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Comment by anoy8888 | Hacker News Reader

i am quite confused . It started saying good chess players are more careful and spent more time falsifying ideas but then he later gave startup examples which is the opposite ( not so careful with falsifying. Just jump into the water with conviction and figure things out on the way ) . Startup game is more like poker . It is very different from chess . Somehow the author drew the wrong conclusions. Very confusing

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> Startup game is more like poker . It is very different from chess .

That’s the point of the article. It contrasts the thinking styles of ‘founder-types’ and ‘scientist-types’.

As a (in the terms of the article) ‘scientist-type’ who regularly gets lost in the weeds of the details, I found it a pretty interesting commentary.

This is not quite true, because poker is fundamentally adversarial, while startups are mostly not adversarial, at least not directly.

Startups are a beauty contest where each player focuses on maximizing the things about them that appeal most to a panel of judges (customers). Similar to the scramble competition that Benenson cites here, rather than an arm-wrestling contest.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31400660/

Startups are competition. You're fighting with others to put up the best product in market. It's a race against time as well.

Right, but my argument is that there are many niches in the market where there is no competition, and startups should try to find that and then creates moats with IP, data, etc. There are many situations where startups don't have direct competition, because they are inventing something radically new. Often true in life sciences, for example. You're right that in those cases they are in a race against time, since someone will eventually come along, but they can go for years without a direct adversary.

I don't think startup game is more like Poker. It's a lot of experimentation and learning. True, you gotta protect your bank roll, but the type of strategy initiatives to take are something like that of a chess.

PS: I'm an early stage founder, who has finally some traction with my current B2B data infra SaaS. I've had a failed company in the past which had 4 major pivots, where we decided to return most of the funding to learn few things again.

In real life, things are rarely zero-sum or have one correct answer.

Nearly all engineering is balancing different concerns - durability vs price, weight vs features, and so it goes.

Besides engineering, you also have game theory, political science, etc.

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