“OK, but there are two rules…”
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How many of the angel-backed startups these days are really looking to be long-term players? How many are looking to IPO in 10 years, vs get acquired in 2-3? How many founders envision themselves as the CEO of their company in 20 years? The fail fast mentality seems, on the surface, to be a reflection on an underlying current in the founder mindset: that entrepreneurship is a way to make enough money that you won't have to get a "real job". Just slug it out fo a few years, then become an angel yourself.
From http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast."
It's a motivation for a startup. Solve the "money problem" early in life, and do more important things later.
I don't have a problem with people launching websites with the intention of selling them in a couple years, but I do dislike the notion that that is what constitutes successful entrepreneurship. The tech world needs its Googles and Facebooks, which means we need entrepreneurs with vision who are willing to stick with it for the long haul.
But, I think the "Be relentless, never give up!" approach is becoming just as bad. A bad idea is a bad idea and you have to know when to move on or pivot big.
One is poor planning. The other is myopia. Both should be avoided.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Fire-Aim-Million-Agora/dp/047018...
Fail Fast can also be seen as: Perform, get feedback, perform slightly better, get more feedback, iterate until perfect.
Also known as “kill ideas fast”, this advice is saying that your idea is probably not worth the pixels it’s displayed on. Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution matters. You’d be better off with a dumb idea in a large, expanding market!
Trust Your Guts
Also known as resilience or tenacity: when everyone else tells you to give up, when there is no hope in sight, what separates the successsful entrepreneur from the wanna-be: perseverance. Don’t give up.
Here’s my take on the contradiction: both your guts and everyone else are right — partially. It takes a very smart person (you) to figure out the gem that your guts detect and remove the junk that everyone else sees.
(source http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/12/18/startup-advice-contr...)
I never saw it that way, or at least at that scale. I see it as a way to move fast by validating assumptions with evidence and being unemotional about sunk costs. Rather than spending many hours of meetings and design sessions and approvals to try a feature or change, just do it, measure it, and if it's not working, kill it. If it is working, keep it, and nurture it. If you just spent 3 months on an idea that is getting no traction, don't spend another 3 months trying to fix it when you've got other promising things in the pipeline.
"The explanation he gives is simple: when someone is building a house, the more tools they have, the better off they are. But when someone is looking for something, the more space they have to explore, the worse off they are"
from:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3ir/narrow_your_answer_space/
and the original article (on Magic:The Gathering design, but with useful information - scroll down to the "Design Tool #1: Restrictions" header where he discusses this point):
http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/dai...
Though that was for school, where the point is often to create things that are neither novel nor profitable.
Many film cameras used to be sold with only a fixed 50mm or a 35mm lens. The restriction forced people to think about what was in or outside the field of vision. Today's cameras that have 10x zooms do not force the same consideration, and I suggest that amateur photography has suffered as a result.
A friend of mine is a house-painter by trade, and has set himself the restriction to never use a brush when he paints a canvas. This forces him to consider what he really wants and how he can get there, instead of simply smearing paint around the canvas until he gets bored.
We have too many choices these days. Getting rid of a few can make results much more deliberate.
That coupled with the ubiquity of sharing pictures on the internet has created a perfect storm of shittiness.
Professional photographers love to lament about this, and while much of it is elitist posturing; there is truth to it (I say that as someone who splits my time about 50/50 as a professional photographer).
If old cameras took better pictures, then I implore professional photographers to use them.
If I accept that the first statement is true (that amateurs have gotten worse), I disagree on the cause (that it's because of zoom lenses, as zoom lenses have been the norm on SLR's since the 80's).
I don't know objectively if amateur photographers are better or worse. I know that nowadays I see a lot more bad pictures than I used to (and while there is also an increase in good pictures, it hasn't increased nearly as much as the bad ones have). I am postulating that this is more likely due to the proliferation of digital and the ease at which photos can be shared (most people's crappy photos would only get viewed by their family members over the holidays when they dug out the slide projector).
I'm don't think it matters if old cameras took better pictures (for the most part, they did; although the other benefits of digital tend to make up for it).
Having started with a film SLR in the digital age, based on my personal experience I can say that it does not take $5000 of film or developer fees to learn f-stops or ISO settings on your camera, unless you have a spastic trigger finger. I learned the above, as well as the zone system, shutter speed, push/pull processing, metering, and night shooting using about 5-6 rolls of film. I did this on a camera I got for $50 off of eBay. Development time is about an hour (Take it to a lab! Why bring up darkroom costs if you wish to lower your costs?), so you can have feedback in the same day. The fundamentals don't take that long to learn.
