Comment by ZephyrBlu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZephyrBlu | Hacker News Reader

A better way to read this is "80% of a not losing strategy". The author agrees with this but buries the lede at the very end of the piece:

"Is this a fail-safe path? Of course not. Even in chess. The rest of the game does matter."

I also think his framing is somewhat misleading, since the default mindset (Despite his hedging) is that you will win (Or have higher chances) if you don't blunder.

The problem is that winning in startups is often a tail event, which means reducing blunders doesn't have much impact on the overall probability. Is reducing blunders the highest order bit?

"An entrepreneur may look at a successful diner and think that customers are there because of the hip decor on the walls. She sets up a competing diner across the street with better decor only to find that it can't pull any customers away. The highest-order bit isn't the decor. It's actually the cheap but high-quality coffee that customers care most about. Without getting the coffee right, no amount of aesthetics will beat the competition."

https://commoncog.com/highest-order-bit/

The only time this is a winning strategy is if survival has compounding effects. For startups, they tend to be default dead.

This memo by Howard Marks explores the case when survival is actually a winning strategy:

"If we avoid the losers, the winners will take care of themselves"

https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/memo/fewer-losers-or...

Reducing blunders is obviously good in any situation, but is it the dealbreaker for startups? It always depends on the context.

> The problem is that winning in startups is often a tail event, which means reducing blunders doesn't have much impact on the overall probability.

Maybe you could compare it to playing chess against a much higher rated player. In that sense, minimizing your weaknesses is still useful. And looking at the "blunders" the author lists we can definitely say that making these errors is worse than not making them.

One place where this analogy breaks down is that chess is a zero-sum perfect information game. Business is neither zero-sum (competition can encourage innovation and better products) nor perfect information. In chess, we can calculate for each of the candidate moves and have theoretically perfect knowledge of the future state of the board. In business and many other situations, this kind of thing isn't possible. The upshot is that several of the "blunders" the author lists may only turn out to be blunders after the fact.

Yes I know it's useful. The last line of my comment said that: "Reducing blunders is obviously good in any situation, but is it the dealbreaker for startups? It always depends on the context".

"is it useful?" usually isn't a very interesting question, because a lot of things are obviously useful and yet don't have much of an impact on results.

When playing against much better player there are two possible strategies in practice:

1. try to simpifly position as much as possible and hope for a draw (and inevitably lose the endgame due to playing too passively);

2. complicate position so much that neither you nor your opponent can calculate or understand it, then hope that your opponent will mess up before you will.

Take from that what you will.

Have to agree with this sentiment, and I'm surprised it's not getting more traction. If startups are like chess, they are like very low level chess because the game was just invented. Nobody knows what a blunder is yet, many will go undetected, and worrying about playing perfect chess will probably outrun your runway.

As the author of the article, I really like your counter-point here.

Because I do agree -- in all startups most "stuff" is being executed poorly (if at all), with issues everywhere, and yet when you get the right 1-2 things _really_ right, that can overwhelm all those problems.

So, perhaps the charitable view is that this piece is a fun way of getting at the usual ideas of things which derisk a startup -- e.g. talking to customers rather than coding in a hole -- and indeed many of these things will surely be a net-positive.

And yet, the "80% of winning" might indeed be correct for amateur chess and amateur tennis, yet it's not "80%" for startups, and that bit is rhetorical.

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