The first 18 months of a startup
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The trick is to look at the source of the advice and think about why that advice worked for them. What aspects of their situation are similar to yours?
So all advice is good, provided you use it all as inputs to your decision making and consider the context when you decide which advice to lean into.
Exactly because of the same reason you write about.
Someone giving advice usually does not have all needed context of your situation. At the same time they are not going to give you all the context they were in while taking similar decision.
Even if you would deal with the same people as that person, those people might just not like you and they liked him/her. Where someone giving advice will think they are just like that for everyone.
Even advice about "great restaurant" is probably bad, because well they were there a while ago, maybe chef will have a bad day or you will get a rude waiter because you will sit in a different spot, maybe they were there with great friends and you want to go with a girlfriend. It might turn out that restaurant was not that great when you arrived.
I get to know about things like series from friends or sites. But I don't have any expectations and quickly judge if it is crap or not, well with "it is a crap" as default and expect to be positively surprised.
Reading between the lines, it seems like this founder is telling others advice he's trying to tell himself.
It’s really not obvious that an unpromising startup could succeed, though.
What were the main factors in those unpromising startups doing well?
I guess it depends a bit on what you mean by "unpromising". One person might see the product idea and think "those guys are gone is 6 mo", while another might see the team coming together well and think "that team is going to do something interesting"
Also, in my experience most people are bad at evaluating these things early on.
> It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increase with functionality: that there is a point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability.
It's a rephrasing of KISS. This isn't about getting something quicker out the door.
That's what the poster you're replying to is saying - it's hard to be consistently correct on if an idea is good or bad.
Which will allow you to play Cyberpunk (Stadia) + browsing the web (Mighty) + do whatever else you want, like using After Effects (?).
I worked with those guys on a large project. They were amazing. I loved their Sun Rays. But if you spoke to other people in the IT community they generally never heard about their tech. "Uh. Don't they sell servers that don't run Windows?"
I used it for about a year and it's fantastic if you have really fast (preferably wired) internet
Can you use it as desktop replacement installing all applications etc.?
Or is there an hour limit? The pricing of 14 € / month can't really provide an unlimited usage of 4 core/12GB/256GB SSD/GTX 1080?
Also when i try to pre-order for Germany the ETA is Mach 29, 2022 ...
Non action games are playable over Wifi, but on a wired connection it's much better. It does have its own client and disconnects if you are idle so I don't think you could run it as a server, but I never tried.
The only odd issue I ran into is that it supports a virtual USB device for pass-through which is cool, but you can't use a fancy multi-button mouse as that USB device because the mouse is "special" and it's always a 2 button virtual mouse but the xbox controller worked just fine.
They do have a fairly slow rollout of new hardware updates and new country support at this point, and seemed to be in danger of going out of business for a while, but so far it's still there. You can always hook up something like Dropbox to back up work in progress.
What are you complaining about, Mach 29 is really, really fast! That's 10 km/s, enough to achieve orbit.
Some companies dipped their toes in the water, but I never found a single company that went all-in.
I suppose if you're running major web apps in the browser, this could be a good idea. With the rise of WebAssembly, you could end up with something like a video editor or photoshop in the browser. And yeah, if big apps in the browser becomes a thing, people will want to run the big app on slower computers. But it'd have to be one beefy server to make the latency of streaming worth the performance speed up. Maybe if you keep common sites hot in the browser JIT and share it across users it'll be really fast but holy security issues Batman.
I'm not super pessimistic about the idea. If there's one thing I'd bet on it's internet speeds increasing while compute speeds plateauing. But I'm not sure I'd bet my own money or 5-10 years of my life on the idea.
There are some competitions, such as Parsec or Stadia, but if you can have an higher-frequency use case to iterate on, why not go with that?
Say that you just made a big frontend change to your website. Before you release it, you can open it on the last 10 major versions of desktop and mobile Chrome/Firefox/Safari/etc. Any rendering failures that you find are the sort of bugs that can be very frustrating to debug from occasional user contacts.
