Startups Are Bands for Hackers
petersobot.com
petersobot.com
It's reasonable to assert that founders who truly care about their product may, on average, fare better than those who don't. However, it feels a little presumptuous to interpret the motivations and ambitions of all successful and admired musicians / artists / founders, en masse and from afar.
Would anyone argue that Amazon was not founded with profit as (at least) a prime motivator? How about Apple or Microsoft?
Moreover, even if not chasing monetary fortune, people can still be motivated by a multitude externalities such as recognition or fame - both of which != passion for the product.
TLDR; The conclusion the author draws is hand-wavy at best and paints a decidedly black-and-white picture of the musical scene and startup ecosystem.
Let's not forget how european classical music came to be a form of work for hire where patrons, for variable amounts of time, sometimes decades, payed for musical art creation. Hope I am not reading that wrong but the op is lacking historical reference and concentrating on a very specific contemporary frame.
His statement is simply false..
OP sees this too black and white. With passion comes devotion, with devotion comes practice, with practice comes performance, with performance comes sucess. Kinda.
It is targeted on a pretty narrow demographics and has no meaning outside it.
The music industry produces art that millions of people all over the planet love and enjoy.
Universal does not equals "millions of people all over the planet". It means transcendence.
There was once an article about a "songwriters auction" where songwriters would pitch their music to producers of famous singers. (sorry can't find it now)
For most commercial pop music it's an assembly line really. Several stages specializing in one thing. McD ideas for McD music. Tastes the same as well.
Dean has a genius for infectious hooks. Somehow she is able to absorb the beat and the sound of a track, and to come out with its melodic essence. The words are more like vocalized beats than like lyrics, and they don’t communicate meaning so much as feeling and attitude—they nudge you closer to the ecstasy promised by the beat and the “rise,” or the “lift,” when the track builds to a climax. Among Dean’s best hooks are her three Rihanna smashes—“Rude Boy” (“Come on, rude boy, boy, can you get it up / Come on, rude boy, boy, is you big enough?”), “S&M” (“Na-na-na-na COME ON”), and “What’s My Name” (“Oh, na-na, what’s my name?”), all with backing tracks by Stargate—and her work on two Nicki Minaj smashes, “Super Bass” (“Boom, badoom, boom / boom, badoom, boom / bass / yeah, that’s that super bass”) and David Guetta’s “Turn Me On” (“Make me come alive, come on and turn me on”).
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/26/120326fa_fact_...
I mean, sure it's ridiculous, but these tracks are made by people who are uniquely good at the ridiculous things they like doing. If they've found a way to get paid for that, my hat's off to them.
So I guess this explains how Justin Bieber's 'Baby' has so many songwriters/composers. It's really an assembly line
"I mean, sure it's ridiculous, but these tracks are made by people who are uniquely good at the ridiculous things they like doing. If they've found a way to get paid for that, my hat's off to them"
Agree wholeheartedly.
It would be really interesting to explore how making art for hire, which used to be the norm for centuries, came to be looked down upon in the last century and a half. Probably a lot of economic factors worked together to produce that effect.
The concept of "true art" not being made for hire seems like an excuse for someone to imagine they are successful without actually being so. One of the factors I think is driving this is that everyone in today’s (US) culture needs to be a winner and there are no losers. While it isn’t bad in and of itself, if you truly look at 2 artists as an outsider and one is being paid and the other is not, it seems clear to me who is producing better art for the masses and therefore generating the most economic value.
This same concept can be applied to startups. I read people making excuses for not having VC funding that typically include things like, VCs only like big market sizes which is dumb or VCs only fund businesses with XYZ type of cofounder which is not fair etc. Normally when I read these statements it is obvious to me that the person writing them just doesn’t understand the reality of the game they are involved in.
Similarly, an artist producing music that only .001% of the population will listen to will make excuses about why they don’t have a record deal bc record execs have no taste in good music. That is obviously ridiculous.
The former is when you already have a buyer lined up before you start working. For example, a rich man in the Renaissance era might ask an artist to make him a sculpture of Bacchus fucking Ariadne. (You'd be surprised how many renowned artists were paid to make porn for rich folks.) In that case, the buyer might pay for the block of marble and cover the artist's expenses while he sculpts, in addition to paying him a handsome fee for his work. But then the buyer also has a direct influence on every aspect of the end product. If the buyer wants the girl in the sculpture to look like his underage mistress, it's going to happen even if the artist thinks it's a bad idea.
