Hacker News Reader

Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Note to Sam: It's possible to anticipate ways HN readers will misunderstand you, and tweak what you write to pre-empt them. It takes some practice, but I'd guess I'm now able to do it maybe 3/4 of the time.

In this case the most common misunderstanding seems to be not to realize that present day big companies were once small. You could have pre-empted that by reminding readers that once companies reach a certain size they don't have to rely on making something great to grow bigger, but that if you look back at the earliest history of those companies, you'll find most did.

I usually put these pre-emptive replies to probable misunderstandings in footnotes, because I don't want to clutter the text with things that are obvious.

View on HN

> In this case the most common misunderstanding seems to be not to realize that present day big companies were once small. You could have pre-empted that by reminding readers that once companies reach a certain size they don't have to rely on making something great to grow bigger, but that if you look back at the earliest history of those companies, you'll find most did. (emphasis mine)

It's hard to call it a misunderstanding when the title of the post starts boldly with "The Only" and the first paragraph starts with "All companies". The premise of there being some universal rule for growth is absurd and requires only a few counterexamples, of which there are certainly many to consider (this page now contains dozens), to be demonstrably false.

By reinterpreting the author's argument with a requalification of most, you've already reached a much more sane argument. But you know as well as I do that this post would never frontpage if it had been called "The Best Way to Get Huge" or "The Way Most Companies Become Huge".

Edit: Or maybe it would have anyway? Sam Altman is a partner at YC [1] and I can't help but wonder if such content gets a boost to frontpage no matter what. After all, people have shown that penalties are applied to a hidden list of phrases and domains which boots them off the frontpage [2], so the same principle might be applied in reverse to certain things. For example, the controversy penalty might be removed for certain domains. I'm sorry, but after reading [2] my faith in the scoring system here is at an all-time low.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman

[2]: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...

With all due respect to Sam I have no idea what qualifies Sam to even be opining on this subject without a bit more of a circumspect attitude.

If he was a professor of business or had a long standing knowledge of business that would be one thing. The word "most" would certainly be better but even that goes a bit to far with a subject as large as "business" and "companies".

To be blunt, people who've done consistently well in the startup world run circles around "professors of business".

This is probably true at the averages, but at the topside of the scale for both populations, I wonder if it still applies.

Do the Peter Druckers and Clayton M Christensens of the world really not know more than the Steve Jobs and Bill Campbell types? I choose those names rather than Bill Gates or Larry Page because those guys have done multiple companies, which seems to be an important criteria for doing "consistently well". I find it difficult to believe that such prolific thinkers as Drucker or Christensen would get circles run around themselves.

For the bottom of both populations, I'd even venture to guess that the professors of business are more knowledgeable than the startup founders. Come on, you've met some pretty bad startup founders, and you know it. Although I suppose it also depends on how one defines the criteria because it's always easy to cull the population to suit one's conclusions.

> those guys have done multiple companies, which seems to be an important criteria for doing "consistently well"

That's an interesting question. It depends on the size of the population, I guess. If we acknowledge that a minority of people can start a successful company by chance, why don't we acknowledge that an even smaller minority can do it multiple times, also by chance?

He's founded a company. It was talent-acquired, but that's more than most professors of business ever achieve.

Aside from the specific situation - I'm kinda curious what HN readers think "qualifies" a person to give advice. My girlfriend's doing an MBA. I read her coursework sometimes. Some of it is useful with the appropriate grain of salt applied, but I find that blog postings from people who have actually run businesses (or listening to Larry, Urs, Amit, Milo, Andy etc. at Google-internal presentations and trying hard to read between the lines) are far more informative. There is the theory and there is the reality when it comes to running businesses, and most of the theory is bunk.

I agree with what you are saying. I went to Wharton but I also have started and run two businesses not including things during high school and college. I am referring to specifically statements that Sam made which would have been something that someone who was either practicing for a longer time or had knowledge of business history would know about more than Sam. That was my point. I am well aware of "book" knowledge. And theory. My dad used to joke about that all the time when I was at Wharton. (I was in the entrepreneurship program.)

Sam is precisely one of the few people whose opinion I would never want to miss on the subject of how to grow "huge". Loopt was in the original YC batch, and so he has had a bird's eye view of hundreds of startups, most of which have or will fail to grow huge .. but also a few that will succeed. That's nearly 10 years of seeing things very few others (in the world) will get the chance to see.

