[volaski]

it's refreshing to see someone who actually successfully scaled a company write an article about "here's how we did it", instead of bunch of failed entrepreneurs who write medium posts about why they think their startups failed to either feel better about themselves or to capitalize on their failure with the attention they get from the blog post (answer: they don't know why they feailed, and that's why they failed. The only way they know what they think they have learned through failure was actually something meaningful is to apply the "lesson" in their future endeavors and see if it works out. Until then, all your interpretations are nothing more than your opinion)

I would love to see more of these posts on Hacker News instead of failed startup post-mortems. Thanks for sharing!

[worldsayshi]

I certainly agree that this is refreshing and a very interesting read.

At the same, because of survivorship fallacy, I think the best way to get insight into what makes stuff tick is to get a balanced mix of both success and failure stories.

[Bekwnn]

Survivorship fallacy is one thing, but I would say overall there is far more value to success stories where a majority of stories are failure ones. Generally speaking it would seem the path to success, varied as it is, is far narrower than the path to failure.

From a failure story you can look at what they did, but if they did X that doesn't mean X leads to failure, as others could do X and succeed. It's possible they succeeded in spite of doing X, but it's usually apparent when that's the case. Maybe X only worked because of a perfect storm of conditions/timing.

I would also say a vast majority of people who fail go on to fail a second time, making their whole reflections write up from the first failure kind of weakened by the fact the lessons they learned from their previous failure were not enough to avoid it the next time. Paying too much attention to what not to do just leads you down a totally different road to failure. Common pitfalls are worth knowing, but it would seem there are 10 ways to fail for every 1 way to succeed. Often big successes do the exact opposite of all the "don't do this" advice.

But that's just my perspective working in games, where creativity and rule breaking is a lot more substantial to the success, I think. However, I feel it all applies to a broader scope of business and software.

[timr]

"...instead of bunch of failed entrepreneurs who write medium posts about why they think their startups failed to either feel better about themselves or to capitalize on their failure with the attention they get from the blog post"

That's really cynical. For a long time, people were complaining about the opposite on HN: you never heard about the failures, which leads to a massive selection bias.

I've always felt that you can learn far more from failure than success. Successful people often have little actionable insight into why they succeeded (e.g. "we worked hard and made something people wanted"), but most people can write volumes about what they've done wrong in life.

[volaski]

you're right i'm being cynical, because i genuinely believe you have not much to learn from people who have failed but haven't succeeded yet.

That said, there are PLENTY of successful people who used to be a failure. In fact 99% of the successful people have been a failure at some point in their life. THESE are the people you listen to.

The things you read in the media about a genius who got it right on their first attempt are very exceptional cases, which means they were not only talented but also very lucky. And you're right that there's a selection bias when it comes to these people and they may be totally out of touch because they don't understand why they succeeded.

But like I said, the vast majority of accomplished people in the world were once failures. They just kept trying and made it happen. Which is why these people are worth listening to. They are the ones who actually learned from their past failures, applied it to their life, and finally succeeded.

But you don't deserve to tell others what you think is the right thing when only thing you've achieved in life is failure. You gotta earn it by taking the lessons you learned and applying it to come to a true success. These people are worth listening to.

From what I see, there are too many people who've never tasted success but just use their failures as an opportunity to get more attention for the sake of getting attention. Most of the times when you read their posts, they're full of "failure biases", which is much worse than success bias. And I think most of the "lessons" they learned are shit, and most of the times demonstrates exactly why they failed--because they were out of touch (which is why they think they understand why they failed)

So my point is, you should listen to people who have failed AND succeeded. There are many people like this.

[timr]

"But you don't deserve to tell others what you think is the right thing when only thing you've achieved in life is failure. You gotta earn it by taking the lessons you learned and applying it to come to a true success. These people are worth listening to."

I am mostly neutral on what you wrote, but this is just wrong. If you think that only "successful" people have valuable stories, you're drawing a very bright-line definition of success (i.e. how successful do I have to be before you'll deign to listen to my advice?), but you're also entirely discounting the value of experience. For example, I have failed at two startups now, but I could give you volumes of practical advice on how to avoid the mistakes I made. It would take you years to learn the same lessons from scratch, and some of the advice I'd give you is stuff that a "successful" entrepreneur in another field couldn't possibly know. Does this information suddenly only become useful if I have a successful startup on my Nth try?

If most of success is learning from failure, you should be trying to make that process as efficient as you can. How do you do that? By listening to the people who have failed before.

