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Comment by tlb | Hacker News Reader

The fact that the survival rate of startups hasn't improved doesn't show that our knowledge hasn't improved. Startups are competitive, with only 1 or 2 VC-scale winners per market. So, the claim is like "race car technology hasn't gotten better, because there's still only one winner per race."

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Exactly. If you would launch a startup with principles from 100 years ago you probably wouldn't stand a chance in most industries.

Racing competition is flattened through regulation(oversimplified). All drivers have the same car. Drivers skill and fearlessness is the deciding factor.

I came here to basically say this about running a company- but your comment was a better launching point.

As someone who has run several companies over the last 25 years and has read and or tried nearly ever "method" mentioned... Im now running a company where Im abandoning everything and just going at with skill and fearlessness... and no funding. It feels freeing, and we are growing.

Hm, no, in F1 they don’t have the same car. Each season, each team builds their own (adhering to the Formula) and put massive amounts of efforts to gaining efficiency through engineering.

Oh really?! I said my statement was oversimplified. Not all groups have the same requirements. NASA Spec is very regulated for instance... But I knew a comment like this was coming, so as someone who grew up with a family race team, has a race car, and builds a motorsports app. Shut up.

My eyes being rolling faster than my crank...

In National Stock Car Racing the cars are all nominally equal, that’s far from the case in F1 where some years a single competitor dominates partially from having chosen a superior technological implementation.

> Nominally

I don't really follow NASCAR, but from listening to my (huge fan) father-in-law, that word is doing some work. His best (or, at least, my favorite) are the creative ways teams find to bend the rules - or blatantly cheat! - to give their cars an advantage.

One that made me laugh: a team once packed their suspension tubes with lead shot to make minimum weight. On the first lap the driver pulled a lever that dropped all the shot onto the track, and then enjoyed an underweight car for the rest of the race! They're always looking for "legitimate" optimizations, too.

I can't think of a single race where drivers are required to drive "the same car", by any reasonable definition of same. Not stock cars, F1, Nascar, demolition derby...

You all are being idiots. Im done. There is so much nuance to all of this that I did not include. Key words are Flattened by Regulation... Have you ever read a damn rule book? Stock, improved, modified, class, my god.

Good bye, never again. Hacker news is a lost cause.

Signing out.

A car race is a zero-sum game, which is not the case of economics (according to orthodox economists at least), so if there was a magic recipe for startups success, more of them would generate wealth, the pie would grow, therefore less should die?

You can have locally zero sum effects.

Either you fight over a saturated market. (Zero sum)

Or you try to grow the market. (Non zero sum)

Or you try to diversify into new markets. (Mixed, non zero sum if its greenfield research into new technologies, zero sum if old).

Yes, and indeed more startups are addressing more markets every year. The total number of attempts and successes are both up, keeping the success rate fairly constant.

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