Comment by lutusp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lutusp | Hacker News Reader

A quote: "Entrepreneur: I just wanted to touch base with you and see if you are taking on new startups right now."

"Me: Can you send me a paragraph and I’ll tell you if it’s something we’d be interested in."

"Entrepreneur: It’s difficult to accurately describe the company, myself, and everything else in a single paragraph. To write something so small but somehow include every important aspect is near impossible, if not impossible. My company is too complex to be described in a single paragraph."

A recipe for failure. This touches on multiple issues, the most important of which is an economy of expression.

Anyone can say his project is too complex for mere mortals to grasp, including people who don't have anything worth describing. But as Einstein said, “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”

Yesterday I saw an article entitled something like "90 things I learned while launching startups." After I got done laughing, I replied that if the author wanted people to read what he had to say, that was about 80 things too many, that he needed to prioritize, but to put it mildly, this wasn't welcome advice.

You're conflating two entirely different ideas. The point here is that you should be able to explain an idea briefly if you understand it well. In the other article you reference, the author had 90 different ideas to relate. Each point in that article was indeed brief; many of those 90 points were only one sentence.

I read your comment in the other article, and I agree with the consensus that it wasn't helpful (to be brutally honest). There is no hard fast law that says you can never learn more than 10 useful things running a company. In fact, I'd say that assumption would be grossly false. There is also no law saying that out of 90 things learned, 10 things will magically be much more important than the other 80, such that they could be separated and treated with more emphasis.

Your suggestion to the previous author was to separate out 10 of the ideas, and to put the other 80 in a post-script or follow-up. But why? To make it more link-baity? Your suggestion came across as, "Hey, you could get more views if you pandered your writing (nay, your thought process) more to the lowest common denominator of reader."

However, clearly the author a) had no interest in doing that, and b) didn't need to, since they made it to front page of HN!

Frankly, I agree with that author. If I have something useful to say about running my company, then my target audience is people who run their company seriously and who make it their lifelong mission to learn. And those are typically not the people who only read Top-10 lists.

Furthermore, the author's article stood out and was very effective, because, how many 90-point lists do you see posted to HN? In this case, being different worked beautifully for the author.

I'm sure you can see the irony in suggesting to a successful entrepreneur that they might have been more successful in some successful endeavor, had they instead done it like everyone else.

> Your suggestion to the previous author was to separate out 10 of the ideas, and to put the other 80 in a post-script or follow-up. But why?

So more people will read what he has to say. The basic principle of journalism, online and offline, is "don't bury your lead."

> Furthermore, the author's article stood out and was very effective, because, how many 90-point lists do you see posted to HN?

Yes, and how many atheists run for president? I suggest you're making a point other than the one you think.

> I'm sure you can see the irony in suggesting to a successful entrepreneur that they might have been more successful in some successful endeavor, had they instead done it like everyone else.

It seems you missed the irony that being a successful entrepreneur doesn't automatically make one a successful writer. I wasn't criticizing the OP's accomplishments, but his way of expressing them.

By your reasoning, Steve Jobs' business successes would have automatically made him a nice person to know, and/or a persuasive writer. But it seems those corollaries are false -- and the first I know to be false from personal experience.

But he isn't trying to be a successful journalist/writer. He was offering advice to other entrepreneurs who would probably take his advice over a journalist's any day of the week.

Being persuasive comes in many forms. You can be a good writer or you can be successful, both of those things get you attention. Being successful might even be better since your words are backed with hard-earned credibility. There's a reason why all sports shows nearly always have a former player/coach as an analyst.

> But he isn't trying to be a successful journalist/writer. He was offering advice to other entrepreneurs who would probably take his advice over a journalist's any day of the week.

Yes, and in that case, he should have been open to the common-sense writing advice of a professional. But no, not so. Apparently he believed being a successful entrepreneur makes one successful at everything else by fiat.

> Being persuasive comes in many forms.

Not in writing. At risk of posing a tautology, persuasive writing depends, not on the writer or the topic, but on the writing.

> There's a reason why all sports shows nearly always have a former player/coach as an analyst.

That ought to have disqualified Ernest Hemingway from writing about bullfighting. But Hemingway could write.

> Being successful might even be better since your words are backed with hard-earned credibility.

