davidkatz

"A minority of your applicants are going to perform badly in that situation because the adrenal glands will effectively reduce the output prefrontal cortex below an acceptable level"

I have an off topic question. I don't see what the problem being discussed has to do with how glands reduce activity in certain parts of the brain. Sounds to me like a fancy way of saying 'people don't perform well under stress'.

You could of course ask - "what mechanisms control human behaviour, and how does stress specifically affect body systems?" Then, great, let's hear all about adrenal glands and prefrontal cortexes. When that's clearly not what the question was though, I find it a form of poor communication.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Second this. Bootstrapping is great, and it's even underrated. Most people raise too much too early, and it ends up hurting them. In the end VC capital is a tool though, and you can use it well.

One position from which raising money might be a good idea is when you have a product that is already scaling and shows strong product/market fit, and you know (know, not think) that going 10x on spending is going to let you grow a lot faster.

Sadly, that just invites a discussion. Laughing it off nips it at the bud and allows everyone to climb down from the idiot tree.

This is absolutely true, and goes for any silly question like 'where do you see yourself in five years?', 'why should we be working with you?', and the like. If you drive conversation to topics that you think should be discussed, you will be respected for it.

Yes, they should. More importantly though, they should offer options.

When you call your cellular carrier to complain about something, you surely want them to apologize and offer you options. If they told you 'We experienced an error. What's next?' you'd be rightfully pissed. Why should software be held to inferior standards?

Controlling how your company communicates with customers in person is hard. If you want good results, you'll have to hire great service talent and let them give customer cases lots of attention. Contrast that to putting more thought into how your app fails. Even a few days of focus on friendly, empowering failures will give you much of the same results.

Take one easy win. Instead of 'Error: looks like you have a network problem', try 'Sorry, looks like you have a network problem. Can we help you somehow? [Email us]'

With one more line of text and a button, you've given your customer a clear sense that you're there for her when she has problems. We've been doing this for years. The feedback we've gotten, and the relationships we've established with customers have been invaluable.

"The other day, I asked my wife to make me a sandwich. She told me to make it myself, and I politely informed her that the 15 minutes spent doing that would cost us $25 so it had better be the best sandwhich I have ever made."

Ugh, what a load of nonsense. This would only be true if the OP was so overbooked that every minute not spent working would result in irreversible income loss.

I bill clients $200/hour for running their product or startup. Does that mean that when I go out for coffee it costs me $100 just to be away from my laptop for half an hour? Of course not. Some people seem to think that when they bill hourly they are tapping into an infinite sea of money, and the only constraint on how much they make is how much time they put in. This is clearly wrong in the vast majority of cases.

The $25 you 'loose' by making a sandwich at 14:00, you gain back by working another 15 minutes at 19:00, or the next day, or the next week.

Most of these discussions really miss the point. Money is merely an amplifier, an enabler. You can think of it like technology. Does the Internet make people happier? Nope, but it sure enables a lot of opportunities to be happier.

How would you answer the question 'does technology make people happier?'. Surely, having (say) a computer is not what life is about? When you stop to think about it though, having a computer is a gate to all kinds of things - communicating better with friends and family, a more flexible (and hence less stressful) work environment, and so forth. Does a computer necessarily lead to these things? Of course not. Is it a huge enabler for these things? Absolutely. Should you want a computer? In the vast majority of cases — yes. There's a qualifier though: the happiness you get out of a computer depends mostly on what you do with it, not you owning it.

Bringing the discussion back to money. Does it necessarily lead to happiness? No, but it sure opens a lot of opportunities. The same qualifier also applies: the happiness you get out of money depends mostly on what you do with it, not you owning it.

Should you go after money? That's a question that probably has no universal answer. My father likes to jokingly say: 'it's better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick', and he has a point. All things being equal, it's hard to see how money could be a bad thing. Problem is, all things are not equal. If what you want to do with your life leads away from money, then doing what you want to do surely matters more than being rich.

If you do choose a path which will not lead to money however, don't try to belittle money's benefits by saying things like 'money does not make people happy'. That really is not the point. Money is a wonderful enabler of opportunities, and we should recognise that so that we can make better decisions.

Journalists have a responsibility towards facts that is just as strong as a scientist's responsibility towards facts. The major difference is that journalists are not necessarily expected to discover facts, but report on them, which greatly shifts their scope of attention.

Helping readers draw connections and get context is valuable, but only if it's done within the facts. A journalist or a publication that reports something that is factually wrong has to loose credibility.

Reporting something as fact when it is merely speculation is a milder form of reporting something that's factually wrong, but it's almost as deserving of our criticism.

