
Founding Stories Are Myths - howitworks
https://medium.com/@trevmckendrick/what-reed-hastings-sam-walton-can-teach-you-about-how-to-start-a-company-d38cfe0eafce
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jfasi
The author is criticizing a genre of narrative that I like to call "career
porn." Consider the similarities between "how I started this company" type
stories and actual porn:

* It depicts something everyone fantasizes about and offers a quick if ultimately unsatisfying release. Who doesn't imagine themselves building something amazing and being idolized by magazines and the general public?

* It happens in an unrealistic sort of magical fairy land, often in the founder's own hazy, romanticized recollections of their past.

* It only shows beautiful companies/people. You don't need to found a space exploration company to be happy just like you don't need to be with a model.

* It offers no real guidance for how to achieve what it's depicting, leaving viewers confused at best and frustrated at worst. This article touches on the fact that people seem to think all they need is an idea, when that's not what it takes.

* It's most popular with those who are either frustrated with their careers/romantic lives, or are otherwise trying to satisfy a need they feel isn't being met. This one is a little shaky because plenty of people enjoy actual porn in healthy ways, so forgive me for the stretch.

The comparisons go on and on. How healthy your relationship with each is
depends on how much exposure to the realities of each field you have had and
how mature you are as a person/profession.

~~~
52-6F-62
> _It only shows beautiful companies /people. You don't need to found a space
> exploration company to be happy just like you don't need to be with a
> model._

We certainly don't hear much about efforts or successes in anyone's effort to
"disrupt" the toilet paper industry, yet it's something most people use daily.
It's not sexy, but we all care a lot when it sucks.

~~~
madeofpalk
But people are 'disrupting' the more 'boring' industries - all the
mattress/pillow startups, Thinx period panties, etc.

~~~
realworldview
I plan on disrupting the garage-based startup business, from my garage.

~~~
JBlue42
Like so?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gG56SCs5-E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gG56SCs5-E)

~~~
realworldview
Exactly like that, and especially with plenty Ramen.

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rdtsc
This is how most myths are born - by winners retro-actively rewriting history
and including things like predestination, God's vision in their dreams (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Milvian_Bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Milvian_Bridge)),
being The Chosen One, etc as the reason for their success.

Today of course those are not appealing, and just sound crazy, so it is
something like "I was just returning a late movie", "I was coming back from my
yoga massage and had this idea...", etc.

The important part is that only after winning and looking back the history is
rewritten. The boring things like plain luck, or maybe persistence, or enough
resources (say because of inheriting money for example) to try some business
idea multiple times, failing and try again until one sticks is just not a cool
story.

Even more interesting is that not just the myth is born but anything the
company did, all practices, rituals etc end up promoted as the cause of
success. Anyone notice this? It's the cargo-culting of methodologies.
Successful startup did some crazy development practice, but as soon as they
become popular everyone starts copying that thinking "surely that is the main
cause of their success". What if the successful startup could be have been
even more successful without that practice, or maybe it had no impact at all.

How about copying personality traits. There was once a CTO I knew. He fancies
himself to be like Steve Jobs. Except instead of copying persistence,
intelligence, attention to details and design, understanding what would work
and what won't for users, he just copied the part of being an asshole. The
idea was that Jobs was an asshole, and look at Apple, that's how I'll have to
act to make my company have the same success. It ended as well as you'd
expect. Developers who didn't want to deal with that simply left and projects
started tanking.

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radmuzom
Having worked in a startup which eventually went on to become an unicorn (I
left very early), I can attest to this personally. As a company becomes more
successful, the narrative portrayed in media changes to present a good
inspirational story - it never presents the countless challenges which
eventually leads to its success.

~~~
IntronExon
Not to mention that you rarely hear some version of the, “We had the same good
idea as some others, but we got lucky in a number of ways, including timing”
truth. It just sounds better, and makes for a better book deal, to claim
immense powers of foresight coupled with devastatingly effective business
acumen.

------
sharno
It doesn't just stop at the successful startup stories. It's the same style of
stories we face in products successful stories, job offers and love stories.
examples:

REGAINE (hair loss treatment) only works for some people, not everyone and if
you use it consistently twice a day for the rest of your life.

A job at Google/Facebook/haskell job requires you to study day and night for
algorithms/functional programming/implement a lot of random programs to get a
hold of all of that.

This couple is in love for 50 years, and they ignore how they had lots of
fights and had to have lots of compromises from each of them, with a lot of
discipline to show care for each other to maintain this love over the years.

These folks got amazing new houses/entered StanfordU because they worked non
stop for the past few years while not spending on other luxury items or they
will work tirelessly for the rest of their live to pay the debt.

Life is a grind

~~~
mmsimanga
Paraphrasing a quote on social media I once heard, "People forget social media
is like a highlights reel. It doesn't show the full game"

~~~
nikanj
Social media makes us depressed, because it makes us compare our behind-the-
scenes blooper reel to their highlights of the season reel.

~~~
lemonberry
I'm a fan of similar, but cheesier, saying, "never compare your inside to
someone else's outside"

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fallingfrog
Let's not ignore the fact that Sam Walton had enough cash to _buy a department
store_ at the age of 27. That helps too.

