You'll be dead soon - Carpe Diem | Hacker News Reader

You'll be dead soon - Carpe Diem

steveblank.com

215 pointsMaro41 comments

I wonder if professional coaches have a vocabulary word for that feeling. The one you get when you watch a student creep right up to the edge of success and then stop dead and start flailing around in apparent desperation.

I guess the term for the actual failure is choking, but what's the word for having to sit there and watch a student choke? Either because it's the only way for them to learn, or because it's impossible for you to help?

Whatever it should be called, it's painful. My best teachers seem to have been pretty good at it, though.

My hunch is it's not really possible to choke like this unless something important in his life has gone seriously wrong.

I blame the B- engineer. How could Bob have been expected to succeed when saddled with what was probably a glorified oDesk coder? You just can't do Insight-as-a-Service unless you have a ninja that dreams in Scala, craps Redis and eats node.js for breakfast.

The most successful founders in this industry are/were people that could do the job themselves, with very few exceptions.

Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Steve Wozniak, Steven Jobs, Paul Graham, John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Michael Cowpland, Michael Morhaime and the list can go on.

These people also found awesome help, that's true, but you can't be a leader unless you have the capability of fixing other people's screwups.

     unless you have a ninja that dreams in Scala,
     craps Redis and eats node.js for breakfast

Personally, I am ambivalent about people like that. Curiosity and experimentation defines a smart individual, however crapping Scala, Redis and Node.js all over a project that doesn't need these newer technologies is simply bad engineering that can sink a product faster than a "glorified oDesk coder" could.

Actually the contrary is true. Each of those successful technical founders you just named did not "do the job themselves". In fact, you just named 3 pairs of co-founders(Google, Apple, Adobe) but for some reason excluded other key co-founders such as Allen(Microsoft) and the FB guys(https://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?founderbios).

Three variables that determine a start-up's success are its 1)product 2)market and 3)the team. Of these, the team is the most important. With a talented team, you can build, get feedback, and reiterate faster on your product. A team that can reiterate every week has a competitive advantage over the team can only reiterate every month because it can push a product out 52 times/year as opposed to only 12 times/year. A team with multiple A-players is always better than a team with just 1 A-player, and their products will be too.

You missed my point - you cannot blame the B-engineers if the founder cannot recognize B-grade work and/or doesn't do anything about it - like firing the B-grade engineers, hiring at least one A-player, fixing it by themselves, etc...

Blame is easy to pass like that, but it seems to me like this startup is bound to die because of a lack of action, more than anything else.

And regarding your opinion, there have been many individuals able to move mountains by themselves when starting out. And there have been many teams of A-players that failed because of irreconcilable differences between them (i.e. too much testosterone, lack of leadership, lack of vision, etc...) - a book I loved reading on this subject is "Dreaming in Code": http://www.dreamingincode.com/

But I hired guys who were cheap because I wasn’t sure if my hypotheses were right

Bob knew that it was a B Engineer.

I'm taking your comment as sarcasm, and I think you are right. The development staff may not have been rock stars but likely were not getting any direction or information about the vision for the product and what features they were supposed to be working on.

This is where failing a few times gives you the insight to know when you have a winner on your hands. Those of us with a lot of attempts but no winners would kill to have users waiting to pay.

I think that's a big part of it. The more "science" starting a company becomes, the more we'll see "analytical" people drawn to it. When starting a company, you'll never have perfect information. You can make more informed decisions, but at the end of the day, there's still risk. Not everyone is cut out for that. Some people would prefer a safe routine to the risk of a startup. It sounds like this gentleman bought too much into the "science" and process of startups, and wasn't ready to deal with the challenges.

re: "Bob was in the wrong business, not the wrong market. He wanted certainty, comfort and security."

This is a key point of difference between those who are cut out for startup life and those who are not.

I think comfort can be provided in some measure by having savings or at least being dept-free. Also being relatively employable, should things go bad, may also provide a degree of security. Perhaps certainty is the only thing that can't be hedged?

Been debt-free, employable I have gone through the painful experience of failing. It isn't about your mechanical abilities being challenged, i.e. skills and ability to pay the bills, it's more about the astounding realization that "I cannot make it" thing. To be disappointed with yourself is much more painful than slavery IMO and is usually the cause of depression.

Me too, all of the above. How did you get over it?

Nothing special - got employed, needed to feed the family. Started to plan on the next action :)

The very first startup I was in (as an early employee) went IPO in the late 90s. My next startup (where I was a founder) crashed and burned in the tech bust that followed. The crash was beyond my control, however failure was incredibly hard to deal with for the reason you mentioned.

