There are plenty of river ports/quays with power and water hookups. If you want to houseboat it, you really only need to move when you want to dump the septic tank (and in some areas, not even that).
The "good" spots are highly desirable and usually privately owned (or on a very long-term lease), and you often need to buy a boat to get the mooring spot beneath it. (A buddy of mine in London ended up with 3 boats while upgrading his mooring spot.)
Another options is to vagabond it, where you move your boat to a new area every week or two -- this is usually unserviced, so it's more like camping, but lets you use unofficial spots and is free.
(The last option is to find goofy loopholes. E.g., in some areas of the Thames, you can create a nesting habitat for an endangered bird on your boat, and then once the bird settles in, they can't force you to move, since doing so would destroy an important habitat. Sounds stupid but a surprising number of permanent city boats are there on some sort of loophole.)
> in some areas of the Thames, you can create a nesting habitat for an endangered bird on your boat, and then once the bird settles in, they can't force you to move, since doing so would destroy an important habitat.
Seems like the fix for that would be to force you to leave the boat where it is, but to stay off of it so as not to disturb or disrupt the bird's habitat while at the same time leaving you responsible for rent and the boat's upkeep. That way you'd have an expensive boat you can't use but must also pay for and maintain. The plus side being that nobody in their right mind would try to attract endangered birds, the downside being that in order to avoid the costs, a cruel person might harm the bird if it happened to build a nest on their boat naturally (not sure how often that actually happens when people aren't intentionally building habitats for them).
It's possible that discouraging that kind of thing just isn't worth it. Maybe the people taking up space with their houseboats aren't as big a problem as there not being enough nice habitats for a struggling species, and the loophole is a net good for the restoration of the bird population without being a major problem for others.
People would never choose the bird over not paying rent for nothing, especially because the people doing this trick would not be the one’s with a lot of money.
Here in The Netherlands, bats are protected. Bats nest in the ventilated outside walls of houses. According to law, if you want to insulate your walls and it is suspected you have bats, you now need to pay an inspector €3000-6000 just to check. If you do have bats, they need to be lured out and re-nested with another expensive operation.
What people do instead is flush their walls with low grade toxins so the bats get scared off.
I do ~$15k/m in royalties from 3 nonfiction titles[1] which mostly sell via word of mouth (as opposed to hands-on marketing and/or author platform stuff). So it's definitely possible, if you approach it properly.
It's true, as another commenter mentioned, that the expected result of most nonfiction is zero. But in my opinion, that's largely because most nonfiction today is built like software in built like software in the 90s, without proper user-facing iteration and refinement. I wrote a whole thing about it[2].
Books created as a cynical cash-grab are already negative value in terms of time investment and opportunity cost. I think they're only worth getting into if you care enough about it (either the end result or the activity) to do it regardless of the money. And then, only once that's true, perhaps start looking for ways to optimize it as a process and product.
I haven't read any of your books, but looking at the "allbooks" link on Amazon, I find it funny that the English title is "The Mom Test" and is has the same title in other languages, "El Mom Test", "Der Mom Test", "Le Mom Test" and so on, while the Swedish title seems to be "How To Talk To Customers To Find Out If Your Business Idea Is True, When Everyone Is Lying To You?". Maybe Swedish people like their titles more explicit?
Any chance you've written more about the system design and incentives side of it somewhere (whether about medium in particular, a previous biz, or just the mechanisms in general)? If so, I'd absolutely love to dig in... It's got big overlap w/ some stuff I'm trying to figure out for building useful communities, and it's not so common to find folks with a deep view on it ;)
I got into the fifth batch (s07) and remember my other startup friends staging an intervention to dissuade me from accepting because "the valuation is really bad."
Interesting to see how long even the industry insiders failed to take YC seriously. And then once it was working, they flipped immediately to complaining that YC was too powerful and too influential (unbeatable network effect, seed/A valuation inflation, and so on).
I also remember the constant naysaying about scalability and batch size. Our batch was ~19 companies. People kept naysaying, "Well this model is fine for now, but it will never work past 20 teams."
PG would always reply with something like, "Yeah, they said that when we had fewer than 10 teams also. We aren't thinking too far ahead; each batch, we just find the next bottleneck and solve it, and we'll see how far that gets us." Which evidently got them pretty far. A lovely example of doing things that don't scale.
I was in the S12 batch “the batch that killed the YC model” with 80+ teams I think. After that they switched to the group model where the batch is divided in to groups and each group has specific partners. In our batch is was definitely challenging when you often got a randomly assigned partner each week and most of the time they didn’t know who you are or what you do. However, Coinbase, Instagram, Zapier etc came out of that batch.
For me as first time founder YC was super helpful and they really drill the right kind of mindset for you. Build product, talk to users. The stuff they tell you is often very simple but I think lot of founders naturally complicate the startup building and focus on the wrong things because they think thats what should do. YC cuts through all the bs and just makes you focus on the few actually important things
Yes Instacart, although Kevin Systrom did visit us for one of the weekly YC dinners to share his wild startup story.
Easily the most memorable summer of my life. I agree that even though we were told everything was falling apart at our batch size, it was arguably the best batch of YC, there was some real magic.