Plenty of other very impressive business people, including the likes of pg, peter thiel etc lend a careful ear to what Sam has to say .. so, with all due respect, I think you'd be a fool to disregard his thoughts.

That is a DH1 argument. Anyone is "qualified" to talk about anything.

Idea: A social news aggregator that scores people on the disagreement hierarchy, and penalizes people who score poorly by not letting them comment and post (or at least gives a lower weight to their comments and posts) (not trying to single you out larrys, just throwing it out there because I think it's a valuable idea)

Slashdot had/has a qualifier attached to up and downvotes.

Sam understands startups better than almost anyone else I know. I defer to him on many topics. E.g. if any YC startup has a difficult fundraising problem, I give them my opinion but then send them to Sam for the last word.

I am not questioning that Sam knows about startups.

But Sam made an all inclusive statement regarding business and not just startups and startups that would be (I'm guessing) the type that YC would fund. I would send someone to Sam for that as well.

In the comments on this thread (in response to me) I am being taken to task over suggesting that he is not a business school professor (who has studied many types of businesses over many years) or an experience businessman (who has observed businesses over many years). Consequently his knowledge of business is almost certainly limited to what he has seen since college (mid 00's) and in a particular niche in the business world. Which was my point. His statement didn't reflect the niche that he knows about. And as you pointed out he didn't use any qualifiers or footnotes.

As far as business school professors I am quite aware of the limitations and the idea of "that who can do those who can't teach". (And exception might be someone like Steve Blank who I have worked with in the past.)

As an example I was sent a document to review by a business school professor that had already been distributed to students and found several obviously inaccurate statement about a subject that I know more than the professor does simply because I have been involved in the subject since 1996. And I work with it every single day. When the professor heard my comments they invited me to speak to the class.

Universal qualifiers aren't absurd for headlines pitched at HN. They seem to work as intended.

'Best' vs 'Only' should be a title-fight deathmatch

    Why "Best" is Best

    How "Only" Got Me To the Front Page of HN

The most accurate version of the title would be something like "The Only Way You Can Grow Huge." There may be occasional edge cases where companies start out big. I'm hesitant even to offer an example, because there are so few, but perhaps Fannie Mae. But these edge cases don't matter to the readers this essay is aimed at, because they can't replicate them.

(And incidentally, there are no upward boosts for comments or stories, and even the penalties Ken described in that post are much simpler than he thinks. E.g. there is only a single penalty for lightweight domains, not a range of penalties chosen by us.)

Your footnote isn't even right. There are large companies that are large just because they were the only player, got a government contract, funded because someone wanted a visa or had family connections, etc.. Anyone who brings up the exception will usually have interesting anecdotes, if not data to bring it up, or experience making them say it. So your comment is kind of a waste of space whereas theirs will actually be useful. I consider your comment the same as adding sometimes to the end of every sentence. Maybe true, but useless.

Now put it in an algorithm that detects any mention of "only, always, never" or any other absolute. Then insert a boilerplate at the top of such discussions, saying there are always exceptions, but the gist of the argument is still valid ;)

I can't help but feel that if fuzzy logic was taught more widely in computer science courses, people would be more sanguine about "only, always, never" as linguistic qualifiers.

... not that I am without guilt on this ...

The funny thing is that I come from a physics degree background and hence have a tendency to stick with the more scientifically accurate "I think, maybe, probably, possibly, almost always", rather than going for absolutes. However, when you enter into the business world, you tend to find that this kind of language comes across as weak and uncertain. Even though you are merely trying to be correct and not give false impressions!

So now I actually appreciate more confident, strong language, because when I read a blog post or article like this, I can take the caveats as being there, but unsaid.

I sometimes think that if everyone took this assumption, Hacker News would decimate its comment count!

So, you got me to thinking.

As a side-effect of his work on expert forecasting[1], Tetlock discovered that people put more stock in those who made confident predictions than those who qualified their predictions. To the point that he basically says: if a person is a famous pundit, they are more likely to be wrong, because the media prefers bold predictions to maybes and perhapses.

