TE
科技回声
首页24小时热榜最新最佳问答展示工作
GitHubTwitter
首页

科技回声

基于 Next.js 构建的科技新闻平台,提供全球科技新闻和讨论内容。

GitHubTwitter

首页

首页最新最佳问答展示工作

资源链接

HackerNews API原版 HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 科技回声. 版权所有。

Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics

46 点作者 rjyoungling超过 4 年前

11 条评论

OliverGilan超过 4 年前
&gt; To validate your hypotheses as quickly as possible with as little money as possible and the try and create experiments with asymmetrical risk.<p>&gt; Because the world is so complex, you’ll often have an answer faster by just building some prototype of the hypothesis you want to test.<p>&gt; If it catches on, you can always scale later.<p>I think one of the coolest real-world examples of this in practice is how Facebook runs thousands of mini-experiments with different users. Facebook is known for having one of the best data science departments in the world and when they want to change or add a feature of the website they do it for a small subset of users and see what the response is like. If the users seem to like it they can repeat the experiment with a larger subset of users. If the users don&#x27;t like the change there&#x27;s no big risk because only a few users were exposed.<p>Contrast this to how Snapchat completely changed their UI for nearly every user all at once and got a ton of negative feedback for it. That was a complete UI overhaul which is different than FB and their hundreds of mini-changes but the idea is similar.
评论 #24962396 未加载
评论 #24962548 未加载
评论 #24963693 未加载
评论 #24963079 未加载
projektfu超过 4 年前
Please consider trying this:<p>Paragraph 1: Topic paragraph, introduce topic and question.<p>Paragraph 2: Summarize argument.<p>Paragraphs 3-n: Topic&#x2F;assertion sentence. Support assertion&#x2F;argument. Last sentence may summarize support. These paragraphs should follow the overall structure but sometimes you will need more than one paragraph to support something you suggested in the second paragraph.<p>Paragraph n+1: Review conclusion and some salient corollaries.<p>Paragraphs n+m: Discussion of implications of conclusion.<p>I read through paragraph after paragraph and I have no idea what your argument was, where it was going. If you have lots of single-sentence paragraphs, you&#x27;re probably frustrating and confusing your reader.
评论 #24965972 未加载
评论 #24967156 未加载
yumraj超过 4 年前
Business plans and financial models are useless, yet they are not.<p>They force the entrepreneur to put some level of deep thought into the entire endeavor and create some sort of initial hypothesis.<p>Even if it proves to be entirely incorrect in future, it provides a very good starting point, that you can keep iterating upon as you learn more.<p>Most of the times you don&#x27;t know what you don&#x27;t know and the business plans and financial models force you to think the entire thing through and start getting a feel for what you know and what all you perhaps don&#x27;t know.<p>Edit: to be very clear, I’m not suggesting that one develops an old style 50 page business plan. I’m simply suggesting that one must have at least a basic understating of the business, the need, the opportunity, the revenue model and so on. It’s a business after all.
评论 #24963118 未加载
评论 #24963719 未加载
_Microft超过 4 年前
Has anyone discovered a way to bring the content into a form that is halfway bearable to read? Neither zoom nor reader mode of Firefox helps.<p><i>Edit:</i> before you spend time trying this: it does not have a proper printing stylesheet either.
评论 #24962904 未加载
评论 #24962694 未加载
评论 #24963142 未加载
ISL超过 4 年前
It is difficult to believe that a business plan is useless. It provides a framework for evaluating a business and its progress.<p>If the plan is wrong, an underlying assumption is incorrect.
评论 #24963132 未加载
评论 #24964798 未加载
dvt超过 4 年前
Apart from the God-awful layout, the article is pretty light on anything useful or actionable.<p>&gt; I need merely two variables [...] resulting in a simple yet accurate model.<p>It&#x27;s accurate-enough, but not <i>accurate</i> accurate. This is why things like quantum gravity are being researched. Maybe I&#x27;m looking too deeply into this analogy, but I think it&#x27;s a really bad one.<p>&gt; In highly complex systems such as business, things like butterfly effects can cause massive distortions rendering our models flawed.<p>Most businesses fail due to a lack of product-market fit. This has nothing to do with chaos theory or initial conditions. In fact, I&#x27;d say if you have product-market fit, the market tends to be very lenient of initial conditions.<p>&gt; In order to perfectly predict the weather, you’d need incredible amounts of data and an equally overwhelming number of data points and then somehow synthesize that into an accurate prediction.<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure that we&#x27;re still not sure if you can even actually predict the weather -- like, ever (we aren&#x27;t sure if Navier–Stokes is smoothly solvable in 3D). All these physics analogies are just shallow and inaccurate.<p>&gt; It’s easy for the takeaway to be human behavior is difficult, business is complex, all data is meaningless, we can’t apply a scientific process at all, let’s wing it. And while there are people who lean heavily on intuition (Gary Vaynerchuk comes to mind) I believe if that’s the takeaway, the pendulum has swung too far out of whack.<p>I&#x27;m not sure why this is &quot;out of whack&quot; -- to me, this seems like a perfectly valid strategy. As I get older, I value intuition more and more. There&#x27;s a reason Warren Buffet&#x27;s moniker is the &quot;Oracle of Omaha.&quot;
