Is the Lean Startup Dead? - <AUTHOR> https://steveblank.com/2018/09/05/is-the-lean-startup-dead/ <comment> salt-licker Overfunding is an existential risk for startups. Scaling a team before finding PMF seems like a blunder in most circumstances.

Instead of setting your best engineers to work creating the best product, they're busy recruiting and dealing with company growing pains from the get- go. The mythical man-month and scarcity of great people combine to diminish your returns on this hiring. Furthermore, battleships don't turn on a dime, and you may be hiring a lot of irrelevant expertise if you have to pivot later. This is why Stripe took 6 months to hire its first 2 people.

Furthermore, huge funding means investors are looking for a huge returns. A $1b sale is now failure?? My gut says this "go big or go bankrupt" pressure encourages tunnel vision among leadership rather than innovation.

Essential Products was overfunded in late 2015 and is already up for sale. I think Magic Leap and Desktop Metal will end up as similar cautionary tales.

I see good arguments for overfunding if (1) there's huge capital costs for development and high probability of large exit regardless of technology success (e.g. biotech) or (2) you're trying to capture a market with a strong network effect. The second case seems dangerous though, e.g. is Uber's popularity really a moat? What if they had spent their billions on developing a product with a real technological advantage instead of scaling to the world first?

As a huge fan of his book, I'm sad to see Steve Blank largely ignore these ideas in his article.

<comment><USER3> > Furthermore, huge funding means investors are looking for a huge returns. A > $1b sale is now failure?? My gut says this "go big or go bankrupt" pressure > encourages tunnel vision among leadership rather than innovation.

If you don't take the money, they will go to your competitor, and give it to them instead.

If you're in a space where you can be killed by your competitor selling $1 for 90 cents, that will kill you just as dead.

It doesn't matter if Uber's popularity is a 'real' moat or not, as long as its a moat big enough to drown _you_.

Sure, a few years later, said competitor will make an announcement on their website about the conclusion of their 'magical journey', but that's not going to matter to you, is it?

<comment> salt-licker Good point, I forgot to mention that "race to IPO and cash out" is a viable business strategy, though a sad product strategy. See A123 Systems, Desktop Metal's founder's previous company that went bankrupt. Also the Energous story: [https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2016/04/those-other- gu...](https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2016/04/those-other-guys-pt- ii.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish it wasn't so but I do think to the degree you can declare something dead the lean startup is. The problem is that lean startups requires a number of things that aren't accessible anymore.

A) Maybe the most important is time. You need time in a good environment to actually develop something. Which has become a lot more costly.

B) Large companies are controlling more areas than ever. People often wary of regulation as a barrier, but as time goes by the market participants creates their own barriers. Many areas are just harder to have an impact in than it used to be.

C) And then there is just competition, especially for things like talent.

I guess it isn't the lean startup that is dead so much as the environment for it. You can say the same thing about co-operatives, non-profits, community establishments and a lot of other things that are good ideas (probably more so than ever) but not able to flourish because of other interests.

<comment><USER5> >A) Maybe the most important is time. You need time in a good environment to actually develop something. Which has become a lot more costly.

Why do you think that is? I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly.

>B) Large companies are controlling more areas than ever. People often wary of regulation as a barrier, but as time goes by the market participants creates their own barriers. Many areas are just harder to have an impact in than it used to be.

That one definitely sounds true to me, the complexity of modern software definitely makes it harder to be competitive with big shops. You can be the smartest coder on earth, if you want to write a complex application today (say, video editing software, smartphone interface, a kernel, a web browser etc...) you're looking at man-years of work if you want to start from scratch. And if you don't start from scratch it'll be harder to differentiate yourself from the competition and "disrupt" the status quo.

I'm always amused when I read stories from the 70's and 80's about lone hackers writing a cool hack for a computer or application of the time and managing to sell it for a lot of money. Like this story I remember reading on HN of the hacker who managed to write a task switching application for some Apple computer of the time and managed to sell it to Steve Jobs (I don't remember all the details and I can't find the article at the moment). It was a clever and completely non-portable use of the hardware resources, in the end it was probably a few kilobytes of (very clever) code. It's hard to imagine something like that today.

<comment><USER6> > That one definitely sounds true to me, the complexity of modern software > definitely makes it harder to be competitive with big shops.

As software professionals, this is a problem of our own making. Nobody is asking for software to be complex. Users don't want complexity. Development companies don't want costly complexity. Software developers don't even want complexity. Who has sat down at the start of a project and said, "you know, this software needs to be as complex as possible!"

Yet we keep building complex software. Layer after layer of libraries and APIs. Frameworks and more frameworks. Containers. Multiple languages. Front end and back end. Machine learning. Problems that used to be solved on a PC now require a 150 node cluster.

It's fashionable to throw huge teams, hardware and middleware at problems these days.

There is still opportunity for the lone coder and the lean startup. You need the competence to stop writing all these bullshit layers and code _simply_.

<comment><USER7> In many companies, big complex software _is_ desirable, because of poor incentive structures. I've seen many projects ballon into vastly over-complex nightmares, because engineers are often rewarded for solving "hard" and "complex" problems. So with complicit management (who are also rewarded when their engineers are promoted), they invent complexity and then "solve" it.

<comment><USER8> Venture capital has corrupted the tech industry to its core.

The VC cash machine has brought us nothing except short term thinking, get- rich-quick schemes, social manipulation, herd mentality, idol-worship, media corruption and corporate growth.

I look forward to the next tech bubble. I hope they all get wiped out.