The latter is a broader concept, and it includes the case where you produce something first and then look for buyers. Novelists often work in this way, spending years to perfect their works without any buyer lined up. Some people who have no problem with this broader concept might still be uncomfortable about the narrower case of "making for hire", because of the direct influence that the buyer's spec has on the product. If you build it first and then look for buyers, at least you have a chance to show people that they might want to do things in a way they never even thought of before.
That's never the case with musicians.
"Computer programming is overrated, it's the 'learning to play guitar' of the geek world."
This article reminded me of it.
So these skills would be a prerequisite for doing anything that has to do with computers and computation. Definitely not overrated.
Mastery of music gives you keys to people's emotions. Likewise, code gives you the keys to the world of information.
They are both powerful and profitable if you know how to use them.
And I answer "No, no - I couldn't do that. Also, I'm not that kind of person", while secretly, in the evening, I spend about an hour writing short, simple, crappy songs for fun - sometimes thinking "maybe I could, if only .." and a thousand different reasons hammer my mind "if I were younger / had a clue / had the skills / had an education / had the time / didn't have a family to support" and so forth.
(Dedicated to all the scriptoldies out there - for keeping the passion alive.)
Startups that set out to make a great product are, on the whole, adored for their work, and often enjoy success as a side-effect.
Startups that set out to make a great product are, when they get anywhere at all, adored for their work, and rarely, but sometimes with a lot of hard work and luck enjoy success as a side-effect.
Just like bands, most startups (esp. the "built in a weekend" kinds) will probably end up being more of a labor of love than a true money-making venture. That's fine, but don't pretend otherwise.
If you are actually trying to succeed as a musician, "success", you are going to make a lot of sacrifices. The opportunity costs are huge. If you're touring as a fledgling band, you are most likely giving up the formative years of your career. The time you're spending with music isn't going to be particularly helpful in other arenas. If you're hacking at a startup, you're acquiring desirable skills in the process. If your startup fails, you can still go get a really good job in SV. If your band fails, you're hitting the reset button. You could be chasing a career in the music industry for 10+ years and be no better off than you were a decade ago.
I also don't think the analogy between VCs and record companies really hold up either. Because of the low returns of signed bands, as compared to funded companies, the models work differently.
Additionally, as a musician, you're ultimately selling a piece of art. It's designed by you, and while it may be influenced by the market, the product is largely determined by your own creativity. A business operates in the exact opposite way. Business as art rarely work. I can give someone a copy of "Kid A", have them say "this sucks", reply back "give it a few listens", and the person may ultimately end up really liking the album. I'm not doing that with a company. If I think a product, say Basecamp, sucks, and I have to pay $20 a month for it, I'm not going to give it much thought after my "it sucks" reaction. We consume art differently than we use other products, because they are radically different things. Market demands are simply too important for businesses. They have to listen to the customers to succeed. The path to success is to take customer problems and figure out a creative solution to them. The customer is driving the most substantial part of the company.
I think the analogy is pretty good actually. You seem to have a bit of a naive view of how music is made a produced. This is a decent description of how music is made, perhaps with the Apple-ish addition of them frequently telling the customer what they like rather than always listening. It's completely treated as a product.
VC funded startups are exactly like a band that says "what should I sound like? What should our next song be? How do we get more listeners really fast?". They need a hit record to even have a chance of making a return on the investment that's been put in, so they better be making a top 40 song (or a mobile social media sharing app/site).
I think I was wrong about your view of music being naive, i think we were just comparing different types of bands and startups here. Match up manufactured record label band and VC funded startup and they match quite well. I have some family and aquaintances who've worked as record execs and you better believe they look at it as a customer oriented problem solving. None of them like the music they push all that much, if they like music at all, they just know how to find/make music that sells.
I liked those guys before everyone else did!
There are several very competent musicians working 'as the band' for famous names or just playing in recording sessions. There's good money on that.
Of course, most of them have their own band, do their gigs at night, usually just for fun (it most certainly does not pay the bills).
