Hacker News Reader

Comment by IceCreamYou | Hacker News Reader

There are an infinite number of ways to fail and only a few ways to succeed. If you learn from failure, you have learned one way that doesn't work out of an infinite number. If you learn from success, you have learned one way that does work out of a small finite number.

Obviously there are some ways to fail that are much more common than others, but those tend to be based on lack of action, e.g. failure to actually ask users if they want to use your product before building it. There is plenty of material on those common sorts of failures, it's just usually phrased constructively, i.e. "how to do SEO" rather than "we died because we posted duplicate content on every page of our site."

View on HN

There are an infinite number of ways to succeed and an infinite number of ways to fail.

Think of the raven paradox (look it up on wikipedia). Finding something that isn't black and isn't a raven should be evidence that all ravens are black.

Why isn't it? Because there are an infinite number of things that aren't black, and a finite number of ravens. You could actually count all of the ravens in the world but you can't count all of the things in the world that aren't black.

Startups are not like this. Failures compare to successes at a rate of, say, 8 out of 10. Both classes are of the same order of magnitude. You need to examine both to find discriminating variables.

The hard part is pinning down the cause of a successful startup. Most people just point at highly visible things, and make a claim like "StartupX is successful because the founders worked extremely hard, the office culture was well-developed, and there were lots of team building activities." The problem is that this ignores the 5,000 other startups that did all those same things, but failed. Perhaps it turns out that StartupX really succeeded because they had a sales guy with lots of good connections, etc.

You have a good point here.

More prevalent in the financial industry, you have a lot of successful retirees who hold talks and write books what kind of tea they drank. Statistically nobody beats the market, so these people had very likely just luck.

Causation is not relation, everybody knows that. But it is damn hard to figure out what and often the people themselves are biased. I would say a big percentage of tips you get this way are totally useless, but to figure out which one of them depends on your judgement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com