<comment><USER9> Ill winds blow no-one any good

<comment><USER8> If they all get wiped out, it will be very good for me personally.

Firstly, I will enjoy watching them fail. It will make me happy intrinsically. If I lose my software engineer job and have to work as a janitor for a while, it would be totally worth it.

Secondly, the subsequent failure of their portfolio companies will free up a huge amount of marketshare in many industries; some of which I will be able to capture with my own side project until I can afford quit my janitor day job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A movement fueled by a book promoter with no notable track record of success for what he is preaching? Yeah, it was a fad.

To be fair, Ries stole a lot of nice bits from different schools of thought. There's stuff his books that actually works.

But you would have to be soft in the head to think that his book represented wisdom. In fact, wisdom does not come from a book – it comes from reading a lot of books, making a lot of mistakes, working with a lot of people, building a lot of stuff, and still understanding that this does not necessarily represent something that can be distilled into bullet proof heuristics. There's always unseen and uncounted factors that you will miss.

In contact with large, established organisations this book tends to produce cargo cults. Simplistic management self-help literature combined with institutional mediocrity, stupidity, fear of change, and hard-shelled delusion is a horrible mix.

The good thing is that these cargo cults tend to die after a few years. The bad thing is that anything associated with them then gets tainted.

The Lean Startup was a management fad and it didn't make people any smarter. It just gave them different ceremonies to perform in order to feel good about themselves. And as all fads, it has now passed. It is okay to move around the cabin and think for yourself again.

I would recommend "Functional Stupidity" by Mats Alvesson as a form of inocculation against this type of self-pleasuring heuristic-seeking.

<comment><USER11> Eric Ries was Co-Founder and CTO of IMVU which had 4 million active users and $40M in annual revenue at one point.

I assume you knew that and just felt like bashing him without adding any nuance to your point. That's a bad habit and you shouldn't do it.

<comment><USER10> I'm well aware of that and, to be quite honest, it isn't particularly impressive.

But there is a piece of perspective that is perhaps missing. I've seen him preach to companies that have orders of magnitude more active users and orders of magnitude as much profit as he had revenue. And making people there believe that he somehow knows something about what it takes to make a company successful. To make a successful product.

I've seen companies who had brilliant people who built more business for their company than this guy ever built for himself be told that "why can't you be more like that". Because it is always more attractive for some types of companies to listen to some outside hack than to actually pay attention to unglamorous people with far more potential. It is easier to admire something that comes with a book, ceremonies and eloquent salesmanship. And sadly, it is easier to take what they say seriously.

I've worked on products that had an order of magnitude more users (products you might well have used) and wondered "why am I doing this again?" because at the company I was working, that wasn't really numbers indicative of a successful product.

IMVU is 23 people. It is the equivalent of a mom and pop shop in this context. I'm sure his story is compelling to someone hacking together a product in their spare time and dreaming of doing a startup. But you do need to understand that he has very little to offer to the kinds of companies this cult does real damage to.

Using the numbers you quote (they tend to vary) IMVU has an order of magnitude fewer users than MySpace. MySpace. The graveyard. That's 4 users for every copy of "The Lean Startup" book sold (well, probably fewer since I haven't kept up with his book sales).

IMVU has fewer users than people who've seen Ries talk - live or online.

IMVU is not a notable success.

He is a successful seller of self help books. No doubt about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For every Startup raising $X million in funding there are probably a thousand solo entrepreneurs bootstrapping their way into profitability.

The spotlight only shines on "Startup X raises millions in new round".

Side projects are the new Lean startup.

<comment><USER13> Solo entrepreneurs are not starting a startup, not as I (and most people) understand the term. After all, those thousands of "solo entrepreneurs" are starting things like coffee-shops, restaurants, garages, etc. They're examples of entrepreneurship, sure, but _not_ startups.

Startups are specifically organizations that are trying to grow very big, or that are looking to try a new business model. The reason the spotlight shines on them is because starting something new is interesting (from a "news" perspective, at least). Getting big is interesting. Starting a new restaurant - not really interesting, except for people who live in that area.

<comment><USER14> Pretty interesting how much argument there is against this view on HN. I guess most people coming here now are not familiar with Paul Graham's essay (maybe most HN posters don't even know who Paul Graham is any more)

[http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html)

> _A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not > in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to > work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." > The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with > startups follows from growth._

<comment><USER15> Interesting how you assume that because Paul Graham wrote that, it is true, and that everyone who thinks differently must not be familiar with what he wrote because _surely_ nobody could disagree with him!

<comment><USER16> He's not assuming that. He's assuming a large fraction of the HN community agrees with Graham's definition. This certainly used to be the case a few years ago, hence his point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yes and no. IMHO Lean has generated a lot of startups that had too much of a narrow focus and optimized away all the potentially interesting parts of their products because they were focusing on a MVP that turned out to be lacking in the V part because they were focusing on the M part.

There's this great presentation by Don Reinertsen "Second Generation Lean Product Development Flow": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6v6W7jkwok&index=55&list=LL...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6v6W7jkwok&index=55&list=LL6P7ZzM6GT554-6xA_3lvjg&t=0s)

Which is a perfectly valid way to fix some of the worst offenses of the original Lean movement, which were to throw out the baby with the bathwater by focusing on only doing things that had low option value and low risk. Sort of the opposite of what you need to do in a startup, which is to do something genuinely new and creating value while taking calculated risks.

