But we retain the solutions that work. A slime mold tries a bunch of useless paths in a maze before it finds the right one. Then it trims and reinforces. Most start-ups failing isn't a sure sign of wasted work.
You can save months of research by spending years of work and hundreds of thousands of people-hours building something that doesn't work.
And if you're a rich investor willing to bet on a lot of such things hoping to make it back on of the few that work, well, you just made that ratio even more lopsided.
One thing that has often surprised me about HN is how people routinely upvote and boast about how they faked a demo. Idk why we refuse to call that what it is: a lie. IDK if Jobs did it, it is still a lie. It's one thing to say that this is what we imagine a technology will be like, but to call it a demo and act like it is the actual tool and that its capabilities generalize to the tasks being shown is theater. Are tech bros just theater kids?
You're describing focus groups. They have a mixed history in product development.
Every product you interact with at the grocery store, every movie, most music, and most products in our modern life go through this process.
It's called user focused design.
If they buy, you're on the right track and are ready to scale up to a larger focus group.
This is called a startup though!
Get good feedback early & often
Focus groups are good for refining. They're absolutely terrible for new product development. If there is an OG playbook for start-ups defeating incumbents, it's in exploiting the committee-based designed process that large companies tend towards. (Owning a product decision is hard. Outsourcing it to a marketing consultant isn't.)
Where you and I probably agree is in the importance of finding the shortest path to a sale.
> It's called user focused design
You're quoting this guy [1]. He also did marketing consulting [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Norman#Nielsen_Norman_Grou...
It's not really that way anymore. The vision of a loan visionary coming up with a new product or invention like being hit by a lightning bolt and then getting rich by building a factory that builds it is just a fairy tale.
In reality it looks more like a series of focus groups. They may not be focus groups per se, but showing your idea to potential customers, getting feedback, refining and showing again is how it's done.
That's how startups that are successful do so.
Norman coined the term user focused design.
> may not be focus groups per se, but showing your idea to potential customers, getting feedback, refining and showing again is how it's done
Sure. I’d argue both focus groups and the lone visionary are myths. But in order to show an idea properly, you have to start thinking about building it. And to start thinking about building it properly, you have to start building it. For every Juicero there are teams iterating around a local optimum.
It pretty much is, yes. Not a sure sign, but SV startups are probably the least efficient way of finding solutions that work. That's not to say that solutions to meaningful problems aren't occasionally found, of course, but the odds are very slim and the amount of money and other resources burned per success is astounding.
On what metric? By any objective measure, barring the tail end of ZIRP, it’s been remarkably more efficient than many national projects.
The point is a VC ecosystem working properly should have a high failure rate. Lots of failures just tells you risk isn’t too low. To measure efficacy and efficiency you have to look at the output. And again, barring the pandemic vintages, it’s a pretty clear record of success.
I'm confused by your reference to "national projects" here. What are you comparing to?
It looks incredibly inefficient to me when I compare the billions blown on failed or worthless ventures to get a small number of valuable ones.
Ceph? (Inktank was founded in 2011 by Sage Weil and DreamHost, which then it raised 1M in 2012 from Mark Shuttleworth, then RedHat bought them for 175M in 2014. Seems like a nice startup stort, no? The project itself was started around 2004 by Weil at LLNL, and then he worked on it as part of his PhD still in 2007, then the work continued at DreamHost, probably because Weil is one of the co-founders of DreamHost.)
Deel, Rippling, Redwood Materials, Convoy, Airtable, Anduril, Cerebral, Checkr and Cerebras were all founded since 2014. Pick one. We're currently seeing an explosion in creativity around satellites, autonomous vehicles (on the road, indoors and airborne), generative AI and biotechnology.
Go back one more cycle and we have SpaceX, Tesla, Uber & Lyft, Moderna, Zoom, DoorDash and other giants that entered busy fields, survived the winnowing and basically created a new industry.
Their innovation was abstracting away the complexity of cross-border hiring. Their impact is meaningful to the degree employment is.
This is sort of like saying the iPod was a better Walkman. Yes, you could functionally do the same thing. But no, it wasn't as easy which meant it wasn't as frequently done. (And as a result of pressure from the upstarts, payroll across the board became smoother.)
> Just because they interact with employment doesn't mean they're as important as the whole concept
Nobody said that. I said "their impact is meaningful to the degree employment is." To the people whose roles exist on account of platforms like Deel, their existence is meaningful.
O: AH, no you didn't, you came here for an argument!
M: An argument isn't just contradiction.
O: Well! it CAN be!
M: No it can't!
M: An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
O: No it isn't!
You then pivoted to the non sequitur that I “like Deel.” I pointed out that isn’t true, and never needed to be—this was never a discussion about which start-ups we want to put a sticker on. It’s a bit rich to complain about logical fallacies after throwing one out.
You haven't changed my mind but you may have changed others' and you did make me think. Let's have an even better discussion next time.
I took it to mean ignoring companies in sales & marketing or FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate), as well as focussing on the effects of a company's products and services versus their valuation.