On Business Madness

Some of the good reasons which depend on "everyone else has":

* Your business model depends on providing physical services to those other businesses. (Gold rush, Levi's jeans.)

* You are planning on acquiring employees from the people who are already in the area. (Most startups in SV/SF.)

* You already live there because you went to where the jobs were.

I see this a lot in weight training. My hobby is Olympic-style weightlifting.

Everyone is looking for the One True Training Method. But there isn't one, not really. There are a few major "schools" of thought (the Russians, the Bulgarians, the Chinese), but when transplanted from their original context they tend not to produce exciting results.

There is no secret to Olympic weightlifting. Consistent practice, attention to detail, control of your emotions and the willingness to be prepare are the basis of the sport. It's also the basis of other sports and, by loose analogy, business and life itself. Then, of course, "time and chance happeneth to them all".

The best weightlifters and coaches got that way by thinking for themselves, by experimentation, by observation -- not by rigidly following someone else's plan.

There's more than one way to do it.

I'd like to quote from a really fantastic book, The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell, a section called "Waiting for Mendeleev":

Unfortunately, at present, there is no “unified theory of game design,” no simple formula that shows us how to make good games. So what can we do?

We are in a position something like the ancient alchemists. In the time before Mendeleev discovered the periodic table, showing how all the fundamental elements were interrelated, alchemists relied on a patchwork quilt of rules of thumb about how different chemicals could combine. These were necessarily incomplete, sometimes incorrect, and often semi-mystical, but by using these rules, the alchemists were able to accomplish surprising things, and their pursuit of the truth eventually led to modern chemistry. [...]

I wish we had one all-seeing lens. We don’t. So, instead of discarding the many imperfect ones we do have, it is wisest to collect and use as wide a variety of them as possible, for as we will see, game design is more art than science, more like cooking than chemistry, and we must admit the possibility that our Mendeleev will never come.

"It was Japanese management theory in the 1980s. A few weeks ago, before our collective attention shifted to the Facebook IPO, it was whatever Steve Jobs had done, from hallucinogens to yelling at your employees."

His link for Japanese management theory points to "theory x" but what it should point to is the toyota production method. Eric Reis's lean startup methodology is a repurposing of lean production methods pioneered by toyota. It's an extension of the same management theory, not just a random fad in business thinking.

While our perception of the leading indicators of success may be changing from week to week, the fundamentals of good business stay the same: sell stuff at a profit. Many things can get in the way of that: bad markets, feuding founders, incompetent execution, poor timing, etc...

I am not a business person. I don’t know what makes a good business. It seems like it helps to have a good idea, great people, the willingness to work hard, and an absolute shit-ton of luck. Being certain about much beyond that seems, well, a bit crazy to me.

This also involves failing. You need to push something out there to see if it's what people want and you can't be married to any one idea. Some people get really lucky and hit on everything in the first pass, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

mixergy.com is also a great place to see examples of this. I'm not affiliated with the site, but I'm a huge fan.