
The key to building an idea seems to be blind faith - manabovethesky
https://nextcept.com/Article/Details/1
======
dvt
I think this premise is reinforced by pg in several of his essays, so it's
weird to see such push-back here on HN. Blind faith seems to be, by and large,
necessary, especially when fighting against colossal odds (as is often the
case in startups).

This kind of "insanity" is the precursor to the relentless determination one
needs when leading a scrappy team of underdogs. Pragmatism and level-
headedness sound good on paper, but borderline irresponsible risk-taking is
what, at the end of the day, gets rewarded. There's no way to convince anyone
-- potential employees, co-founders, investors -- without a cult-like aura. If
you'll allow me some hyperbolic flair, startup founders are prophets.

~~~
JasonFruit
Is it possible that the attitude expressed in those essays stems from what is
good for founders in the aggregate — that is, pg's pocketbook — rather than
what is good for any one particular founder?

~~~
mikekchar
I think there may be another way to look at it (even though I'm not actually a
massive fan of the way VC works). The "if you don't play, you can't win"
argument is a fool's errand if your chances of winning are miniscule. However,
_if you 've already decided to play_ you're going to need an attitude that
ignores your tiny chances of success -- otherwise you are likely to get
disheartened and quit.

~~~
JasonFruit
That's a reasonable interpretation. If you play, you probably won't win — but
if you're going to play, give it all you've got.

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abhinai
_The key to building an idea seems to be blind faith._

Blind faith is a bad idea. You want to start with an idea and become its
biggest enemy for a few weeks. You need to attack it from all angles, talk to
potential customers and try to find reasons why it would not work and why you
wouldn't want to spend the next 5-10 years of your life building it. If after
several weeks you still cannot prove that you have a bad idea then
congratulations you have a good idea candidate.

Luck is still going to play a big role in your success but at-least you have a
sound starting point.

~~~
ams6110
Aren't most of Elon Musks projects examples of blind f faith? Who would have
agreed that starting a new auto manufacturer based solely on electric vehicles
was a good idea? A new rocket company? Going up against some of the biggest
most established companies with probably the "old boy network" working to
prevent entry of newcomers. Seems like blind faith to me.

~~~
abhinai
Being aspirational does not imply lack of homework on Elon Musk's part. In
fact I would respect Elon Musk a lot less if he did not do his due diligence
before starting to work on all of his companies. Faith is tested deeply during
most entrepreneurial journeys, which is all the more reason why one needs to
do their homework before starting.

~~~
solipsism
You seem to be missing everyone's point.

Virtually anyone who would consider Elon Musk's ideas using your approach
would immediately throw them out, for many many reasons. So your approach is
meaningless unless you can tell everyone exactly what criteria to use when
deciding if something "would not work."

If your assertion is just that you have to be so smart that you can analyze
all the variables and correctly predict the future, then that's not really
useful to anyone is it?

------
hogu
There is a whole culture of boots-trappers who focus on testing and making
pre-sales rather than sinking time on blind faith. I just came home from
hanging out with them at

[https://www.microconf.com](https://www.microconf.com)

I don't see why blind faith is necessary for the majority of ideas.

------
talkingtab
While I agree with the gist of the article I think "blind faith" is
misleading. Having faith in your intuition is certainly the key. In my
experience intuition comes from pattern recognition and often from recognition
of discontinuities. Christopher Alexander, he of "A Pattern Language" has
another book, "Notes on the Synthesis of form", in which he discusses what I
think can be summarized as: we can tell that something is wrong, but
understanding how to fix it is harder. At least that is what I took away.

The "blind" part half way applies. You have to have faith that you recognized
something that that is out of kilter, and you have to be blind to the fact
that you don't know the solution.

------
raz32dust
Blind faith, with a good sense of when to open your eyes. There is always an
element of faith in any venture or risk. But I doubt it is totally blind. If
there is evidence that the idea is not working, you have to see it and adjust
your plan. Do you think it is not working because your assumption was wrong?
Or was it because your execution is flawed? Is it some temporal issue that
should get fixed? You have to ask these questions constantly and know why you
decided to push on, instead of ignoring everything.

