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- Hacker News
- If you have a thing people want that you spent a decade making that isn't easily replicatable, the rest doesn't matter.
If you don't have that, the rest also doesn't matter. Unless you're obsessed with money, in which case, you are very confused and should not be guiding anybody to anything.
Guides regarding minutiae from lottery ticket winners are tiresome. I think anyone over 30 has learned what these 'guides' amount to from looking at Paul Graham.
by alexashka - > I love working with great people on problems just on the verge of the possible. This can be hard in large organizations, as large orgs tend to (unintentionally) avoid having too many good people on one team (the value for the large org is maximized by spreading out great people to guide many teams - so most teams will only have 1-2 great members).
The problem is in my opinion a little bit different: these good people would love to make the team in which they are working better, but are actually actively kept down by work colleagues and bosses. Thus, the organization does not profit from these good people, because is has no use for their greatness. Instead, this approach introduces a lot of (political) infights into the teams, where often the good people are treated as the evil troublemakers at the end.
- Maybe a simple question I didn’t see here: paying yourself a salary?
How true is it you’ll need to persist under extreme duress unable to pay yourself a salary? Relevant for us with kids / families where we provide the family’s income.
by softwaredoug - Excellent writeup from someone who clearly cares about hitting the intersection of "good for customers, good for himself and investors, and good for employees".
We'd be much better off with people thinking and acting in line with this!
by mrkiouak - I see a pattern where companies end up becoming consulting firms with a bit of proprietary tech. Then all their efforts are put into a handful of clients. The companies call them “design partners” but they’re basically clients.
Seems like a particularly risky trap for bootstrapped companies desperate for revenue. At the same time the best companies I see out there are relentlessly customer focused.
How do you draw the line between “design partner” and becoming someone’s consultant.
by softwaredoug - I resonate a lot with these reasons. I definitely know I am not the most optimal employee, but often times the people I clash with are people that I cannot respect. Either
- They think they're higher than me (you cannot collab like that)
- They want it their way, despite there being multiple ways to Rome, and will cut off the conversation with orders, not arguments
- They pretend to be technical and are only making the bureaucratic back-and-forth worse. You can definitely tell when someone knows what they're talking about
Sadly a lot of companies will reward these type of people by putting them in the high seats.
by ramon156 - > there are two separate personas that you need to “create”: The user persona and the buyer persona.
Even more important: stop using personas, start using actual people. I've experienced many startups make unforced errors by conflating people into personas. A better way is to tag people with attributes, such as specific interests, explicit concerns, tasks to be done, usage goals, learning preferences, and the like.
When you switch from personas to actual people, it opens up many more product experiments-- many of which are surprising and may even feel counter-intuitive to founders. Increase your startup chances of success by carefully connecting with your actual users.
by jph - This is all great. One thing I wanted to call out in particular is Thomas' take on investor verbal agreements. YC has a thing about this: it's called the Handshake Protocol.
The idea is: you and your investor agree on (1) an amount to be invested, and (2) a valuation or cap. Maybe you shake hands. Then, after the meeting, you memorialize the deal in an email. The deal is then socially binding: reneging on a Handshake Protocol deal is a big thing, gets noted in Bookface, whatever.
There's nothing magic or even interesting about the protocol; all it does is eliminate a form of ambiguity that professional investors are facile with and founders aren't. Investors are very good at saying "yes" and meaning "no"; they want the option to invest without the commit. If you don't put it to them directly, they'll take the option! The Handshake Protocol puts it to them directly: "are you committing?"
Most of the time, you're going to get a "no" answer to that, which is exactly what you want: clarity, so you can make decisions.
by tptacek