humans are different -- our life experiences shape our perspectives and our perspectives shape our understanding. Elon's confidence comes from his better grasp of the challenges to make EV a reality which is why he felt emboldened to tackle the problem anew, where others had failed.
Elon felt his understanding of EV and how they would evolve made him uniquely qualified to invest in an EV venture called Tesla when he was pitched by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003.
And it goes both ways: bankrolling a EV startup at that time was considered crazy.
Elon's personal bankrolling of a rocket company back in 2002 gave off two crucial signals:
1. a money-bag that gets manufacturing (only a handful fit this criteria);
2. a money-bag with the right kind of crazy (an even smaller handful fit this criteria);
that assured Martin and Marc that Elon was the right person they should be speaking to to invest in Tesla, which he did.
Those two signals were necessary for the investor minority at that time to appreciate the value proposition of Tesla. The majority of investors actually laughed off such an investment as what Elon himself characterized as "idiocy squared".
Virtually anyone who would consider Elon Musk's ideas using your approach would immediately throw them out, for many many reasons. So your approach is meaningless unless you can tell everyone exactly what criteria to use when deciding if something "would not work."
If your assertion is just that you have to be so smart that you can analyze all the variables and correctly predict the future, then that's not really useful to anyone is it?
Although not all the time.
So decision is still a big chance, either way
So just to be clear, you have had a idea, used your approach and succeded?
The key to building and idea is to ensuring the resources are there to build it, not to kill it while it’s still in the idea phase. No one ever became the founder of a billion dollar company by being cynical early on.
And sure you might think that you save yourself from “wasting 5 years of your life”. It my experience is that founders who work 5 years on establishing a vc backed company that ultimately fail just walk straight on to another leadership role in another company, and they had a great sallery and job for those five years, so what is really wasted?
There's a big difference between "fake it till you make it" and "crime it till you climb it". You can have blind faith in your product, but you can't lie just lie about your business constantly in the hope that maybe one day your lies will be true.
Your mistake is in conflating "successful business" and "fraud." It was not a successful business until the collapse, it was a successful fraud. In this way, I believe you're promoting a poor ethical standard, one that valorizes crime as long as you get away with it.
You can declare that kind of religiosity unethical, but it comes off sounding slightly disingenuous when that kind of religiosity was instrumental in forming the ethical foundations of western civilization.
The traditional religions, of course, aren't super compatible with the modern world and we're moving away from them. Still, people need things to believe in as much as they ever did so it shouldn't be surprising that non-traditional religions such as Musk or Theranos will emerge.
With the most deeply held beliefs it's essential that they can never be proven true, because they'll stop being beliefs and become facts, which don't serve the intended purpose. For Theranos to fulfill it's mission, that blood testing device can never materialize.
For most startups it's about having blind faith that an idea can be turned into a meaningful service or product. With Theranos blind faith is the product, and it's the most meaningful product of all.
I don't see why blind faith is necessary for the majority of ideas.
The "blind" part half way applies. You have to have faith that you recognized something that that is out of kilter, and you have to be blind to the fact that you don't know the solution.
...imho.
Edit to expound: if you have blind faith in your idea, then when it is about to fail, you will go down with it. If you don't, and it's about to fail, you will recognise this and extract yourself in time to survive.
At that point it's up to your personal moral compass whether you help the others whose blind faith you've built to reach the escape pods.
Take for example smartphones and tablets. After the "one computer in every desktop" was accomplished, it was obvious that one computer in every pocket was going to be the next big thing.
So companies like Microsoft invested billions of dollars in that (think in Pocket PCs and TabletPCs).
The vision became a reality and today all of us could have a GPS, cameras and more computer power that desktops had 10 years ago incredibly cheap.
We humans tend to believe only in what we can see, but some people just see the future possibilities just like they are realities. It is not like these people, the visionaries, have more faith than normal people, but that they see the future as real as if it exist here.
Of course watching the future as real have lots of problems in real life, specially when this people have to live along people only interested on reality, like doing the laundry or searching for a better "real job" instead of following "dreams".
Faith literally means believing in something. The idea that believing something will work is simply delusional is inherently problematic.
You may actually have good reasons for believing it will work.
We always have only partial information. That doesn't mean just bulling on ahead, and don't confuse me with the facts, is a good approach. It means that the people who succeed can't necessarily explain their success adequately to satisfy those who would like to follow in their footsteps.
I also would bet that sometimes they don't really want to explain it. Giving away "the secret sauce" may not be in their best interest.
Same thing probably happens with startups. You don't start a startup unless you have Blind Faith (btw. great album). But only a few of the startups make it big. When we see the ones that made it we may see that none of them would exist unless their founders had had blind faith. So (more or less) Blind Faith seems to be a prerequisite for success. But it is not a guarantee, far from it.
You do haveto suspend judgement, for a time, when it's not clear whether the idea is good or not. That's the incubation stage, a point of deliberate, but measured, risk-taking.
Blind faith leads you to reject obvious signs of nonviability or danger. And whilst some may get lucky (or cash out before reality requests payment), many don't.
I'd suggest looking at the 3M model instead. Large-scale diversified but manageable risks.
> Means something somewhat relevant to your company or is completely random.
Well, is there any other possibility?
In other words, there is no formula for success because it's not a rational construct. Many of us aren't driven by credentials or money or power, yet those things are a prerequisite for anyone to listen to us or to have any kind of quality of life in a capitalistic society. The notion of success is at odds with its expression.
It's not that ideas are worthless, but that most people don't have the discipline to trade months or years of their lives to see them through. If the person with the idea is not the one who reaps its rewards, then it's easy to see how there could be bias against ideas. I would even go as far as to say that the most successful people have the fewest ideas that would change the status quo.
To put all of that in more of a positive light, I prefer to consider the success of others as part of any idea. So in these times, I feel that most startup ideas just aren't very good. They're too busy trying to satisfy constraints of finding capital or product-market fit or achieving a big exit instead of actually solving the problems facing the world like authoritarianism, underemployment, unsustainability, etc, etc, etc that are too numerous to even begin to list here. Maybe those challenges don't require big ideas so much as being more clever with how and where we apply the disruption we're so infatuated with where it could really make a difference.
And what are the odds?
And then they fail utterly to ever substantiate or defend that claim. They just presume the audience accepts it on blind faith. This is a common problem with arguments that invoke 'blind faith' in almost any capacity. Even Kierkegaard's famous 'Leap of Faith' interpretation of belief in God (the idea that because God is beyond human understanding, belief in it can only come through a 'leap' and not through a chain of reasoning) is underlaid with an unsupported presumption that there exist things which can be beyond human understanding, or that such an idea is even sensical itself. Yet that is never supported there either.