= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
RichardKennaway comments on Open Thread: July 2010 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (653)
Paul Graham has written extensively on Startups and what is required. A highly focused team of 2-4 founders, who must be willing to admit when their business model or product is flawed, yet enthused enough about it to pour their energy into it.
Steve Blank has also written about the Customer Development process which he sees as paralleling the Product Development cycle. The idea is to get empirical feedback.by trying to sell your product from the get-go, as soon as you have something minimal but useful. Then you test it for scalability. Eventually you have strong empirical evidence to present to potential investors, aka "traction".
These strike me as good examples of applied rationality. I wonder what percentage of Less Wrong readers would succeed as startup founders?
I wonder what percentage have ever tried?
That at least partly depends on what you define as a "startup". Graham's idea of one seems to be oriented towards "business that will expand and either be bought out by a major company or become one", vs. "enterprise that builds personal wealth for the founder(s)".
By Graham's criteria, Joel Spolsky's company, Fog Creek, would not have been considered a startup, for example, nor would any business I've ever personally run or been a shareholder of.
[Edit: I should say, "or been a 10%+ shareholder of"; after all, I've held shares in public companies, some of which were undoubtedly startups!]
At the most general, creating your own business (excluding the sort of "contract" status in which the only difference with an employee is in the accounting details) and making a good living from it.
At the most narrow, starting up a business that, as Guy Kawasaki puts it, solves the money problem for the rest of your life.
Maybe a survey would be interesting, either as a thread here or on somewhere like surveymonkey tha would allow anonymous responses. "1. Are you an employee/own your own business/living on a pile of money of your own/a dependent/other? 2. Which of those states would you prefer to be in? 3. If the answers to 1 and 2 are different, are you doing anything about it?"
I can't get back to this until this evening (it is locally 10am as I write). Suggestions welcome.
You need at least one more item in there - "retired", i.e. with passive income that exceeds one's costs of living. Different from "living on a pile of money", insofar as there might still be things you can't afford.
I wonder what percentage are even inclined to try?