Does the "Entrepreneurship Subculture" prevent big ideas? | Hacker News Reader

Does the "Entrepreneurship Subculture" prevent big ideas?

noahpinionblog.blogspot.com

51 pointsmarklabedz25 comments

I would say that in Spain(at least before the crisis), we have a very good "great ideas" detector, but with inverted polarity. People usually goes around saying "this sucks, that sucks". But they can not think in fixing anything. That´s why I love the SV way of thinking, every thing is possible, just stand up and DO IT. Also being 35, I realize that now I have more experience than when I was 23 (obviously), and that experience allows me to take distance from the group thinking the OP mentions (and now a days is oppressive here in Spain. People can´t think there is an end to the crisis, as there was an end to the crazy bubble). I think is a good idea to change for a time, and immerse yourself on another ambient, job, place, whatever. There are thousands of things broken that need smart energetic people to fix them, and they are not another social network.

edit: some typos and punctuation.

The other thing this article doesn't mention, but related to the article the other day about going to the moon: when we work only in small teams, and dislike the massive ordered military-like hierarchical companies, we make it harder to do things as big as going to the moon.

Sure, but that really hits on the "big thing" about the moon Mercury/Apollo missions. They had a funding model that allowed them to spend incredible amounts of money with absolutely no expectation of return on that investment.

If you put 10000 really smart people to the task of solving big problems while giving them nearly unlimited resources, they could get a lot done.

Of course that's not how entrepreneurial funding actually works. For better or for worse it takes a really unique financier (like the government) to make that happen. The moon landing was the product of a really unique time in our history, I wish we'd stop using it as an example I guess.

We could use Zheng He or Christopher Columbus instead, I guess? Though one has the disadvantage of no one having a clue who he was and the other is problematic to anyone who is bothered by the stuff he did.

But why was it unique? Why couldn't it be duplicated? Why shouldn't it?

There are huge risks that nick bostrom talks about http://www.nickbostrom.com/

The only difference is between that and the cold war is that people don't give them due attention because they are non-anthropomorphic (a fight with nature instead of against other humans). If it was the soviets who were behind the asteroid threat, and they were causing old age and cancer, and they were behind worldwide poverty, the US government would be mobilizing trillions of dollars to tackle those problems.

I seriously hate people who keep saying we need to chase 'big ideas'.

Why?

Because big things have small beginnings c.f. the universe, earth agglomeration, the sun, galaxies, life, humans, civilisations, businesses, technologies and AI. Everything snowballs - nothing just magically appears from nowhere - it's all just a combination of incremental past states.

People who don't understand how things are made feel as though all we need is more "eureka moments", geniuses, "innovation plans" and "big all encompassing goals" when this is not how innovation works at all.

Innovation is directed evolution of the adjacent possible via the convergence of many secondary composable technologies and ideas and hence is messy, arduous, long and always incremental. Chasing big ideas is like building extremely complex software using the Waterfall method - it just doesn't work too well.

What people should be saying is that we should "reduce the cost of failure", "speed up the iteration cycle" so that a bunch of small trivial composable ideas can quickly be assembled into something extraordinary - like the repurposed cells that create a human, or the combination of engines and wheels that make our cars.

People who chase 'big ideas' miss the DNA for the forests.

You have to work on making DNA before you can build the trees.

But there's also a place for big science. Manhattan project, Apollo program, Soviet industrialization.

No doubt.

But looking at light through slits, firing atoms through foil, falling apples and making tiny sparks using dynamos made those all possible.

You'll also notice those were all government funded defense programs - and are hence a special case with the final one not being effective.

I wouldn't dismiss the final one so off-handedly. The Soviet economy may have been pretty unimpressive by the 70-80s, but earlier on it was making fast progress, not completely unlike the progress of the Chinese economy of the past 20 years.

Russia started from a pretty low starting point when Lenin took over.

> Russia started from a pretty low starting point when Lenin took over.

That's why they were making fast progress - any idiot who doesn't work will increase performance 100% by getting a job.

