Abandon Your Big Idea. But Don’t Give Up Your Big Ambition. | Hacker News Reader

Abandon Your Big Idea. But Don’t Give Up Your Big Ambition.

calnewport.com

43 pointsph0rque21 comments

Remember, entrepreneurs: this is how academics think. And this is the attitude that makes begging for money via grants a lot more appealing than entrepreneurship. It's "give me money to do this because I'm an expert in it" instead of "make something people want and they will give you money."

Huh? So entrepreneurs are "better" than academics? That's just silly and pompous.

Remember, 90% of everything is crap. That goes for both businesses and research.

No, it means there's more pressure on entrepreneurs to succeed because there's more risk if they fail. There's no ladder or set of stepping stones on a path to entrepreneurship -- you either started/work at a company and are innovating, started/work at a company that's going to fail, or haven't started a company.

I have no idea how you got that conclusion from my comment. My point was that the academic attitude about expertise is pompous. I've worked with several academics and research labs trying to turn their research into startups, and you would not believe the attitudes prevalent in academia. The most common example of this I've seen is when professors bring up a potential competitor and state that the competitor does not have as much expertise (no founders with PhDs in the subject matter) as the professor, so the professor's new company should succeed wildly.

If the attitude present in this article was paid any mind by innovators, we would not have some things we truly love. My favorite example is ZFS. Built by prodigious hackers, not distributed filesystem experts by any means. I can't find the article anymore, but I remember reading that they felt their lack of expertise allowed them to approach the problem from a new angle, ignoring common wisdom.

My message to young entrepreneurs is this: Innovation doesn't work by experts expertly shaping the future incrementally. Innovation is messy. It works by lots of people - some experts, some not - trying to solve a problem. Almost everyone will fail, but you can't succeed if you don't try.

I agree with this, and see this trap in lots of entrepreneurs. They want to disrupt healthcare, or teleconferencing without any domain expertise in it. They think having a keen sense of UI, superb technical skills, with some SEO mixed in will get the job done, but without the deep domain knowledge, you're just rolling the dice. I think that's what the author is getting at.

Example: The person who just wants to innovate for the heck out of it will create an app that allows people to learn foreign languages through Skype. The person who's actually studied foreign languages and accelerated learning will create an app that concentrates on input/listening first.

Ouch. It stings me 'cause it's true.

I am always thinking up ideas but I realize now that I lack domain knowledge for most of them. See here: http://ideashower.posterous.com/

The area where I do have a lot of domain knowledge would be personal development and maybe skill acquisition. So maybe I should focus my efforts there? :)

On the other hand, I wonder about the philosophy from David Sacks. But I guess he's also admitting that when you reach a certain point, you need people who know how to get inside from experience in order to really hit it big. But when starting up, he seems to say avoid getting those people involved.

One of the lessons we learned is that professional managers hired from the industries you're trying to disrupt tend not to be very beneficial. This whole idea that Mark Zuckerberg should stay CEO of Facebook, as opposed to being replaced by a professional manager, that was one of the things we learned at PayPal early on. If you look at the PayPal companies, they did not try to replace the initial leadership with supposedly more qualified people. Don't hire people from the industries you're trying to disrupt. They have too much ideological baggage about the way things have to work.

One of the ways PayPal was so successful is we did not know all the Visa and MasterCard rules we were supposedly violating. There were other companies who didn't pursue what we were pursuing because they thought it'd be a violation of the rules. In fact, was it a violation of the rules? At most it was a grey area because Visa and MasterCard rules weren't written for the Internet....

eBay certainly felt constrained -- this may have been a rationalization after the fact for losing to a company they so clearly should have beaten -- but they always said they felt too constrained with the risks and liability they could take on. PayPal was able to take on these massive liabilities because if the company didn't work it was going to go out of business anyway so there was nothing to lose.

BI: How do you apply those lessons here at Yammer? Particularly in hiring -- do you look for people who have never worked at big software companies?

