It's not an entirely unreasonable heuristic. The supply of startup pitches is vastly greater than the demand for them. Investors have to filter somehow.
Getting a first meeting with any VC is pretty easy, even for someone with no connections whatsoever. There are hundreds of possible paths you can take to get that intro.
It's not a big stretch to assume that any entrepreneur with a good chance of success should be able to clear that low hurdle.
Building a successful startup is 1,000 times harder than hustling your way into a VC meeting. If you can't do the latter, it's pretty likely you won't be able to do the former.
It's also 1000 times harder than playing the national anthem on a recorder. But that's not a very useful filter.
To some extent, being able to work a social network (or cold call a contacts friends, and get them to introduce you) is an advantage to a start-up. But it's not really sufficient, and may not even be necessary (since it's something founders will learn as they go).
If it's an enterprise sales company, it's certainly a requirement though.
You're making a very bold claim that being born into wealth and connections is a prerequisite for VC funding. Do you have any hard evidence to back this up?
Please don't take this the wrong way: Your comments seem to reflect your own track record of professional failure rather than some legitimate trends or observations about the industry as a whole.
If every founder, investor, executive you have met has seemed malicious or incompetent, please consider this: the only common denominator is you.
Your comments seem to reflect your own track record of professional failure rather than some legitimate trends or observations about the industry as a whole.
You know nothing about about me, what I have seen, or where I have been. It's true that I've picked some terrible startups, but hundreds of people have had similar experiences to corroborate. If I were the only one who held these opinions or had that category of experience, I'd think differently about the whole thing.
I'm pretty good at picking out genuine problems (i.e. the persistent low status, mistreatment, and mediocre compensation of software engineers in this industry) from noise (transient bad luck that happens to all of us).
If every founder, investor, executive you have met has seemed malicious or incompetent, please consider this: the only common denominator is you.
That is far from what I said. Not even close. Not every one is bad. However, I do think that the social class distance between VCs and petitioners is vast and is already at, if not beyond, the point of being the most important factor in the interaction.
This game has already been worked out, and we should leave it to the people who won it and go build something new. They don't have much without us, so what are we waiting for?
I think you're making this up, and that the supposed "social class distance" between founders and VCs isn't a significant factor at all.
Also, not sure you're allowed to be indignant about what commenters claim to know about you after saying something like Most often, "took more risk" means "comes from a rich background and had a softer landing".
I was actually half-joking. I don't actually believe that software engineers will have to work out of storage cells in 12 years. It was a Snow Crash allusion.
Isn't the entire premise of venture capital that you only make money off the big winners?
Assuming lifestyle businesses fail at similar rates as venture-backed companies, the way to maximize returns is to invest in the companies with the biggest potential upside.
In other words, how many $10/month SaaS companies would it take getting acquired to match the return of your average $300M VC-backed exit?
Don't say 37signals. 37signals is an outlier in the same way Instagram is an outlier. The existence of either of these proves nothing.
By definition a mid-growth business will NEVER generate the returns needed to sustain a venture fund.
I don't think it's fair or the most beneficial to society that VCs only invest in high-risk, high-potential businesses. But that's the only way the math could work. You can't argue with math. The only exception would be funds like YC that can invest very small amounts at very low valuations and make money from acqui-hires.
Lifestyle businesses are usually about a modest initial investment by the founder and then reinvesting modest profits into raising the hot air balloon a bit. VC backed companies usually start out losing tons of money and hope they achieve flight by the time they reach the end of the runway.
Serious question: Why aren't you building a startup right now?
You have all of these theories about how a company should be run, you hate managers, you're a top .0001% programmer, etc.
It seems that being a founder is the perfect position for you.
Don't you want to validate your assumptions? If a flat, open-allocation model really is the best way to run a startup, you might be on to something huge here. You're clearly passionate about this...what's stopping you from making it happen?
Well, first of all I never claimed to be a top-0.0001% programmer. Possibly plain-old top-1% if we interpret programmer literally.
If a flat, open-allocation model really is the best way to run a startup, you might be on to something huge here.
Actually, that's a misconception. Startups tend to need a constrained open allocation: yes, everyone can work on anything important to the company, but the latter must be defined conservatively to ensure focus. As firms get larger, the open/closed allocation decision becomes more formalized and there's a clear right vs. wrong way to make that call.
I am certainly considering, for the long term, that I'll probably be starting a company at some point. It might not happen now, it may not even happen this decade, but I probably will reach a point where that's the best next step.