Just because you take hundreds of millions of people that aren't working and starving to death to working and still starving to death - doesn't mean you did anything particularly useful.

It just means you really fucked things up. China's real growth began with capitalist reform. So did Russias.

Your argument doesn't really make sense though.

Nonworking -> working can describe early soviet industrialization, but it was far more impressive than you're making out - they were first in space for everything up till 69.

Also, going from the everyday puddling to big science projects can also be described as nonworking->working. If government taxes landowners more thoroughly and invests in big science instead, you can consider that as nw->w.

I think you're diminishing the role of a big "good" vision in the process of innovation.

What's the guiding vision of the internet community ? as far as i can tell is mostly there's no valuable guiding vision. It's all about rapid trial and error to appeal to as many people as possible with whatever idea that will work.

So we end with most of the web development community working on creating junk-food sites, optimizing ads and new ways to sell stuff. This way you get McDonalds and TV advertising invented. Big inventions indeed , mostly with negative value.

Of course there are some clusters of the web with a big guiding vision: collaborative consumption, using the power of the web to reduce prices, better ways to share important knowledge, new labor marketplaces, democratizing innovation.

And you see a qualitative difference between both sorts of companies.

I don't think the difference is as qualitative as you might think.

"using the power of the web to reduce prices" -- If any company had 1/10 that influence here that Wal Mart has had, they would be doing well.

Get off your high horse - the market dictates usefulness within the bounds of negative externality regulation and human rights.

The internet has produced more value over the preceding 10 years than essentially any other industry. "Purists" irritate me for the very reason that they don't work in the real messy world.

People like McDonalds. People like watching TV. Just because you don't like it doesn't matter.

Crass consumerism is the saving grace of the United States - it's what allows companies to thrive and grow and build wealth.

"Important" things are overrated by those who don't do.

Google's Ads and YouTube's cat videos have done more for the web than Wikipedia.

The issue here is all wrapped up in "bounds of negative externality regulation". I'd hate to 4Step my way into being Zygna - I don't think it's useful for the end users and is nearly 100% parasitic. The market isn't perfect due to there being no "digital-heroin regulations" to prevent this drag on human progress. I think we can say with confidence that we're in a local optimum in current market conditions, and some us - myself included - wish to select ourselves out of doing such companies.

"Wealth creation" is a byword for justifying rent seeking as if that was an end in itself - "job creators" at least has some positive end in sight.

The argument you make "cat videos, etc." being beneficial is a valid one. The 90% of shit is why we have much of our infrastructure from AWS to FedEx. However, it's dangerous to assume that this is the only, or best, path to increasing our standard of living, and moreover to not see why we shouldn't try, in our own activities, to try to rise above it.

Any concerted effort on solving a problem produces the effects you speak of - it's not just crap. Pure end-user numbers, vis-a-vis "crass consumerism", are not what dictate these positive externalities (AWS, etc.) that we experience. It's likely the challenge of the problem with respect to having a product-market fit. In other words - a hard problem solved for a small market is likely to produce outsized spillover effects - like why Rails powers productivity software and now tons of things.

There is a middle ground between the dreamers and the rent seekers where the biggest impact to society can be gained. Rent seeking hoping for spillover is not the optimum path. Instead, if you really do want to make an impact first, find a real problem that benefits humanity and solve it - don't dream about it, and don't whitewash what's black.

I've been told that one way to come up with ideas for startups is to put a timer on your watch/phone that goes off every 30 minutes. When that alarm goes off, stop what you are doing and ask yourself "Why does this suck, and how could I fix it?". Keep a journal of the ideas and see what you come up with over time.

I think that if you are a 25 year old guy living in San Francisco/Chicago/NYC/insert your favorite major US city it is really likely that you are going to come with ideas that solve a common set of problems. Are those business worth building? Maybe so. Are they going to make an impact on a global scale? Maybe not.

Perhaps if you combined an entrepreneurial spirit with travel to emerging/developing nations and put yourself in uncomfortable or unusual situations you could come up with something that had the potential to change the world.