Now, learning to color balance is levels harder, but that's something you have to do whether you're on film or digital.
I have since switched to a digital SLR for the reason that it's a pain to get film scanned. But if it wasn't for that, I'd keep on shooting film; my prints from film have been more gorgeous, with more dynamic range and detail, than images from my SLR. I also picked up an old TLR from eBay for $50 that lets me use 120 film. Digital cameras with that kind of resolution still costs $10,000 (e.g. Mamiya).
Finally, there's a certain joy one gets from crafting your print by hand in the darkroom, the sense of mystery as the print develops, that I now miss when I sit in front of my computer and click-click dodge-and-burn my images. Like you, I cannot justify the costs of setting up my own darkroom (although I believe a black-and-white darkroom is relatively inexpensive, depending on how good of a deal you can get on your enlarger, maybe $1000-$2000?), and even darkroom rental locations are fast disappearing. For that I feel a little sadness, like watching whales go extinct.
Digital.
I'll stick by my argument that self-imposed restrictions can really help people get innovative and avoid the me-too traps of entrepreneurship.
Restrictions can and do lead to restrictions. Think of all the limited resources in a computer 20 years ago and all the tricks played with memory and registers and bit-shifting and such to push the limits of what the hardware could do.
Star Wars Budget: $13M
Return of the Jedi Budget: $32M
I'm not joking when I say that juxtaposition influenced the way I think about life.
Now the idea almost seems like a trivial commonplace to me. Everyone from John Paul Sartre to David Heinemeier Hansson has written about it.
CPI June 1977: 60.7 $13 million
CPI June 1983: 99.5 $21.3 millionnecessity is the mother of invention. There are plenty of restrictions already I think, due to necessity, whether it is time, money, skills, why be even harder on yourself.
I'm struggling with this right now. When building web applications, there are some constraints that are interesting and useful ("the user should be able to do everything without logging in") that might result in great stuff being built, and others ("it has to use this particular technology stack or this particular algorithm") that are less obviously beneficial to the creative process.
Is 1:30 too early?
Be dismissive without rolling your eyes...
Ready? Go!
Arbitrary restrictions can also inspire creativity and create focus (timeboxing, learning to say no), but creating restrictions can be an opportunity to frame the problem in a purposeful way.
If I applied the arbitrary constraint that x must be an odd multiple of pi, then I'm not going to get a very good answer to trying to maximise cos(x)...
For example, let P be the set of all English-language poems of N lines, where each line is a semantically and syntactically valid expression in English and N>0. P is an incredibly huge set. We want to find solutions of high aesthetic fitness on the set P. Applying a few arbitrary constraints reduces the size of the search space but has little effect on our ability to find solutions with high aesthetic fitness. For example, we could arbitrarily restrict our search to the space of English poems with N=14, 10 syllables per line, an alternating pattern of an unstressed and stressed syllables in each line (iambic pentameter), and a rhyme pattern a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d-e-f-e-f-g-g in the terminal words of each lines. We've now drastically reduced the size of the search space such that we are now searching only the space of valid Shakespearean sonnets. However, even with our arbitrary constraints in place, we're still solving a highly unconstrained optimization problem and the arbitrary constraints we applied don't prevent us from finding solutions of high fitness.
We could say that the bumpiness of the fitness function is fractal -- the shape of the fitness function on an arbitrary subspace resembles the shape of the fitness function taken over the whole space, providing that the subspace is itself "large" in some sense. The point is that there's nothing special about the arbitrary constraints we imposed. We could instead choose to work in the space where N=16, the number of words per line is between 4 and 7, the first four lines are all questions, and the last line is constructed in the form of a direct object followed by a subject and a verb and a repetition of the direct object (e.g. "Yoda, you seek Yoda"). There are still many aesthetic and unaesthetic solutions in this space, perhaps there are even some solutions with greater fitness than any of the 154 solutions that Shakespeare discovered with his set of arbitrary constraints.
While restrictions can encourage innovation, sometimes they really do just get in the way.
(Well: I say "every", but it's changing even in Puerto Rico.)
- Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
Let's just say it makes me less immersed in today's era when it comes to matters of visual taste/preference, which in turn lets me make creative choices that some people may find surprising (or at least that's what my self-serving bias tells me).
I do understand the importance of keeping up with trends though, but I restrict my trend-seeking to people who I personally perceive as trendy (and which tend not to be on TV).