Don does a great job of providing some nice economic rationalizations of how deal with things that are risky but valuable, planning and estimating these things, etc. He also makes a great argument for shipping value fast, which is to maximize the economic life span of your product and prioritize getting revenue earlier vs. getting revenue later with a potentially better product. Many tech startups get sucked into building the perfect thing and missing their window of opportunity for both raising funding and monetizing their product.

Unless of course your startup is not about the tech, in which case definitely avoid taking risks on the tech front and focus on shipping a product fast. If you are building a market place, the last thing you want to do is reinventing how those work. You instead want to focus on whatever the hell it is you are selling. Lean was always popular with those type of startups. I tend to think of them as no-tech startups. You get a bunch of MBAs, marketing and other non techies and then bring in the full stack hipsters to copy paste a bunch of crappy js files together to fake it until you can afford to hire a proper team.

<comment><USER18> ""the baby with the bathwater by focusing on only doing things that had low option value and low risk. ""

That's not what the Lean Startup says.

Lean is about reducing risk but that doesn't box one into only doing low risk/value activity

<comment><USER19> What Lean says and how people commonly used it are distinct, which is what the OP is talking about. Some people took some parts of Lean too far and didn't focus enough on delivering a high level of value. That takes risk and vision, but you build better products.

As opposed to obsessing over managing risk and keeping things lean, without properly investing in the hypothesis to really test them out. Which means in practice a bunch of small half-hearted plays that get abandoned too early - <USER2> were inherently a minor incremental value proposition that wasn't valuable enough to build a sustainable business around.

<comment><USER20> This is the same problem suffered by most Capital-N Named Things (Lean, Agile, etc.). By becoming capitalized, they become specific practices. Some of the practices are good, some are good in context, some are bad out of context. But people fail to make the proper value judgements about what's worth it and what's not, and often pick which practices to do by the visibility of the practice.

Is a kanban board useful? Immensely. Is it useful if you don't know what it represents? Nope. But it's highly visible so people adopt it. They may get some value, but only limited, if they fail to comprehend it. Or, worse, they get negative value because it becomes a set-in-stone "process" "(We can only handle 4 of X at a time! Scrap everything over that." "Wait, why was it 4?" "Oh, because we had half the staff before. I guess we can actually handle 6 now."). If that question isn't asked, it's fixed in time and the organization isn't a learning organization, it's actually dying but hasn't realized it yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The problem I see with the Lean Startup is that Eric Ries isn't actively promoting, defending and explaining it.

On Mixergy, I interview founders who try to make their bones or get attention for their messages by disagreeing with the Lean approach.

Eric doesn't debate, correct or engage with them. So they get to make statements without anyone credible taking them on.

Listen to my latest interview it's Rand Fishkin and you'll see what I mean. He's not anti-Lean, but he's disagreeing with it his book to make get attention for his message. With a bit of pushback from me, he admits as much.

Each one of these mini-attacks from accomplished entrepreneurs hurts Lean's credibility.

Only Eric has the credibility and social grace to disagree and explain in a way that builds up The Lean Startup.

I'd love to see him step into the conversation more. He and pg defined how to run a successful startup more than any two people I know.

We need to hear more from both of them.

<comment><USER22> I think the core problem here is (lack of) consulting dollars.

The Agile movement got huge in part because a lot of its proponents could make good money promoting it. E.g., the MLM scheme that is Scrum certification. Or the many consultants, some good and some bad, who made bank teaching it to people. (I did that for a while.) This was also the death of what I think of as "real Agile" because the great bulk of consulting money on offer was selling watered-down Scrum to giant companies who wanted the feeling of change without hard work or actual change.

But there's no money in startup consulting. Startups don't have much money, and startup founders a) think they know things better than everybody else, and b) think they can ignore most of what matters to other businesses. (I'm a former startup founder, so that's not knocking anybody; it's just what's required by circumstance.) I know people who have started great startup- focused consulting businesses, and they've all gone elsewhere because it's impossible to make a living doing it.

From what I know of Ries's consulting it was at places like GE [1]. GE is definitely not a startup, but really wanted to be innovative and presumably paid him a bundle. And now he's moved on to the Long Term Stock Exchange. [2] This all strikes me as reasonable. He did his bit and set the ideas free into the world. Although I'd love it if he spent more time promoting the Lean Startup approach, I totally get why he's focused on doing what he wants, not what I want.

As an aside, for those still interested in discussing the topic, Lean Startup Circle still exists and still has an active mailing list. I'd love to see more people there: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lean-startup- circle](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lean-startup-circle)

[1] [https://www.ge.com/reports/digital-magic-eric-ries- brought-s...](https://www.ge.com/reports/digital-magic-eric-ries-brought- startup-way-ge/)

[2] [https://ltse.com/team](https://ltse.com/team)

<comment><USER11> Hey William. I also think one of the big mistakes is that Eric trademarked Lean Startup. Check out the book, Starfish and the Spider. The way to kill a grassroots movement is to centralize the power and then it dies with the center.

<comment><USER22> Hi, Trevor!

I get that concern. But the Agile movement didn't trademark anything and came to regret it as the word got more and more watered down. All things considered, I prefer this outcome; at least the term still has meaning. If I had to pick next time, though, it would be making the trademark but building up enough of a community to carry the flame and then handing over the trademark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Key points:

1\. The Lean Startup isn't dead.

2\. For most organizations, Lean is now essential to deliver innovation at speed, and the Innovation Pipeline is more relevant than ever.

3\. But when capital is readily available at scale, it makes more sense to go big, fast, and make mistakes than it does to search for product/market fit.

