2,166 karma · joined April 1, 2011
If your product is successful enough that systemic complexity is your chief problem, congratulations, you've made it further than most startups - which die from lack of demand, lack of paying customers, and lack of users giving feedback.
In my case, all I had done was make HTML/CSS websites with a bit of PHP. But I didn't let "I need a technical cofounder" and "I'm just the business guy" stop me from figuring out how to build v0.1 myself and get it out. I had never touched a server before. I had never built a web app with a MVC stack before. I had zero experience with command-line prior. I didn't have any formal technical training. But I just started coding and built it myself, and from there was able to attract a great technical cofounder and early team. And 10 years later, we sold it for $100M.
I'm not saying this to brag. I'm proud that "I figured it out" with duct tape but I realize that I had the good luck that it all worked out.
But I worry that other guys like I was are sitting there thinking 'Shit, everyone says I need a technical cofounder'. Well, maybe not. Go try to build it yourself. Especially in the age of co-pilot and decades of StackOverflow - for most apps, you can figure it out.
No one take this the wrong way. I'm just trying to potentially inspire some bright person out there to try it themselves, and building the first simple version yourself might be the missing step in attracting a REAL technical person or at least validate your hypothesis.
It can be True and Trite at the same time. I've lived the startup CEO journey from 0 to successful exit, and "You have to care about everything more than anything" is almost poetic in terms of summarizing the constant chaos and battering you take mentally.
Now, would that have made sense or been useful to me during the early stages? Not at all. It has almost no educational value.
It reminds me of some famous quote that goes like "Life consists of learning profound lessons that appear trite from the outset... until you actually live and learn them."
I can't find it on PubMed or in my bookmarks.
If memory serves - high/low fat, high/low carb, high/low protein, etc - didn't matter as long as the restriction is stopping sugar/HFCS.
And it also explained the rebound effect - e.g. after the extreme restriction, the participants start re-introducing sugar and HFCS back into the diet, and since that's the real culprit, weight goes back up.
No taking away from this super cool citizen science - deep kudos on testing things like this out! I'm tempted to participate in something like this. Self-experimentation is a lost art.
I struggle with this. Yes, it seems almost a law of nature that fitness begets more fitness. But surely we can structure society to be above mere nature?
So what's the mechanism to protect against it?
Market forces don't seem to work too well.
Corporate taxes would/should work, if our government weren't also co-opted by capital?
Unions?
UBI?
Hmmm it doesn’t seem unreasonable in that context? You’re really asking people to work more effectively, to accomplish the same amount of work more quickly.
It’s like asking sales people what their quota should be. They pick a number that is no-brainer hittable, because there is a lot of complexity and many unknown variables in getting deals signed, so to prevent looking bad they’ll pad their number. But their no-brainer number is below what the business needs.
So you tell them their quota is going to be a bit higher. They’ll have to stretch to hit it.
And it’s even MORE important since their comp is DIRECTLY tied to hitting that number.
And yet sales people aren’t writing article after article about how self-set quotas are sacrosanct, should only settable by sales people themselves, and how clueless management is to try to get more performance above the no-brainer target.
"Time kills all deals" can be extrapolated into "Time kills all companies".
On the other hand, in the time it takes you (even with VC rocket fuel) to get 1 company to $100M with 10% ownership, you can probably start 2 or 3 smaller business that could end up at $10M.
Both of which skew again towards preferring those outcomes to the bootstrapping one.
#3 is definitely better in terms of your longer-term ability to make money as well. The personal brand from founding a $1B startup is very monetizable (if you must / want to) after acquisition/IPO, or at the very least to raise seed money for your next venture.
Whether or not this calculus factors into founders' decisions to start a company I can't say. I doubt the mercenary motivation is as common as you suggest, just among the founders I know at least. I think the lure is more to get to build something yourself and 'not have a day job' / sense of adventure, and the potential for money is just kind of a nice cherry-on-top.
1) 100% of a 10M exit = $10M
2) 10% of a $100M exit = $10M
3) 1% of a $1B exit = $10M
Path is (very) arguably the easiest on the $100M exit? You likely raised outside funding, had a big enough market, grew your team and didn't have to slow-play everything, and still get a decent exit. Paid yourself some salary during that time. As the article says, lots of M&A in the ~$100M range.
$10M exit - a lot of risk, probably slower growth, bootstrapped, etc. Tons of small exists happening at that level too, but also more competition.
$1B exit - personally this seems hardest, even if probability of each occurring was the same. The size of team, scaling issues, etc all required. Of course you'd almost definitely own more than 1% at IPO.
Then stack your odds of success against those figures. Still feels like $100M is the optimal balance of risk/return.