[volaski]

The reason why your advice is not as useful as you think is because chances are, if you google around, most of that lesson would be already out there. Don't take this the wrong way I mean no offense. I'm sure you've learned a lot of lessons and I'm sure they're all valuable lessons, just saying most of what I read online nowadays are basically rehash of what these failed entrepreneurs heard from someone else, who probably heard it from some other successful person.

My point was "why listen to failures when you can listen to people who've both failed AND succeeded, especially when most of what the former would say is a rehash of what the latter said?" Think about it. I've thought about this myself as a once-failed-entrepreneur, and come to a realization that until you actually have succeeded in life and gained enough confidence to be able to think independently AND have the confidence to share your lesson you came to independently, most of what you think you understand are basically what you heard from other more successful people. You may think otherwise, but if you think deeper, that's what you're doing.

There's nothing wrong with this on its own, but the problem is that most of the articles I'm referring to actually mislead other people into believing in some seriously wrong interpretations of why they failed, and they all stem from the fact that these people have no idea why they failed but just try to come up with their own "theory" of why they failed with their limited knowledge. There are many reasons why people fail at something. Some people make all the bad decisions yet still succeed because they made one small decision that made a huge difference. Some people make all the right decisions yet fail because they made one small decision that messed it all up. Without this COMPLETE context, your advice is not complete because it's just small tidbits that may or may not work. If this comes from someone who has succeeded at least once, you at least know this is something that has happened. But if you follow "advice" from people who have only failed, then what are you really believing?

[timr]

"The reason why your advice is not as useful as you think is because chances are, if you google around, most of that lesson would be already out there. Don't take this the wrong way I mean no offense. I'm sure you've learned a lot of lessons and I'm sure they're all valuable lessons, just saying most of what I read online nowadays are basically rehash of what these failed entrepreneurs heard from someone else, who probably heard it from some other successful person."

I don't take offense, but you're wrong. You have no idea what kind of advice or knowledge I have, but you're jumping to the conclusion that you've heard it all before.

This thread is extremely off-topic, and it feels silly to try to convince someone to listen to other people, so this will be my last post. Good luck.

[volaski]

As someone who tries to position oneself as someone with all the wisdom in the world, you sure are acting immature, closing your statement with "okthxbye" type comment.

Also, "You're wrong" is not such a mature way to engage in a conversation, and yet that's exactly how you start every comment you posted here. Could have been a productive conversation if you acted maturely.

And even though I said no offense and clearly meant it in a generic manner (and not attacking YOU), you actually sound very offended. Why are you so offended by some random guy on the Internet?

But I guess I'll never get an answer, since you're probably a man of your words and keep your promise to keep that last comment your last post :)

[dasil003]

How do define success? I get there are a lot of clueless Dunning-Kruger cases writing Medium posts who are so far from competence that their ideas are worthless to anyone else, but those cases are straw men. What about the people who have some modest success but haven’t created a household name? There’s a lot more of those out there and yet they seem to get less credibility than some middle manager at Google who really had nothing to do with their success but just still gets to ride the coat tails of their success.

[volaski]

any success is a success as long as you truly believe it was a success deep inside.

Which means the people you're talking about are all success cases. You don't have to be a household name to be considered a success.

A food stand guy who makes a good living and has learned tons of things about life and street smarts is a huge success and we have much more to learn from those people than idiot VC funded startup entrepreneurs who con their way into raising capital and burn through all their money without making anything work. These people may even pretend they're a success by "acq-hiring" themselves to a larger company, but anyone who's actually been in a startup know that's all fake bullshit. If you get acq-hired you have failed, period. Don't listen to these people's advice either.

The specific category of people I'm criticizing are those who have nothing to show for themselves but failure. They write Medium articles on their way out, so that they can:

1. get a pat on the shoulder

2. get more exposure so that they can get a job now that they're jobless.

3. get more exposure so that they can use that false influence to keep their charade going.

4. just do what everyone else does (they genuinely think for some reason that writing a post-mortem is some sort of a ritual to celebrate the liquidation of their startup for which they raised tons of money from strangers)

Most genuine entrepreneurs I know don't do this. They instead try to analyze what they did wrong, but they're humble enough to not shout out loud to the world to listen to what they have to say about why they failed. They show the lessons learned through action, not through medium post.

[workinfunk]

The merely smart learn from their failures. The wise learn from others' failures.

[newbie912]

It's also well understood that we incorrectly attribute success to the individual and failure to externalities when measuring outcomes, so the successful entrepreneur says "be like me", while the failure lists a lot of factors. Accounting for bias means there's a lot more value in the latter.