In business you can be bold or not bold. If you're not bold, you are at a social disadvantage.

Then you can be right or wrong. If you are right, everyone hails you as a visionary. If you are wrong, nobody remembers.

So in fact, in business, the rational strategy for an individual is to speak confidently and let the dice fly high.

[1] I reviewed his book a while back. http://chester.id.au/2012/07/29/review-expert-political-judg...

Yes it's actually quite an awkward point for me at the moment. I have a side-project that I've been developing for a while. My attachment to it means that I know every single bug and flaw within the product. But at the same time I know that if I add caveats to any marketing (it's a bit alpha/beta, etc.), then it will come across as unconfident. On the other hand, if I just say it's amazing and will change your life, I'll probably (can't resist the language even now...), do far, far better.

I know how you feel. The way I deal with it is to find the claims I can confidently make and stick with those. A lot of the time you can do that by looking at the business value side of things.

For example, I can't truthfully say that my code is bug free or the best or whathaveyou. But I can say "My product improves <business problem>."

I guess the trick is to have two hats. The first hat is the problem domain hat. This is where you make confident, accurate claims about your product.

The second is the solution domain hat. This is where you park your professional anxieties about whether you've crossed and dotted everything.

People don't care much if pundits are right or wrong. Instead people care that pundits are clear (confident statements help with clarity).

Qualifiers are substituted by getting multiple opinions from different pundits.

I suppose I should have added that the confident pundits were usually wrong because they tended to make more extreme predictions. Most of the time, stuff doesn't change dramatically. Predicting big shifts all the time means that your overall hit rate is terrible, because big shifts are not the most common case.

Luckily there's an extreme predictor for every extreme event, so simple selection happily promotes some loudmouths to guru every now and then.

Edge cases seem to be where all the fun is, tho... =D

What I like about fuzzy logic is that it pushes a lot of paradoxes down a level. Instead of having paradoxes bubble up to the top level and derailing discussion, you instead turn fuzziness into an abstract object which is polymorphic to other logical objects.

This gives you the handles you need to grasp and wrestle with the vagueness of the actual world without either needing to give up rigour or rely on hacks and undocumented conventions about the mapping from the real world into the logical world.

If you've got the patience, I can give as an example a long review I wrote of Sidney Dekker's Drift into Failure, where in part I argued that his argument largely vanishes if reframed in terms of fuzzy logic: http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/

Edit: Hmm, I really look like a spammer in this thread. Not intentional. No more than usual, anyhow.

For an example of this, look at the sibling comment by pak (made after yours) =)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6844169

To which I say, what is the point of words like "only" and "all", if they do not mean what they are supposed to?

I'm not trying to be a stickler. Granted, I work mostly in science research, where broad claims are discouraged and quantifying confidence in a hypothesis is expected. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

At best, I think this rule could apply to (maybe) 80% of "huge" tech companies. 80% is a disingenuously long distance from "all companies".

Because humans are not logical inference engines; language is flexible, nuanced and complex. A blog post is not a industry research paper.

I think one of the issues with short form writing where you don't take the time (or have the room) to qualify things is that you are going to open up what you write to multiple interpretations of (what you call) "misunderstanding".

Take this statement at the opening:

"All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people."

The statement "all companies" and "only one way" is pretty complete and absolute by my reading.

When obviously there are plenty of large companies that have not relied on word of mouth. For example Boeing. Or Asplundh a large privately help tree contractor. Or haliburton. Etc. Even "in the beginning". Or Fedex is another.

Of course there is a subset of "all companies" for which this statement is true. So a footnote would have helped or a few words as qualifiers to the original thought.

For example, this comment would have made a lot more sense had it had a footnote reminding everyone that Sam is a partner at YC, and therefore does have reason to keep HN in mind as an audience when writing.

I had to figure that out from other comments, because my first reaction was, "Why is pg taking the time to tell some random blogger how to tailor their writing to this audience?"

(I'm a casual HN user, and don't keep up with YC, maybe the identity of the partners is more common knowledge in the larger population.)

Even Microsoft (presented as a possible counterexample) had a great relationship with developers in the early years that sustained its incredible growth.

Where would MS be today if not for the luck of Digital Research turning away IBM? Maybe wind up like Lotus or Ashton-Tate?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com