Your success and the success of YC doesn't make your friends wrong. YC has improved over time, both in valuations and processes. Even today, it is not perfect, and there is a significant survivorship bias used to describe its success as the unicorns are called out, but I don't hear much talk about how all the founders do - what is the median result of all YC companies, for example? (I honestly don't know that answer... I would love to see it because don't see such overall stats.)
YC absolutely has accomplished something, as have some of its companies. I don't want to be dismissive of that. But we should acknowledge that it embraces and encourages the high-risk/high-reward model, which should be entered into with open eyes.
What? The entire industry of venture capital is based on a tiny percentage of companies absolutely exploding. The point is, compared to everyone else, YC does it much better - the gulf between YC (which is on track to have multiple $100b portfolio companies) and second place accelerators like Techstars (who have, at best, a couple of single digit unicorns) is astronomical.
> The entire industry of venture capital is based on a tiny percentage of companies absolutely exploding.
Exactly. Which means the risk level to founders is high. Because it is a roulette wheel where the VCs are the house, and the founders are the gamblers. With TechStars vs. YC being akin to the difference of the wheel having one zero or two. Founders are still gambling... even if YC gives better odds than others.
Again, VC has it place, as does YC. I'm not saying nobody should do it - I'm saying they should do it as a fully informed decision.
>> I got into the fifth batch (s07) and remember my other startup friends staging an intervention to dissuade me from accepting because "the valuation is really bad."
> Your success and the success of YC doesn't make your friends wrong
His friends weren't telling him to leave the startup world. His friends were in the startup world themselves, and felt that there were better options out there compared to YC. In this context, his friends were absolutely wrong
This is very wrong. VCs don’t control the game at all and their economics come from the few huge outcomes where founders also have a life changing outcome. Also, gambling has a negative expected value, while a good team starting a company has a positive expected value.
Startups are a high risk game but no one says you have to play it.
> [VC] economics come from the few huge outcomes where founders also have a life changing outcome. Also, gambling has a negative expected value,
VCs get more shots on goal, so the typical outcome of a VC could approach that of the average of the industry. (It doesn't, but that's for other reasons.)
Founders can't because they have too few shots on goal.
Suppose that I'll give you a 10% chance at $100k if you pay me $1k.
If you can take that offer "enough" times, you have reasonable odds of making 5-12x on your money.
However, if 100 people take that offer once each, around 90% of them will lose their $1k. (They should pool.)
> we should acknowledge that it embraces and encourages the high-risk/high-reward model, which should be entered into with open eyes
We were W21. I would argue one of YC's main goals is to reduce the risk to founders, and enable starting startup more accessible to those with the right skills, regardless of circumstance.
Getting into YC guarantees a certain minimum amount of funding and essential support, which not everyone outside SV has access to. It's commonplace to see people quit high paying jobs, and start businesses whilst married with children (the old narrative of 20-something male dropout is no longer the norm). This all happens because YC creates a platform that reduces risk for founders.
Aw, you're a star, Andrew. I really appreciate (and admire) the sentiment and thoughtfulness. (Although I still think that I dropped a bit of an unsalvageable mess on your lap!)
As a side note since you're here, I'm super psyched that you've taken the time to share what you've learned in your new book -- it's the next one up on my list for serious study, and I couldn't be more excited about it. Based on the reviews so far, it looks like you've written something really special and that I'm in for a real treat. Can't wait :)
The mundane answer is that there's some stuff that I worry about optimizing and other stuff that I don't, and this little personal site is the latter ;).
To a lesser extent, I also didn't exactly expect this to hit frontpage, so I'd sort of assumed that the only people who would see it were people who already knew me.
I'm still not sure about the answer to that, but this has at least prompted me to give it a proper think and decide whether I want to try to appeal to "the world" or just stay focused on my own little orbit. No idea where I'll end up, but it's an interesting question, and I appreciate you giving me the nudge to take it seriously.
I don't have a proper answer (because it's a good and difficult question), but I sort of think of it as a context-dependant thing.
E.g., During a customer interview where I'm trying to understand what they've done (and predict what they'll do), I have vanishingly low confidence in their self-predicted behavior. So I prefer to try to look at what they've actually done in the past, talk to them to understand why they did it that way instead of some other way, tease out the invisible data (like what they tried or researched but didn't continue with), and then come to my own conclusion about how that's all likely to extrapolate.
But in terms of understanding and ascribing purpose to my experiences? Or understanding and empathizing with a friend or stranger? Or sending a message out into the world in a way that can stick and spread? In that case, it's kind of a subjective thing to start with, and it's all about the stories. (To clarify: not intentionally fanciful or fictional stories. Just "stories" in the sense of how we tie all these things that happen into something coherent and ordered.)
That was kind of a non-answer, and I'm sorry I can't be more helpful. I only understand a very, very small number of things. (Three, I think, although I'm working hard on understanding the fourth.) Apart from those few narrow domains, I'm just fumbling through it like everybody else.
Heya, thanks, it's a new site setup, so it's super helpful to hear about your experience with it -- I'll get that clarified. (I had nestled an about/bio link in the deep bottom-left sidenav, but it's admittedly very easy to overlook.) In the meantime, if you're still curious, the full bio thing is at: http://stuff.robfitz.com/about/
