Pursuits That Can't Scale | Hacker News Reader

Pursuits That Can't Scale

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69 pointszuhayeer19 comments

The arc described here reminds me of the “hero’s journey” where there are two distinct phases.

First, the going out and away to slay dragons, which is unnatural, corresponding the to the conquest of scale.

And then there is the return—a homecoming-where one applies the transformative lessons to one’s more local and immediate life.

The journey is not complete without the “return”.

DIY works on the theory that even though the individual[0] acts don't scale, their popularity means a finite[1] number could still (compactly?) cover the population.

[0] the Camiroi in Lafferty's Primary Education of the... (1966) could presumably do everything alone, "do it yourself", but we're probably better to aim at small groups, ie "do it yourselves".

[1] centralisation vs decentralisation is a question of small N vs. large N, and actually small N isn't so bad on it's own, it's just that when N goes down to 1 or 2 it's just as likely to go all the way down to 0.

+1 for mention of Lafferty. His is a strange status indeed, a kind of well-known obscurity, or great fame writ small. Maybe he's more a writer's writer.

> Maybe he's more a writer's writer.

He definitely is. He was also a really nice person (I only knew him for a few years, before his stroke)

WHOAH!? Tell us more, please!! (My fave short was Continued on Next Rock, I just wish I had time to reread his novels).

> the conquest of scale.

Dragons are good at amassing wealth because they know how to exploit economies of scale.

But dragons are not good at exploiting that wealth, except for self-advertisement. Smaug quite literally just sits on his wealth.

But what else should one do with wealth? Take Elon Musk... Oh, he makes flying, firebreathing, spacegoing dragons with his money.

This post was just a series of "nah not in my experience"'s for me. I think it's a lesson on how just because something seems like common sense to you, doesn't mean it's a universal principle that applies to everyone.

> after a successful stint at building things that do scale (or at least giving it a really good, long try), many people seem to gravitate towards building things that don’t scale.

Building systems that scale is very fun for me and I'd like to do more of it, but it's tough because customers couldn't care less how scalable we are, they just want, you know, the pesky stuff they paid for!

(BTW I think that PG essay is a product of a fading era in the Valley when your product could kind of stink and you could casually break every law you came across, and it just worked and you could just SCALE because blue oceans and free money abounded. A bunch of Valley crooks (sorry I mean luminaries) are still addicted to those halcyon days, writing books that are veiled manifestos for abolishing anti-trust law, and so on.)

> I have a theory that chasing things that scale makes you need therapy, and the therapy is pursuing things that can’t scale.

Again if anything it's the opposite for me. Actual businesses where you're keeping customers happy all day is hard, scaling systems is fun. I love tinkering with them on paper and then putting the changes out there and finding out if I was right or not, it's almost therapeutic. Maybe this is something of an engineer/introvert mindset, most programmers I know don't want to deal with real, messy customer concerns, they just want to build and optimize their perfect system.

> I once wrote that every entrepreneur’s dream is to succeed at building an impossibly hard business and then finally open a local coffee shop to be happy.

I always say that people with coffee shops or pretty much anything in F&B/hospitality/etc. have much harder businesses to run than I do. These are immensely difficult businesses with razor thin margins, you work tons of hours, customers may or may not be appreciative depending on the latest random Instagram post they saw etc. Like who wants to run a cafe instead of a nice technology business where you can literally sit around in your underwear, think about stuff, and then type it out and that's actually productive? These people who told Anu they want to run a cafe, what are they sick of? I wonder if it's just dystopian San Francisco tech culture, I understand why they'd be sick of that

> One extreme case in point: Zuck

Are we really taking this detour to read the tea leaves of Zuckerberg's public image and pretend that we have some real insights to his character? We know they're meaningless, this paragraph simultaneously observes that he's doing all this stuff like judo or whatever, but still grinding it out in the Facebook office, so I'm not sure why we even went there

I feel like this whole article only makes sense if you're steeped in a very narrow and specific tech culture which may never actually come again

But are you not referring to a very narrow definition of “scale”? That is, just the technical side. But the article talks about scaling a business at large, which includes scaling customer concerns, and so on.

So scaling here refers to conquering a market, beating down competitors, and, yes, building towering tech.

Other than that I agree with your criticisms.

Zuck example was misleading I think. Since he’s been doing athletics since his teenage years, including combat sports (fencing and wrestling IIRC). His parents wanted him to be good at 3 sports, at least one of them being a team sport…I think.

Also, instead of “things that don’t scale”, I think it’s probably being more of a craftsman. Being at scale necessarily means “giving away your legos”[1]. Which can make your impact very detached. Being a craftsman brings you back. But idk, never been a CEO that’s scaled :)

1. https://review.firstround.com/give-away-your-legos-and-other...

If you only do things that can scale, the universe of interesting and useful things that are possible to do gets much smaller.

I view this all on a much more fundamentally human level. You figure out how to survive and how to be desirable as a mate fundamentally (however you define that success, social acceptance, admiration, status, cash, etc) then indulge in the other things (the curiosities). And then people weight priorities differently. “Scaling” is a proxy for that first bit - making money.

You can attempt things that don't scale, fail, learn and apply to things that do scale. It's a process, not always an outcome.

100% agree, not everything you try should be a success, and most failures bring lessons with them.

I barely remember a comment (made, or at least quoted, by some geek of renown?) along the lines of: it is faster to first build a 3" telescope, then a 6", than it is to just build a 6".

Thompson's Rule for First-Time Telescope Makers: "It is faster to make a four-inch mirror then a six-inch mirror than to make a six-inch mirror."

I've seen that one example repeated often. If you bring it to IT, it's often faster to learn Python and then C than to learn C. (But this one is not as clearly a winner as the telescope example.)

I guess every area has things like this.

Anyway, I do disagree that the VC's one is about learning. It seems much more connected to marketing and ensuring a business viability.

To scale is to externalize, acquire population, and watch the 80/20 static-to-dynamic ratio slide leftward into inflexibility.

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