In fairness, I think there's a difference between being too wordy in a description, and not even bothering to try ("My startup is too complex to be described in a paragraph"). The former indicates a lack of discipline, but the latter hints at a sort of naive arrogance.
Both, however, indicate that the founder doesn't fully grasp his own project. That's the bigger issue. If you can't describe an idea clearly and succinctly, you probably haven't mastered the idea in the first place. The selling proposition of an idea shouldn't be an afterthought; it should be baked into the idea itself. After all, great ideas are usually solutions to great problems.
The author makes a good point about not wasting the short time you're given to present something to people who can help you. It's an important point. But to me, it's almost a side issue. It's a symptom of something deeper. If you can't get your head around your own idea, then your idea -- or at least your conception of it -- may have some fundamental problems.
Short and sweet is necessary to grab someone's attention. Their time is worth more to them than you are, so boil what you have to say down to essentials. And then figure out what essentials you can leave out to make it even shorter.
Of course this is a horrible way to understand a complex topic. When I was preparing http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2012/09/ab-testing-vs-mab-algor... I was concerned about its length. Patio11 told me, If that's too much for people they shouldn't be making decisions on this topic anyhow. He was right.
You MUST be able to boil your pitch down to a tiny seed. But that's just for grabbing people's attention - don't make the mistake of substituting bullet points for thinking when you need to think.
A quote: "Entrepreneur: I just wanted to touch base with you and see if you are taking on new startups right now."
"Me: Can you send me a paragraph and I’ll tell you if it’s something we’d be interested in."
"Entrepreneur: It’s difficult to accurately describe the company, myself, and everything else in a single paragraph. To write something so small but somehow include every important aspect is near impossible, if not impossible. My company is too complex to be described in a single paragraph."
A recipe for failure. This touches on multiple issues, the most important of which is an economy of expression.
Anyone can say his project is too complex for mere mortals to grasp, including people who don't have anything worth describing. But as Einstein said, “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”
Yesterday I saw an article entitled something like "90 things I learned while launching startups." After I got done laughing, I replied that if the author wanted people to read what he had to say, that was about 80 things too many, that he needed to prioritize, but to put it mildly, this wasn't welcome advice.
You're conflating two entirely different ideas. The point here is that you should be able to explain an idea briefly if you understand it well. In the other article you reference, the author had 90 different ideas to relate. Each point in that article was indeed brief; many of those 90 points were only one sentence.
I read your comment in the other article, and I agree with the consensus that it wasn't helpful (to be brutally honest). There is no hard fast law that says you can never learn more than 10 useful things running a company. In fact, I'd say that assumption would be grossly false. There is also no law saying that out of 90 things learned, 10 things will magically be much more important than the other 80, such that they could be separated and treated with more emphasis.
Your suggestion to the previous author was to separate out 10 of the ideas, and to put the other 80 in a post-script or follow-up. But why? To make it more link-baity? Your suggestion came across as, "Hey, you could get more views if you pandered your writing (nay, your thought process) more to the lowest common denominator of reader."
However, clearly the author a) had no interest in doing that, and b) didn't need to, since they made it to front page of HN!
Frankly, I agree with that author. If I have something useful to say about running my company, then my target audience is people who run their company seriously and who make it their lifelong mission to learn. And those are typically not the people who only read Top-10 lists.
Furthermore, the author's article stood out and was very effective, because, how many 90-point lists do you see posted to HN? In this case, being different worked beautifully for the author.
I'm sure you can see the irony in suggesting to a successful entrepreneur that they might have been more successful in some successful endeavor, had they instead done it like everyone else.
Clearly, you didn't even look at the article yesterday, nor any of the comments nor any of the replies to your run and gun comment. That 90 item list was near universally praised.
There are times when people need to expand their attention to read more than a page of writing.
Not everything can be explained so succinctly. Books exist for a reason.
I agree that people need to to be able to explain their companies and what they do in one paragraph - at a high level. But that is a skill that is easily honed by an afternoon of thought... no need to be so dismissive.