DS: Yes. There's a strong strand of consumer DNA in our company. Out of the first 15 people who started, none of them worked at an enterprise software company. I don't think we hired anyone who had worked at an enterprise software company until last year. We came at it from a blank slate. What we've learned is there are certain enterprise functions we've had to backfill. There's been this steady process of starting with a consumer mindset and then saying, "OK, we need an enterprise sales team. We need some enterprise marketing to back them up."

BI: Do you find you need a big enterprise sales force to compete with the big guys?

DS: In the large accounts, yes.

http://www.businessinsider.com/david-sacks-qa-2011-11#ixzz1g...

Question from the Article: She admitted that she was having trouble with this ambition because no one at her school did behavioral neuroscience research. “But I really want to get involved in that area,” she emphasized. “How do I find someone to work with me? I’m stuck.”

Answer Given: "I told her to abandon the idea."

Correct Answer: Find another school.

Are you kidding me? She's an undergraduate. Presumably she chose the best school she could get into. It's not graduate studies.

> Presumably she chose the best school she could get into.

There is no "best school". There's a "best school for what you're trying to do". If you change what you're trying to do, the "best" school may change as well.

Important to note also, this blog article is aimed at students, who don't have significant domain experience in any field most likely.

Therefore, his advice is sound for this audience as giving up big ideas is necessary when they're so nebulous and you don't have anything you could apply it to. An entrepreneur, by definition, has a skill in 'making something people want' and getting them to give you money and can apply that skill to a field, regardless of if they have much experience in that field.

While agree that this must be filtered for his audience of students, I have to take issue with his tone that seems to boil down to what most of academia does: very unambitious incremental research. Sure - this schlep is needed, but I think his cadre our too biased in this direction. The system dislikes risky research, and that's a shame.

Also, a glance at his books looks exactly like the grade-grubbing BS that leads to kids becoming valedictorian and then failing to do anything of significance after. These zombie achievers miss the point of education, and I feel like this guy is only encouraging them.

The article merely says that to make progress in a field, your best bet is to become an expert in it first.

I think he's saying, to make progress in a field, find a place where there are experts and work with them.

Regarding his books, he explicitly states the valedictorian approach is probably wrong for most students in one of his books (The High School Superstar one). He recommends almost the opposite approach, which seems to be close to what you are saying, do well enough to get your foot in the door grade wise and go deep in something interesting.

Not sure I agree with his thesis in the context of entrepreneurship... sometimes, the inexperienced person comes up with a surprising (and surprisingly scaleable and profitable) take on a problem precisely because of lack of experience. However, I don't know if that's a statistical anomaly.

I'd lean towards the idea he's half correct - small amounts of progress are relatively guaranteed to be made by someone with experience and lots of background in the field.

However, for someone to revolutionize or fork a given field, perhaps you do often need the inexperienced person with a different perspective...

If you think you're interested in problem, start trying to solve it. If you really get into it, along the way you'll become a domain expert.

At least for me, that's how I learn. Who cares if you end up solving a different problem than the one you started with.

I think his advice is "good" in the sense of safe. If it is followed, it is very likely that the student ends up in a good place professionally. But, I think he ignores the fact that to become really good at something is not pure grit, but something has to feed your motivation. I'm just as sceptical about "passion" as Cal is, but at least one might need to discover some kind of drive towards achievement. For me it seems to be a particular kind of curiosity to "understand" something difficult, and use it to build stuff. It's not exactly passion, but still one needs the drive, not just a direction that when diligently pursued usually gives good results.

Every member of each generation grows up and implicitly faces a decision: am I going to follow the path of others towards success? or am I going to redefine success? The former is for iBankers, lawyers, doctors, carrer academics and social capitalist. The latter is for innovators.

Ok. A thesis that sounds reasonable, except how do we test this belief and what measuring stick?

In other words, how do we know that experience depth lead to being a successful research scientist. What does a successful research career mean? Discover something new and significant? Getting a teaching position? Citation? Nobel prize in a science field?

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