But it can be tricky to automate the detection of visual bugs. And what if you have to make a few clicks and execute some javascript to get to the screen that you want to test?
Anyways, that's one use of browsers-as-a-service.
With web apps becoming more complex by the day, having the ability do all the heavy work on a remote server and stream the resulting “webpage” back to a weak receiver with little processing power will unlock new ways of doing things: one can imagine a very slim screen that, as mentioned in the thread already, is running the full Adobe Suite from this remote server.
Great battery life and responsiveness without needing an expensive GPU / CPU on the device itself.
I have a feeling with these things timing and luck is everything no matter how well you follow what worked before. I bet some startups do almost the opposite of this advice and still end up doing well just because the idea and timing were so good.
I'm wondering if startup gurus know their advice won't help anyone but still give them because that's what people want to read. Or if they don't know this won't help anyone
https://slate.com/culture/2020/01/uncanny-valley-brand-names...
There will be so much resistance to going back to the office.
I also think there are some obvious benefits to physical office space, so I hope I'll be able to combine the two. Like every other week or something would work nicely.
It gets you in the zone almost instantly.
A second category of worker benefits from the rituals of getting ready in the morning, context switching to office mode, seeing their peers in person (however briefly), and sitting down at a separate workstation that is dedicated to work and nothing else.
In my experience managing mixed on-site and remote teams, most people assume they’re in the first category but many people eventually discover they’re actually in the second category.
WFH is great for some, but actually quite difficult for many others.
Depends on whether there are more distractions at work or at home. Some live alone and have no distractions at home, but at work must try to ignore some really loud people in an open-office and/or engage in constant, impromptu, relatively unimportant meetings at work.
People that can focus instantly on demand and ignore distractions excel at this type of office.
It seems some hope to bait and switch their employees back into office and then say WFH isn’t allowed anymore.
To his second theme (ask tough questions often), it's just the common trap tons of startup founders seem to fall into. "We don't know if users will pay for this" should be one of the first questions you answer, way way before "How will we scale" or "What tech should we use". Managing worry is identical to asking tough questions (why are we worried about this and how do we overcome the worry). Mitigating risk is identical to asking tough questions (what could cause us to fail that is in our control). A part of being a leader is being unafraid to ask questions that need answering, even if their answers may be painful or scary. Most people aren't capable of looking hard at all of their possible failure scenarios honestly, and even less are able to objectively move forward with the findings of that examination. It's a tough ego game to play.
mixpanel: "Powerful, self-serve product analytics to help you convert, engage, and retain more users."
I'd love to read about founders that actually make something. In days of yore, practically any startup actually made a physical 'thing', unless they were busy writing some useful workstation software. Basing an entire economy on internet advertising and related issues strikes me as a risky bet.
To be fair, probably due to offshoring, about the only useful startups I've personally run into for the last decade or so have 100% been specialized medical hardware. The FDA can quickly become the main focus of your life.
Here's a way to find startups that make something: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?industry=Consumer%20El...
I was at a start-up with a website that had exactly one page. The page had a photo of a bank vault, a company logo consisting of 2 letters, and a phone number.
That was perfectly fine. The business was not a website.
Another type of a business is software products. A business like that can basically be a website. Or more fancily, a web app. Or a mobile app, or a desktop app, or a CLI, or a smart TV OS, or anything else written with code that gets used by people.
Now, people need different things, come from different backgrounds, just behave differently. Analytics software simply helps you learn how your thing actually gets used. Do people drop off somewhere in some flow? How do people use this feature you just built? How many users do you even have? Plug in an analytics service's library and find that out with minimal effort. The basic advice for startup founders is: talk to users. That's qualitative research – product analytics is just the quantitative counterpart. Both have value.
I've seen other software and mostly-software businesses where analytics software was out of the question. One example was a company that made an underwater device. Another example was a company that made an OS that got used in military equipment. (add analytics software if you want to live in prison) Not everything is on the internet.