I think the point that Einstein was making that you should be able to explain it to a 6 year old but not necessarily expect him to understand your explanation. I would love to hear him explain why e=mc^2 to a 6 year old and then quiz the 6 year old.
Wasn't there a news entry some weeks ago where a startup investor made quite contradictory points? That you should keep your eyes open for startups which don't have a clear "message" / punch line? Because these are the ones with the possibly most innovative (but yet not fixed) ideas that are often overlooked by other investors?
Mike Lee of Appsterdam, had a talk at at AppsWorld, where he said pretty much the same:
Working at Apple, he had heard the rumors that if you went into an elevator with Steve Jobs, you had to explain what you did and why you were doing it before he left and as such – even though he didn't believe in the rumor – he tried to explain all he did in only 60 seconds.
This is what he answered, when asked for his currently 60-second-speech: "I'm making educational games for kids. […] It's just enough to make you curious and want to have a conversation. […] If your 60 seconds-talk is an attempt to try to cramp as much shit into 60 seconds as you can, you're doing it wrong."
"Because telling you about Appsterdam, it's real simple. If you wanna make apps, come to Appsterdam, it's awesome. You wanna know more about it? Google it. You wanna know why Appsterdam is a thing, what Appsterdam is all about and what kind of insanity leads a person build their own ecosystem before building a company? That's what I'm going to talk about. And I'm going to talk about it honestly. That means there is going to be some swearing. So if that is going to offend you I suggest you just go ahead and ... leave. For the rest of you: It's real simple. -- Do something that actually fucking matters."
The arrogance and self-importance of the speaker made me quit after 60 seconds.
The full version of the Steve Jobs rumor was that he would fire you, on the spot, if he didn't like your answer. To this day, I think it was a myth that they used to spread to the newbies to keep them sharp and focused. And with Jobs's passing, we'll never know the truth now (unless someone was fired in such an encounter, and wants to speak up?).
Regardless of whether one's ass is on the line in an elevator pitch, it's still good advice. Especially because you're going to have to make that pitch about a million times throughout your life. So it's not just about intriguing The Boss; it's about intriguing everybody. (Or not losing everybody's attention, depending on how you want to look at it).
When I was in university, one of the mandatory classes in engineering was Professional Development, and one of the threads in that was writing. They stressed "Soon enough you'll be communicating with people with not enough time to hear what you have to say. Get to the point." Sage advice.
I have to encourage those I work with not to do it, sometimes by ignoring the long-form or just stating that I don't have time to review something so lengthy. For design docs, sometimes a few well considered diagrams really are worth a thousand words.
Honestly that is a stupid argument -- if you don't have time to understand it the first time, you don't have time to come back when everything is falling apart.
"...I like three sentences: (1) what we do, (2) who we do it to, and (3) why you should care."
Should (2) be "who we do it for"? Mine goes something like...
1: I teach mathematics
2: I encourage adults who always had problems with school Maths to learn and achieve a qualification
3: Mathematical reasoning is important for sensible decision making both in everyday life and in science and in making political choices
Very true, if you cant explian your idea in one paragraph then in many ways you don't understand it yourself.
Like first impressions, the first paragraph in anything counts. With that any article that can't be summed up in a headline is more than one article. This one is spot on, even if it is more than one paragraph and laid out so is easier to digest.
i find this attitude troubling on a couple of levels...
so we should not pursue to solve inherently complex problems for fear that we won't be able to explain them within the time frame for an elevator pitch? is ADD really that prevalent?
General relativity: nothing in the universe can travel faster than light. There are many fascinating consequences of this, including changes in mass and relative time observed by people traveling at different speeds. If this is fascinating to you, sign up for my series of 20 four hour lectures diving into the details.
"So we should not pursue to solve inherently complex problems for fear that we won't be able to explain them within the time frame for an elevator pitch? is ADD really that prevalent?"
Unfortunately yes. There aren't many hard and fast rules in the startup world, but I think the closest we've got is that it's always better to sacrifice value for better explainability.
