

Do Not Start A Startup: Or, What I Learned At Startup School 2011 - andrewpbrett
http://andybrett.com/startup-school-2011

======
nl
<RANT>

Why can't Justin.TV fix their platform so that people can find the videos?

Every single time there is a startup school thread on HN, there is a sub
thread of Justin.TV urls passed around like dodgy bittorrent urls. Surely the
platform should support this?

The titles on the URLs make it even worse: "Broadcasting LIVE on Justin.tv" -
hours & days after it isn't being broadcast, isn't live and is only on
Justin.TV because they happened to record it.

</RANT>

~~~
andrewf
Links to one video per speaker:
<http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/videos?page=1>

~~~
nl
This is great - except some of the titles are wrong.

------
alexhaefner
I read about whether or not to start a startup on hacker news often. In these
discussions there's always the 'startups fail', 'billion dollar company'. I
can say 2 things about these two things.

For myself, failure is quite okay. I spent the entire weekend at a hackathon
where I failed to have anything to demo. My teammate and i were the only ones
there to fail to have a demo. I had had success at other hackathons so this
hurt. Ultimately it doesn't scare me though, as I'll explain later.

And on the billion dollar company, I have to say I can't relate. My friend and
I come from middle class (blue collar working town middle class) families, so
we've never had much money and we don't really chase it.

So for us, it's not about the money, it's always been about building great
things that we want for ourselves. And with each failure and each success, we
learn more, and what we make becomes better and better from our learning. I
like the idea of failure because it's only ever made the things that I make
better, and helped me to be sure that I am doing what I love. Ultimately every
time I ready one of these articles, and I realize that I embrace failure as an
opportunity, and see money as a distraction, i feel more right with myself
that we should indeed be starting a startup.

Disclaimer: I am a student who has no idea what I'm talking about.

------
jmonegro
It's been said before in another thread, but Ashton Kutcher blew my mind at
this Startup School.

Goes to show how good an actor he is too - I never would've imagined that the
same person who played the doofus Kelso in That 70's show, or the guy from
punkd would be giving solid, down to earth business advice at such a young
age.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
I cannot find the video for that part of the talk -- does anyone know where it
is?

~~~
jules
It starts here around 1:55:00:
<http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298670703>

and continues into Part 2: <http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298680010>

------
dlikhten
I have a better question: Imagine you have at least 15 competitors. Some of
whom have been around for years. All of whom have more money than you, and
same amount of reach (no... more than you). However you think they all suck
and you can do better.

Why?

If you can answer the why, you have a solid idea. That why is what everyone is
looking for.

Side note: When joining a startup you ask that question.

Basically think Google. Google was the first search engine to make search fast
and accurate. They had probably 10 competitors, 1 of which, yahoo, was thought
to be immovable.

~~~
timr
_"Imagine you have at least 15 competitors. Some of whom have been around for
years. All of whom have more money than you, and same amount of reach (no...
more than you). However you think they all suck and you can do better. Why? If
you can answer the why, you have a solid idea. That why is what everyone is
looking for."_

You know what's funny about that, though? Larry and Sergey wouldn't have had a
great answer for that question when they started. They had a relatively
primitive technology demo, and were taking on massive competitors with deep
pockets (hell, even _they_ tried to sell the idea before they gave in and
started Google). There's absolutely no reason that one of the major search
companies couldn't have focused their resources on search, come up with
something similar to PageRank, and smothered Google in the crib. They just
didn't. Oops.

Frequently, the correct answer to your question is: _"our competitors are
bureaucratic and slow, and while our approach could be replicated by any good,
two-person team, history suggests that won't happen"_...but that always seems
to be the hardest answer to sell. Everyone is looking for the deterministic
solution to the problem of innovation, when the solution is actually
stochastic.

~~~
vidarh
Google's advantage was cultural: They went into it looking for an algorithmic
solution where Yahoo was dead set in a belief on curated results and Altavista
and others were dead set in changing user behavior. Indeed, Altavista results
were for a long time _very_ much better than Google's for _power users_ that
understood how to use their operators.

This is not something you just change, and it was a very real benefit for
Google (but perhaps one that was difficult to see).

So I'd argue that the answer wasn't bureaucratic and slow, but "our
competitors are set in their ways".

No matter how nimble you are, if you've stared yourself blind on your own
perceived solution of a problem, you might be unable to react to the challenge
of some little startup coming in and solving the problem in a different way.
You might even have tied yourself down with partners etc. in ways that makes
changing your model incredibly much harder even if you do realize.

