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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes you lose. Sometimes you invent the modern consumer electric car and the modern commercial space program. The beauty of SV startups is just that - high variance.

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The modern consumer electric car did not come by throwing darts at a board and hoping for a bullseye. It was planned on scientific principles and took decades of precursor work.

Amusingly enough, until Tesla was successful, HN was all ablaze with why they shouldn't try new things. Tesla should just hire all the experts from Ford et. al. and do the same thing as everyone else, except electric. In fact, they were going to fail because they didn't understand "automotive grade". Touchscreens? Psh, guaranteed product failure.

SpaceX was going to fail because they didn't use conventional wisdom building their stuff. They used Electron for their UI (my god! guaranteed product failure! astronauts will hate them!). Their stuff exploded when they tried it out. Classic, should've done what ULA did. ULA are the experts.

"They don't listen". That was always the theme. They don't listen. That's why they win.

I don’t remember hearing those complaints about SpaceX. Nobody has anything good to say about ULA — it’s a joint venture of defense contractors.

Tesla makes a lot of stupid choices and are an example of survivorship bias in many ways. They make opinionated products and Musk has the instinct to play chicken and attract investors to keep the thing alive.

Fortunately, we can search:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19905701

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20446963 (Boeing is part of ULA)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22095120 (Claims that SpaceX is treated better than Boeing)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22096380 (I've seen more accidents from SpaceX than launches from Boeing)

To be clear, I just searched "site:news.ycombinator.com spacex boeing" and grabbed the first few I could. Took me 5 minutes.

It probably isn't too far to go to find comments about how ULA hasn't had a single explosion or some such thing.

>>That was always the theme. They don't listen. That's why they win.

You forget about tons of startup and business that failed spectacularly because they think they know better than those "old fools" (also, they usually comes up with arrogant attitude to change the world for some reason)

Tesla is one of a very very few outlier. I have to give them credit for that.

Edit: To clarify things up. I didn't mean that old way is always better, some people I've work with are just too stubborn with their old-school thinking and led to lack of innovation to the point of annoying. But I'm also sure that there are also good old wisdom in different perspective that younger generation can learn from, and not just discard it completely.

I don't think anyone forgot about them. It's just... that's how innovation happens. Most big, established companies you see were once young upstarts who arrogantly thought they knew better than everyone else how to run a business.

No, no one forgot those guys. It's a necessary but not sufficient condition if you want to make a highly disruptive startup. You don't win by repeating the status quo. But you can most definitely lose by not repeating the status quo.

That I wholeheartedly agreed. I just felt that some people just discard the old way completely, seeing it as outdated(which is true in certain aspect) I personally think that there are always old wisdom that younger business owner can revisit, to learn from.

The trick is to ignore survivorship bias every step of the way

Oh no, it's the opposite. Established companies could be established for no good reason. ULA was in space, they're the experts, but they could be beaten. The incumbent could be just a result of survivorship bias. That's what presents an opportunity. If the incumbent is just very good at the product, the only part you can disrupt is margin (or verticalize or something, but lets set aside that) and you don't want to be in a price war unless you're uniquely suited to it. So you don't fight those guys.

So you count on the market leader being disruptable, which is often because they're just there as accidental survivors.

What you write makes a lot of sense in terms of successful startup strategy. It doesn’t detract from the vacuity of your original statement on “high variance“. When you cherry-pick two data points- from the same founder, even- while ignoring the high rate of failed startups, it makes for quite an empty fallacious statement indeed. One might as well argue for the merits of big government statism by singing the praises of the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, while contrasting them with the DMV.

Well, yes, you can and you'd be right. That's how existence proofs work. State funded projects make great moonshots, yes, and you have some great examples.

It's a great argument for Big Government statists that governments are capable of large scale technological progress out of the reach of common corporations.

But no one was disputing the existence of successful, even wildly successful startups. People are criticizing startups that behave ignorantly and arrogantly. (And quite frankly, give the entire scene a bad name.) You are attempting to play devil's advocate by pointing out that some flout conventional wisdom and established practices and succeed. Very well, we can all agree that those enterprises exist. The question is if they exist in any appreciable number, which is very debatable- again, due to the simple arithmetic of very low startup success rates.

You are celebrating lottery winners. The existence of that very few does not justify bad behavior from (some of) the rest. Your proof is facile.

It isn't bad behaviour. It's just a failure. No harm in trying things that don't work. It doesn't look anyone misrepresented themselves. They came in, sucked, and got taken out by the market. The fact that they didn't listen hardly matters. It's not bad behaviour to not listen to advice from your landlord.

I'm not playing Devil's Advocate. I genuinely think it is good that people are trying different things. They're exploring the state space and I enjoy that.

If they were actually misrepresenting themselves or their ability to pay, or reneged on their debts without going out of business (which is a well-understood way to renege), or something like that, sure. But it looks like everything is on the level and the article is just saying that all of these guys who tried it weren't good at it. That's not a crime or even morally problematic.

People aren't saying they're behaving criminally. If anything, their behavior is both mockable and foolish- out-of-touch, operating in an SV bubble, detached from the needs of real-world people would their businesses ostensibly serve, and perhaps representative of the excess that dumb money empowers. They're gauche.

(And yes, during times of mass unemployment and rising economic uncertainty, moralizing does start to creep in; when mom and pop stores are dying by the tens of thousands, VC-funded fail does seem like bad taste, at least. Fair's got nothing to do with the creation of this perception; but optics are optics.)

Is it wrong to have higher standards for this industry? Less sloppy business practices, more empathy for the world at large? More curiosity and respect for established wisdom? What's the point of learning from "fail fast, fail often" if the failures are just going be the same mistakes over and over again, caused by foolhardy founders and negligent investors? Infinite samsara wheels, doomed by hubris.

I’m not so sure. When it comes to manufacturing, attempts at cutting corners seems to just disrupt startups themselves.

Only in business models the break things philosophy seems to work. idk though

Essentially the VC people have figured out how to make money off of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

There's an element of dumb luck at play, and too few will recognize that.

No, that's the point. You aim at the guys for whom, if they're lucky, they can win and win big. Then you attempt to cover as much of that space as efficiently with your money as possible.

That's what the VC world is about. Luck is factored in. You don't make the waves, but you do need to be out there on your surfboard if you want to catch one.

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