How not to die
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
There are multiple research groups with different success rates and what I have noticed is groups with extremes are not doing that well. By extremes I mean professors who try to micromanage and get a daily update and professors who do not care at all. In my group, we have a biweekly meeting for everyone to present what they did in 2 weeks time which makes all of us work hard but on our own terms. I think incorporating similar things in education/research will be very helpful in the long run.
Good article PG!!
Maybe someone should set up a cron job to submit that talk to HN every 3 months.
This particular one was last posted almost two years ago.
We'd all be more successful if we could capitalize on our good moods and not let our bad moods drag us down for long.
Whenever I sense that I'm getting stagnant, I always go back and reread old faithful, "Good and Bad Procrastination".
http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
(When someone invents an ebook reader that plays bridge, I'll make the switch.)
I dont know: I came to HN after I began hacking and doing startups (I never even called them startups till I got here) and my assumption was that 99% failed anyway as a part of the process of learning.
I figure you have to either be super lucky (and make a Twitter, Facebook or Google hit) or you have to fail hard a few times before eventually succeeding. I chatted to some London VC's the other week and they said they trusted founders from previously failed startups a lot more than newbies - simply because they had learned many of the hard lessons and wouldn't then make them at the crucial moment their company could be worth something 6 figures or more.
It's not a rule, but hard work definitely pays off - most of the time.
Same here I've been doing startups since 13, didn't even know about the dot-com boom bust at the time.
So naturally they trust your attributes alot more than others' when they are talking to you.
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It reminds me of a foolproof recipe for (human) immortality, which I think I read in a book by Raymond Smullyan. It goes something like this: every day you say "I will say this sentence again tomorrow". If you always keep that promise, then you are assured of never dying.
The point, of course, is that "if X, then Y" doesn't mean that by doing X you can ensure Y, even if on the face of it X is something under your control.
Similarly: yes, indeed, if your company continues interacting with PG and other Y-Combinator-funded companies, then it will not die -- because if it dies, it will no longer be able to have those interactions.
But that's false. People don't lose the ability to email us once their company dies.
Don't get me wrong; I think "keep doing something and stay in touch" is an excellent piece of advice for someone doing something difficult where failure is strongly correlated with losing motivation.
But I wonder whether you're overestimating the causal role of demotivation here. Toy model: a startup has some kind of "health score" which varies according to exogenous events; "motivation" is some function of health and d(health)/dt, which is small when the startup is unhealthy and getting healthier; the startup dies if its health goes negative. In this model, motivation has no causal role, it's a pure epiphenomenon; but I bet you'll find that startups that die typically have very poor motivation shortly before their demise, and that poor motivation is a good short-term predictor of failure.
Of course, this is only a ridiculous toy model; in reality motivation clearly does have causal effects of its own, but it's also clearly affected by outside causes that themselves have an effect on the success of a startup. An observed correlation between demotivation and death is only weak evidence that demotivation is the underlying problem more than it's a symptom of having no customers, no money, technical problems you can't solve, etc.
(Doubtless you have more evidence than that correlation, having seen lots of startups succeed and fail.)
/me ducks
It was even more powerful when pg actually delivered it. I wish a video from that night's dinner existed.
TWITTER WAS A SIDE PROJECT!