</comment><comment><USER24> This needs to be balanced:

" _All this is driven by corporate funds, sovereign funds and even VC funds with capital pools of tens of billions of dollars dwarfing any of the dollars in the first Dot Com bubble – and all looking for the next Tesla, Uber, Airbnb, or Alibaba._ "

Yes, but this is the other reality of today, from Calculated Risk:

" _CR Note: Currently the target range for the federal funds rate is 1.75% to 2%. With inflation running close to 2% by most measures, the real Fed Funds rate is still negative._ "

In other words, investors still can't find enough investment opportunities that they find attractive, so they are still willing to give huge amounts of money to the government for free. Some of this can possibly be attributed to the Great Stagnation, the slowdown in innovation, growth, productivity and technology which began in 1973. Some of this can certainly be attributed to rising pools of savings all over the world. But it remains a fact that there are not enough software startups (nor enough manufacturing startups, nor enough legal startups, nor enough medical startups, nor enough of any kind of startup) to absorb enough capital to bring the world's capital markets back to "normal", if we can agree that "normal" means most investors expect to make at least a small profit on their investments, including their bond investments.

<comment><USER25> I thought the wealthy were job creators, captains of innovation, stewards of the future...

We'd be better off taxing these folks who can't find anything to invest in and redistributing the funds to the worst-off. The economic activity would inevitably be captured by these same ineffectual investors but at least the material situation of the poorest among us would be slightly better.

<comment><USER6> This problem is not new, but arguably getting worse. So much capital out there, in the hands of so few people, and they have no idea how to deploy it productively. Their trillions could be used to start whole industries, build critical infrastructure, and pull millions out of joblessness. Instead, they unimaginarively loan it to the government or a bank for a negative real return.

The rich of the past built the modern world. Today's rich seem to just sit on their wealth while inflation and missed opportunity erode all the value away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> $1 billion for a video streaming service?? Are these people actually insane? I don't see any way they will make back that much money with a service in a completely oversaturated part of the internet where YouTube, Netflix and other streaming services are pretty much meeting every desire any customer would have.

I mean, power to the people that have invested, but this looks like an investment graveyard.

<comment><USER27> youtube leaves a lot to be desired from a quality stand point.

<comment><USER28> Yet it still has a massive first mover advantage.

<comment><USER29> Youtube wasn't even close to first -- it started in 2005. They were more like third or fourth. Youtube (and later google) got the formula and right -- they learned from the mistake the first movers made.

Sort of like Facebook, Dropbox, Salesforce, Instagram, Google, etc. None of them were first. Being first is dangerous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm not sure I understand this. You can't skip finding product/market fit. No matter how much money you have, if you have no product/market fit you're toast. If you're not desperate to find product/market fit (as Lean startups are) because you have tons of money -- you may never find it.

To me, Lean startup is not about money. It's about building the most efficient process of finding product/market fit. Once you've found something that really works, _then_ it's time to look for big money and scale up. In most cases, what you need in the beginning is $50K-500K which can come from savings/FFF/consulting/seed round.

Too much money in the world now. A result of the decade of near-zero interest rates.

<comment><USER31> FFF = Friends, Family, and Fsomething?

<comment><USER32> I think the saying is Friends, Family, Fools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> How much equity do you need to give away to get VC money for an unproven business idea? Is there a ballpark figure? I heard like $100k for 20% or something but I guess that's more like angel investing? What's the minimum amount of work you need to do before getting money with no track record as a founder?

<comment><USER34> Until a startup is obviously a billion-dollar entity (reasonably on track towards $100M+ ARR), it varies greatly based upon;

\- Growth metrics (MoM, YoY)

\- Following, absolute metrics

\- How these metrics compare to others in your vertical

\- Business thesis

\- Total market size (needs to be gigantic)

\- Strength of vision, ability to execute

\- Ability to convince others of said vision

\- Ability to attract, recruit and retain talent (investors, employees)

\- Many more magical and unspoken factors that influence an investor's perception of you, individually

There are many, many different ways to optimize any specific signal here but realistically you're going to have to throw half of 'em away. With the exception being you can't really budge on market size or you're not VC- fundable. Some of the factors can be leveraged off of one another to improve the other. (Strength of vision -> ability to recruit, etc.)

$100k for 20% is a nightmarish Shark Tank deal for a lifestyle business that's generating sustainable revenue. As another poster mentioned, you're looking at $5k - $50k checks in the Angel stage. If you're on to something, with a product in market a reasonable hypothesis as to how it becomes a $B company, you're looking at starting to raise on SAFEs at a ~$4M Cap. At least, AFAIK, that's pretty standard _absolute lower bound_ out of an accelerator or incubator (which will give you some credibility -- I might optimize towards that path first). Meaning you're assuming pre-money capitalization at a priced round of $4M or greater. You can go lower if investors _really_ want to deal chase or it'll get the right person in. So, if you raise $500k on SAFEs and pull in $1M in total investment for a seed round at a $4M pre-money valuation (+$500k from a MicroVC or small VC check), you get diluted 20% in exchange for $1M (post-money of $5M).

Edit: should mention, YC's standard deal is $120k for 7% [1]. Other accelerators are more aggressive on the capital they provide / equity they ask for in exchange. I've skipped a step here and assumed you've been through an accelerator to raise at a $4M+ Cap, though it's not absolutely necessary to have gone through one -- but the accelerator deals are more in line with what you're asking about.

[1] [https://www.ycombinator.com/deal/](https://www.ycombinator.com/deal/)

<comment><USER33> That's really helpful, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > It (Lean) is a response to scarce capital, and when that constraint is > loosened, it's worth considering whether other approaches are superior

Definitely worth looking at both approaches objectively.

