Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by peppertree 773 days ago
In my 20's I thought startup was a quick way to make a million bucks. I had a list of ideas. Copied and spun others' ideas. Some of them made money but none was wildly successful. Now I'm older and money is less of an issue, I realized starting a business is more about finding the people you want to help, working with people you like, and being the right person to solve the problem at the right time.
4 comments

This is a great insight. People make a great business - and life is too short to surround yourself with people who you need to drag along with you.
True, finding that marginal p/m fit is hard. We interviewed 40 target customers and processed all the transcripts into an LLM to arrive at our MVP, still not sure it’s there because of the variables of competition and alternatives.
Why did you think weighted probabilities of words occurring together in past internet texts would somehow help you find a market fit idea inside a bunch of interviews?
thats on the left side of the spectrum. on the right, businesses and people are nothing more than balance sheet entries to be traded.
Even in the balance sheet mindset, a business is still just the efforts of a bunch of people. Without the people who made the business and keep it running, you don't have a business. Sometimes all or some of those people are replaceable, sometimes they're not. Any or all of those people can leave at anytime as well. So, it's important to remember that the value behind the balance sheet is because of the people. That seems to be one thing many CEOs, Private Equity firms, and sometimes managers forget, or simply take for granted -- it's not always something that can be ignored (and sometimes it is).
from what I've seen: the human side of things is almost always ignored on this side of the fence.

im not sure who is right.

Yes, that's what I've seen too. But, it's clearly wrong and exploitive since there is no company without the people.
This is 100% true!