Summary of "Must Read" articles for starting entrepreneurs | Hacker News Reader

Summary of "Must Read" articles for starting entrepreneurs

tappen.posterous.com

This is an impressive list of articles, and includes some of the best articles I have read on these topics. However, seeing so many of these articles in one place made me think two seditious thoughts: (1) Larry and Sergey didn't need a single one of these articles to start Google, and (2) if everyone else reads and acts according to these articles, you should probably do the opposite. Just as generals fight the last war, advice articles seems determined to duplicate the last success. If you want the next out-of-left-field success, you need to be where no one else is even thinking to look.

EDIT: Yes, I realize I've just added another advice article to the pile.

Exactly, you should modulate your base carrier domain knowledge with some random fluctuations to beat the herd.

Here's a counter seditious thought ;-)

Everyone spotlights the biggest success stories (in your case Google) and tries to exrapolate what the average should do to be like them.

However, the average case won't be like the outliers regardless of what methodological is followed, and maximizing the profit for the average startup is likely wildly different from maximizing the profit of the outliers.

Secondly, Google acted like an average startup--seeking funding, seeking sale to Microsoft, Yahoo, et all---until they stumbled upon their disruptive technology: ads.

So unless your startup is likely to revolutionize the industry its good advice to follow proven techniques for profit making.

Failing that, you should know what others have done before you lest you repeat the same mistakes.

After fifty startups find out something doesn't work, should the fiftyfirst really try doing it?

Sometimes, I'd venture, that is exactly what makes the fifty first succesful.

There are guidelines to what you should do, and what you shouldn't do, but every case is different. Clearly, there are things that you aren't likely to ever want to do (rm -rf /), but there are plenty of instances in which a company didn't succeed doing x, and then a later company succeeded in doing exactly x. Whether it was due to a difference in the timing, or a difference in the market, or that something else within the company made x work differently for them than their predecessors, who knows.

Admittedly I'm just playing devil's advocate, but I feel like not enough focus is given to learning from these sorts of guides vs just blindly following them as a business plan.

Information is power. You can always choose to ignore poor advice, but if you don't read, you miss the opportunity to act on good advice.

> If you want the next out-of-left-field success

Most people are quite happy with plain old success; you generally don't need new industries or novel techniques to do that.

As others have pointed out, the term "must read" is often times thrown around very loosely. I'd probably be more satisfied with this if it were labeled "256 Articles for Starting Entrepreneurs That Might Help You Out" but that just isn't as catchy. The 'summary' part also threw me for a loop, as there aren't any summaries.

That being said, it's a fairly comprehensive list that does hold a lot of merit.

I found Eric Ries to be remarkably underrepresented on this list. I've assembled a list of some of his best presentations and related work on this bundle: http://bit.ly/fXzcTQ

It mostly falls on product strategy, culture, idea, and general startup advice. Mostly product strategy.

Unrelated fact: the stock "article" picture at the top is from a Polish article about snap elections and Polish politics circa 2006.

Web copy: http://www.wprost.pl/ar/86230/Wybory-szeryfa/ (pictured part is on the second page), machine translated: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&...

How much "must read" articles, books, blogs do we've to read in order to be successful?. I don't think it's bad to read an article or so once in a while, but there is no "must read" list.

This is a case where someone's HN reputaion made the collection a "must read" for me. RoG has done a great job here of knowing what's been posted, more than "finding dupes" and adding to the conversation. I look forward to checking out the list.

It's very kind of you to say so, but in the interests of full disclosure I must declare that I've had no hand in creating this list. I've read several of the linked articles and found the general quality to be high (by my standards, for my rather limited context) and so thought I'd share it.

I even suspect it was posted here some time ago, but was ignored. I found it in my "Great Articles" experiment that I'm starting to review that to see if I can turn it into a more generally useful tool.

ADDED IN EDIT: Yes, thought so, here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1753144

This doesn't really seem like an abridged version of a month's worth of reading...

If you get enough information, of course you can make a good business. The challenging part is condensing that so you can learn the right lessons in a non-geologic timescale.

None of these are "Must Read"

Probably the best advice is to learn to write compelling titles like "Must Read articles for Starting Entrepreneurs" vs. "The links on HN I've upvoted in the last year"

useful != "Must Read"

Despite your downvote, I agree with this.

Two things came to my mind when I landed on the page with links to 256 articles.

1) this isn't a "summary" of articles this is a "list of" articles. There's no time savings to be had by going through this list. In my opinion, it would be a wonderful & time saving "summary" if the article author read the article, and listed the key points contained within. As far as I can tell, the author of the list could just as easily have included the articles based on "has catchy title & contains a significant amount of text" How much repetition & Overlap? Which leads into my second thought upon landing on this page:

2) "Analysis Paralysis" - in the quest to become and entrepreneur one may very well get caught up on preparing to make that leap. There are numerous ways to do that, and the time spent reading those articles (256 articles * 10 minutes = 42 hours) could very well be better spent actually doing something

Anyways, I'm sure there are those that disagree with me (as evidenced by the down-vote you received). I certainly didn't evaluate the quality of the articles and maybe they're truly amazing, but I agree, this list isn't "MUST READ".

It looks like it's probably a quality list, but not "must read" or "a summary of"

EDIT: What I'd really love to see is an article entitled "What I've learned from reading all 256 'Must Read' articles" (don't leave out watching each of the videos linked up in full. That's at least 10 hours of TED talks)

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