

All the Startup Advice You Read is Wrong - nqureshi
https://medium.com/on-startups/8ba2f1774789

======
Udo
Yes, there is a lot of cargo culting going on. People tend to put a lot of
stock in the pecularities of successful companies and influential people in a
(misguided) effort to imitate them. A better way to copy success would
probably be to do some dry analysis, as compared to another round of "5 habits
of highly successful people" or "what would Steve Jobs do". But I would like
to argue that the best thing to do is probably to follow your own visions and
constantly debug what doesn't work.

I believe the myth of the A player is also part of that particular cargo cult.
Most competent people don't fit into a single category. Competence isn't a
global integer value. An employee's ability to contribute depends on many
factors and can change dramatically with the situation. Companies claiming to
"hire only A players" are not getting this.

~~~
msglenn
The A player rhetoric makes it easy to discard an employee without reflecting
on how your actions as a company might be affecting that person's performance.
The blame for poor performance immediately falls to the employee.

Sometimes the employee truly isn't going to work. But if you're a startup and
you have someone who buys the vision of the company, fits the culture but
doesn't exactly fit the role, it may pay to reevaluate the specifics of the
job in light of the skills you know that person has.

So maybe it's not just about getting rid of the idea of the A player, but
reconsidering whether the A player has to come into your company ready made.

------
jmathai
Luck: Success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through
one's own actions.

The most important thing you can know about startups is that it's a game of
luck. You can control certain aspects of luck by being at the right spot at
the right time, knowing the right people and keeping your startup alive. But
in the end it's largely luck and contrary to popular belief it can't be
reverse engineered.

Basically: location, connections and timing.

What's better than reading blog posts about start up advice is finding some
founders that have been successful and others that are in the same boat as you
and talking with them regularly.

You can be lacking in all 3 categories and still be successful. But it's going
to be much harder and the odds are stacked against you even more.

You can be proficient in all 3 categories and still fail.

~~~
vignesh_vs_in
I completely disagree with you. i don't see that as luck, i see that as
probability.

You can increase your chance of success by being at the right place and time.
The probability success also depends on the founders. So, even if in the
surface it seems like luck only matters, u can turn the odds in your favor.

Every company/idea has a chance to succeed(different levels) or fail, and if
we keep the idea as constant, people are the only variables in the equation.

~~~
jmathai
We're calling the same thing two different names. Luck is probably a misnomer
but I think it captures the essence very well.

I agree that you can influence your success but the degree to which you can do
that is pretty small for most founders.

~~~
prof_hobart
The problem with the word "luck" is that it can easily be taken to mean that
success is entirely random - any idea, at any time, executed in any manner has
an equal chance to succeed. And that's not really true. I doubt very much that
this is what you are saying, but it's an easy interpretation to make.

Whereas the word "probability" still implies a level of randomness that is
totally out of your control. However good, and however well executed, you idea
is - there's a million and one unforeseen things that could destroy your
business. But that doesn't mean that you ideas and your execution don't have
an impact on your likelihood of succeeding.

Compare the game of backgammon to snakes and ladders. Both have dice in them,
which introduces a level of randomness. But while I would describe snakes and
ladders as entirely a game of luck (your success in the game depends 100% on
the roll of the dice), I would describe backgammon as a game of probablilities
- if the dice keep going against you, you're going to lose. But there's an
awful lot of skill in reducing the odds of the dice being able to go against
you.

~~~
jmathai
Agreed. Luck is/was the wrong word to hinge my comment on.

------
lquist
_How about the least-controversial and most common advice ever given: “Only
hire A players.” Here’s when that doesn’t apply: When you can’t hire A
players._

Unless if your company is terrible, the problem will never be that you can't
hire A players, it will be that you can't find them fast enough. That said,
the compromise in waiting for only A players will appear to be to slow growth.
In my opinion, though, the quality of people is so important to an
organization's long term success that what will look like a compromise will
actually be a tradeoff between short term growth and long term growth.

~~~
bitwize
Problem is, A players want to work pretty much anywhere else but where the
vast majority of software gets developed. How are all the banks and insurance
companies going to keep their IT systems ticking over if they only hire A
players who would rather be working for Google, Valve, Basho, etc.?

~~~
coldcode
How do define an A player? Seems like a rather vague idea to base your
business on.

------
RivieraKid
Why have there been so many medium.com links on HN lately? Is this marketing
or just a natural result of medium's growth?

~~~
jeremyjh
Just a wild guess: people are submitting and up-voting lots of these links.

------
msglenn
Might I suggest a third reason: Maintaining your sanity.

Not just in terms of remembering that there are other people out there
struggling alongside you in the entrepreneurship game, but also in giving you
a modicum of control over your next steps. While I don't believe success is
completely up to luck, a lot of the when and how is completely out of your
hands. Reading on startups often gives me concrete, actionable advice. This
ties into Ev's first point but it's not just the ideas, it's the feeling that
I have a key, non-random role to play every step of the way. If you're the
type of person who needs the world to be a certain way to be happy, knowing
that you have a chance to make it that way keeps you on the right side of
crazy.

------
grimtrigger
I think the most important bias is "novelty bias". Lots of people want to
convince you they have a unique thought process so they can sell some books or
interest investors or position themselves as a "thought leader". Nothing wrong
with this in theory, but in practice I assume people are speaking with far
more confidence than they should have.

~~~
epochwolf
> Nothing wrong with this in theory

Oh, I think there's plenty wrong with this theory. There is very little that's
new in the world. People aren't as special as they think or are taught. :)

------
beat
Startup advice ! = How Google did it.

I read a ton of startup advice, but I consciously filter out the corner cases
like Google and Facebook. I'm a lot more interested in how the thousands of
less famous companies have succeeded (or failed).

------
x7r4wur57
The funny thing is that the article at the bottom suggested for read was
"Formula for Entrepreneurial Success" by Ev Williams.

------
vignesh_vs_in
point 2 agreed. Its better to hire B player who love your idea than hire A
players who thinks your idea is interesting.

~~~
omegant
So true, but also I think that A-B players can be a bit too general. I've
found that there is people that will execute flawlesly but only when they know
exactly what to do, while others are able to fill gaps of your idea and
execute with just general guidelines. The later are the ones you need when
your team is small (A or B players), but you'll need more of the former when
you get traction, market fit and your organization grows.

