= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Vaniver comments on Who Wants To Start An Important Startup? - 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 (407)
I believe there are results (linked by Hanson recently?) showing that cofounders do better when they're selected for merit reasons (i.e. this guy was the best coder we found) rather than identity reasons (i.e. we both went to the same university). It's also relatively easy to get to know people quickly.
Flakes as cofounders, however, is a critical error that must be consciously avoided. I like your mention of previous projects- whenever someone tells me they think we'd make a good founding pair, I try to look for a small project that we can ship in a few months that will give us a taste of how we work together. I've avoided a few mistakes that way.
Something I learned from watching a nearby train wreck: The emotionally dominant person in a partnership should not be a compulsive spender.
Indeed.
More general lesson: look at emotional factors about the founders, not just the abstract question of whether the business would be likely to succeed if it's run by sensible people.
When the idea of that business was first floated, the thing that made me edgiest was actually that the person the storefront was bought from and who had a similar business seemed awfully eager to sell.
This have to be dome implicit or explicit? Creating a startup with someone who just met is I assume, is made primarily for technical reasons, and after that, for emotional ones. Someone will say to a person they are technically prepared but not emotionally?
That's an interesting question. I might have been reasonably blunt about the situation to the less dominant person if I'd seen the problems coming. On the other hand, she was the less dominant person, and I don't know whether I could have said anything general that would have helped. If I'd known the outcome of that business in clairvoyant detail (lost money, lost friendship), I think it might have registered, but there was no reason to think I would have known that much.
After it all fell apart, I read in The Millionaire Woman Next Door that it was a sort of business (gift shop) which is especially likely to go under. That might have been useful information. As I recall, the book has bankruptcy rates for different sorts of businesses.
In retrospect, I don't think they were technically prepared, either-- but I didn't know enough to evaluate that.
In general, it's hard to get good advice.