Driving, and the art of running a business | Hacker News Reader

Driving, and the art of running a business

swombat.com

44 pointsjoshuacc6 comments

This is a good analogy. I think it would do many newcomers to the business world a lot of good to first get a mentor as suggested or (if possible) run a simulated business before attempting to dive into their own business blindly. Very few businesses succeed if the founders have no idea how to run a business. Facebook is an obvious exception.

Young people tend to see business today with more of a recreational view than a career choice. With that approach, the likelihood of making more mistakes in managing the business is higher.

To add one more analogy, running a business is like playing a sport. You should practice as much as possible and learn the rules extensively before going out on the field, otherwise you'll lose the game.

I beg to disagree, I think it's a really bad analogy. First, businesses are unique in many areas. Opening a restaurant is different than opening a book store. Second, in business, there are people involved. In sales, in production, in customer support and people are unique. While in driving, every car in the world feels and looks the same.

But opening a restaurant is similar to opening a restaurant. Given that there are many people who have opened restaurants before, it is obviously reasonable to get some advice from them before opening your first restaurant (though I'm sure many restaurant owners fail to do that).

Startups are no doubt more varied and unpredictable, but there are still a lot of commonalities. Unlike driving, a startup mentor won't sit in the driving seat and do it for you, but their advice can prove invaluable, because once you're experienced enough, many aspects of business do look the same across all or most businesses.

To sharpen the analogy, maybe each type of business is like a certain type of car or sport. You should learn the relevant skills before diving in. Driving a Geo is different than driving a Ferrari, but they're still both cars.

Not sure it is such a great analogy. Driving is a fairly deterministic affair where you can just follow a proven recipe and obtain the desired result. It takes some skill, certainly. And so does running a business. But there is a major difference. In driving if you simply do what most other drivers do it will (mostly) result in success.

Running a business is far from a deterministic affair. It takes skills and the skill set is diverse. And on top of that you don't want to do exactly the same everyone else is doing. If you do that, what would be the point of running your own business. You want to do something different or in a different way. You'll always get at a point where you need to take a course that others may see as risky or unwise to get at your intended destination. And that bit, nobody can help you with. You've to experience it for yourself - including the bumps and bruises.

Having an experienced mentor can be a good thing for the more mundane aspects of running a business, but for the actual "running your own business" part, not so. In my experience actively seeking out a rich variety of sources of inspiration is far more important for that part.

All analogies break down if considered from enough angles, but I think you're being overly focused on disruptive tech startups.

999 business out of every thousand are very similar to other businesses that have run before. Services, consulting, manufacturing, restaurants, shops, and even many types of IT companies, have built up a huge base of knowledge about what to do and what not to do, which is in the heads of those who have run this type of business already.

Even web startups are very similar to each other. Sure, some elements are unique to your startup, just like every road/vehicle configuration is different, but there are a lot of principle that apply across the board, and that a new entrepreneur is often completely unaware of. If that wasn't true, then approaches like Eric Ries' Lean Startup wouldn't be useful.

Thinking that your business is unique and different, that the rules that crush so many other businesses don't apply to you - that is precisely the disease that having a more experienced mentor can cure. Chances are, your business won't die from some unique combination of factors that was totally unpredictable. It will do something monumentally stupid and avoidable like running in stealth mode for 5 years (if you have the cash), building something nobody wants, or failing to build customer acquisition processes.

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