If people can't understand it in a sentence then they aren't going to use it. And if you can get them using it then you can always add more functionality later.
Problems that are inherently too complicated to explain in a sentence or two aren't worth solving, at least not for startups. That's why we have government and non-profits.
That's not to say everyone needs to able to grok every implication right off the bat. For my own startup everyone can understand what I'm working on after a sentence, but no one can understand why it's a good idea without reading another three or four paragraphs. That's fine though, because it will be obvious once it's launched without having to read anything.
"We're going to travel to the moon and harvest a rare mineral only found there. We'll return it to earth and use it as the basis to create a new, entirely clean, replenish-able source of energy." That would be one heck of an undertaking but a 6 (ok, certainly by 8 or 9) would get that.
Complex problems can be explained simply, can't they?
Take Netflix -- solving some insane problems: immense storage, random access of huge files, enormous jumps in the uptime space, etc. Elevator pitch: Stream your favorite shows and movies to tons of devices, instantly.
[+] [-] jonnathanson|13 years ago|reply
Both, however, indicate that the founder doesn't fully grasp his own project. That's the bigger issue. If you can't describe an idea clearly and succinctly, you probably haven't mastered the idea in the first place. The selling proposition of an idea shouldn't be an afterthought; it should be baked into the idea itself. After all, great ideas are usually solutions to great problems.
The author makes a good point about not wasting the short time you're given to present something to people who can help you. It's an important point. But to me, it's almost a side issue. It's a symptom of something deeper. If you can't get your head around your own idea, then your idea -- or at least your conception of it -- may have some fundamental problems.
[+] [-] btilly|13 years ago|reply
Of course this is a horrible way to understand a complex topic. When I was preparing http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2012/09/ab-testing-vs-mab-algor... I was concerned about its length. Patio11 told me, If that's too much for people they shouldn't be making decisions on this topic anyhow. He was right.
You MUST be able to boil your pitch down to a tiny seed. But that's just for grabbing people's attention - don't make the mistake of substituting bullet points for thinking when you need to think.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lutusp|13 years ago|reply
"Me: Can you send me a paragraph and I’ll tell you if it’s something we’d be interested in."
"Entrepreneur: It’s difficult to accurately describe the company, myself, and everything else in a single paragraph. To write something so small but somehow include every important aspect is near impossible, if not impossible. My company is too complex to be described in a single paragraph."
A recipe for failure. This touches on multiple issues, the most important of which is an economy of expression.
Anyone can say his project is too complex for mere mortals to grasp, including people who don't have anything worth describing. But as Einstein said, “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”
Yesterday I saw an article entitled something like "90 things I learned while launching startups." After I got done laughing, I replied that if the author wanted people to read what he had to say, that was about 80 things too many, that he needed to prioritize, but to put it mildly, this wasn't welcome advice.
[+] [-] JangoSteve|13 years ago|reply
I read your comment in the other article, and I agree with the consensus that it wasn't helpful (to be brutally honest). There is no hard fast law that says you can never learn more than 10 useful things running a company. In fact, I'd say that assumption would be grossly false. There is also no law saying that out of 90 things learned, 10 things will magically be much more important than the other 80, such that they could be separated and treated with more emphasis.
Your suggestion to the previous author was to separate out 10 of the ideas, and to put the other 80 in a post-script or follow-up. But why? To make it more link-baity? Your suggestion came across as, "Hey, you could get more views if you pandered your writing (nay, your thought process) more to the lowest common denominator of reader."
However, clearly the author a) had no interest in doing that, and b) didn't need to, since they made it to front page of HN!
Frankly, I agree with that author. If I have something useful to say about running my company, then my target audience is people who run their company seriously and who make it their lifelong mission to learn. And those are typically not the people who only read Top-10 lists.
Furthermore, the author's article stood out and was very effective, because, how many 90-point lists do you see posted to HN? In this case, being different worked beautifully for the author.
