
Tech Superstars Build 'Startup Factories' - prostoalex
http://www.wired.com/2014/11/startup-factories/?mbid=social_fb
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ed
This is not "the next big thing." It's actually symptomatic of a bug in
silicon valley culture - high profile entrepreneurs aren't allowed to fail in
the same way as normal folks.

When these studios work, it's not because the studio approach is inherently a
better way to do things, but rather because the people running them are really
awesome.

The only reason to start a studio, as far as I can tell, is to set the
expectation you'll release a few crappy products at first.

This is normally what a startup does anyway. I guess the difference is that
high-profile entrepreneurs aren't given the same leeway to fail, which kind of
sucks.

~~~
joshu
Trust me, they can fail. I have both been one of these and invested in these.

They often get a first pass free but they still have to succeed in the normal
way.

My next thing is unlikely to be venture backed until it already has some
success or momentum.

~~~
nostrademons
I read the grandparent post as "People in Silicon Valley often have the
unrealistic expectation that everything a previously-successful entrepreneur
does will succeed. When their first try inevitably doesn't work, this poisons
the well for subsequent refinement and iteration. As a result, previously-
successful entrepreneurs are creating startup labs to set the expectation that
everything coming out of it is an experiment and insulate themselves from the
PR backlash of trying some dumb ideas to get to a good one."

Which is not at-odds with your comment, although as a previously-successful
entrepreneur, perhaps you can speak to whether or not there really is that
backlash and premature judgment that he posits.

(Personally, as someone without much of a brand name, I relish the freedom
that gives me to try stupid stuff. There's no way I'd be brave enough to try
my current startup attempt - which is really quite humble - if everyone
expected me to invent the next big thing.)

~~~
joshu
I think that it is hard to build great products if you raise money first.
Success is corrosive.

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api
I'm a bit skeptical.

I'm not sure that a creative enterprise like entrepreneurship is amenable to
any sort of factory model. While theoretically it could be a bit like drug
discovery -- make lots of permutations, test them, iterate, goal seek -- the
problem is with the human factors. Companies aren't organic molecules that can
be reliably produced and then re-produced. They're made out of people.

I suspect that these entities would become echo chambers dominated by
cronyism. The term "stars" already gives me that feel. The incentive structure
gets all wacked out... it ends up being more about status within the startup
ecosystem than shipping stuff that works and that the market likes. The SV
ecosystem in particular already has this problem, and concentrating it more
into a more institutional model might make it worse.

I think the same problem haunts modern-day academic "factory science," where
people who specialize in getting grants are very good at getting grants and
churning out very mundane, plodding science.

The best accelerators escape some of this problem by accepting open
applications from anyone, anywhere.

~~~
fapjacks
This is the most coherent and observant comment I've seen on HN in a very long
time.

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rgbrgb
>> “A lot of entrepreneurs are motivated to understand how to make their
success repeatable,” says Prof. Williams. “But what they have to recognize is
there’s a lot of luck involved in entrepreneurship, and most entrepreneurs in
the tech sector might only get lucky once.”

This actually seems like a good reason to start a studio or accelerator. Even
YC understands that half of their companies will fail. In many cases this not
because the founders are lazy or untalented but because there's a good deal of
luck involved in creating a product that sticks. Consumer products in
particular are extremely hit-based so it kind of makes sense to make a "record
company" rather than put all your eggs into a single band.

~~~
mikeknoop
I bet if you asked any of the founders mentioned in the post, this would be
their explicit answer.

Launching 4 divergent products a year means you're 4x as likely to find a hit
in that time frame.

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theseanz
Idealab has been doing this for 18 years now:
[http://www.idealab.com/our_companies/](http://www.idealab.com/our_companies/)

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dmritard96
"Lately, however, a new formula has begun to take hold, one that challenges
the very idea of how a business should be built. It plays out quite
differently: you start a business, your business experiments with lots of
ideas, many ideas fail but some succeed, you turn these ideas into new
businesses, and the formula repeats on its own. Or at least, you hope it
will."

Where I am confused/interested is how the investment/ownership works in this
case. So if I start a company, discover a great business/product and then
create another company around it, I would assume that the investors in the
original company would get the same percentage in the new company?

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justifier
these sorts of efforts seem to simply stem from a thinking paradigm, that..
hyperbole ahead.. may be most easily accessible through programming, of
organising your process in order to reuse as much functionality as possible
for highest efficiency

musk talks about how interesting process manufacturing is: ~" very often
people think of manufacturing as some rote process of making copies, which it
isn't, which it actually isn't, it's building a machine that makes the
machine, and if you think the machine is important, well then building the
machine that makes the machine is also extremely important, and more often
than not, what i've found is, um, it is the manufacturing that is harder than
the actual product ".. Elon Musk, One on One with Elon Musk MIT AeroAstro
Centennial Symposium .. ,45:13~47:39 ..
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOpmaLY9XdI#t=45m13s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOpmaLY9XdI#t=45m13s)

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bbody
I can't help but see parallels to Skunk Works.

