Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbiggar | Hacker News Reader

"This should fix the problem. If it doesn't we'll try something else."

That's an interesting phrase. This should really be implicit in everything we say or do. It stands to reason, if something doesn't work, you try something different.

But when you're famous and have thousands of people who constantly try to undermine you or misquote you or take something out of context, you start to need to be explicit in calling this out. Otherwise next month's tech rag headline says "YC partner recants failed investment policy".

View on HN

Oh I'm sure it'll happen, they'll just ignore the existence of this policy altogether when they do: "PG Prevents Partners from Investing in Minority-Founded Startup"

Come on, mocking straw men just makes things worse for everyone.

That's not a straw man, it's satire.

satire is a subset of a strawman

If either of those is a subset of the other then strawman would be a subset of satire.

Yeah, subset wasn't the right term. The sets intersect. Exaggeration (a form of satire) is a strawman.

are you saying he's attacking a straw man of strawmen?

Truly gratuitous thread-crapping.

This is one of the things I really admire about YC as a business -- it still acts like a start-up.

can you elaborate?

They change things. See what works. Iterate.

That's called being rational; nothing startup-specific about it.

It is being rational, but it's also absent from many other organizations. I don't think it's because the people involved wouldn't want to try something else when their initial solution is failing. It seems to be all about face saving. The culture around them is partly to blame for that. New companies have a fresh culture and the people involved know that failure is a very real possibility.

Big companies forget step three. They tend to head down a path, see what worked, then retroactively redefine goals so that everyone hits their target.

I think the startup-specific part is being willing to identify mistakes.

"This should really be implicit in everything we say or do."

My version of this problem is almost always having to insert the word "generally" into generally almost all of the things that I state (note the redundancy in that sentence).

A corollary to this is to have to preface things that you say in order to not offend one group or another or a particular person that was held in high esteem by others.

"But when you're famous and have thousands of people "

Same issue that celebrities have. We can call it the "sucks to be you" problem. You become so famous that you can't even go out without getting accosted by photographers.

It's particularly bad in politics. Politicians tie themselves to a particular solution and seem to persist with it even when it's clear that it will never work well.

and those that do change are branded flip floppers

Yeah, "flip-floppers" or "weak". So much so that it actually takes the most strength to admit that something isn't working and try something else. (risking electoral defeat)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com