Or we could question whether attempting to come up with problems to solve in order to create a business is a good idea at all. Perhaps we should build businesses because that's the best context in which to execute a solution to an actual problem?

The approach described in the first paragraph led to the invention of the snooze button.

I think the current entererpenural culture centered around silicon valley encourages people to think small. There's so much you can do with a big team and real resources, but that doesn't really jives with the culture in the Valley nowadays.

There's a LOT of engineers in SV. If everyone get as little as one great idea each 10 years it's a lot of great ideas. The cognitive bias described in the article doesn't really matter because of the statistical nature of the process.

The problem with enterpreneurs is that they are focused on getting funding. The investors that provide the funding tend to prefer proved solutions, so the enterpreneurs dump great ideas as too weird or too unproven or having no clear business model to possibly get the funding.

Great points about how groupthink can limit creativity, but I suspect it can also impede execution which may be even more important. As good as lean startup is, it certainly causes many to groupthink the best execution strategy. This may increase competition for ideas well suited for it, and prematurely kill (or pivot away from) ideas best pursued with a different approach.

What are some of the biggest ideas solved by small startups? Maybe large organizations or established industries are needed to develop some of the biggest ideas and startups are not solving big ideas because that's not their purpose.

"What material to use in making a transistor".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Silicon_transist...

Too often, the bigger the idea lust, the bigger the insecurity.

You will find many more successful businesses that started small with the idea that really resonated with customers.

I agree with many of the points you raise, but I think you're trying to unite tangential concerns around a single issue.

The excerpt from your father's paper suggests that our problem solving can be inhibited by our initial impulses about a solution. I agree that this is often the case- most people seem to have a natural resistance against reversing out of a train of thought in order to choose a different branch. Our natural inertia tends to carry us forward. Even when we drive, think how awkward it feels to make a wrong turn and have to reverse down the street in order to correct your error. Obviously on the road this act puts your physical health at risk, so it's not a perfectly sound analogy, but the feeling is similarly uncomfortable with our problem solving tendencies. Most people would prefer to continue to drive and hope/wait to find a turn that will bring them back to the road they know or suspect they should be on.

Considering this tendency in the context of entrepreneurship, I agree that it would be inhibitory, but I also would suggest that the capacity to recognize a wrong turn and act appropriately to correct it is a necessary characteristic of a successful entrepreneur.

After the citations of your father's papers, you move into a sequence about how a self-contained entrepreneurship subculture might result in 'collaborative fixation'. I would argue that a central tenet of the culture, and something that makes it what it is, is that those individuals who self-select into that group de facto bring their own unique personality and background toward working on solutions to problems. If anything, the entrepreneurial subculture puts a premium on thinking differently than your peers, even if those peers also happen to consider themselves entrepreneurs.

Regarding the mini-terrier social network (dibs on that idea, by the way), there are always going to be individuals who copycat models and try and apply them to specified contexts. But, at least in my opinion, that kind of business doesn't exist in the same context as trying to address a Big Problem (then again, I don't have a mini terrier- maybe for some people it is).

I agree with you, again, about your last point regarding context. If a problem is really a Big Problem, it exists across multiple contexts, affecting a number of different people in different ways. That's why it's a Big Problem. As such, it's critical to be able to conceptualize approaching that problem from and through a variety of different contexts, and once again, that's a critical trait for an entrepreneur trying to address a Big Problem.

tl;dr:

After writing this, I'm wondering if it's not so much that the entrepreneurship subculture is inhibiting our capacity to address Big Problems as much as the problems themselves. That's why they're big in the first place right? In order to solve them, a person or group has to be agile enough to abandon their wrong answers, self-aware enough to stay true to the solutions they believe to be tenable, and diverse enough to consider a solution across diverse contexts. I think if anything, the entrepreneurship subculture encourages all these things, and if it were easy to uphold all three characteristics at any time in the face of any problem, entrepreneurship wouldn't be the art that it is.

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