
Startup skills vs startup ideas - davidw
http://swombat.com/2012/1/9/startup-skills-ideas
======
rfrey
It seems like Daniel is critiquing the tendency to advise entrepreneurial
novices to "dive in" and start something. He seems to me to be saying that the
just-do-it advice ignores the fact that entrepreneurship is a skill -- you
wouldn't advise somebody who wants to learn to program to start with a complex
web app, so why do we advise novices to just start a company, when
entrepreneurship is equally as complex?

I find the analogy unconvincing though. Both programming and entrepreneurship
are trades-like skills that are improved primarily through practice, true. But
programming practice is amenable to small, toy projects done in private,
gradually moving to larger, collaborative projects as one's skills improved.

The only way to practice entrepreneurship, on the other hand, is to start a
company. You could certainly get some practice at the component skills (OP
gives an excellent breakdown of those) - maybe do some recreational haggling
at car dealerships? Join Toastmasters? But that's akin to doing scales on the
piano - to really develop you have to open the music and give it a go.

~~~
AznHisoka
I agree. And the skills he listed? Well, they're great and all, but they are
implementation skills. Implementation skills alone in a vacuum is useless. You
first need to know how to think critically and apply a high level solution to
a problem.

Things like domain expertise, and exposure to hard problems are what we need
first: not the ability to code, design, sell, and definitely not the ability
to manage and hire (that's so trivial compared to other things). Learning all
those skills will make you great at designing cool things, but not at
designing cool things that solve problems people will pay for.

~~~
swombat
My point is, jumping in with vision and method but zero skills results in
pretty much guaranteed failure.

On the other hand, if you can acquire the skills while, say, at university, or
working for someone else, and then jump in with the method/vision, you'll have
a much better chance.

The manner in which you decide to implement your vision will necessarily
depend on the skills you have. If you're a programmer, you will tend to dive
into implementation first. If you're a salesperson, you'll tend to dive into
sales first... etc.

To maximise your chance, you need a reasonable level of skill in each of those
core areas, so that you don't avoid obvious shortcuts just because you don't
know anything. Some obvious shortcuts that are often missed by people with
limited skills:

\- building a product for 6 months instead of making a few phone calls and
preliminary paper-based demos to validate the demand;

\- hiring an outsourcing firm to "build your prototype" instead of rolling up
your sleeves and doing it yourself;

\- building an unusable or ugly product instead of using a baseline competence
in design to create something reasonably ok...

Etc.

Reductio ad absurdum: by itself, with no skills, the lean startup method
cannot achieve anything. It assumes some skills. The more skills you have that
fit into whatever method you've picked, the higher your chances of success.

If you don't mind needlessly failing over and over again for years, though,
feel free to jump right in with no clue what you're doing.

~~~
danhodgins
The core entrepreneurial skills mentioned in Daniel's article do need to be
present in some combination on the founding team. This team could include
various blends of founders, advisors, employees, contractors, and directors.

Some core skills are orders of magnitude more valuable than others. For
instance, raising $100,000 of capital in 1,000 hours is worth exactly
$100/hour. Doing entry level marketing coordinator work is worth approximately
$18/hour. The higher-impact activity in this context is obvious, especially if
getting deals done is the driving force in a founder or co-founder's DNA.

Daniel's article is on the money when it comes to creating a list of the core
entrepreneurial skills that CAN and should be learned in order to increase the
odds of startup success, so let's continue this discussion over the coming
weeks.

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geebee
I think the "idea vs execution" debate is an interesting one, but I think it
often overlooks the often sizable overlap between idea and execution. It's not
that ideas without execution are worthless, it's that ideas without execution
aren't really ideas.

Suppose I have an "idea" for a novel. It's about a boy whose parents were
killed by an evil wizard school, and who is living with unfriendly relatives
who don't like or trust magic, and who goes to a wizard school to slowly reach
his potential and experience a show down with the aforementioned evil wizard.

Ok, an idea, right. But have I _really_ give you the idea behind Harry Potter?
If you give this idea to two different writers and tell them to run with it, I
don't think you'll get two different _executions_. I think you'll end up with
two different _ideas_. The execution and the idea are so intertwined that you
really can't distinguish the two. Software is often like this.

I suppose sometimes there really isn't much of an idea - like when a
programmer is handed a series of wireframes and told to "make it live" (or
when a writer is asked to "novelize" a screen play, with absolutely no
deviation from the script). Programmers do often end up in this category for
hire, so I'm not dismissing the "idea vs execution" thing completely. But I do
think it often misses a big part of the picture.

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fedd
being non-native english speaker i can't distinguish skills and experience in
this article, but i do know the difference between experience and knowledge.
the scientist will not try to build the perpetuum mobile because he _knows_
the law of conservation of energy, not because he tried to build the perpetuum
mobile for 5 years in academics, failed, thus gained this experience and can
move on.

but the skills do really come with experience, many of them, like
communication and management.

i missed how lean startup method falls into the same category of methods as
scientific method. if we really want to compare them, they really have more in
common then contradict: you make theory/MVP, then check it with experiment,
then amend the theory | pivot etc...

