Startup skills vs startup ideas | Hacker News Reader

Startup skills vs startup ideas

swombat.com

42 pointsdavidw20 comments

It seems like Daniel is critiquing the tendency to advise entrepreneurial novices to "dive in" and start something. He seems to me to be saying that the just-do-it advice ignores the fact that entrepreneurship is a skill -- you wouldn't advise somebody who wants to learn to program to start with a complex web app, so why do we advise novices to just start a company, when entrepreneurship is equally as complex?

I find the analogy unconvincing though. Both programming and entrepreneurship are trades-like skills that are improved primarily through practice, true. But programming practice is amenable to small, toy projects done in private, gradually moving to larger, collaborative projects as one's skills improved.

The only way to practice entrepreneurship, on the other hand, is to start a company. You could certainly get some practice at the component skills (OP gives an excellent breakdown of those) - maybe do some recreational haggling at car dealerships? Join Toastmasters? But that's akin to doing scales on the piano - to really develop you have to open the music and give it a go.

The only way to practice entrepreneurship, on the other hand, is to start a company.

Correct me if I'm totally missing your point, but there are different types of businesses and companies, some of which lend themselves to "entrepreneurial practice" more than others. Sole-proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs, S Corps, C Corps, whatever, they get progressively more complex and risky.

I agree. And the skills he listed? Well, they're great and all, but they are implementation skills. Implementation skills alone in a vacuum is useless. You first need to know how to think critically and apply a high level solution to a problem.

Things like domain expertise, and exposure to hard problems are what we need first: not the ability to code, design, sell, and definitely not the ability to manage and hire (that's so trivial compared to other things). Learning all those skills will make you great at designing cool things, but not at designing cool things that solve problems people will pay for.

My point is, jumping in with vision and method but zero skills results in pretty much guaranteed failure.

On the other hand, if you can acquire the skills while, say, at university, or working for someone else, and then jump in with the method/vision, you'll have a much better chance.

The manner in which you decide to implement your vision will necessarily depend on the skills you have. If you're a programmer, you will tend to dive into implementation first. If you're a salesperson, you'll tend to dive into sales first... etc.

To maximise your chance, you need a reasonable level of skill in each of those core areas, so that you don't avoid obvious shortcuts just because you don't know anything. Some obvious shortcuts that are often missed by people with limited skills:

- building a product for 6 months instead of making a few phone calls and preliminary paper-based demos to validate the demand;

- hiring an outsourcing firm to "build your prototype" instead of rolling up your sleeves and doing it yourself;

- building an unusable or ugly product instead of using a baseline competence in design to create something reasonably ok...

Etc.

Reductio ad absurdum: by itself, with no skills, the lean startup method cannot achieve anything. It assumes some skills. The more skills you have that fit into whatever method you've picked, the higher your chances of success.

If you don't mind needlessly failing over and over again for years, though, feel free to jump right in with no clue what you're doing.

The core entrepreneurial skills mentioned in Daniel's article do need to be present in some combination on the founding team. This team could include various blends of founders, advisors, employees, contractors, and directors.

Some core skills are orders of magnitude more valuable than others. For instance, raising $100,000 of capital in 1,000 hours is worth exactly $100/hour. Doing entry level marketing coordinator work is worth approximately $18/hour. The higher-impact activity in this context is obvious, especially if getting deals done is the driving force in a founder or co-founder's DNA.

Daniel's article is on the money when it comes to creating a list of the core entrepreneurial skills that CAN and should be learned in order to increase the odds of startup success, so let's continue this discussion over the coming weeks.

so, that's why first time entrepreneurs need interested advisors / investors! they will provide some lacking experience / skills.

the article is really not that pessimistic! :)

I think the "idea vs execution" debate is an interesting one, but I think it often overlooks the often sizable overlap between idea and execution. It's not that ideas without execution are worthless, it's that ideas without execution aren't really ideas.

Suppose I have an "idea" for a novel. It's about a boy whose parents were killed by an evil wizard school, and who is living with unfriendly relatives who don't like or trust magic, and who goes to a wizard school to slowly reach his potential and experience a show down with the aforementioned evil wizard.

Ok, an idea, right. But have I really give you the idea behind Harry Potter? If you give this idea to two different writers and tell them to run with it, I don't think you'll get two different executions. I think you'll end up with two different ideas. The execution and the idea are so intertwined that you really can't distinguish the two. Software is often like this.