------
eponeponepon
The key to building an idea is _inducing_ blind faith _in others_.

...imho.

Edit to expound: if you have blind faith in your idea, then when it is about
to fail, you will go down with it. If you don't, and it's about to fail, you
will recognise this and extract yourself in time to survive.

At that point it's up to your personal moral compass whether you help the
others whose blind faith you've built to reach the escape pods.

------
hevi_jos
I do not believe in blind fate, but common sense. You can extrapolate the
future following the trends just like Jules Verne did.

Take for example smartphones and tablets. After the "one computer in every
desktop" was accomplished, it was obvious that one computer in every pocket
was going to be the next big thing.

So companies like Microsoft invested billions of dollars in that (think in
Pocket PCs and TabletPCs).

The vision became a reality and today all of us could have a GPS, cameras and
more computer power that desktops had 10 years ago incredibly cheap.

We humans tend to believe only in what we can see, but some people just see
the future possibilities just like they are realities. It is not like these
people, the visionaries, have more faith than normal people, but that they see
the future as real as if it exist here.

Of course watching the future as real have lots of problems in real life,
specially when this people have to live along people only interested on
reality, like doing the laundry or searching for a better "real job" instead
of following "dreams".

------
DoreenMichele
There is actually research that indicates "luck" isn't as random as we usually
imagine. People with certain habits tend to be perceived as "lucky."

 _Faith_ literally means believing in something. The idea that believing
something will work is simply delusional is inherently problematic.

You may actually have good reasons for believing it will work.

We always have only partial information. That doesn't mean just bulling on
ahead, _and don 't confuse me with the facts_, is a good approach. It means
that the people who succeed can't necessarily explain their success adequately
to satisfy those who would like to follow in their footsteps.

I also would bet that sometimes they don't really want to explain it. Giving
away "the secret sauce" may not be in their best interest.

~~~
contingencies
I like the take Mark Burgess gives in _In Search of Certainty: The Science of
Our Information Infrastructure_ where he states that separation of concerns is
"a necessary consequence of loss of resolution due to scale ... a strategy for
staying sane." Perhaps having scope-blinders and persistence is simply
perceived by outsiders as irrational, whereas internally it is an intellectual
tool for focus and achievement. Of course, there are drawbacks to mad focus...

------
galaxyLogic
The key to becoming a stock-market billionaire is taking big risks. But that
does not mean it works for everybody it actually works for very few the lucky
few.

Same thing probably happens with startups. You don't start a startup unless
you have Blind Faith (btw. great album). But only a few of the startups make
it big. When we see the ones that made it we may see that none of them would
exist unless their founders had had blind faith. So (more or less) Blind Faith
seems to be a prerequisite for success. But it is not a guarantee, far from
it.

------
crimsonalucard
I found the same strategy works for the lottery too.

~~~
techsin101
Winning comment ^^

------
contingencies
The easiest option is always quitting. In the same way that a flexible opinion
is a sign of intelligence in individuals, an adaptable vision is an asset to
any venture. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

------
pessimizer
Or lots of friends with money. I'm pretty sure blind faith is a euphemism for
Always Be Selling and a willingness to go into deep debt.

------
amitport
Unfortunately, the key to losing money, health and family while attempting to
build an idea also seems to be blind faith.

------
eruci
The key to building an idea is getting excited enough about it. Blind faith is
counterproductive, as is faith in general.

~~~
wrnr
Columbus discovered America but died thinking he found a shorter route to
India, he was operating with the knowledge the earth is round but did not know
how big the world is

~~~
Jare
I think in this context, "faith" and "knowledge" can be considered opposites.
Sort of like "opinions" vs "facts", the former can emerge from the later but
not the other way around.

------
dredmorbius
No, it is not.

You _do_ haveto suspend judgement, for a time, when it's not clear _whether_
the idea is good or not. That's the incubation stage, a point of deliberate,
but measured, risk-taking.

