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By endurance we conquer

blog.samaltman.com

60 pointskogir17 comments

OK, so here's the real question: how do you know when what you're doing can be called 'endurance' and not foolishness?

You work on your product; initially everything's great, there's a feeling of 'nothing is impossible'. As the months go by without any traction, you begin to have a few doubts. Finally, after you've spent quite a lot of time and got nowhere, you're really pissed: on the one hand, you 'invested' so much of your time into it. It might need 5% or even 0.1% more effort to become successful. But, how do you know when to stop? How do you know that you're not going down a dead end?

Like all maxims, "by endurance we conquer" is meant only to remind you of some potential solutions. Knowing when to quit and when to stick with it is the hard part.

I think the premise of the question is wrong. In business, there's never a case where you're 95% or 99.9% of the way to "success". Success is something that develops over time.

Validating your ideas is the most important part of the journey, and learning how to do it in the context of your particular product or market is what will lead to success. It's also something you get better at over time.

So it that sense it's self-fulfilling; with endurance you get better at validating your ideas, and become more successful.

But some common validators for startups are:

- growth (in traffic, user signups, revenue) - this is considered by far the most important in YC

- user engagement & feedback

- user testing

- a/b testing or multi-variate testing

Whole books have been written about this stuff - most notably by Eric Ries and Steve Blank in recent times. It's probably worth your while to read them.

That is a hard question. Probably the best you can do is ask people who've seen a lot of similar situations.

I'd imagine that you have some sort of spreadsheet to keep track of your predictions, both positive and negative.

I'm curious if your educated conclusion beats a random walk (similar to mutual fund managers for example)

This sums it up rather well:

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-09-19/

This is pretty much isomorphic to the Halting Problem. ;)

Is this who we want to take inspiration from? Reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Shackleton I see:

Away from his expeditions, Shackleton's life was generally restless and unfulfilled. In his search for rapid pathways to wealth and security, he launched many business ventures and other money-making schemes, none of which prospered. His financial affairs were generally muddled; he died heavily in debt.

Yup! Sounds like he fits right in the startup world! (Not necessarily as a model to emulate...)

Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, CVO, OBE FRGS (15 February 1874 – 5 January 1922) was an Anglo-Irish polar explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic, and one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.

Seems pretty inspirational to me.

I think that it is wonderful that people like him have lived.

I don't want to be like him.

Ernest Shackleton is probably the greatest mortal leader since Moses. Read Alfred Lansing's Endurance and you'll probably agree, although his greatest skill is probably this: http://cbpowerandindustrial.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/the-unc...

I gave you an upvote for the description. Nice to know about that "human" side of him.

People can be inspirational without being perfect. Despite his failings later in life, Shackleton acted honorably and courageously on the Endurance mission.

On one of his expeditions, after their ship got stuck in the ice, Shackleton basically saved the lives of every single man on the mission through excellent decision making. I have read accounts of several 'Heroic' exploration missions, and in too many of them, the leader sacrifices the lives of his team mates to "win". Shackleton seems to have been the exact opposite of that.

"Shackleton's concern for his men was such that he gave his mittens to photographer Frank Hurley, who had lost his during the boat journey. Shackleton suffered frostbitten fingers as a result."

"Shackleton immediately...set to work to organise the rescue of the Elephant Island men. His first three attempts were foiled by sea ice, which blocked the approaches to the island. He appealed to the Chilean government, which offered the use of Yelcho, a small seagoing tug from its navy. Yelcho reached Elephant Island on 30 August, at which point the men had been isolated there for four and a half months, and Shackleton quickly evacuated all 22 men."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Shackleton#Loss_of_Endur...

People are inspirational because we're impressed and gratified that people like that exist. But we do not necessarily want to be like them.

That said, the characteristics that in one person lead to repeated failure can in another lead to success. My mother had a book called Cradles of Eminence which was basically a retrospective study of what kind of childhood lead to great fame later in life. One of their many interesting findings is that the fathers of many eminent people tend to be failure-prone. But not failure-prone in any way - failure-prone in that they dared too much and it didn't work out.

The reason why my mother had this book is that she was curious whether deliberately creating the circumstances that lead others to success would lead to success for her children. There is no way that I could summarize the result of her experiment - nor would I suggest that anyone else try her techniques - but I do have 2 half-sisters with Oscar nominations...

During the time when his vessel, the "Endurance," was stuck in the ice, Shackleton applied management principles from which perhaps startups can learn. He made sure to pay attention to what and how everybody was doing at all times. One thing he did then was to assigning people meaningful tasks to keep them from becoming despondent and dragging down morale. What he did there has actually been studied by military researchers who were interested in ways to get people and organizations through periods that seem utterly hopeless. Startups come to mind...

Are you saying we should never take advice from a man unless we're looking to emulate every last aspect of his life?

I like this other quote by Sam better: startups: growth solves nearly every problem, and if you don't have growth nothing will solve your problem.

(Ref: https://twitter.com/sama/status/289918007151583232 )

Corollary: if you don't have growth, endurance will not solve your problem.

Except when it does. Many/most startups experience the trough of sorrow ( http://andrewchen.co/2012/09/10/after-the-techcrunch-bump-li... ). Hard to know when to throw up the white flag... But the ones that win certainly refused to do so when all/most of their data showed them that they should.

tl;dr irrational (at the time) perseverance is a necessary but not sufficient trait for startup success.

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