filip01's comments

We're remote and side project friendly. Send me an email, filip at aevy dot com.

Hi Davies! Founder of Aevy here. Incredibly sorry for this. I used your name and image as an example when sketching the front page internally. I intended to replace you before going live, but completely forgot! I understand that you're upset, will get this fixed and deployed as soon as possible. Again, sorry!

Could someone explain why "signals of growth", or as in this case "momentum", would be relevant to anyone? I understand that actual growth stats might be difficult to get hold of, but I think I'd rather have 200 of those than 200 000 "weekly growth of web traffic, mobile downloads, inbound links, employees, and social media".

Agree - to assume based on analogy seems risky. Taking the Musk "first principle" road and then navigating based on feedback the "lean" way is what makes the most sense to me.

I'm guessing: There will always be people who think they know why your idea won't work. It's in the nature of the game (http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html etc). Founders who take these people's opinions seriously are more likely to give up.

Agree. He seems to struggle with how to interpret the "want" part of of "make something people want". The point of this sentence as I've learned the hard way through sales, pain points etc is that "want" and "should want" are not the same things.

Even though Francis Pedraza's intuition says that people should want something, it's not certain that they actually do (and will pay for it). For example, my intuition tells me it'll be really difficult to build a business around his Everest app but if there's something to learn from Lean it's that intuition rarely is sufficient. (And I'm sure the Everest team proves my intuition wrong with good growth and feedback).

Though, in general, I love visionary startups and founders but I don't think that a grand vision should be an excuse for not validating the value and growth hypothesis.

And of course he has a good point in that startups often need many iterations to find the exact product that their customers want and since these iterations can be painful it's very helpful, if not necessary, for founders to be vision driven.

You might have a point there :)

Alright, perhaps ordinary web cams on the faces of the employees involved? Just seeing the hard work and stress in their eyes would be pretty soothing. That might be an idea for any site: "We're currently down, but here are the faces in real-time of our engineers trying to fix it".

I'm just joking. (But who knows, maybe people would take lighter on the downtime if they could see the team working really hard to fix it).

Wouldn't it be a good idea for Github to set up a video + sound stream from their office when these things occur? I for one would watch. Can't really work anyway (at least that's what I persuade myself to think).

Why?

It's bizarre that this type of essential advice is news to so many founders (including me). It's understandable from the VCs perspective though. Since they're mostly in it for huge exits it's rational for them to prefer companies with zero revenue, but good traction, over profitable (or close to profitable) companies with the same traction. Simply because the close to profitable company will have much more leverage than the zero-revenue one. In fact, a zero-revenue company who has been aiming at a VC Series A will often be forced to accept the term sheet at one or another VC whereas the profitable or close to profitable always can downsize, get a loan etc if they're not comfortable with the terms they can get at a VC. All this is because profitability isn't to the VC that much of a hint of long-term mega success as some growth metrics might be.

Related to this, it's a shame that the VC terms are often not well understood among first-time founders. If they were, I'm sure more people would try the revenue-route.

For a founder, it all boils down to how much this possible revenue will harm overall growth. In some cases (Instagram etc) it really does. In most other cases, it does not (or very little). But the zero-revenue route is easy to decide on since it's less work. "Yeah, let's take sales and all that later on" is easy to say especially when endorsed by the VC industry.

Put this in your user key bindings and then you can auto-indent with cmd+shift+g:

{ "keys": ["command+shift+g"], "command": "reindent", "args": {"single_line": false}}

They probably interpret your use of "emotional" as "irrationally emotional".

Agree, Github Issues allows this as well and once you get used to it this upload process seems a bit complicated.

Would be great if you solved it. I think you can just create a made up organisation to test. Think it's pretty common to not only work on individual private repos. If you would like to email me when/if you're done it would be appreciated!

OT:

Your hotfix project actually seems interesting. I tried it out but it couldn't find any of my repos since they're tied to an organization I own (via my personal github account) and not directly to my personal account. Am I doing anything wrong?

Great post but author really should have said up-front that this text was a way to promote his new project "willthisfly.net". Probably doesn't affect the value but it does affect the credibility. Is an outsider's opinion valuable for startups? Maybe, but as founder of an outsider-opinion-service, you're biased, which is fine, but I would want to have that in mind reading the article.

And some feedback to willthisfly.net:

For it to have a chance to fly it need (more obvious) incentives for people to comment. Something along the lines of having to comment on three projects before you can submit your own perhaps?

What does this mean? That Hans (in this case) needs to be investing his personal assets in order to get a E2?

Great, thanks. Do you know of a more formal way of expressing this "flip"? (Don't get any good Google hits).