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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

This is all great stuff.

Be careful that you don't apply lessons too broadly. If you're selling high-dollar, recurring sales items into big business it might be enough to have 100 purchasing managers love you. You probably don't need a media blitz.

As an aside, not particularly related to this story, one of the drawbacks of learning from success is that every deck ends with how great things are. I wonder 1) if sometimes luck gets disguised and genius and 2) if it wouldn't be more useful to study failures than successes.

The commercial airline industry has a great safety record. They do this by meticulously taking apart every accident that happens. Too bad we don't do that in other fields.

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They do this by meticulously taking apart every accident that happens.

Well, the reason this works so well for airplanes is that the airplane used to work, and everybody knows exactly what a working airplane is supposed to look like.

In general, nobody has any idea what a working version of a failed startup would have looked like. There are too many ways to succeed, and so many chaotic events that affect the timeline in profound ways (imagine if the inventor of CP/M hadn't been out when IBM came to call...) that you can't really think about the various alternate histories without quickly running into a combinatorial explosion. So I think your metaphor is not very useful. ;)

Well, that used not to be the case, but the industry matured because they started doing that.

My uncle is an aerobatics pilot, and he says that the main reason aviation is so safe is due to the meticulous and ubiquitous use of check-lists. Every time there's an accident the intent is to analyse it so we can update the check-lists to prevent it from happening again.

You're right, we don't know what a successful startup should look like, but they didn't used to know what a safe 'plane was like. Because of the unrelenting analysis of crashes, we do now.

I think the point still stands though. Success and failure in airplane flight is very well defined, and the amount of human hours logged in designing, building, flying, and analysis of one single and clearly-defined (even if complex) task dwarfs the amount of resources available to startups (or any company for that matter).

Not only is the problem space nearly infinite in comparison to flight, but the "physics" governing business success change impossibly fast.

None of that is to say that we shouldn't study failures, but the question is which failures have widely applicable lessons? If you indulge me to abuse the analogy further, most startups are like those early flight attempts by people who jumped from high places wearing ridiculous balsa and fabric contraptions.

Let's not go immediately to extremes -- obviously some sort of things work better than some others. It's not as if there is no definition at all out there. Things like incremental releases, getting close to the customer, or wealth versus money are true no matter how your startup is configured or where it operates.

I think the analogy might best be put at the borderline between flying-chicken-man and the Sopwith. Obviously there are some folks that are flying, and flying reliably, obviously some things work and some things don't -- so now is the time to start writing it all down and sorting it out.

The problem is that we can't even see the airplanes of the folks who are flying -- we just get to hear the cool stories about how they got from point A to point B.

I look at places like DreamWorks which are able to capture "lightning in a bottle" over and over again or some of the serial entrepreneurs out there, and think that it is possible to take highly variable environments and put a little bit of structure around them. Nowhere near as much as aviation, but like the other posters pointed out, the only reason we have that for aviation is that a lot of smoldering craters became somebody else's life lesson.

Luck is disguised as genius all the time! Not only do we tend to see just the winners (survivorship bias), those winners honestly mistake their lucky guesses for great decisions (hindsight bias).

I would love to study more examples of failed startups. But people are not that fond of sharing with others how they screwed up (again, it's easy to see your own mistakes in the past). We need Anti-TechCrunch.

And with selection bias it's all so subtle that most times everybody fails to find it.

For instance, in this article one of the points was "make friends with the press" That's all fine and dandy, but a zillion other guys are also making friends with the press. If you're a YC alum, know a bunch of other "friends", live in the Valley, etc, you're going to have an easier time of it.

Lots of seemingly insignificant factors work cumulatively to make an easy piece of advice actually doable. Too often when the winners throw out the advice, however, there's no mention of all the dozens of little supporting pieces -- most of the time because they don't know or haven't really thought about them.

It can be extremely misleading.

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