I suppose sometimes there really isn't much of an idea - like when a programmer is handed a series of wireframes and told to "make it live" (or when a writer is asked to "novelize" a screen play, with absolutely no deviation from the script). Programmers do often end up in this category for hire, so I'm not dismissing the "idea vs execution" thing completely. But I do think it often misses a big part of the picture.

being non-native english speaker i can't distinguish skills and experience in this article, but i do know the difference between experience and knowledge. the scientist will not try to build the perpetuum mobile because he knows the law of conservation of energy, not because he tried to build the perpetuum mobile for 5 years in academics, failed, thus gained this experience and can move on.

but the skills do really come with experience, many of them, like communication and management.

i missed how lean startup method falls into the same category of methods as scientific method. if we really want to compare them, they really have more in common then contradict: you make theory/MVP, then check it with experiment, then amend the theory | pivot etc...

i missed how lean startup method falls into the same category of methods as scientific method

OP's comparison, which I agree with, was that both the scientific method and the lean startup method provide a mechanism for the efficient application of skills and expertise. Neither are a substitute for skills and expertise, nor are they useful without that expertise.

Contrast that to a recipe for cookies, which will just work if you follow it to the letter.

programming skills - yes, i still can't compare, namely, communication skills with the scientist's knowledge. i believe first come with practice, the latter come with learning and understanding.

> Contrast that to a recipe for cookies, which will just work if you follow it to the letter.

oh, not in my case! :)

actually i got what you're saying

My philosophy is this: Be really great at a few things and don't suck at anything. That's a good list of competencies for an entrepreneur. Eighteen months ago I wanted to build a web application that I thought would help a lot of people in my industry. I knew next to nothing about programming and quickly realized outsourcing the core product wasn't going to cut it. So, I quit my banking job and took courses in discrete math, algorithms & data structures, and computer architecture. Along the way I taught myself python/django, HTML/CSS, and JQuery. Last week I launched a private beta and have received great feedback. I'm really great at financial analysis and product development. And now I don't suck at programming, among other things.

> "If you handed down the Scientific Method to someone who is not a trained scientist, in theory they should be use it to derive new laws of nature. In practice, though, what would most likely happen is that they would mis-apply this method and come up with all sorts of crackpot theories about perpetual motion machines and life-altering magnetic bracelets"

What!? I pretty clearly remember being able to apply the scientific method properly in grammar school. The conclusions we reached may not have been earth shattering, but they were valid, because we followed the steps.

The problem with this advice is that if you have all these skills, you'll be already paid so much that you'll never become an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurship as a whole is done on the margins and by definition that implies having a lot of time, not too many skill but also having the mentality that your willing to do whatever it takes.

In the job market its impossible to find a job that lets you cultivate all those skills he listed. Better is to start something on the side and learn all these skills part time.

uhm... the most important skill is missing from his 8 core skills: Marketing

without good marketing, all the other skills are worthless. (yeah, yeah, I know there are exceptions, but seriously, marketing is the skill with the most leverage)

This is the same as adopting Agile. Just because you use some sort of Agile process doesn't mean your project will all of the sudden be fixed. Agile is generally well suited towards a group of skilled individuals.

Speaking of Lean Startups - did you actually glean anything useful from it? Like something you could start doing tomorrow?

Many things from the blog. So far, the best bits of the book are repetitions of the blog (reasonably enough...). Concepts like:

- If you can't fail, you can't learn

- Growth hypothesis & Value hypothesis as the two first root hypotheses to check

- "Innovation accounting" - keeping track of things so you can validate your learning as much as possible

I think Lean is a great framework to apply entrepreneurial skills, so long as it's not followed dogmatically, of course...

And does he give you specific advice on how to do those? I mean, everyone wants to know if they can grow, but for certain kinds of startups, there's a hockey stick curve, meaning that before it grows... it doesn't.

He gives examples in various contexts, rather than advice, but it looks to me like there's a whole series of "Lean Startup" books coming up (e.g. this one: http://www.ashmaurya.com/2012/01/the-new-and-updated-running... ), and some of them will inevitably focus more on practice. I think the point of Ries' book (which I think is reasonable) is to lay out the theoretical basis and start a movement.

Entrepreneurship often involves having sheer audacity. To start something, qualified, prepared or not.

An example? Look at all the entrepreneurs succeeding with a business despite x, y and z, and have "no business being where they are".

Knowledge is not so much power as much as knowledge filled action.

Entrepreneurs who act can beat people with knowledge who don't act. They'll probably be messier, but there's always the chance they'll learn and improve like anyone.

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