~~~
gnosis
When Google came on the scene, it wasn't competing with Yahoo, since Yahoo
wasn't a search engine but rather just a structured collection of links.

Google's main competitor was Altavista. I don't know why everyone else
switched from Altavista to Google, but I can tell you that for me it wasn't
because of Google's much-vaunted "page rank" algorithm (I certainly didn't
notice any improvement in the search results over Altavista). I had two
reasons for switching:

1 - Google had no ads, versus tons of ads on Altavista.

2 - Google was very fast.

These two factors made choosing Google over Altavista a no-brainer for me. I'm
convinced that if Altavista had restrained themselves from serving up ads
along with their search results, Google would have been dead in the water.

~~~
vidarh
Oh, yes, they were most definitively competing with Yahoo too, since Yahoo was
the first port of call for non-technical users. Altavista was too complex.

For me, the speed and lack of ads vs. Altavista was irrelevant. When my
friends and I finally switched, it was because the results finally convinced
us that spending a lot of time tweaking search queries on Altavista wasn't
worth it when Google would give better results on the first query. That
realization was a long time coming.

Altavista's basic ranking was abysmal, and if you didn't notice any
improvement it is probably because you like me knew how to search on
Altavista. Regular users didn't. It worked well for technical users because
we'd expect to do stuff like add "+term" and "-term" and quote phrases and use
and and or. Regular users didn't.

I remember a lot of very long back and forth discussions with people I knew
about whether or not Google would have a chance, because the above described
method worked so well and it seemed so simple to use that it was hard for us
to accept that getting non-technical users to use it wouldn't fly. Many of us
were convinced that the Altavista model would win out in the long term, and it
frustrated some of us (me included) to no end that Google were so stingy with
their operator support even after we'd switched.

But as the net got flooded with relative beginners who'd type in a single word
or two and expect decent results immediately, it rapidly became obvious that
Altavista was a dinosaur.

Today we see just how much we (and Altavista) overestimated a large part of
the user base:

Go to search.yahoo.com. Type "google" in the search box. Watch the second
search box appear in the results with a "Get straight to your answers here
with Yahoo! Search" above it... It's there for a reason: People do indeed
search for search engines by name on Yahoo. I first learned of this one when I
worked at Yahoo; they had numbers to back it up.

------
Hrothgar15
Make things. (Hat tip Caterina Fake.)

And if those things need a company as a vehicle, make that, too.

~~~
alexwolfe
Way to sum it up. "Make Things" is a good mantra, that's the fun part anyway.
Pretty sure financials, legal work, and HR are not the exciting part of any
endeavor :)

------
dchuk
I think one of the major reasons a lot of tech startups are failing is because
so many of them don't even begin to focus on monetization and are still stuck
on being acquired with a big exit. Even with the whole Lean Startup movement,
I think so many startups are still far from thinking the way they need to to
make a profit in a reasonable amount of time.

MVPs and customer interviews and everything else are great, but at the end of
the day, what's most important is that you target a market large enough to
sell to enough customers to make for a sustainable business model. Even a
perfect product can fail if a market is too small or worse, completely non-
existent.

~~~
Sato
I think it's time to take such an advise seriously. Today's investments go to
either successful late stage startups or seed ones[1]. And this trend is
likely to continue for a while.

Also, there was a good discussion about profit[2] a week ago. I recommend to
take a look.

[1] [http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/30/us-venture-
bround-...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/30/us-venture-bround-
idUSTRE79T17220111030)

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3147487>

------
mark_l_watson
Great writeup. BTW, I like it when I hear people (usually customers) talk
about building a company that they want to run for a long time, wrapping their
life around it (and vice-versa).

------
Gotttzsche
what are smart-ish jeans?

------
gameon87
I think its ironic and hilarious that Ashton Kutcher preaches startups should
solve a problem, and not jump to goal of being a billion dollar company, and
then he invests in Likealittle, the company lambasted here
[http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/13/the-city-by-the-meh-
thought...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/13/the-city-by-the-meh-thoughts-on-
falling-out-of-love-with-the-valley)

Likealittle, with zero revenue model, exemplifies what everyone is complaining
about.

~~~
robryan
It's a high risk bet, very little chance of seeing any return from that
investment but if you have the funds no reason not to mix in a few high risk
bets you feel are capable of paying off.

~~~
count
Or maybe it's a friend or family member?