I did the obvious thing, got a real job, saved cash etc. Things have obviously changed dramatically since then in terms of ease of starting one's own project, so I've been plugging away at mine for a while.

I have to admit though that I do find myself thinking like "Bob" sometimes because I want desperately to avoid another f-up. I've gotten around it by having a key team of advisers/mentors that have done startups successfully. I challenge their opinions sometimes, but generally listen to what they say.

Its also very easy to over-analyze something until you don't know what's up or down.

Sounds like a victim of his own fear of failure. Knowing you're about to start an endeavor that will truly test you is overwhelmingly scary for someone who isn't ready to be tested. I've watched a lot of people (myself included) give up before starting instead of risking a chance of actually failing and facing their own limitations.

I wonder what the product / prototype was.

This is now my new failure mantra: "At least I haven't personally disappointed and been individually called out as a nontrepreneur by Steve Blank"

;)

It is one thing to learn engineering, but one also needs to study leadership first hand for a while before attempting it themselves. Bob couldn't find it within him to pull the trigger when he should have. Or he is more risk averse than he considered himself to be.

Sounds like he was burnt out. It's not that hard to recognize when you have a good product.

It's not hard to recognize when you have a good product when it's feature complete and selling like hotcakes. Recognizing that you have the core of a good product with potential to be great if you slog it out and stick to your vision is hard. Really hard.

No doubt, but if you have Steve Blank as a mentor telling you that you have a good product it might be a significant clue.

Also, potential customers flat out telling you that they are ready to pay. That kind of helps.

"Remembering that I’ll live forever is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in face of endless time, leaving only what is truly important." --The immortal Steve Mobs

We shouldn't need death as a pretty bad excuse to seize the day.

Great advice. I find a bit more interesting the "Memento Mori" motto. Same idea, though.

Thanks for the -- new to me -- phrase. It certainly have a stronger meaning for me than carpe diem.

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero

That's where it comes from, and "have little trust in the future" alludes to death even if it doesn't state it.

"Memento mori" is actually used generally to refer to art, while "carpe diem" is solely an idea - and I much prefer the latter for, while it has the same meaning, it is from the positive point of view, not the negative.

Personally I can't think of "carpe diem" (a favourite phrase of mine, incidentally) without hearing Robin Williams speech that is shown at the end of this article.

- We are food for worms, lads

- Believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is going to stop breathing, turn cold and die.

- Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they are capable?

- These boys are now fertilising daffodils.

(If you haven't seen Dead Poets Society.. you should. Wonderful film.)

Thank you, corin_, for the name of the movie, i.e., Dead Poets Society. I was about to skim Robin William's IMDB and find it.

I got intrigued by the video clip as well. FYI. Used "Into_Now" iphone App to find out the movie [Didn't see this comment then] Alas, its not available for streaming on Netflix as of now.

Powerful words. Just the brutal truth in those phrases. Thanks for sharing. I should watch that movie.

You're right, it carries a more negative point of view. But for me that´s what really gets me going: remembering that I´ll be dead in the future prompts me to enjoy this day to its fullest.

Also, it helps not to stress so much over anything.. it´s of course a slippery slope towards cynicism, but I can handle that.

Actually, it's sort of the opposite

I wonder how bad a developer you have to be in order to get someone, who is only following along in "bits and pieces", really concerned for the startup that hired you.

I find people rating people extremely annoying. Especially when you apply a rate (B) to the overall performance. I mean, those people must not even be people, they are monkeys. A monkey can be said to be an overall B compared to humans (as monkeys don't seem to code to well...).

You only live once. So make it count.

I think this is where proper mentorship is extremely valuable. If the student was consistently coached from the get-go he might have pulled it off.

On that note, is there a community online where one can seek out mentorship. It doesn;t have to be a community of who's who - just some decent nice people with common sense and desire to succeed should suffice. I am at a stage where I could use some advice as well.

We should build it:

http://ideashower.posterous.com/urgent-an-idea-i-have-for-a-...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-multi-modal-coaching-si...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-crowdsourced-lifecoache...

How about right here?

Bob was taught by and getting advice from one of the best teachers of entrepreneurship, if such a thing can be taught, and he was still falling short.

Not only was Bob unable to get away from himself, he wasn't able to take advice from a seasoned entrepreneur and do a 'leap of faith'. I'm sorry, but if Steve Blank gave me valuable advice and I was starting my first company you had better bet I'd do more than stare blankly at him.

Bob will never start his own company.

Some people just have to learn some things the hard way. You can coach, advise, mentor all you want and they will just stubbornly do what they are going to do until they figure out for themselves that it's not working.

My 15 year old is like that. It's quite frustrating.

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