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Comment by gpcz | Hacker News Reader

"The same thing will happen if you're running a startup, of course. If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble."

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

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"Something must be done, and this is something". I don't really see the evidence that the 'odd' startups are more likely to succeed, and even if that is the true it doesn't obviously lend itself to the strategy of 'do something odd intentionally to increase your chances of success'

> I don't really see the evidence that the 'odd' startups are more likely to succeed

Successful startups are ipso facto odd. It's not unreasonable to assume that that's correlated with doing odd things.

> it doesn't obviously lend itself to the strategy of 'do something odd intentionally to increase your chances of success'

I'd say it fairly naturally suggests that in a startup you should be pursuing high-variance strategies i.e. taking risks (indeed I'd say that's already accepted wisdom for startups). Following through on your contrarian thoughts more often than you would in a more established company makes sense.

> It's not unreasonable to assume that that's correlated with doing odd things.

I don't think this logically follows: it is odd to win the lottery but being weird while scratching your ticket doesn't make you more likely to win.

But even if we accept "successful startups did something odd, and that was responsible for their success", it seems more likely that successful startups found a couple key odd things which helped them succeed, but that startups which specifically deliberately opt into doing odd things without reason are more likely to fail than average. Most odd things are odd because they are bad, at any given decision taking the odd path is more likely to lead to failure except for a few golden odd opportunities that you have to try to identify somehow.

I guess it also depends on the goal of the startup, if you're buying a unicorn lottery ticket with your streaming video startup then leaning into increasing variance might be what you want. If you accept "lifestyle startup run rate" as a success it seems more likely to succeed doing maximally boring things.

Successful startups don't necessarily have to be _operationally_ odd; they could just choose an odd domain and then operate in the most boring, corporate way imaginable. There are so many underserved markets that the larger players either don't see as worthwhile or don't see at all.

I think the point was that oddness is a necessary condition for survival; that doesn't make it sufficient.

Does the failure have anything to do with the tech stack? Or is it just that business is hard and they often sell stuff nobody wants?

This seems like total nonsense to me. Compare:

"If you do everything the way the average runner does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you won't win a race... So if you want to win a race, you'd better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble."

Obviously the typical way runners win races isn't by doing something "odd", it's by combining natural talent, normal advice about training, and a ton of effort, more effectively than the other runners. Why would that be less true about successful startups?

We understand how to run faster, through a combination of hard work and favorable morphology. We're don't understand what will make a startup successful. But we do know that easy and obvious ways to make money are already being done by someone else. If you want to do something new, you have to do something different.

But I also appreciate the viewpoint that you need to be strategic about what you do differently. Buying solutions to problems you aren't actually trying to solve is very reasonable.

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