~~~
chronic729
> Let's not ignore the fact that Sam Walton had enough cash to buy a
> department store at the age of 27. That helps too.

So poor people should never try to be an entrepreneur because the world is
rigged against them? Well that surely will help reduce the wealth inequality.

~~~
overcast
Everyone should try, but with the understanding that the world is definitely
rigged against them.

------
k1ns
This is why I love the How I Built This podcast. It tells the story of a
successful founder from childhood to present day. It discusses early successes
and failures that ultimately led to that person becoming an "overnight
success" decades later. It doesn't try to build this narrative of them being
one-hit wonders, it tells the truth. The truth, which isn't nearly as sexy as
people would like, is that building a business takes time, hard work, and
resilience.

~~~
timcederman
And even then, their messier version of the truth is cleaned up for a lot of
the stories.

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tc
Just as there's only one hero story, at a high level, there's only one founder
story.

TLB described this archetype some years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16523609](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16523609)

------
trvlngwlbry
I don't think it's fair to use that one small piece of Netflix lore as the
counter example to the point of the article. I'd categorize Reed Hastings as
having one of the more long-term views/strategies in tech and business in
general, and he would be the first to say that Netflix became what it has
become not because of the lightbulb moment, but because of the long slog
they've endured to get where they are. Using that Netflix example comes across
as clickbaity.

Not to mention, that particular Netflix myth has nothing to do with the
importance of having a lightbulb moment. The point is to provide a north star
for the company about the importance of always keeping the customer/user
experience top of mind. By charging late fees that exceeded the value of a
video, Blockbuster had lost sight of the customer experience, which
contributed to Blockbuster's downfall. Meanwhile, maintaining its intense
focus on the customer experience helped Netflix navigate what was an
impressive shift from mailing DVDs to streaming video online.

~~~
jsgo
I could be wrong, but I think the article is saying that the Netflix myth
never happened and it is trying to posit that instead of looking at the
instance of breakthrough as the beginning, look at the less sexy work and
experience that got them to that point.

Granted, while Walton's was certainly successful, I think they'd be better
served highlighting someone that had to cut bait on something professionally
in the past and succeeded after adjusting because Walton's story reads like
"bad thing happened -> keep trudging" infinitely.

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kens
Walmart gets a lot of flack for moving into small towns and ruining the
existing stores. But the 1969 New York Times excerpt in the article mentions
how Walmart was dominant in small, rural towns but was facing competition as
"the industry's big guns are moving in". ("Big guns" being K-Mart, Gibson and
Arlans. K-Mart declared bankruptcy in 2002, Gibson in 1996, and Arlan's in
1973.)

It's kind of mind-blowing to think that in 1969 Walmart was the local store
needing to fight off the big chains. But now it's the exact opposite.

~~~
newsat13
As a non-american, what's wrong with walmart? Apart from them being 'big'?

~~~
adventured
There has only ever been one serious problem with Walmart: it historically
hasn't paid very well.

It's just starting to kinda-sorta catch up with Target and Costco in pay and
benefits.

There's a pay trade-off that the Walmart critics go dramatically out of their
way to avoid however. Costco can pay what they do, because their employee to
sales ratio is extremely different from Walmart. Walmart employs a lot more
people per dollar of sales, and operates a very different style of retail
business. To match Costco's employee count to sales ratio, Walmart would have
to fire a million people. If you ask the critics if they would like to see
Walmart fire a million people so they can raise the wages for the other
million, you'll get an immediate evasion in response.

Walmart's net income margin for 2016 was 2.8%, and that's typical for them.
They get by on a razors edge. They do $485 billion in sales, and only have a
$7 billion cash buffer (Twitter has $4.3 billion), while operating on that
comically tiny margin. One bad slip, the entire thing collapses in a giant
heap of red ink, and a million people lose their jobs instantly. Walmart's
ability to survive long-term at such thin margins, is one of the great
business stories of the last century.

The notion that Walmart destroys small towns is a crock. I believe only
someone that has never actually lived in a poor small town, could claim that.
This is what it's like working for a small town retailer: minimum wage, zero
benefits, high likelihood of losing the job because the business goes under
(pre-Walmart), zero upside potential at all for the employees. That's what
small town retailers overwhelmingly looked like in the US from the 1950s
through the 1990s, when Walmart reached saturation.

Oh, and Walmart raises the standard of living by drastically improving product
selection and access in small towns. Small town retailers have horrible
selection and pricing. Critics will claim Walmart's pricing power is a
negative, when in fact it's a massive positive for the actual humans that live
in small towns (versus the people on the outside that have never lived in a
poor small town, that like to write articles from a million miles away and
talk about small town retail poverty culture as though it's glorious and
should be preserved).

So let's recap: Walmart raised wages, it improved selection, it lowered
prices, it absorbed labor slack, it provided benefits, it provided a
consistent and large base of employment.

Growing up I watched Walmart move into every corner of Appalachia. It was a
vast improvement everywhere it went and it absorbed immense labor slack among
low skilled workers. The notion that there was a paradise beforehand, is
blatantly false.

