All the Startup Advice You Read is Wrong

Yes, there is a lot of cargo culting going on. People tend to put a lot of stock in the pecularities of successful companies and influential people in a (misguided) effort to imitate them. A better way to copy success would probably be to do some dry analysis, as compared to another round of "5 habits of highly successful people" or "what would Steve Jobs do". But I would like to argue that the best thing to do is probably to follow your own visions and constantly debug what doesn't work.<p>I believe the myth of the A player is also part of that particular cargo cult. Most competent people don't fit into a single category. Competence isn't a global integer value. An employee's ability to contribute depends on many factors and can change dramatically with the situation. Companies claiming to "hire only A players" are not getting this.

Luck: Success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions.<p>The most important thing you can know about startups is that it's a game of luck. You can control certain aspects of luck by being at the right spot at the right time, knowing the right people and keeping your startup alive. But in the end it's largely luck and contrary to popular belief it can't be reverse engineered.<p>Basically: location, connections and timing.<p>What's better than reading blog posts about start up advice is finding some founders that have been successful and others that are in the same boat as you and talking with them regularly.<p>You can be lacking in all 3 categories and still be successful. But it's going to be much harder and the odds are stacked against you even more.<p>You can be proficient in all 3 categories and still fail.

<i>How about the least-controversial and most common advice ever given: “Only hire A players.” Here’s when that doesn’t apply: When you can’t hire A players.</i><p>Unless if your company is terrible, the problem will never be that you can't hire A players, it will be that you can't find them fast enough. That said, the compromise in waiting for only A players will appear to be to slow growth. In my opinion, though, the quality of people is so important to an organization's long term success that what will look like a compromise will actually be a tradeoff between short term growth and long term growth.

Why have there been so many medium.com links on HN lately? Is this marketing or just a natural result of medium's growth?

Might I suggest a third reason: Maintaining your sanity.<p>Not just in terms of remembering that there are other people out there struggling alongside you in the entrepreneurship game, but also in giving you a modicum of control over your next steps. While I don't believe success is completely up to luck, a lot of the when and how is completely out of your hands. Reading on startups often gives me concrete, actionable advice. This ties into Ev's first point but it's not just the ideas, it's the feeling that I have a key, non-random role to play every step of the way. If you're the type of person who needs the world to be a certain way to be happy, knowing that you have a chance to make it that way keeps you on the right side of crazy.

I think the most important bias is "novelty bias". Lots of people want to convince you they have a unique thought process so they can sell some books or interest investors or position themselves as a "thought leader". Nothing wrong with this in theory, but in practice I assume people are speaking with far more confidence than they should have.

Startup advice ! = How Google did it.<p>I read a ton of startup advice, but I consciously filter out the corner cases like Google and Facebook. I'm a lot more interested in how the thousands of less famous companies have succeeded (or failed).

The funny thing is that the article at the bottom suggested for read was "Formula for Entrepreneurial Success" by Ev Williams.

point 2 agreed. Its better to hire B player who love your idea than hire A players who thinks your idea is interesting.