I think you should definitely consider doing this sooner rather than later.
From reading your comments, it looks like you make the claim that:
1. Most startups are horribly mismanaged and are run incompetently by VCs/MBAs.
2. You have a radically different strategy for running a startup that makes engineers significantly more effective.
If so, this represents a tremendous opportunity for you. A startup run on your model, if your assumptions are correct, would have a massive - possibly several orders of magnitude - competitive advantage, and could have a very meaningful impact on the business world as a whole.
At the very least, I'd be curious to see a startup bring you in for management consulting and see how they do in a few years.
Anyway, kudos for taking the long view. It's rare to see people plan things many years or decades out in our social media addled age.
>>We're often distracted by the Zuckerbergs or Jobs' who are abrasive and embody their own don't-care-for-anything style, but the ugly truth is that those guys got so unbelievably lucky that they never needed to actually work on themselves.
This is obviously my opinion. You are free to voice another one or present data that offers another perspective. There is really no "citation needed" for every thesis a person happens to entertain, and that comment alone with no other content accomplishes absolutely nothing besides being rude. Try to reason with me, or if you're lazy, vote me down; though I personally prefer to vote on post quality rather than agreement/disagreement. [citation needed] is not a meaningful interaction in my opinion.
It is my opinion that "[citation needed]" can push conversations in a direction that I value, and as such is often a meaningful-to-me interaction.
We can't live in a world where every statement has citations, of course. So in practice, apparently-factual statements often have to stand on the authority of their speaker. As such, it's regrettable when people utter unfounded claims in the language of authority (like "the ugly truth is"). And so it's useful (to me), for people to call out when other people are doing this, in the hopes of eventually raising the conversation. "citation needed" means "This statement is phrased to sound authoritative, but has no evidence, and I think it's wrong, and I'm willing to be persuaded by evidence". I strongly disagree with the claim that it accomplishes nothing but being rude... unless, of course, the recipient (you, in this case) has no interest in discourse.
Why would fearless reason with your unjustified and implausible claim? And why would (s)he downvote your entire comment, just because the last sentence is silly? Upvotes for fearless!
> "This statement is phrased to sound authoritative, but has no evidence, and I think it's wrong, and I'm willing to be persuaded by evidence".
That is just so damned smug. Why doesn't that person have any of these lofty responsibilities about making a perfectly articulated argument? It's acceptable for them to literally type two words as their contribution to the "discourse," and the onus is pushed back onto the person who actually put some effort into it? Discourse does not mean "you will go on at length, and I will offer a simple rejection until I am satisfied with your argument."
> Why would fearless reason with your unjustified and implausible claim?
Because it's a community, it's a two-way street. If he wants to push the conversation that way, he can help it get there with an actual contribution.
edit: On second thought, removed some unnecessary snark. Others have covered my point anyway, just got a bit riled.
I agree with the sentiment, but I find the actual text of "[citation needed]" too flippant. Instead, I just ask the person to provide a source or an argument.
This is a discussion forum, so the better way to ask for evidence is to present a contrary opinion backed by evidence. That will draw out a meatier response, or if not, still edify the reader. Fearless added absolutely nothing to the conversation in content or in style.
While I agree that "citation needed" is rampant around here, part of the reason is phrasing. You stated an opinion as a fact. A lot of people roll their eyes at this, but if you expect something to be taken as an opinion -- which is totally reasonable -- then you should phrase it that way.
"I get the impression they never had to work on themselves" doesn't beg a citation. It's clearly an opinion and doesn't imply that it's attempting or intended to be anything else.
It may seem pedantic, but when all people have to go on are the words you put in the form, being clear is important.
I think you have a point, but context is important. And I say this as someone who has been repeatedly accused in this forum to make abundant use of "weasel words" just to qualify the boundary between fact and opinion. As a result I don't do it as often anymore, especially when the context of the subject itself already serves as a good indicator that whatever follows will be opinion.
Still, I have to admit that I do believe it to be factual that extremely successful people did not have to work on making themselves pleasant or conformant to the same degree as normal people. I explained the reasoning for this in the sister comment, but the upshot is that I indeed see this as a fact that probably could be supported by biographical evidence.