Ok so let's talk about your land itself. First time entrepreneurs just kind of randomly end up on a plot of land, due to their prior experience or friends or personal challenges they want to solve etc. Maybe that will happen to have oil under it or not. Maybe the oil is plentiful and close to the surface, or maybe it's deep and small anyways. But often the choice of your land is kind of happenstance.
Meanwhile, hype-driven 'founders' hear some piece of dubious folk wisdom -- "land that has coniferous trees on it tend to have oil underneath" (akin to 'blockchain is the future!!!1') and go buy the first patch of land with conifers on it. Then struggle and struggle.
In contrast, seasoned entrepreneurs spend a lot more time deciding which plot of land to buy in the first place. They'll pick one that has good indications of having oil underneath, although they still won't know how close to the surface or how large the patch might be. They'll conduct surveys and other studies prior to really buying the land. Once they feel like the odds are in their favour, they'll buy the land and start the process of proving there's oil.
So you suspect you may have oil hiding deep in your property, and while you know your land REALLY well, you're not totally sure how to go about validating that its there; or even if you could validate it, how to proceed best.
You hear there is a very friendly and experienced outfit called YC that will help you (a) quickly figure out if there's oil, and (b) if there might be oil, set you up for success with the bigger money that you'll need to extract the oil. This YC firm is basically geared towards helping someone like you figure this out quickly. And actually, YC will give you $ to explore this very thing. In exchange, they will own part of your land (a small fraction).
If it turns out there isn't oil after all - not the end of the world. You'll go back to farming, and at least you won't be wondering if you should have explored the oil thing more. YC won't care much about you anymore since they are in the business of owning a small % of the land that strikes BIG oil. But they also won't be a nuisance.
If it turns out there IS oil under there, then YC will help you navigate the big oil money people to help you get it out faster.
Metaphors are never perfect but I'm having fun with this one. :)
You don't get to just 'decide' if your fledgling business is a potential unicorn or will just be a lifestyle SaaS business. It's a product of your idea/technology, the size of the market, competitive pressures, and your early traction.
It's more like this: You wake up and realize that -- while it's still early -- the thing you started has major potential; but you need a lot of capital to seize the opportunity. So you realize that going the VC route is likely your best bet. And that if you're doing the VC route, getting into YC is the best possible start.
If instead you wake up and realize your TAM is probably <$100M, your tech isn't anything particularly novel, and your path to a 'good life' is fairly clear if you can just organically grow from there - great, don't go the VC route.
But this idea that you're trying to discover treasure in a field or some bullshit is just bad. The better analogy is - you have a patch of land. You can slightly change that patch of land but it's mostly fixed. You could slowly farm that land and make a good living. Or you could risk it all, dig everything up in a search for oil, and maybe strike it big. If you fail, the land is worthless. Now, today you realize you have strong indications and evidence that there is A LOT of oil down there. So you go talk to some money guys, get funding for the exploration, and you're off.
But the guy who has zero evidence of oil, zero reasons for thinking it's down there, and is happy farming anyways - OF COURSE is better off just going the farm route.
But then again, part of the beauty of the psychedelic realization of the 'flimsy nature of perceived reality' is also realizing that our non-intoxicated / non-NDE mental state is also not necessarily 'true reality' either.
So IMO still plenty of room for ghosts in the machines :)
(1) The industry overview infographics. I'm not very familiar with the quickly-changing application layers of AI, so it's nice to see what are the noteworthy companies in the various slices (at least according to this particular VC), and explore some of them a bit more.
(2) I also think the retention point and related metrics are interesting, and maybe some of the metrics are hard-to-find / not very public (? not sure about that). It starkly paints the current challenge in the space.
Don't get me wrong, it's a great piece of marketing for them too.
And basically they're saying - if you can claim one of these little boxes on our infographics, and/or have solved the retention challenge, then we'll fall all over ourselves to invest in you (just like any other VC). So it's a great move on their part.
(1) much harder to launch as some amorphous vertical AI - like, what would a 'Transportation AI' look like? Versus targeting a specific workflow within it - "AI copilot for truck drivers".
(2) The large incumbent software platforms that already are powering the day-to-day workflows are THE companies to implement AI first and most accessibly. So the likely winner of the vertical AI race is whatever incumbent platform is already in the highest % of companies or powering the highest % of workflows.
US Tech in the past: "we dislike the military, the government, the military-industrial complex (and generally all authority) because we skew hippy and/or libertarian. Let us be creative and free!"
US Tech today: "we dislike the military, the government, and the military-industrial complex because our particular flavour of cultural identity politics doesn't like it. Let us conform to the moral outrage of the day."
Meanwhile, the best reason IMO -- "we dislike the military, the government, the military-industrial complex because it serves the interests of the wealthy first and foremost (at the expense of the poor)" -- seems to get less discussion.
