[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.

[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.

[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).