What Entrepreneurs Should Not Do | Hacker News Reader

What Entrepreneurs Should Not Do

blogmaverick.com

31 pointsagotterer19 comments

This reads much less like a clear explanation of "What Entrepreneurs Should Not Do", and much more like, "Huhuh, dude, check out this idiot and his idiot paper, huhuhu!".

Classy, Cuban.

I don't know why, but I actually read most of that letter. It consistently misuses words and reads like a scam. I found the post interesting only because I'm surprised he doesn't get many more emails like that on a daily basis.

Being flooded with poorly written letters asking for money must be a nice problem to have.

Huh? Having so many sales that your server side script can't keep up is a nice problem to have. Having so much money you can never possibly know your actual self-worth is a nice problem to have.

Getting bugged by people who could never add value to you (emotionally, monetarily, or otherwise) is not a nice problem to have. It's just a problem.

Getting a flat tire on your Lamborghini would also be a nice problem to have. Get it? You drive a Lamborghini.

(Unless you're driving 200 mph on the highway and going to crash...)

You're taking the "nice problem to have" meme too far. If I were rich, any problem I have is a "nice problem to have"?

That's just silly.

are you being intentionally obtuse? problems that only come about it situations involving you being rich are "nice problems to have" that's the point of the colloquialism. get your knickers untwisted.

Not really, that letter reads straight like a 419 Scam, complete with the bad english and the obligatory "God Bless". Their mission is to "save lives and create the next standard of living" .. what the hell? Seems like somebody had plenty of practice ripping off churches and thought they might try Mark Cuban next.

These things are hardly mutually exclusive. Perhaps harsh for your tastes but being an idiot writing idiot letters is certainly something one should not do in professional and business correspondence. Be concise, write well (and if you can't get help from people who can) As advice, it may be mundane and obvious but it's hardly unclear.

Similar things can be said for his other point - cut the bullshit/fluff. Perhaps we've become so used to filtering it out due to its prevalence that a reminder that it actually tends to have zero informational value is helpful to those sending pitches to people who put some value on their time.

Just as a random example, I loaded up the Rails front page and was greeted by the following [annotated]:

"Web development that doesn't hurt. [ok catchy tagline]

Ruby on Rails is an open source web framework [actual information]

that's optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity [are any web frameworks optimized for unsustainable productivity or programmer misery? Fluff]

It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration [Fluff]"

Then you get the following quote, also essentially zero-information-content fluff. Well, you learn that Tim O'Reilly is excited about Rails.

"“Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming. Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days.” -Tim O'Reilly, Founder of O'Reilly Media "

This style of writing flaunts its disregard for the time and intelligence of the reader. It's simply bad on a website aimed at technical users looking for information and a few download buttons. It's inexcusable when asking for money.

Apart from actually delivering, rails was the first framework to actually "market" itself as sexy that I have heard about. And it worked. Maybe programmers want to be excited, and not just read detailed specifications all day ;)

This is a bit of a straw man, though - the opposite of 'bad, vapid, uninformative writing' is not 'detailed specifications'. It's writing that's good, succinct and informative. There's no reason such writing should not convey one's enthusiasm or infectious excitement about the topic. There's certainly a lot more leeway in a general product website, especially when your product is so well-established the bad writing almost doesn't matter. It's hardly a luxury an unestablished player, let alone someone looking for funding can afford, though. Besides, simply because you can afford to get away with badness doesn't actually make it anything better than bad. One way to read Cuban's message could be 'You're likely misestimating the point at which you can pass drivel for communication so don't.'

Blows my mind that someone thought asking for money like that would work. Reads like a Nigerian phishing scam. Hilarious.

> First, I want to thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to overlook a great opportunity we have for the near future.

Thank YOU. I will be glad to "overlook" your "opportunity".

You gotta give the guy credit for writing 3 whole pages without saying a single, solitary, concrete fact about what exactly the company does. It's almost like a challenge where he's daring the reader to figure it out.

Why? The only reason this didn't hit the round file is 10 seconds is because it was so bad. Slow blog day, I guess.

> They sender has come up with a name, but doesn’t have the focus or confidence to put up a website.

The say that focus is in they eye of they beholder

Too easy. Anyone could have written that.

Know what I'd like to see? Mark Cuban critiquing something that appears to be pretty good by my standards. That's data that would make a difference to me.

What if you happen to have better standards than Mark Cuban? Let's not rule out the possibility that Cuban's circumstances could be in part due to any number of random variables (i.e. right place, right time) that anybody with a reasonable amount of ability could exploit to become wealthy.

I may write better code than Mark Cuban, but I doubt that I have better deal making standards than he does. He does this as often as I write programs. By sheer repetition, he must have something to share.

Cuban would be the first to admit that he was in the right place at the right time. But he knew the right thing to do, time and time again. Nothing wrong with trying to learn something from someone with a track record like that.

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