But all of these are reasons why tech can dislike the military or at least be uncomfortable with it, even while DARPA funding has helped progress tech and many innovations have come out of military-first applications.
2) The combination of cows spreading out and your 3 axis of action (left/right + angle of gun + timing of shots) is really cool.
3) Consider levelling. Every x asteroids, there's a pause (the cows get into the barn to sleep), player rests a moment, and then sun rise and play resumes with faster / more asteroids. Have the cows re-clump after each sunrise and spread out from there.
4) Kind of silly, but if the cows bred more cows infrequently that would be cool.
"Well, in the early days we agreed to send a certain % of Revenues, in perpetuity, without dilution or adjustment, to earlier investors. So ya, that's where it's going."
"Oh. Ouch. I guess that makes your company less valuable to us, since the future cashflows are skimmed off. Ahem, excuse me, not the future CASHFLOWS, but the REVENUES are skimmed off. Double ouch."
"Ya. But back then we obviously would have raised from LITERALLY ANY INVESTOR that had just been willing to do a regular SAFE, but we couldn't, so had to do this weird thing."
"Sorry to hear that. We're obviously out as potential investors - this doesn't seem like an equity structure we can work with. Maybe find another investor who likes SAFER's, and keep stacking these future Revenue rights? Just make sure you have enough Revenue left over to pay your staff etc. Best of luck!"
So funny that we cheer for products we love, like it’s a sports team. Prior generations maybe felt this way about their hand tools.
"Well, because some misanthrope might misinterpret this as permission to be terrible means it's bad advice".
Dealing with things directly, as close in time to the event as possible, is probably a great idea.
But you'll never get a pure ground-truth on every event in your life... so learning that your narrative of the past can act as a tyrant in your life (if you let it) seems like a good insight to me.
Maybe there's some sweet spot, where founders have enough real-world experience to understand how the world works, and how to build things, but are still curious and driven enough to jump off and try.
Past that point, I fear that curiosity starts declining even as competence increases - say, when you're 50, will you get the feeling you 'know' the world in-and-out, you 'know' there's no easy opportunities... and besides, you have a teenager-filled family, a mortgage, etc all of which perhaps stifle really broad-ranging curiosity not least because your time has more demands on it.
CURIOSITY seems to be the horizontal line; i.e. the person's latent curiosity about things, domains, areas, etc, and the urge to explore/discover is what drives the horizontal movement.
The 'amount of paint' variable, which is clearly the most important part of the physical reality underpinning the metaphor, would perhaps be akin to COMPETENCE. Competence is a stand-in word for intelligence, grit, suitable background knowledge, and probably a host of other qualities.
So what's the grand conclusion here? That highly curious and highly competent people tend to be prolific in their output?
Not so surprising perhaps, but fun to think about.
Reverse the API bullshit, remove all the pressures about IPO'ing, and win some positive PR among users.
Not sure that would be good for humanity, but it would probably be good for Reddit users.
It also happens at the product level - building features too early or too deeply for a poorly understood workflow; abstracting things that don't need to be abstracted for probably YEARS; over-engineering for major scale despite having no users; knowing that ONE DAY you'll need, say, multi-language support, so on Day 1 you over-complicate everything by insisting on a language framework etc.
Beginners lack the foresight of 'what this will look like at scale' or maybe better said 'why this won't work at scale', but that's ironically why they are better early on - speed matters a lot more than anticipating potential scale issues years later.
Or are you making the more subtle point that, currently, any use of psychedelics outside of an approved study makes one "a criminal"?
Risk-takers, innovators, short-cut-seekers, I'm-smarter-than-you's, I-can-out-hustle-you's, I-need-adventure-not-safey's, drop-out-of-school-to-code's etc are all going to be more likely to experiment with mind-expanding substances than the general population.
They are also more likely to start companies, perhaps with wild ambitions.
VCs are the pattern-matching mimics of the ecosystem, so who cares what they do - they are clearly just following the trend that is set out by the founders.
How is it surprising, then, that startup hotspots have higher use of psychedelics (especially against the backdrop of a giant revival of psychedelic use)?
Isn't it exactly what one would suspect?
Loading a new page, new tab, or simply navigating fully away to a new editing screen are all pretty heavy disorienting actions for something that could be pretty light.
But it's related to the amount of work being done in the modal.
For a very small amount of work (e.g. editing a single text field), inline-editing would be best; for a lot of work (e.g. composing a bunch of textboxes and including other data, etc) a dedicated page is best.
A modal belongs somewhere in-between - editing a few things at once, in context of other things.
"Can this modal be an inline-edit?" <-- first question I'd ask. If the answer is No:
"Will the work being done on the modal take more than 2 minutes to do?" <--- then I'd consider a separate page.
But things in-between seem perfect for a modal.