

Startup knowledge decays quickly - jackaltman
http://jackealtman.com/2013/01/10/startup-knowledge-decays-quickly/

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BobWarfield
This article assumes all knowledge is equally valuable, equally hard to gain,
and decays at the same rate, but none of that is true.

Frameworks change constantly, computer languages less frequently, and
architectural notions much less frequently. Yet the value and difficulty of
learning is exactly reversed.

The nature of the media that defines the marketing strategy changes relatively
slowly compared to tech. Successful business strategies change still slower
than the marketing, and the actual behavior of people much more slowly.

Most of the facts that are changing the fastest are very cheap to "re-
discover". So cheap that there is a term for it: the Google Effect.

I can't see any particularly good lessons for startups from the article as a
result.

~~~
chipsy
The way I would put it is: most of the things we call "wisdom" are more like
"fashion." It's fashionable to be "in the cloud." It's fashionable to "fail
fast." And so on. These are cyclical attributes; one can always find, at the
least, an anecdotal situation which demonstrates or disproves their worth. And
over a period of time - one year, five years, 30 years - the fashion runs its
course, gets replaced by something else, and then gets revived again.

And - the other part of this is - tech businesses, and consequently tech
employees, are entirely reliant on staying within the fashion to make their
money. Any single product you push out today has a good chance of devaluing
within a few years, if the industry as a whole moves on. And so, over and
over, part of the fashion cycle is the monopoly play - every company races to
monopolize and lock in its users so that it can break through the fashion
cycle, sit on the product with old tech, and maximize extraction. But then,
some time later, it gets disrupted by a startup, which then proceeds to lock
in its users...

Triple-O strategies (open standard, open source, open development) seem to
break the fashion cycle in software over the very long-term and force business
to move to new categories(a good thing for the global economy, especially with
software demand being ever-increasing). This is especially true when an open
solution can break out of the "back office" and improve its UX. But one of the
big, largely unanswered questions is whether businesses can be given economic
incentives to remain open, and whether this phenomenon can escape software and
move into hardware.

~~~
Shorel
Sorry to disagree, but I don't think we are going back to seriously think the
earth is the center of the universe and it is flat.

~~~
aurelianito
I do. Did anyone told you about creationism?

~~~
aurelianito
To modders out there: Do you find my observation offensive in some way? Why is
it modded down?

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rmason
Lets narrow it to tech startups. When I started my company in 1999 if you
weren't in a startup hub it was very hard to come by certain knowledge.
Usually you learned the hard way which shortened your runway of both cash and
time.

Now there's a lot more information on the web. It requires some study for the
first timer to decide which is the correct information and what is just noise.
But the resources are there and I would bet this information is changing much
slower than from the nineties to present day.

HN and around a dozen blogs are the biggest resources that I've got.

~~~
gangfren
Would you mind sharing a couple of the non-HN resources?

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chandru89new
Although a really interesting post, I beg to differ at one point at least.

The materialistic aspects of startup knowledge definitely have a half-life,
sure enough.. but when you are talking about things like "fail-fast", I don't
think they're "fashionable."

Startup wisdom - which stems from knowledge - cannot go stale in most cases.
Intricate details like what kind of a metric you use to see what affects the
conversions can change but the very fact that you should track your
conversions doesn't change for centuries or more.

If this is what you did mean by startup knowledge, thanks for writing this! :)

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kaliblack
> Founders should try to see around corners to anticipate what knowledge today
> will be obsolete tomorrow, and find their place accordingly.

I'm not sure how I feel about the final point in the article. It's really hard
to predict a change in knowledge. All you have to do is read the "Key Trends
of 2012" articles that were written at the end of 2011 to see how hit and miss
we are about predictions. Those that correctly "predicted" a shift look like
geniuses. Those that didn't...

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xiaoma
This kind of thinking is one of the reasons I spent my teens and 20s
emphasizing things like mathematics and human languages instead of something
more applied.

~~~
ekm2
Exactly.It is the main reason i double majored in Math and CS:CS being the
temporal and math the eternal

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kanejamison
I was following along until he said "There is a dinosaur called the
Brontosaurus" was no longer "true." Apparently I missed that update:

[http://www.npr.org/2012/12/09/166665795/forget-extinct-
the-b...](http://www.npr.org/2012/12/09/166665795/forget-extinct-the-
brontosaurus-never-even-existed)

~~~
jackaltman
the fact that I keep up to date on dinosaurs is my problem, not yours.

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bomatson
We've been building businesses in our society for years and years, how could
'startups' be considered an immature industry?

~~~
jzwinck
Many of the things we call startups are even today referred to by folks we
call business people as "not businesses." Instagram for example: was a
startup, arguably not much of a business, and doesn't seem to have much of an
analogue in history.

~~~
rgbrenner
There is no contradiction.

Instagram was started with the hope that if they gain enough users, they will
be able to figure out how to monetize those users. It's not much of a business
today, because they still have not figured out a way to do that.

Those who have invested in Instagram either believe they will be able to
figure that out, or they believe they can sell it to someone who believes they
can do so.

This is no different than if I were to open a convenience store. I open it --
I'm losing money on rent, the renovations, inventory, etc, etc, etc -- I hope
that after a certain amount of time I will be able to attract enough customers
to make up for that.. but until I do, I do not have much of a business.

In a way, Instagram is at the opening stage. They're building a user base
(what would be the store in my example). And when they figure out how to
monetize the users, they will 'open for business' and accept their first
customers (probably advertisers.. but they might come up with something else).

There is no contradiction, and there are plenty of analogues in history.

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dakimov
What in the world is the 'startup industry'? I thought you could start a
business in any industry at any point.