After hiring hundreds of people the most knowledgeable people were the ones who worked on successful teams at failing companies, and very few founders go through that experience in the same way as non-founders do.
Founder advice is for founders.
The reason this works is that you're identifying the individuals who are able to make success happen while having the deck stacked against them. People who have this skill and are in a successful company tend to have better experiences and can be more valuable. But it's also harder for you to identify.
I've checked the thread and while there's some materiality to it, it's not anything I haven't heard elsewhere. I'm also wary of founders that might have "gotten lucky" (a weak project in SV is much easier to get financed than a more solid project elsewhere), I'm skeptical of that founder's current project (looks too niche to be sustainable)
To be fair, he did say that his first target was 10 customers. I assume all 10 of them happy as he mentioned.
He's not someone I consider to be full of bullshit, but his thoughts on startups are as valuable as anyone else's with a few extra grains of salt that are worth considering.
Founders tend to rewrite history in ways that benefit themselves presently. It’s human nature, but it’s finely honed in founders who are pitching their personal brand on social media. Even the humble, self-deprecating anecdotes are usually carefully filtered in ways that make them look good in the present, or as something they can wear as a badge of honor for overcoming.
I worked for a small startup that nearly died because one of the founders made some really bad decisions. That same founder now writes a lot of Medium thinkpieces about how to be successful, including advice to do some of the things that were clearly not at all beneficial to our startup.
Take everything with a grain of salt.
4/ Think of a way to make your users have some skin in the game enough to yell at you to make your product better. Charge or trade for it early on. Waiting for your product to be "good enough" reduces the amount you'll learn each day. The first set of users paid me $20 on Venmo!
This will vary by type of market you are pursuing. Some things are harder to charge for and take longer to get a first sale, but, yes, you need to be charging. Otherwise, you are "playing house" (a thing they say at YC) or you merely "have the trappings of a business, not an actual business" (that's my typical phrasing for the phenomenon).
In a nutshell: The difference between a business and a hobby is paying customers.
8/ Be married to the problem, not the technology.
There are some great videos from YC that also make this point and I think it needs to be said more often.
There are also some great nuggets about self-management that can be useful to anyone doing anything hard in life or living through a crisis. Some of these resonate with me as a former military wife who raised two special-needs kids mostly alone as the husband was often gone.
13/ If you're worried about something that will cause your inevitable demise, use my patented Threshold of Worry (tm):
1. Set a quantitative value for the worrisome issue. 2. If it's above the value, worry! 3. If it's below the value, focus on the next risk & ignore
I have a longstanding policy of "bread and circus." If you can work on the problem, work on the problem. If you can't work on the problem, feed everyone and keep them entertained so they aren't freaking out, panicking, fighting, etc.
17/ When building a startup:
If you have fear, de-risk by talking to users. If you have uncertainty, build a prototype to rapidly rebuild your conviction. If you have sudden doubt, sleep. Try again tomorrow.
When my kids were little and I was chronically short of sleep, I learned that eating something, drinking something and/or taking a short nap could be the difference between feeling like everything is overwhelmingly impossible and feeling like "The sun will come out tomorrow."
19/ I was ruthless about ensuring I had as much deep work time as possible. Live somewhere boring. Eliminate meetings. Don't meet investors if you're not raising. Build a rhythm each day that enables the largest chunk of hours to get great work done. Users will notice your pace.
This is gold. Stop whining about how you have a phone addiction and you can't turn your phone off because all your friends and relatives will be mad if you don't answer it and so on. Stop claiming that all the shiny tech we live with is controlling your life and you are a victim of circumstance. Start taking control over your time and doing what you need to do to carve out time to think, to work without distraction, etc.
We live in an incredible era with amazing things. But you do need to pick and choose and not feel obligated to be plugged into everything all the time. You do have a choice in the matter.