Founding Stories Are Myths

207 点作者 howitworks大约 7 年前

19 条评论

jfasi大约 7 年前

The author is criticizing a genre of narrative that I like to call "career porn." Consider the similarities between "how I started this company" type stories and actual porn:* It depicts something everyone fantasizes about and offers a quick if ultimately unsatisfying release. Who doesn't imagine themselves building something amazing and being idolized by magazines and the general public?* It happens in an unrealistic sort of magical fairy land, often in the founder's own hazy, romanticized recollections of their past.* It only shows beautiful companies/people. You don't need to found a space exploration company to be happy just like you don't need to be with a model.* It offers no real guidance for how to achieve what it's depicting, leaving viewers confused at best and frustrated at worst. This article touches on the fact that people seem to think all they need is an idea, when that's not what it takes.* It's most popular with those who are either frustrated with their careers/romantic lives, or are otherwise trying to satisfy a need they feel isn't being met. This one is a little shaky because plenty of people enjoy actual porn in healthy ways, so forgive me for the stretch.The comparisons go on and on. How healthy your relationship with each is depends on how much exposure to the realities of each field you have had and how mature you are as a person/profession.

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rdtsc大约 7 年前

This is how most myths are born - by winners retro-actively rewriting history and including things like predestination, God's vision in their dreams (see <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Milvian_Bridge" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Milvian_Bridge</a>), being The Chosen One, etc as the reason for their success.Today of course those are not appealing, and just sound crazy, so it is something like "I was just returning a late movie", "I was coming back from my yoga massage and had this idea...", etc.The important part is that only after winning and looking back the history is rewritten. The boring things like plain luck, or maybe persistence, or enough resources (say because of inheriting money for example) to try some business idea multiple times, failing and try again until one sticks is just not a cool story.Even more interesting is that not just the myth is born but anything the company did, all practices, rituals etc end up promoted as the cause of success. Anyone notice this? It's the cargo-culting of methodologies. Successful startup did some crazy development practice, but as soon as they become popular everyone starts copying that thinking "surely that is the main cause of their success". What if the successful startup could be have been even more successful without that practice, or maybe it had no impact at all.How about copying personality traits. There was once a CTO I knew. He fancies himself to be like Steve Jobs. Except instead of copying persistence, intelligence, attention to details and design, understanding what would work and what won't for users, he just copied the part of being an asshole. The idea was that Jobs was an asshole, and look at Apple, that's how I'll have to act to make my company have the same success. It ended as well as you'd expect. Developers who didn't want to deal with that simply left and projects started tanking.

radmuzom大约 7 年前

Having worked in a startup which eventually went on to become an unicorn (I left very early), I can attest to this personally. As a company becomes more successful, the narrative portrayed in media changes to present a good inspirational story - it never presents the countless challenges which eventually leads to its success.

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sharno大约 7 年前

It doesn't just stop at the successful startup stories. It's the same style of stories we face in products successful stories, job offers and love stories. examples:REGAINE (hair loss treatment) only works for some people, not everyone and if you use it consistently twice a day for the rest of your life.A job at Google/Facebook/haskell job requires you to study day and night for algorithms/functional programming/implement a lot of random programs to get a hold of all of that.This couple is in love for 50 years, and they ignore how they had lots of fights and had to have lots of compromises from each of them, with a lot of discipline to show care for each other to maintain this love over the years.These folks got amazing new houses/entered StanfordU because they worked non stop for the past few years while not spending on other luxury items or they will work tirelessly for the rest of their live to pay the debt.Life is a grind

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fallingfrog大约 7 年前

Let's not ignore the fact that Sam Walton had enough cash to buy a department store at the age of 27. That helps too.

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k1ns大约 7 年前

This is why I love the How I Built This podcast. It tells the story of a successful founder from childhood to present day. It discusses early successes and failures that ultimately led to that person becoming an "overnight success" decades later. It doesn't try to build this narrative of them being one-hit wonders, it tells the truth. The truth, which isn't nearly as sexy as people would like, is that building a business takes time, hard work, and resilience.

