Hacker News Reader

Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

It is. But without survival bias no successful company would exists.

The success of a company is highly tied to the intuition of the founder, thet are usually the only people that are critical to the company still improving. But the opposite is true, they are the only ones that are critical to bankrupt the company. But they take decisions taking into account the success of the whole company, something that team don't do as much

View on HN

> It is. But without survival bias no successful company would exists.

I agree with your overall argument but not this premise -- without survival bias you still get all the successful first-time companies who, through more dumb luck than anything else, happen to luck their way into a perfect situation without any past company experiences to bias them, survival or not

But you wouldn't luck into a new market if you just listened to old data, meaning that such luck requires founder intuition and not expertise or customer expertise. Established companies will always beat you on expertise and data, so founder intuition is the only reason a startup can compete, if you don't rely on it then you have lost before you even start. That doesn't guarantee success, but not doing that guarantees failure.

How would you quantify the difference between founder intuition and founder randomness?

Why is founder randomness interesting? It doesn't matter if you got good or bad intuition, if you don't trust it you don't get that chance to succeed. Both talented and lucky founders did it the same way.

It's interesting if combined with the insight that a lot of founders were simply lucky, regardless of what they tell themselves and others about why they succeeded

I don’t understand how survivorship bias is being used here. I thought it was a wholly backward-looking error of not taking into account failures along with the successes, not something that somehow empowers future success.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com