~~~
Noos
Uh..i live in a relatively small town, and a lot of the local stores were
better than walmart at wages and service, and had good selection. They just
couldn't beat price due to being regional instead of nationwide chains. Stores
like Benny's for example:

[http://wtnh.com/2017/09/08/bennys-to-close-all-31-stores-
thi...](http://wtnh.com/2017/09/08/bennys-to-close-all-31-stores-this-year/)

Wal-mart killed toy stores, I think too; better selection, but you can't beat
them on price.

You can't compete with someone who can price things maybe even half of what
you can because of scale. That means they replace the two or three retail
department stores and many small specialist shops or niche stores in your
region with one or two walmarts

------
netman21
I always like the EDS founding story. Ross Perot started EDS with $1,000. They
never mention he was a multimillionaire from being a top salesman for IBM. Big
deal that he opened a bank account with $1,000.

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TheWrongGuy
Great point that these narratives are usually self-mythologizing and mostly
untrue. Success is more than just a “eureka” moment where it all comes
together. It is also more than the alternative that you present here, wherein
the person succeeds purely by outworking the competition. A much more complete
— and frankly, more interesting — picture of success would include the ideas,
the hard work, and also explain how Walton’s early stores were financed by his
father in law Leland Stanford Robson (who often paid his son-in-law’s bills,
sometimes even without Walton’s knowledge), that he was active in Missouri’s
fraternity communities, was a member of QEBH, the UoM secret society that also
includes several past and current state governors as well as one of the
founders of Kinder Morgan. If your aim is to demythologize success and present
a more accurate view of the the path one must walk to become massively
successful, isn’t it kind of misleading to omit Walton’s network of powerful
family, friends, and benefactors?

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johnmax
I would add that the founder stories we read about are, even if true, only the
5% which turned interesting.

95% may have been boring failures

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TheBiv
/r/entrepreneur thread about the same post:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/80f0c3/why_yo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/80f0c3/why_you_should_ignore_every_founders_story_about/)

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cortesoft
I think it is a bit unfair to call them myths; they are narratives. All
stories are narratives, you can't simply dump EVERY fact about a situation.
There are infinite facts and details about how a company came to be, and
telling the full story is impossible. Instead, we look at the story, pick a
narrative we want to tell, and tell it.

You HAVE to do this when telling a story, and all stories do this. While it is
true that believing the narrative tells the full story is incorrect, it is
also incorrect to say these stories are 'myths'. They are just one part of the
full story.

~~~
rossdavidh
I don't know the truth of the matter, but the author of this article seems to
be saying that the core idea at the heart of the Netflix founding narrative
is, in fact, a myth. Whether that is the case or not, I don't know.

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tomc1985
Either someone told me, or I read somewhere in a book, about how these things
are called "business lies" and that it is supposedly OK to do in the name of
making money

No harm no foul if everyone feels better about themselves right?

/s

~~~
justherefortart
Having worked in a lot of shady businesses. I'd like to see the book that
shows how most every company is pulling some really borderline (if not
completely) illegal and unethical dealings to get ahead.

My first job as an auditor really opened my eyes (did some M&A work that blew
my mind at the shit companies would try). Funny thing is the company I worked
for (Andersen) got killed by their own shady dealings!

------
gowld
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_myth#Founding_myth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_myth#Founding_myth)

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skummetmaelk
Echoing PG:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html)

------
Froyoh
I got drawn in by the clickbait title

~~~
ronilan
Title does a disservice to the writing. It is a good read.

~~~
giarc
Is it? Perhaps the headline should be "Why You Should Ignore _THIS_ Founder’s
Story About How They Started Their Company"

I feel like if the author is going to make a broad generalization about
founding stories, he should use more than 1 example. I don't count Netflix as
one of his examples because he simply says "That didn’t actually happen." So
to combat Reed saying this is how I started Netflix... the author just says
"no" without any proof. Who am I going to believe? The founder or a blogger?

~~~
ronilan
It is a good read.

You read it. You feel about it. You formulate an opinion (pro/con). You learn
something. You doubt something.

That’s what a good read is.

~~~
giarc
I guess that's subjective. I would have like to seen more proof to back up the
argument.

The author provides proof that the Netflix startup story is about "rental
fees" a long time ago. But then fails to provide any evidence that is not
true.

The author then switches to Walmart to prove that founder stories are not
true, but doesn't provide any evidence that people claim Walmart was an
overnight success. Overall it's a bad article in my opinion.

------
justherefortart
One of my bosses had a chance to buy 25k in Wal-Mart stock or bonds. He chose
the bonds because they were less risky.

He sold his company for ~17m in the late 90s (so he did fine). In the early
2000s he asked me for stock advice since he kept blowing 60k on penny stocks.
I said put 10% of your money on Apple. I'm not 100% sure what's going on but
it seems to be a pretty good bet.

Wish I'd followed my own advice instead of doing my first self funded startup
(2003). I made about 4-5x my investment. Didn't realize how paltry that would
look compared to my Apple advice :-)

As someone that's on startup #8 (about to fire my partner). They're never
easy, they are fun (and stressful at times).