I'm sure you can see the irony in suggesting to a successful entrepreneur that they might have been more successful in some successful endeavor, had they instead done it like everyone else.
[+] [-] michael_nielsen|13 years ago|reply
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
[+] [-] twmb|13 years ago|reply
There are times when people need to expand their attention to read more than a page of writing.
Not everything can be explained so succinctly. Books exist for a reason.
I agree that people need to to be able to explain their companies and what they do in one paragraph - at a high level. But that is a skill that is easily honed by an afternoon of thought... no need to be so dismissive.
[+] [-] ehosca|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Flip-per|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josso|13 years ago|reply
Working at Apple, he had heard the rumors that if you went into an elevator with Steve Jobs, you had to explain what you did and why you were doing it before he left and as such – even though he didn't believe in the rumor – he tried to explain all he did in only 60 seconds.
This is what he answered, when asked for his currently 60-second-speech: "I'm making educational games for kids. […] It's just enough to make you curious and want to have a conversation. […] If your 60 seconds-talk is an attempt to try to cramp as much shit into 60 seconds as you can, you're doing it wrong."
I can only recommend listening to the whole 30-minutes: http://www.apps-world.net/europe/images/stories/audio/dev-d1...
[+] [-] ville|13 years ago|reply
The arrogance and self-importance of the speaker made me quit after 60 seconds.
[+] [-] jonnathanson|13 years ago|reply
Regardless of whether one's ass is on the line in an elevator pitch, it's still good advice. Especially because you're going to have to make that pitch about a million times throughout your life. So it's not just about intriguing The Boss; it's about intriguing everybody. (Or not losing everybody's attention, depending on how you want to look at it).
[+] [-] bengoodger|13 years ago|reply
When I was in university, one of the mandatory classes in engineering was Professional Development, and one of the threads in that was writing. They stressed "Soon enough you'll be communicating with people with not enough time to hear what you have to say. Get to the point." Sage advice.
I have to encourage those I work with not to do it, sometimes by ignoring the long-form or just stating that I don't have time to review something so lengthy. For design docs, sometimes a few well considered diagrams really are worth a thousand words.
[+] [-] tomjen3|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithpeter|13 years ago|reply
Should (2) be "who we do it for"? Mine goes something like...
1: I teach mathematics 2: I encourage adults who always had problems with school Maths to learn and achieve a qualification 3: Mathematical reasoning is important for sensible decision making both in everyday life and in science and in making political choices
[+] [-] Zenst|13 years ago|reply
Like first impressions, the first paragraph in anything counts. With that any article that can't be summed up in a headline is more than one article. This one is spot on, even if it is more than one paragraph and laid out so is easier to digest.
[+] [-] ehosca|13 years ago|reply
so we should not pursue to solve inherently complex problems for fear that we won't be able to explain them within the time frame for an elevator pitch? is ADD really that prevalent?
[+] [-] biot|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Alex3917|13 years ago|reply
Unfortunately yes. There aren't many hard and fast rules in the startup world, but I think the closest we've got is that it's always better to sacrifice value for better explainability.
If people can't understand it in a sentence then they aren't going to use it. And if you can get them using it then you can always add more functionality later.
Problems that are inherently too complicated to explain in a sentence or two aren't worth solving, at least not for startups. That's why we have government and non-profits.
That's not to say everyone needs to able to grok every implication right off the bat. For my own startup everyone can understand what I'm working on after a sentence, but no one can understand why it's a good idea without reading another three or four paragraphs. That's fine though, because it will be obvious once it's launched without having to read anything.
[+] [-] jusben1369|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taybin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Domenic_S|13 years ago|reply
Take Netflix -- solving some insane problems: immense storage, random access of huge files, enormous jumps in the uptime space, etc. Elevator pitch: Stream your favorite shows and movies to tons of devices, instantly.
[+] [-] d--b|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bwelford|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wilfra|13 years ago|reply
Now I feel so much less special that he responded to my email :(
[+] [-] its_so_on|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]