1\. Lean Approach: Stay lean, build MVPs, find PMF, then go big.

2\. Big bang approach: Have conviction in your idea, use capital to launch big from get go.

Given capital is not a constraint, the next most important thing is time i.e. which approach would help us build a thriving business _fastest_.

Big bangs take up extra time/energy in ancillary tasks like hiring, PR and so on. Pivots take time, even to communicate internally. Lean let's you operate the whole thing as a series of cheap experiments to validate your assumptions. Pivots are natural and cheap.

Big bang would be beneficial over lean only when your first set of assumptions were on the mark and the company required almost no major pivots. That's rare, maybe Katzenberg can pull it off.

<comment><USER36> Maybe Big Bang is more effective for iterative companies, those whose business model and PMF is well established. like a second wave of ride-share businesses who copy the Uber/Lyft paradigm but with enough of a personalized twist to secure substantial capital upfront.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I thought the whole idea of the "lean" methodology is not to waste the dollars you raise.

Even if you have raised $2 billion, shouldn't you know if people want short form content?

Actually, isn't it _more_ important to know if people want it if you have a lot of money you spend?

Can't you still launch an MVP quickly, and iterate up and then pour on the rocket fuel?

This idea that scarce capital is what made lean startup important seems contrary to the original premise of the lean startup.

<comment><USER19> > Even if you have raised $2 billion, shouldn't you know if people want short > form content?

This has already been proven with Youtube.

The bigger question is whether there is a ~$100 billion market for a Netflix style service selling 10min videos, which justify a $1-2 billion investment. And whether this company can recruit the talent in a sustainable business model, where they can produce enough _good_ content to keep users happy.

Even if there is a $100 million dollar business here, that would be a failure scenario for this startup right out of the gate. As it won't return the investor money anytime soon.

<comment><USER37> I don't disagree with most of what you said, I was using "short form content" as shorthand for the business model, however:

 _But Hollywood has remained skeptical in the year since he announced his venture. Several executives have argued that there is little evidence to support the notion that viewers are craving short programming. And beyond the initial hype, Mr. Katzenberg has been short on specifics._

and

 _Higher production values will distinguish NewTV's programming from the majority of video shorts that gain traction on YouTube, Mr. Katzenberg said. And he trusts that viewers will appreciate the difference._

from:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/07/business/media/katzenberg...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/07/business/media/katzenberg- streaming-video.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> One of the interesting differences between Jeff Katzenberg's new startup, and the type of startup's that existed when the Lean Startup was invented is the number of variables which are unknown. This new media startup isn't starting at an unknown. In fact, virtually everything about this business model has been tested before somewhere.

Lean is about experimentally approaching hypothesis about business models. Then scaling up when you find something that works. Short videos targeting mobile isn't new. If I allowed him too, my son would watch dumb youtube videos all day on my phone. This is a gamble that consumers might want better quality content. Not a huge gamble :\

</comment><comment><USER39> Calling a popular term "dead" is certainly a good way to attract clicks. And sure, when money is cheap and you have $2B to spend, you can afford to throw much bigger Spaghetti at the wall. But Lean defines a startup as a project under extreme uncertainty. Commercial video streaming sites exist, the only thing that seems to be new about the example in the article is the video length. I would not consider this an environment of extreme uncertainty. So imho, while cheap money does change the equation, 99% of the article's punch lies in its clickbaity headline.

<comment><USER40> You do realize that Steve practically invented the term, right?

<comment><USER39> That's evident from the article. And it does not change the fact that the headline is clickbait, a promise which the article fails to deliver on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> So Blanks thesis seems to be go lean when money is hard to come by, otherwise take the cash and go big because there is more out there if you fail. I'm not sure this is much different than what has been talked about for a while, but it puts a nice point in what most people just talk around.

The capital is there, there's a very good chance you're going to fail anyway, you might as well fail while eating something other than ramen.

</comment><comment><USER42> Tangentially related, but the real gold is well hidden and secretly traded. The schlock is through the roof everywhere and in large excess.

A piece of an adequate analysis: [https://hackernoon.com/the-rise-and-fall-of- yplan-is-the-mos...](https://hackernoon.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-yplan-is-the- most-boring-tech-story-ever-4280cebf9f1f)

</comment><comment><USER43> As a bootstrapper, I see the point of what this article is trying to say. It's been increasingly difficult to create products that can find product market fit/validation and reach a scale where the income justifies the effort. And to top it off, the MVPs are becoming much more full product than simple landing page MVPs of years past -- and all of this requires a lot of capital (time, money, connections, volunteers, etc).

As more entrepreneurs enter the space, competition will only become more fierce. Even selling the tools to the gold rush has become commoditized with the choices available.

<comment><USER12> > MVPs are becoming much more full product than simple landing page MVPs of > years past -- and all of this requires a lot of capital

It depends. If you're a developer then it's just your time.