[cbzehner]

You should look at the articles from First Round Review[0]. I haven't read any in a while but they tend to be high quality long form write-ups from successful execs. Similar to this piece.

[0] http://firstround.com/review/

[seanmcdirmid]

There is a certain amount of luck/risk involved in doing a startup. You can do everything “right” and still fail.

[yarper]

That is not a weakness, that is life

edit: this is a star trek reference

[stevehawk]

the thing is... it's a lot harder to succeed than to fail.. so the pool of people who can supply those articles is pretty limited..

[iamgopal]

Your reason also apply to success. The o lu way they know what they think they learned through success was actually something meaningful is to apply lesson in their future endeavours and see if it works out. Until then all your interpretation are nothing more than Your opinion.

[taytus]

>they don't know why they failed, and that's why they failed.

You can very well know why you failed. Post-mortems (most of the times) try to answer that question

Knowing something doesn't make it inevitable.

[tonyedgecombe]

I've worked in a failing company where everybody knew what was wrong but still couldn't stop it.

Interestingly after the failure most of those people got new jobs doing what they should have been doing at the original workplace.

[6t6t6t6]

There are much more people who failed than people who suceeded, so it make sense that there are more blog posts about failures than about success.

[dang]

That would be great, but there's a structural limit: people running successful startups don't have time to write about it, while people who have wound down their companies do. When a company is going strong and HN sees a post like this, it's usually because they're hiring :)

[kolpa]

That's a bizarre claim. Writing about the company is one of the big PR tasks of a CxO or SVP.

As you noted yourself, blogging is a form of marketing.

[dang]

It's an empirical claim. I'm not seeing the articles!

I spend a lot of time giving feedback to people about how to appeal to HN's audience. Authors tend to be founders only for very-early-stage startups, such as the ones you see in Launch HNs. The authors from larger companies tend not to be founders or even execs. My sample is biased, of course, but if founders and execs of successful startups were writing informative articles about how they run their startups, readers here would be interested and we'd surely see them posted.

[jeffreylees]

Absolutely. If a going concern can't make time for blogging and other similar ventures, they're not staffed appropriately for their success!

[Bromlife]

That's a pretty stupid claim.

[dang]

Please don't name-call or post shallow dismissals here. Those are two of the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

[Semirhage]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17420230

Aren’t you kind of the one lowering it?

[enraged_camel]

>>people running successful startups don't have time to write about it

This is both offensive and incorrect. Offensive because it implies that if someone manages to find the time to write about how they are running their company they probably aren’t successful. Incorrect because the startup world is in fact full of leaders who do manage to find the time to write about how they run their companies (kalzameus comes to mind).

[eropple]

Patrick works at Stripe.

Before that, he consulted and ran a bingo card creator.

I love the dude and his advice has been invaluable to me--but it has been invaluable because he is not a guy who has run startups, he's a guy who's had to make a buck.

[bdcravens]

Plus it seems his output (on his blog and here on HN) has decreased quite a bit since he moved to Stripe, so this validates what happens when you get busy.

[newbie912]

Although a big part of his job is writing about similar topics, so you could also say he's still doing the same thing, only posting to a different end point and getting paid. That too is success.

[enraged_camel]

Running a bingo card creator qualifies as a startup.

Unless of course we are using the ultra narrow HN definition of a startup.

[eropple]

No, we're using the tech-industry definition of a startup.

I don't run a startup, either. I make money.

[dang]

The offensive bar sure gets lower these days! I'm surprised the point is controversial. It would be great if you were right; I'm just not seeing the articles. This one stood out as an exception. Also, we all love both Patricks but the one who runs Stripe doesn't blog anymore (does he?) so I think I get Stripe in my column on this.

[volaski]

it's offensive only because you choose to be offended, it actually tells more about yourself than parent.

> people running successful startups don't have time to write about it, while people who have wound down their companies do

tell us what kind of mental gymnastics you have to go through to go from above statement to come up with such a twisted interpretation as "it implies that if someone manages to find the time to write about how they're running their company they probably aren’t successful". Since it's HN, I'm sure you can show how you came to that conclusion, in logical expression.

[bdcravens]

patio11 (Patrick McKenzie of kalzumeus.com) hasn't blogged on his personal site since September 2017. His current blogging seems today to support Stripe's business objectives, as he publishes to their site.

[enraged_camel]

I am well aware. I am referring to pre-Stripe.