
Graham vs. Buchheit: All else being equal, should startups seek out hard problems or avoid them? - Benja

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pg
I don't disagree with anything PB says. I say to do hard things if they
benefit the user proportionately. He says not to do hard things just because
they're impressive. Since in practice impressing people (including oneself) is
the main reason people do hard things that don't benefit users, these two
principles yield the same advice.

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Benja
I suppose I took PB's post more broadly than it was intended, then. If he was
only talking about solving hard problems that don't benefit the user
proportionally, I see that there's no contradiction [and have a clear answer
to the question of when to follow which advice ;-)].

Thanks for the clarification.

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Benja
paul says that the way to build successful products is to avoid hard problems:

<http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/04/secret-to-making-things-easy-avoid-
hard.html> <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16409>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=17040>

That made a lot of sense to me. But on the other hand, pg's "How to Make
Wealth" makes a good argument for precisely the opposite view:

"Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your
company, but also at decision points along the way. At Viaweb one of our rules
of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased
by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you
go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you
can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs
is hard for you but even harder for him. What this meant in practice was that
we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add
to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we'd
always take the harder one."

<http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html>

Of course, no piece of general advice is right in all cases. But what should
you look for, in a given situation, to know whether it's better to seek out
the hard problems or better to avoid them?

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paul
Don't seek problems -- seek solutions. Avoid all problems :)

One of the hardest things for a big company to do is move fast. Startups
typically have very limited resources, so the only way to move fast is to not
spend very long on any one problem, and that's generally going to mean
avoiding problems that are hard. What I'm really advocating here is that you
look for the easy 90% solution that seems almost the same to the user but only
take you 1% as long to implement.

~~~
Benja
Thanks, Paul! Between your reply and pg's, I understand your point a lot
better now, I think.

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zaidf
I say down with such vague philosophical arguments:)