<comment><USER44> You still need to pay for marketing, sales, some administrative work (accounting, legal...) Maybe you need help outside of your expertise (graphic design, UX...) There is a lot that goes into a startup on top of just building the product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I think it's saturated. Lean goes best with the easy to execute ideas--where a viable product is possible in days or months. Take an animation software program designed for professional artists: it's not possible with only a few features, because it wouldn't be competitive with existing products. You need such a large array of polished features to have any staying power. Let's also say you want to make a product with better core functionality which can't be done with 3rd party add-ons or working with existing software. There's still a lot of opportunity for people willing to work on something for several years before releasing, as long as they aren't taking gambles with their primary value proposition. (Would hate to be wrong after spending that much time) There are still untapped niches where lean works, though, I bet, if that's your calling. My backup, if I'm making a product that people don't use, is to be my own customer, and open an animation shop which uses the software to make animations to sell to people. So if you're not going lean, go for a product you will use (and obviously a product that is useable by only one person[not a social network]) to make money, if people don't buy the product itself. (Ie, if you're making software that makes it easier to host websites, make sure it's software that you would personally use in the case that you can't sell the software, but can still sell the hosting)

</comment><comment><USER46> Meg Whitman as the CEO on NewTV, $2 Billion in total funding, unproven market hypothesis.

I wish there was a way to short a startup...

<comment><USER47> Right? It's born a unicorn. But could also be a eunuch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's a collection of ideas and tools.

Osterwalder's business model canvas lives on in its original form and variations of it. Use it to organize important ideas on paper.

Get "out of the office" early in the process and speak with prospective customers.

Create a product that does the minimum required to achieve your goals.

How could these ideas possibly be dead? Maybe "Lean Startup" as a turn-key solution to entrepreneurship has died and it has become more difficult for the Ries and Blank to monetize. However, they promoted many valuable ideas and practices that live on.

</comment><comment><USER49> "It's a response to scarce capital, and when that constraint is loosened, it's worth considering whether other approaches are superior. With enough cash in the bank, Katzenberg can afford to create content, sign distribution deals, and see if consumers watch."

There are two main thoughts from this that occurred to me: 1\. There are very few Katzenbergs out there, so him personally raising that money is not surprising. If Spielberg or Lucas wanted to create a short form video company I am certain that they would be able to raise similar amounts. I am not him; therefore the lean rules still apply to me

2\. the times that I have had enough money to buy my way out of problems has not yielded the best results. In my 30 years of doing this the clever answers have always come when my resources have been restricted, with often the best results from the most constriction. Extra money can bring bad results sometimes, the beauty is in the restraints.

TL;DR You are not Katzenberg. Neither am I.

<comment><USER47> Lol: you are not Katzenberg. Neither am I.

Good points. Good post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> For what I see, it seems to me that hard STEM startups tackling industrial problems can't work through the lean paradigm, that's why too much too often their projects are shut down or internalized as soon as a nice acqui-hiring happens. In other words, bigger firms just scoop applied r&d teams in their field before they actually become a commercial threat.

</comment><comment><USER51> I think it's cyclical: there are periods of lots of funding available and less of funding available. There's still market economics at play. So the Lean Startup is not permanently dead simply because we see articles of startups getting $XX million funding or have $X billion valuations.

A company that is restricted on cash and "lean" is more inclined to be risk- averse and calculated in their business model decisions because they have to 'do more with less'. Whereas a company pumped full of cash has a greater 'trial and error' risk-tolerance because their goal is to overpower a target market to become the dominant player as quickly as possible. Investors still want to see a pleasing return either way.

</comment><comment><USER52> To what extent does user trust factor into how lean a startup can be?

A small company can't afford to spend a lot of resources on data integrity and protection, encryption and retention best practices, keeping up with laws like the GDPR, and they're that much closer to going bankrupt and having the data they've collected become part of asset liquidation and auction. It seems like these days, the discerning consumer ought to put more trust in a larger company's offerings in a given space than a smaller company, and even be wary of a smaller company that's offering something truly novel if that novelty isn't worth the price of private data being at-risk.

<comment><USER53> Theoretically you're right. In practice not enough customers think about that risk for it to have a material impact on the startup's financial viability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Investors aren't stupid - they won't fund millions of dollars (series A and above) unless they see a working product that customers are raving about, a large market opportunity, and a clear go-to-market - general indications of product-market-fit (although the definition of PMF depends on the space and product). We have seen rare cases of outsized seed rounds w/o a product, but they are extremely rare (even today). So this notion of "go big or go home" isn't vaporware - most founders cannot get that kind of investments, and few that can (reputed, second time founders for example) think 100 times before they jump in.

</comment><comment><USER55> The idea for short subject videos is actually pretty good but here is what I don't like: Netflix, HBO, and Amazon rock because they spend a ton of money making their own material. I don't see getting the same quality by farming out production to contractors.

Regarding the main point of the article: I always liked the idea of lean and sometimes bootstrapped startups. The current trend of mega financing perhaps comes from all of the money slushing around in markets looking for investments. Part of the effect of increasing wealth disparity is the the very rich have much more capital than they need to live and want to invest.

</comment><comment><USER56> I think the problem with Lean today is that everybody knows about it.

Starting a startup in 2002-2005 was _hard_ , just the mechanics of it. Incorporating took several thousand dollars of lawyer time; there was no Clerky, and online LLC-generators were largely unknown. Accepting payments meant getting a merchant account with a CC; no Stripe, Square, or other payment processors. Payroll meant dealing with ADP or PayChex; benefits meant hiring a person to manage those relationships. There was no YC, generally no seed funding ecosystem other than angels, no AngelList, no gigantic startup blogging scene where everybody gives advice on everything.

As a result, there were plenty of unfilled pain points, and potential customers were overjoyed when someone would actually come talk to them about it rather than assuming they knew what was best, a la big companies or massively VC-funded startups.

Now, everybody and their brother is founding startups, which means that if you _do_ happen across a genuine pain point, there are already 2 dozen startups working on it. Customers get weary of even talking to prospective entrepreneurs because they've had that conversation so many times before. I've done the Lean Startup methodology, and have several friends that have tried it; the most likely outcome today is that you'll talk to a 100 customers (after trying to talk to several hundred more who don't respond), and then discover that there's no actual market need addressable with current technology and you should keep your day job.