Blind faith leads you to reject obvious signs of nonviability or danger. And
whilst some may get lucky (or cash out before reality requests payment), many
don't.

I'd suggest looking at the 3M model instead. Large-scale diversified but
manageable risks.

~~~
Farradfahren
Most people i met can not do that. They tear themselves to shreds, going back
and forth over when to leap and where to leap. Sometimes you need a madmen.

------
esolyt
From the section about Naming:

> Means something somewhat relevant to your company or is completely random.

Well, is there any other possibility?

~~~
rabidrat
Yes, you could name it something that has another established meaning that is
not relevant to your company. Most names are like this.

------
zackmorris
The funny thing is, as logic and science-driven as I am, I've come to believe
that this is actually true. We only have to rely on audacity and tenacity and
serendipity because success is an emergent phenomenon that results from a
loosely associated sequence of deterministic processes.

In other words, there is no formula for success because it's not a rational
construct. Many of us aren't driven by credentials or money or power, yet
those things are a prerequisite for anyone to listen to us or to have any kind
of quality of life in a capitalistic society. The notion of success is at odds
with its expression.

It's not that ideas are worthless, but that most people don't have the
discipline to trade months or years of their lives to see them through. If the
person with the idea is not the one who reaps its rewards, then it's easy to
see how there could be bias against ideas. I would even go as far as to say
that the most successful people have the fewest ideas that would change the
status quo.

To put all of that in more of a positive light, I prefer to consider the
success of others as part of any idea. So in these times, I feel that most
startup ideas just aren't very good. They're too busy trying to satisfy
constraints of finding capital or product-market fit or achieving a big exit
instead of actually solving the problems facing the world like
authoritarianism, underemployment, unsustainability, etc, etc, etc that are
too numerous to even begin to list here. Maybe those challenges don't require
big ideas so much as being more clever with how and where we apply the
disruption we're so infatuated with where it could really make a difference.

~~~
manabovethesky
This is my goal for www.nextcept.com. I focus all my spare time on building to
see if I can create a new way of finding people to work with through personal
questions rather than something like a resume. Thanks for checking out the
article. It was more of just a rant about what I’ve run into over the years.

------
crimsonalucard
The only people who win the lottery are those that are stupid enough to play.

~~~
dredmorbius
The only people who lose the lottery, on the other hand ... are also those
stupid enough to play.

And what are the odds?

~~~
crimsonalucard
The contradiction lies in the winning hand. You have to be stupid to win.
Being stupid to lose is a given.

~~~
dredmorbius
There are better games to play.

------
grzm
Title of linked article: "How to know if an idea is any good."

------
nielsbot
“If we had known it was impossible, we never would have succeeded.”

~~~
techsin101
Although Survivor bias very much

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oneowl
Ok. But why is blind faith a bad idea?

------
technobabble
@manabovethsky. Assuming this is true, do you think one develop blind faith
for anything? Why or why not?

------
otakucode
The article appears to provide no support for it's bold claim. Why is that?
Why can't they provide an argument that shows that examining the fundamentals
and rational consequences of an idea can actually evaluate whether an idea is
'good' or not? That seems like a valid strategy to me. Often good ideas are
rooted in a fundamental shift in perspective on an admitted need. Yet this
article makes the claim that this method of evaluating a good idea, and every
single other possible method one could formulate, must be wrong.

And then they fail utterly to ever substantiate or defend that claim. They
just presume the audience accepts it on blind faith. This is a common problem
with arguments that invoke 'blind faith' in almost any capacity. Even
Kierkegaard's famous 'Leap of Faith' interpretation of belief in God (the idea
that because God is beyond human understanding, belief in it can only come
through a 'leap' and not through a chain of reasoning) is underlaid with an
unsupported presumption that there exist things which can be beyond human
understanding, or that such an idea is even sensical itself. Yet that is never
supported there either.

~~~
manabovethesky
Thanks for checking out the article. These are really just areas I’ve found
over the years. I’m sure there are many other successful methods.