评论 #24963287 未加载
jswrenn超过 4 年前
If the concept of ergodicity introduced here intrigues you, I highly recommend reading the Nature paper &quot;The Ergodicity Problem In Economics&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41567-019-0732-0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41567-019-0732-0</a>
评论 #24963156 未加载
justiceforsaas超过 4 年前
The basic premise of this article seems to be that, yes, entrepreneurship is not physics, mainly because human behavior is harder to model than things like motion and forces. So the TLDR (according to the author) is: &quot;The point is not to ‘not fail’, the point is to fail quickly and fail often in non-lethal ways so you have pragmatic, real-world knowledge to help you guide your decisions.&quot;<p>I liked the part where they also talk about &quot;asymmetrical risk&quot; and creating experiments where you may risk 10% of your capital, but if that thing works, it will double your business. I think this applies to all aspects of entrepreneurship, not just building the product. For example, I write about acquisition channels that consistently work for founders [1] and found the most successful ones place &quot;small bets&quot; that can potentially have &quot;big results&quot;. Like mentioning their idea in a FB community where they could get 1000s of potentially interested people. Time invested: 10 minutes. Results: 1000+ potential users. Not bad.<p>Nassim Taleb also talks about this &quot;asymmetrical risk&quot; concept [2] and a lot of his &quot;Antifragile&quot; book was about it. I&#x27;m really curious who originally came with this concept (it seems to go by different names, the OP calls it &quot;asymmetrical risk&quot;, Taleb calls it &quot;convexity), and it seems the first person who came up with it was someone from the finance industry decades ago.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firstpayingusers.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firstpayingusers.com</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.advisorperspectives.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2013&#x2F;07&#x2F;16&#x2F;nassim-nicholas-taleb-to-prevail-in-an-uncertain-world-get-convex" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.advisorperspectives.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2013&#x2F;07&#x2F;16&#x2F;nass...</a>
评论 #24963183 未加载
gist超过 4 年前
The OP &#x27;studies what makes companies successful&#x27;. The issue is you are only studying the lucky sperm ones (if we take that sentence at face value; maybe &#x27;they&#x27; do) as opposed to the complete set of companies. And also you&#x27;d never be sure anyway since people are connected to people and you&#x27;d never know how a connection resulted in success (vs. some other factor). It&#x27;s an art and luck it&#x27;s not (as a point was made) &#x27;science&#x27;.<p>Now that said some thing can work to insure success or make it more likely.<p>Take the author here. His firm has &#x27;feynman&#x27; in their name. On HN who from what I can tell worships Feynman (I didn&#x27;t even know who he was prior to HN) that will work. In another place it would have the same impact of using &#x27;warby&#x27; in &#x27;warby&#x27; parker. Meaning good but not stop the presses. (It&#x27;s clever but some might also say it&#x27;s annoying to use a cheap trick like that not the same either (it&#x27;s all nuance) as calling your bagel place &#x27;einstein bagels&#x27; (there is one or was one).<p>I have been &#x27;studying&#x27; (you could say) both successful and failed companies for probably longer than most HN readers have been around. Best I will say it&#x27;s hard work, luck, and of course timing as the major factors. Separately they don&#x27;t teach any of that when I was in of those really good business schools that people would die to go to.
评论 #24963675 未加载
arbol超过 4 年前
I found the layout of this article too annoying to finish reading it.
FeeJai超过 4 年前
This reminds me of a CNN video I saw today [1].<p>Maybe this is what makes the difference between statisticians trying to predict the election and the method used by &quot;Trafalgar Group&quot; who try to understand each states regulations and specifics to make rule based predictions, instead of extrapolating from a big pool of data. In two days we will know who was right.<p>[1] Pollster who predicted Trump&#x27;s 2016 win makes 2020 prediction: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0BOhRCeoMzM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0BOhRCeoMzM</a>
评论 #24963209 未加载