Like most knowledge related to markets, once everyone believes it's true, it ceases to be true.

<comment><USER57> So, it seems the methodolgy worked, right?

It prevented you from wasting time on a product that has no market.

<comment><USER56> Yep, you could argue that finding out after 2 months that an idea won't work is preferable to wasting 2 years on it. 'Course, then I went and repeated the process 8 more times, then decided that if there are no untapped market areas that can be filled by existing technology, it's time to spend 2 years inventing new technology. It remains to be seen whether that's a waste or not.

At some point you also have to apply the same logic to methodologies that you apply to ideas, though. The point of the Lean Startup methodology is to avoid wasting time implementing ideas that won't work so you can find a scalable, sustainable business model quicker. If your goal is to found a startup and all experience is that the Lean Startup methodology, in 2018, does not provide a scalable, sustainable way to do that, then you should ditch the methodology. Chances are you'll have to do your own methodology invention, though, because once a scalable, sustainable way to get rich becomes commonly known, it ceases to be sustainable.

(See also Bitcoin, which was a great way to get rich when nobody considered it a way to get rich, and then became a great way to become poor when everybody was certain it would make them rich.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Is there a single example in business of someone taking a huge amount of money, and plopping a famous CEO in charge of a dozen people and saying "go" and generating a successful business? (Let's set aside investment funds, obviously. I guess Meg Whitman could just hire some iconoclastic traders and tell them to manage the $2B while her 10 staff clone YouTube.)

There are quasi-legendary cases in history (think Spartan and Byzantine super- soldiers) of a tiny band with no resources executing ludicrously successful military campaigns, so I guess it's not completely impossible.

<comment><USER59> Fairchild Semiconductor, or Intel?

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> The low hanging fruit has been picked and we're waiting for the next technology trigger. My friend said to me recently, not only are all the good ideas taken, but so are all the bad ideas.

<comment><USER61> I don't believe that at all. Maybe the low hanging fruit in San Francisco has been taken, but the future is not evenly distributed... opportunities everywhere (read a headline about a Nigerian startup getting funded, that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about).

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> As an aside to the discussion about lean, I don't understand why these guys got 2 billion, even if it is Katzenberg. Netflix already has short content specific to mobile. They're subtle about it, but if you browse on mobile you'll get presented with shorter bits of content in your recommendations.

I guess the idea is that they are starting a studio to create short content, and hope to make billions selling the content?

</comment><comment><USER63> Someone should make a site or project to highlight bootstrapped startups.

There are plenty of very successful ones but you just don't hear about them as often.

<comment><USER64> [https://www.indiehackers.com/](https://www.indiehackers.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> It has always been dead or near dead. That's the point of a lean startup. It's a recession business operating in a surplus market. They're trying to make it successful despite market evaluation. (Can be a good thing or a bad thing.. mostly it's a bad thing for the long term economy, bad for customer value and solving customer needs)

</comment><comment><USER66> Lean Startup may or may not be dead but my Boss is going to continue to misuse the term MVP regardless. It pains me to think that this term isn't going away. I believe it will be used by managers for a long time to make developers forgo good development practices in lieu of getting that minimal ~viable~ product out.

<comment><USER67> Its become such an overblown annoying cult.

The core idea is good but even the book itself was trying to stretch an academic paper further than it needed to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If there's no product/market fit, too much capital is a death sentence. If they don't go out of business in a giant explosion, NewTV surely won't build anything innovative or disrupt anyone. Too much pressure and too many expectations at the wrong time/place.

<comment><USER68> Product is all that matters. And I'm not talking about the app. If they spend that cash generating quality video content, it is proven people will talk about it and will pay a subscription. So I think this investment speaks to the confidence that this guy can execute on this vision and that the market is receptive to this format, which it will be if done right. Also, if modestly successful there are plenty of Big's who would acquire. Knowing nothing of the players and how they execute, this actually passes the sniff test more than most and I'd say it sounds like it could be a winner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> If you don't test your idea before you spend a lot of money implementing it .. you stand to lose a lot of money.

It's common sense. And that's how I'd summarise much of the philosophy involved in the lean startup.

\--

And conversely; if you invest a lot of money in an idea without testing it, you're gambling.

</comment><comment><USER70> Uber changed the game by growing globally at an breakneck pace. Now, if you have a successful product, you need to globalize as quickly as possible otherwise people in Europe, China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, etc will all copy your idea and you will be left flat-footed.

</comment><comment><USER71> _You don 't have to follow SV stereotypes_

The lean startup is alive in well in most entrepreneurial ventures. Starting a food truck? Grocery store? Custom t-shirts? Indie video game? Small focused SaaS?

The echo chamber is real. "I looked outside and saw no lean startups, its dead!"

<comment><USER59> The article (and most of HN) refer to the local Silicon Valley jargon definiton of the word "startup": a company that is meant to grow extremely fast through the use of new technology. It's not a synonym for any entreprenurial venture.

What you're talking about is locally called a "lifestyle business" (not a "startup") -- a small business that can provide a comfortable living for the founder and a few employees, but which has essentially zero longer term growth prospects.

This point seems to be the source of much confusion in the comments here.