I'm sorry to say that I've had personal conversations with faculty researchers in diverse fields that gave me the distinct impression that these people really should not be doing research. It's very easy to go through the 'form' of good research. Interview a lot of people, look at a lot of data, but that's no guarantee for good research.

When someone says: 'here are 7 habits of unsuccessful CEOs' and does not even attempt to account for the problem of 'how do we know it's really these habits that caused the company to fail?', but rather just flat out assumes it in the face of decades of findings that suggest that this is an easy trap to fall into, I for one can't take them seriously, and academic credentials have almost nothing to do with it.

Seriously? How many more decades are we going to see people mistake correlation for causation as if this problem had not been thoroughly understood? This article reads like one long speculation presented as fact.

Kahneman and other psychologists have long established that we color character traits into stories that fit the result. If a CEO is pursuing his beliefs strongly and the company succeeds, we call him a visionary. If the company fails, we say 'he never listened'.

If you really wanted to check the influence of a certain character trait, you'd need to try to (carefully) compare how CEOs with the trait performed compared to CEOs without the trait, and make damn sure your sample sizes and methods are sound before making any confident assertions. What you definitely don't want to do is look at a handful of failed companies, find some common traits among their CEOs and call it 'The 7 Habits Of Spectacularly Unsuccessful CEOs'. That's intellectually negligent, and it's a testament to something that is fundamentally broken in journalism — we have publications that pretend to educate when they in fact serve misinforming entertainment.

Shame on Forbes for publishing such ill supported claims, they should have more respect for their readers.

This is a pretty strong allegation, and requires evidence. Do you have any? For example, can you quote any IDF KIA stats that seem to include suicides?

I'm still not sure there's a real pattern here, beyond the always present 'make a quick buck' style of business, which has probably been around since business was discovered. Good discussion though. Thanks. You on twitter?

Perhaps you're right, but I haven't come across much superficially pretty junk. Any high profile examples come to mind?

I understand. Generally, we should aim to build tools that address the greatest gaps in quality. You might say that design is currently not the most important gap to address, and that may be, although it hasn't been my experience. Although design has been getting a lot of attention in recent years, the tools for design are still very much in their infancy.

If you contrast the availability of design tools to say, development tools, I'm pretty sure you'll agree there's a huge gap there. I grant that there has been a recent surge in UX/sketching tools, but so many areas of design are still left untouched. Recently, for example, I was very excited by discovering http://macrabbit.com/slicy/ and http://iconfactory.com/software/xscope - both solve problems many designers have, and they both make my designer life so much easier.

Perhaps to return to your original point - the world is full of people who follow trends blindly. I run an app development company, and if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me to build an app that no one needs, well, you know the end of that saying. Still, if you're going to follow trends without good thinking, 'invest in design' is by far not the worst you could follow.

I understand the point, but I'm not convinced. Looks factor into quality, and are not merely an indicator of it. If I can have a market trend which increases quality across the board, I fail to see that that can be a bad thing because it took away a shortcut for assessing quality. It just means we need new shortcuts.

If you're interested in the durability of a can opener, the weight of the material sounds like a good candidate.

The article clearly laments the fact that you can't use design anymore as a quick quality shortcut, and that's the point I attacked.

Your point seems to be:

"The problem is that the focus on design means that developers spend too much effort on design and not enough on quality. We build tools to make design easier rather than making quality easier for developers..."

To that I would say, design is one aspect of quality, and spending effort on it is spending effort on quality. What would it mean to make quality easier for developers, beyond making better tools for design, development, testing, market validation, support, and so forth? All of these tools exist and new tools are consistently released.

In fact, I think the surge in attention to design can largely be seen as a 'catching up effect'. For many years, all the other kids in the party got a lot of attention, now design is getting attention as well, but I'm not at all sure it's getting disproportionate attention.

Finally, new shortcuts for assessing quality always exist, and they're almost by definition at the cutting edge of their field. Maybe that's not 'pretty looks' anymore, and that's ok. Other areas of rare craftsmanship are still alive and kicking - communication quality is a good example. Lousy copy on pretty pixels abound.

The whole argument here seems broken. The OPs main point seems to be:

"So what's wrong with [good design]? The problem is we judge books by their covers. We're more likely to pick the prettiest object up first."

Why would you value a shortcut for assessing quality more than an actual improvement in quality? The fact that design is better is a huge all around win for everyone. Does it make every product good? Of course not, but so what?

Not too long ago, you could perhaps have measured the quality of a house by the question: 'does it have running water?'. If the answer was yes, you could assume someone put a lot of effort into the house, and that everything else about it was likely to be better too. Today, all houses have running water. Is that a bad thing? That would be an absurd claim to make. The fact that all houses (even the relatively bad ones) have running water is a huge win.