Meh... I used to feel that way, but over time I've realized that life is too short to stop and waste the time to put "I think" or "I feel" or "in my opinion" in front of everything I write. If I write something, it's implicit that it's my opinion. It may or may not also be a fact. In either case, if somebody disagrees or has a counter-claim or wants to present evidence to the contrary, then let them do it. But bitching because people don't load every paragraph with qualifiers, weasel-words and cop-outs is just silly.
Expecting people to say what they mean has absolutely nothing to do with weasel words or qualifiers. If you can't be bothered to communicate clearly, all you're doing is diluting your message. Hopefully you have nothing important to say, because if you do, everyone loses when you fail to say it clearly.
Right, but adding "in my opinion" and "I think" and "I feel" in front of every opinion has nothing to do with communicating clearly. There are lots of things in communication that are implicit and don't need to be stated explicitly.
vs
Right, but I think that adding "in my opinion" and "I think" and "I feel" in front of every opinion has nothing to do with communicating clearly. In my opinion, there are lots of things in communication that are implicit and don't need to be stated explicitly.
Now, would you really argue that the second version is any more clear, or that anyone's understanding would be changed by adding all those qualifiers? Personally I don't find it to be anything except unnecessarily verbose. shrug
When you say something is "the ugly truth", you're presenting it as fact, not opinion. I don't mean to be rude, but the prevailing attitude on HN of "successful people are successful because they got lucky" is poisonous to say the least.
I'm not asserting that all successful people are that way because of luck, but those two examples are certainly valid in that sense. The citations can be found all over the place, including Wikipedia. That doesn't mean those people didn't have talent. I'm simply stating that they could get by without changing their style because their success predated their need to get along with people.
A lot of extremely successful people got there because of extreme luck. Their extreme luck became an essential component of their success. It's not that they won a planetwide lottery without doing anything for it. It's that they won the lottery and were very competent, and in some cases, hard working. Again, please note that I'm talking about the extremely successful people that we like to iconize.
To be phenomenally successful you typically are extremely young, come from a reasonably affluent background, have enjoyed a very nice education, and your early life is characterized by crossing paths with lots of influential rich people. Contrast that with "normally" successful people, they are just different. They can be any age, come from a variety of backgrounds, and typically they had to deal with (and improve on) a longer streak of rejections.
I don't think it's poisonous to acknowledge luck, it is one of the necessary ingredients of extreme success. And extreme success is usually a necessary ingredient for trend-setting the styles and mannerisms we have come to expect from all successful founders.
Have you answered the three big questions of validating an idea?
1. Who is the target market?
2. What problem does this solve?
3. How will you make money?
Thanks fearless. The short answer is: absolutely. These are the questions that drove us to this product, and we feel very passionate about our answers, but it's helpful to see idea validation articulated in such a clear, concise way.
Yeah- I mean it would be easier for the community to give feedback if we knew your answers as to who the target audience was. i.e if your business model was to be a gambling site like Intrade, I would be very interested in participating and trading. If it's more just for fun/timewaster, I wouldn't be in your target market and couldn't give good feedback.
Makes sense: our business model is not gambling. We want to offer:
- Users a way to show their support (at first, with virtual dollars, but pending JOBS Act implementation, with real investment) for the businesses, products, and causes they care about;
- Businesses, products, and causes a way to find, track, and engage their supporters and eventually turn them into investors.
I still don't think nonviolent drug crimes are the same as bank robbery.
When you commit a bank robbery with a loaded firearm, you're telling society you have no problem taking a person's life for a little money.
If people change, why is the recidivism rate for felons over 50%? And those are just the ones who get caught.
Again, I'm speaking strictly to violent crimes here. Nonviolent/drug offenders should be treated very differently.
Because it's damn near impossible to make an honest living with a felony conviction on your record in the current economy. The mentality of "Why should you get the same as honest men like me" is one that has societal costs, but it is a third rail of politics, as no congressman is going to make an argument for lighter sentencing, or easier integration of felons. In reality, all felony sentences are life sentences, and this is something we need to fix.
I think there's a big difference between killing someone and threatening to do so. Though I also think it's entirely possible to kill someone and regret it and not do it again.
I think recidivism is high due to ridiculously long sentences, as well as the fact that our prisons are brutal hellholes that leave people much worse off psychologically than when they went in. And of course the fact that no one will give you a job.
if you go into a bank without a gun, imply you have a gun, it's bank robbery. you don't need a gun, the gun can be a toy gun, so long as the victim feels you have a real gun, you get charged as if you actually have a real loaded gun.