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tc大约 7 年前

Just as there's only one hero story, at a high level, there's only one founder story.TLB described this archetype some years ago:<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16523609" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16523609</a>

trvlngwlbry大约 7 年前

I don't think it's fair to use that one small piece of Netflix lore as the counter example to the point of the article. I'd categorize Reed Hastings as having one of the more long-term views/strategies in tech and business in general, and he would be the first to say that Netflix became what it has become not because of the lightbulb moment, but because of the long slog they've endured to get where they are. Using that Netflix example comes across as clickbaity.Not to mention, that particular Netflix myth has nothing to do with the importance of having a lightbulb moment. The point is to provide a north star for the company about the importance of always keeping the customer/user experience top of mind. By charging late fees that exceeded the value of a video, Blockbuster had lost sight of the customer experience, which contributed to Blockbuster's downfall. Meanwhile, maintaining its intense focus on the customer experience helped Netflix navigate what was an impressive shift from mailing DVDs to streaming video online.

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kens大约 7 年前

Walmart gets a lot of flack for moving into small towns and ruining the existing stores. But the 1969 New York Times excerpt in the article mentions how Walmart was dominant in small, rural towns but was facing competition as "the industry's big guns are moving in". ("Big guns" being K-Mart, Gibson and Arlans. K-Mart declared bankruptcy in 2002, Gibson in 1996, and Arlan's in 1973.)It's kind of mind-blowing to think that in 1969 Walmart was the local store needing to fight off the big chains. But now it's the exact opposite.

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netman21大约 7 年前

I always like the EDS founding story. Ross Perot started EDS with $1,000. They never mention he was a multimillionaire from being a top salesman for IBM. Big deal that he opened a bank account with $1,000.

TheWrongGuy大约 7 年前

Great point that these narratives are usually self-mythologizing and mostly untrue. Success is more than just a “eureka” moment where it all comes together. It is also more than the alternative that you present here, wherein the person succeeds purely by outworking the competition. A much more complete — and frankly, more interesting — picture of success would include the ideas, the hard work, and also explain how Walton’s early stores were financed by his father in law Leland Stanford Robson (who often paid his son-in-law’s bills, sometimes even without Walton’s knowledge), that he was active in Missouri’s fraternity communities, was a member of QEBH, the UoM secret society that also includes several past and current state governors as well as one of the founders of Kinder Morgan. If your aim is to demythologize success and present a more accurate view of the the path one must walk to become massively successful, isn’t it kind of misleading to omit Walton’s network of powerful family, friends, and benefactors?

johnmax大约 7 年前

I would add that the founder stories we read about are, even if true, only the 5% which turned interesting.95% may have been boring failures

TheBiv大约 7 年前

/r/entrepreneur thread about the same post:<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/80f0c3/why_you_should_ignore_every_founders_story_about/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/80f0c3/why_yo...</a>

cortesoft大约 7 年前

I think it is a bit unfair to call them myths; they are narratives. All stories are narratives, you can't simply dump EVERY fact about a situation. There are infinite facts and details about how a company came to be, and telling the full story is impossible. Instead, we look at the story, pick a narrative we want to tell, and tell it.You HAVE to do this when telling a story, and all stories do this. While it is true that believing the narrative tells the full story is incorrect, it is also incorrect to say these stories are 'myths'. They are just one part of the full story.

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tomc1985大约 7 年前

Either someone told me, or I read somewhere in a book, about how these things are called "business lies" and that it is supposedly OK to do in the name of making moneyNo harm no foul if everyone feels better about themselves right?/s

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gowld大约 7 年前

<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_myth#Founding_myth" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_myth#Founding_myth</a>

skummetmaelk大约 7 年前

Echoing PG: <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html</a>

Froyoh大约 7 年前

I got drawn in by the clickbait title

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justherefortart大约 7 年前

One of my bosses had a chance to buy 25k in Wal-Mart stock or bonds. He chose the bonds because they were less risky.He sold his company for ~17m in the late 90s (so he did fine). In the early 2000s he asked me for stock advice since he kept blowing 60k on penny stocks. I said put 10% of your money on Apple. I'm not 100% sure what's going on but it seems to be a pretty good bet.Wish I'd followed my own advice instead of doing my first self funded startup (2003). I made about 4-5x my investment. Didn't realize how paltry that would look compared to my Apple advice :-)As someone that's on startup #8 (about to fire my partner). They're never easy, they are fun (and stressful at times).