The point is that running water makes any house better, and good design makes any product better. Claiming that better design is a problem is not something I can make any sense of.

The OPs tone is perhaps unnecessarily aggressive, but I think the point deserves a fair look. HN, more often than not, shares content that is the nth derivative of the same old tired tunes (which were great the first year we heard them).

HN used to be valuable, now it's mostly entertaining. The OP is also right that words like 'hacker' and 'entrepreneur' have become maddeningly useless on HN.

Saying things like 'you could vote and change that' is not a counterargument. Sure, I could invest lots of energy in trying to make HN better, but I'm not interested in that. Don't get me wrong - I applaud the people that are, but this is not my fight - I'm here as long as content is good, and it's really on the tipping point for me.

I will however voice my dissatisfaction, with the hope that someone who does want to fight this fight will be ever so slightly moved by it.

I believe this misses the point. We have significant influence over almost everything that happens to us. For example, when a deal goes sour both parties could most likely have prevented it. Important - this does mean we live in a hopelessly relativistic world, and leaves ample room for clear convictions about who did what wrong.

The point is that even if the other party acted a lot more 'wrong' than I did, it is still surprisingly often true that I could have completely prevented it. Furthermore, I am significantly more responsible for avoiding damage to me than someone else is. Once you realize that, an attitude of 'everything is my fault' naturally follows, and I applaud it.

EDIT: slightly shortened

Excellent post. One thing which the OP alluded to but I think deserves strengthening - 80% of the quality of your talk is in your talk, not in your slides. The OP helps focus you on your talk by giving you rules of thumb like 'less content'. That's good advice.

Along the same lines, if you're just getting started, it's not a good idea to attempt to make your slides beautiful. Plain old text on solid backgrounds will do just fine. To drive this point home, go watch some TED talks. The slides on those things can get positively ugly, but that hardly detracts from the quality of the talk. That hinges almost solely on the speaker.

Here's something I need which I would pay 2% for right now - the ability to email someone an invoice. I'm stuck with PayPal, which I hate.

Honestly, I've spent decades of my life living amongst Americans, and I had no idea that 'blackface' is something offensive. This is totally harmless, and no racist by a long stretch.

Please, let's all stop this cult of parenting, and cult of personality. Let's assume that Patrick and John had played with legos, and that their parents taught them programming. What would that teach us? That we should teach our kids Programming and let them play with legos? Certainly not.

Much respect to John and Patrick, I hope that they continue to do impressive things and that a few years down the road they'll look at the things they did in their 20s as 'merely setting the stage' for whatever else they'll be doing then.

Could someone point out what the story is here? The linked article seems to suggest that an Israeli official painting his face black and captioning it 'Obama style' is racist, but I fail to see why. People dress up as other people all the time, and usually it's a sign of appreciation.

Flagged pending clarification.

Why is Google Analytics needed? I've found it superseded a long time ago.

You're absolutely right - there are different types of businesses that fit different types of entrepreneurs, and that's exactly what Suster fails to capture. By reading his post, you could easily walk away with the feeling that entrepreneur = stress.

Fair point Mark, I do not know you. Even though my post may come across as aggressive, that wasn't my intent. I'm just getting started with blogging, and next time I'll have to be more careful with my language. Apologies.

I agree that VC funding is not the only path to stressful business, although it certainly helps a lot. In this sense, VC is a part of a larger problem - people's tendency to take on more risk than they should. I dare say that if more people lived and did business within their means, we'd all be calmer, have less bankruptcies, and maybe even less divorces.

It is very easy to read your post and come away with the feeling that being an entrepreneur is necessarily stressful, and that just isn't the case. It starts being stressful when you can't meet your obligations, and that mostly happens when your ability to meet your obligations is heavily dependent on circumstances you can't control - circumstances like relying on outside money.

Is VC better than loans from family? Most definitely, because by taking money from someone who fully appreciates their potential losses, everyone gets to be less emotional about the whole thing.

Still, I believe that by not taking any outside money, or extracting a heavy price from yourself, you get a shot at a significantly calmer variant of Entrepreneurship, and that's something people should know.

Sound advice, I'm still figuring out how to blog well. I think that some controversy (=haters) can be a good thing, and hope to strike a better balance in the future.

Thanks! Turns out not everyone knows/accepts the meme use of 'Bitch Please'. Since I didn't want the discussion to gravitate towards the title, I changed it.

You're probably right, but he should have chosen his words more carefully. It's very easy to misunderstand him and conclude that starting a business is inevitably going to be shitty.