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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

You still need to be sharply realistic about your own ideas, though. Blindly charging ahead with the first idea that occurs to you, as an entrepreneur, is probably not going to work no matter how strongly you believe the world will get there. Neither will not charging ahead at all, assuming that because the last 10 ideas failed the next one will too.

Many years ago on HN, I think before he even became part of YC, Paul Buchheit said "You have to be arrogant enough to believe that everybody else is wrong, but humble enough to believe that you may be wrong too." That about sums it up.

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Yeah. Entrepreneurs need to know that the average response they get in the stage seed is all about social proof. When you look like a struggling guy saying something crazy, the public is going to treat you that way. You're going to get that all the way up until you look like a rich guy, and then they'll be begging to know what you did to get there and trying to copy it.

This means that public response to the bare idea is never a good barometer, and you have to look to other things for data about whether it's going to be successful enough. This requires rigorous study and brutally honest introspection.

Don't get bent out of shape if people don't understand or respect what you're doing, but don't assume you're invincible or automatically right. Some wanna-be entrepreneurs waste their entire adult lives starting failing business after failing business, assuming that starting a business is the key to success, and that any idea they have is intrinsically valuable. Don't do this.

> Blindly charging ahead with the first idea that occurs to you, as an entrepreneur, is probably not going to work no matter how strongly you believe the world will get there.

Statically, you're just as likely to be right with the first idea as the one you're sat on for months

Sure, but statistically, if each idea has a 10% chance of working, you're significantly more likely to have one good idea if you test 10 ideas (1 - 0.9^10 = 65%) than if you test one idea (10%). And even if you work really hard at that idea, so that its chance of success goes up to 20-30%, you still would be better with the 10 quick tests.

In practice, that usually means do the minimum you can to verify the key assumptions of each idea, back out and try something different if any key assumption doesn't hold, and if you find something that has a good chance of working, stick with it.

I'm sorry, that sound a bit absurd to me. What did you mean?

If you sit on an idea for months, then that means it has survived a a good deal of reasonability testing and careful analysis, as you have been mentally prodding and poking the idea for a while, and haven't found a good reason to abandon it yet.

While the idea you just came up with has been through absolutely no deep analysis, by definition.

The subconscious mind is incredibly powerful, but it needs time to do its work.

Of course, slowly acquired self-delusion and emotional entanglement regarding the idea is a risk. But this varies significantly among people, can be somewhat defended against, and doesn't negate my main point.

Well said.

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