I had to dig around for sometime and I thought these papers must be behind some pay-wall. I was surprised to find them on the KISS website. It is not that they are clueless about how to bring back an asteroid and extract resources from it. They just want their MVP to the be the act of prospecting itself. Also I was really surprised to learn that Ion Engines have been routinely used before for asteroid missions like Dawn(http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/ion_prop.asp). The scaling they need to achieve for these missions is much smaller than the average non space geek would expect.
Does anyone here know if the scalability requirements of solar ion propulsion systems they need for the mission of tugging an asteroid into lunar orbit is realistically achievable by 2020?
By the way, startups are for people who are interested in business. If you are interested in business, YOU ARE NOT A HACKER. Hackers are interested in technology for the technology's sake. They don't do UI, they don't do A/B testing. Please stop.
Anyhow, Leonardo da Vinci was certainly a “hacker”: misfit who spent all his time cutting things open and taking things apart, doodling new inventions, etc.
When the Coen's wrote that line for Lebowski, they were shooting for comedy, not debate.
"Once a vague item of obscure student jargon, the word “hacker” has become a linguis-tic billiard ball, subject to political spin and ethical nuances. Perhaps this is why so many hackers and journalists enjoy using it. Where that ball bounces next, however, is anybody's guess." - Free as in Freedom, Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software
I find this particular usage especially amusing considering that the words "hacker" and "business" were about as diametrically opposed as words could be. (In the same way that "punk" and "policeman" don't go together.) And yet now it seems that many businesses are being overrun by people who like to rip things apart just to see how they work.
Theres a delicious irony in a world where the people who rejected the likes of IBM as disgusting went on to create businesses that do things like track you across the web for ad money, or lock you into an environment of rampant ADHD web posts with side offerings of 'social games' that exist solely to convince you to waste your time playing them.
1. It's a little too self-congratulatory, like people who call themselves poets. In the words of Louise Gluck: "'Poet' ['Hacker' for our purposes] must be used cautiously; it names an aspiration, not an occupation. In other words: not a noun for a passport."
Agree with the similarities. Another one is disruptors. Think about successful bands and how they disrupted the music scene.
There is a fitting comic that has a geek looking character threatening a school yard bully - "if you don't give me your lunch money I will hack your Facebook account."
Times have changed.
I read on The Verge that the boombox had the highest adoption rate for any gadget in history. Now we don't need it, we have our computers and we don't need to drive to someone's house to connect with them either. http://i.imgur.com/d29b0.png
And just like most musicians, people who found startups have delusions of grandeur.
And just like most bands, even the ones that succeed are screwed by early-round investors (record companies/VC).
Of course, YC doesn't profit from very bad contestants, so there's one difference
But if you see the progression of the candidates through the competition you can certainly draw several parallels.
YC doesn't have a 'clear cut' winner as AI, still you know that there is a slight mismatch between 'winning the competition' and be 'market successful'. One rarely matches the other.
And of course, the issues of focus, strategy, pressure are very similar among AI and YC. Some contestants start shining early on in the competition, some have perfect technique, but in the end, it only goes so far if it isn't a balance of competences.
However, this ends up supporting the VC = Record Label analogy that I don't think is strong.
Record Labels give much more support to their protégés, and "charge a higher fee" as well (VCs don't ask for 'creative control' of their startups as an example)
Now that the tech and investing world has changed, YC seems more like Motown Records. It's worth pointing out that in its early days, Motown used to release records on Chess and other labels, but at some point it naturally just made sense for Motown to become its own label.
http://pragmaticstartup.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/similaritie...
But, Michael Arrington == Casey Kasem. There is an interesting analogy.
where are the groupies, the sex, the drugs
what am i doing wrong
(
More seriously: While there are certainly some similarities between the lifecycle of a band and a startup, the author seems to put forth a very structured form of the startup lifestyle--I think that claiming there is one true trajectory does any favors to us.
Also, something to muse on: "The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band."
What do you think would be a reasonable mapping of this onto tech/startups/CS/engineering?
)
That fits pretty well to me. The problem everyone seems to be having, author of the piece included, is to spin this analogy so that commercial music sellouts == bad, commercial hacker sellouts == good.
Accept the fact that an investor funded startup trying to get a big exit by getting a huge number of users and pivoting as necessary isn't were people with "passion" or who would object to having to change the "soul of the[ir] art" would end up and it's a great analogy. As they are both hit based businesses where the market is heavily influenced by hype from big market makers and there's a lot of money to be made it's not surprising that similar patterns emerge.