~~~
rfrey
_i missed how lean startup method falls into the same category of methods as
scientific method_

OP's comparison, which I agree with, was that both the scientific method and
the lean startup method provide a mechanism for the efficient application of
skills and expertise. Neither are a substitute for skills and expertise, nor
are they useful without that expertise.

Contrast that to a recipe for cookies, which will just work if you follow it
to the letter.

~~~
fedd
programming skills - yes, i still can't compare, namely, communication skills
with the scientist's knowledge. i believe first come with practice, the latter
come with learning and understanding.

> Contrast that to a recipe for cookies, which will just work if you follow it
> to the letter.

oh, not in my case! :)

actually i got what you're saying

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porter
My philosophy is this: Be really great at a few things and don't suck at
anything. That's a good list of competencies for an entrepreneur. Eighteen
months ago I wanted to build a web application that I thought would help a lot
of people in my industry. I knew next to nothing about programming and quickly
realized outsourcing the core product wasn't going to cut it. So, I quit my
banking job and took courses in discrete math, algorithms & data structures,
and computer architecture. Along the way I taught myself python/django,
HTML/CSS, and JQuery. Last week I launched a private beta and have received
great feedback. I'm really great at financial analysis and product
development. And now I don't suck at programming, among other things.

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thesash
> "If you handed down the Scientific Method to someone who is not a trained
> scientist, in theory they should be use it to derive new laws of nature. In
> practice, though, what would most likely happen is that they would mis-apply
> this method and come up with all sorts of crackpot theories about perpetual
> motion machines and life-altering magnetic bracelets"

What!? I pretty clearly remember being able to apply the scientific method
properly in grammar school. The conclusions we reached may not have been earth
shattering, but they were valid, because we followed the steps.

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keeptrying
The problem with this advice is that if you have all these skills, you'll be
already paid so much that you'll never become an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurship as a whole is done on the margins and by definition that
implies having a lot of time, not too many skill but also having the mentality
that your willing to do whatever it takes.

In the job market its impossible to find a job that lets you cultivate all
those skills he listed. Better is to start something on the side and learn all
these skills part time.

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sixQuarks
uhm... the most important skill is missing from his 8 core skills: Marketing

without good marketing, all the other skills are worthless. (yeah, yeah, I
know there are exceptions, but seriously, marketing is the skill with the most
leverage)

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mbesto
This is the same as adopting Agile. Just because you use some sort of Agile
process doesn't mean your project will all of the sudden be fixed. Agile is
generally well suited towards a group of skilled individuals.

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davidw
Speaking of Lean Startups - did you actually glean anything useful from it?
Like something you could start doing tomorrow?

~~~
swombat
Many things from the blog. So far, the best bits of the book are repetitions
of the blog (reasonably enough...). Concepts like:

\- If you can't fail, you can't learn

\- Growth hypothesis & Value hypothesis as the two first root hypotheses to
check

\- "Innovation accounting" - keeping track of things so you can validate your
learning as much as possible

I think Lean is a great framework to apply entrepreneurial skills, so long as
it's not followed dogmatically, of course...

~~~
davidw
And does he give you specific advice on _how to do those_? I mean, everyone
wants to know if they can grow, but for certain kinds of startups, there's a
hockey stick curve, meaning that before it grows... it doesn't.

~~~
swombat
He gives examples in various contexts, rather than advice, but it looks to me
like there's a whole series of "Lean Startup" books coming up (e.g. this one:
[http://www.ashmaurya.com/2012/01/the-new-and-updated-
running...](http://www.ashmaurya.com/2012/01/the-new-and-updated-running-lean-
book/) ), and some of them will inevitably focus more on practice. I think the
point of Ries' book (which I think is reasonable) is to lay out the
theoretical basis and start a movement.

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j45
Entrepreneurship often involves having sheer audacity. To start something,
qualified, prepared or not.

An example? Look at all the entrepreneurs succeeding with a business despite
x, y and z, and have "no business being where they are".

Knowledge is not so much power as much as knowledge filled action.

Entrepreneurs who act can beat people with knowledge who don't act. They'll
probably be messier, but there's always the chance they'll learn and improve
like anyone.