Under those circumstances, with an assured audience, he should have had the courage to offer ten points rather than 90.

"I am sorry I have had to write you such a long letter, but I did not have time to write you a short one" -- Blaise Pascal

It seems you missed the irony that being a successful entrepreneur doesn't automatically make one a successful writer. I wasn't criticizing the OP's accomplishments, but his way of expressing them. By your reasoning, Steve Jobs' business successes would have automatically made him a nice person to know, and/or a persuasive writer. But it seems those corollaries are false -- and the first I know to be false from personal experience.

That's not at all what I was saying. The irony I was referring to was that this particular author became a successful entrepreneur by doing things differently. They then wrote an article explaining the things they did differently to be successful. The article itself became quite successful (as seen by the support it received on HN, Twitter, etc), in part thanks to the fact that it too was different ("90 points" vs the hundred "top 10" posts I see in blogs every week). And then to get the suggestion that they could be more successful if they were to follow the trend that everyone else does, seems to miss the point entirely.

I was referring to the fact that the article was actually quite poetic in the way it described how to be successful by doing things differently, in a way that was quite different for such an article. The very thing that helped make this article successful was in how it was different than the mainstream top-10 articles.

The suggestion that it instead be formatted the same as every other article in order to be more successful, would have made it stand out less and be easily forgotten. In the author's and most readers' opinions, that suggestion would have likely made it less successful. And that is the definition of irony.

According to wikiquote, Einstein never said that:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

So it seems. Thanks!

Clearly, you didn't even look at the article yesterday, nor any of the comments nor any of the replies to your run and gun comment. That 90 item list was near universally praised.

There are times when people need to expand their attention to read more than a page of writing.

Not everything can be explained so succinctly. Books exist for a reason.

I agree that people need to to be able to explain their companies and what they do in one paragraph - at a high level. But that is a skill that is easily honed by an afternoon of thought... no need to be so dismissive.

> Clearly, you didn't even look at the article yesterday ...

The problem isn't that I didn't read the article. The problem is that I did. The author should have been renamed Captain Obvious.

> That 90 item list was near universally praised.

I wasn't the only one to point out that it had 80 points too many, or words to that effect.

> Not everything can be explained so succinctly. Books exist for a reason.

But it wasn't a book, it was an online article.

> But that is a skill that is easily honed by an afternoon of thought... no need to be so dismissive.

My post wasn't dismissive, it was critical, and the criticism was legitimate.

I think the point that Einstein was making that you should be able to explain it to a 6 year old but not necessarily expect him to understand your explanation. I would love to hear him explain why e=mc^2 to a 6 year old and then quiz the 6 year old.

> I think the point that Einstein was making that you should be able to explain it to a 6 year old but not necessarily expect him to understand your explanation.

Perhaps, but (a) I don't think so and (b) we'll never know for sure. :)

I'm pretty sure the point he was making is that most scientific ideas are accessible to concise explanation with no loss of comprehension. Of course, he said this before the time of quantum theories, to which he strenuously objected for the remainder of his life.

> I would love to hear him explain why e=mc^2 to a 6 year old and then quiz the 6 year old.

e = mc^2 is actually pretty easy to explain, if one accepts the premise of energy conservation. But I agree that the read-back from the average six-year-old would at best be mildly entertaining. From a truly bright six-year-old, I would hope to hear something like, "Because all energy has to be somewhere, potential energy makes things heavier."

e=mc^2 is the sort form of an equation that includes velocity. Getting a 6 year old to understand energy takes a sloped hill and tossing balls up it. The harder you throw the ball the farther up the hill it goes and the faster it is when it rolls back. To talk about mass take a heaver ball and get the idea that how far up the hill something is * how heavy it is gives some idea how much energy it has at the end. Say knocking stuff over or hitting a wall of sand.

Then describe mass as having energy like a being on top of a vary big hill. If you converted a little bit of mass into energy you have a really fast ball. Like a big ball that's 1/2 way down the really big hill.

This of course assumes an intelligent 6 year old. But, the expression is talking about some six year old not, all of them. You may need to talk about wind resistance as well, but there are some vary good demonstrations for that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndFXXasM6ZE

PS: Honestly, I think after that discussion your intelligent six year old would probably understand it better than your average high-school or even collage student who has no clue there is more than just e=mc^2.

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