<comment><USER72> Those aren't "lean" either! "Lean" means starting your business before you have a product, marketing-driven development, and fumbling around chasing customers until you find something they want to buy, and _then_ building it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lean_Startup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lean_Startup)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> This Startup School lecture posted today about how to find product market fit is literally all lean methodology [https://www.startupschool.org/videos/38](https://www.startupschool.org/videos/38)

</comment><comment><USER74> Katzenberg's business idea cannot be explored without lots of capital. I bet you could find startups like it (i.e. raising lots of money before product- market fit) even when investment money is scarce, just fewer of them.

</comment><comment><USER75> > the amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to find is > inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital

businesses and risk capital are not related. Proof: businesses existed long before risk capital.

</comment><comment><USER76> Why don't they just give Dave Chapelle 1B and his own live streaming app? Dude is the best short content creator out there.

</comment><comment><USER77> TLDR: There is too much money chasing too few good companies, so even marginal companies can get funding.

</comment><comment><USER37> I should also point out why the "Lean Startup" is more relevant than ever: Theranos. (The other story trending in hacker news).

After reading Bad Blood, I am not convinced that Holmes (at least initially) intended to perpetrate a fraud. She may have believed it was possible to produce the machine she dreamed off, and it was a question of putting in the R&D. (It still might be possible).

If this is the case, the "lean" methodology would have saved her if she had just started out small and focused on developing the tech first.

Saved in the sense of convincing her it did not work and that it was best to return the rest of the money.

There was a time when the distribution deals were signed and the tech wasn't read and the deals were used to raise cash that really must have felt like things have gone too far.

<comment><USER78> Theranos's problem seems to be that they (especially Holmes) would not bend on technical issues that would have allowed them to build a functioning product.

It sounds like if they had allowed the machine to be a little bigger, and if they had compromised on being able to take a little more blood (instead of the one drop they had been marketing), they could have had a real machine that would produce reliable results.

Then they could have iterated and continued the push to miniaturize what they already had commercialized.

Instead, Holmes insisted on a sample size that technically they couldn't achieve reliable results with, and when faced with the decision of compromising on spec to get something to work, or release something that didn't work and then lie about it, she chose the latter.

If anything, a "lean" approach (to the extent possible with medical testing hardware) would have benefited them.

<comment><USER37> That is a good point on the size of the machine.

It would be crazy -- I mean in a cosmic way, not talking about any particular person -- if it were possible to get a decent MVP if it were slightly larger and took in slightly more blood.

The book implied this might have been possible, but it was not clear to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Betteridge's law.

<comment><USER80> Scrolls to bottom of article:

> Lessons Learned...The Lean Startup isn't dead

Ah yes, there you go.</comment></comment>


Python, Ruby, and Golang: A Command-Line Application Comparison - <AUTHOR> https://realpython.com/blog/python/python-ruby-and-golang-a-command-line-application-comparison

<comment><AUTHOR> IMHO: The author neglects the fact how Go shines in the Packaging. It is clear that ruby and python are nice for scripting but Go also is not too verbose.</comment>


Ask HN: You have $1BN, how do you disrupt Facebook? - <AUTHOR> If I you were given a billion dollars to disrupt Facebook, how would you go about it?<p>Clarification: Your objective is to get enough FB users onto your platform over a 2-3 year time frame that more or less will lead to FB's obsolescence. This is intentionally vague to encourage creativity and also question what it is that keeps FB users on the platform in the first place. <comment><USER3> Assuming you didn't mean "disrupting" in the sense of creating a product that replaces Facebook, I would spend the money on a relentless negative media campaign.

Buy/cultivate influence with sympathetic publications/journalists or create/acquire your own media presence and just hammer them with every negative thing you can find about the management of the company, the business, the users, the content, anything. Pay moles inside the company to leak sensitive information to you.

Then when/if you manage to bring Facebook's reputation down enough, target advertisers with a coordinated campaign to boycott this "horrible" company.

<comment><USER4> So basically you'd Uber them?

<comment><USER5> Well if you believe the story that Russia bought a 100k in ads and hit 70 million ppl with them and influenced the Presidential election...then anything is possible.

<comment><USER6> Beat me to it

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> $1B $2B $10B makes no difference. You can't.

Same as when Microsoft billions to "disrupt" Google in search with Bing. Fail.

If it was simply a matter of money then there are plenty of companies with alot more than $1B to spend on stealing FB's business.

When companies fail, as most do in the end, it is usually because not of external reasons but internal reasons - typically the company has grown too dogmatic in its own beliefs about its plac in the world which makes it ripe for disruption and replacement. This happened alot more in the early days of computing when the platforms were in flux - today the platforms are relatively stable which makes for long term stability of those companies that won the "winner takes all" battles.

There was a time, hard to believe now, where it looked very much like Microsoft woud own all computing for the foreseeable future. That didn't last long, and dogmatism and internal politics are to blame for that future not happening as anticipated.

</comment><comment><USER8> Focus on making the concept of a "social network" less disruptive from a personal standpoint, and more "complementary." There is a wealth of evidence that Facebook, as it exists today, is toxic to mental health and relationships. If you could create a social network that is seamless and complementary to your existing interactions in the physical world, that would be a compelling product.

How to do it? That's the $1B question.

<comment><USER9> I would say that part of the reason of FB popularity are the features that are addictive and disruptive. Same with IG. They design for addiction. The question then becomes if you do not design for addiction can you achieve success on the level of FB? If you are thinking in a social sense, then I would ask the question: how might we design an app that helps people connect, without being intrusive and letting people really connect?

<comment><USER10> IG = Instagram? I'm only guessing. The Wikipedia disambiguation page has a lot of expansions for "IG".

<comment><USER11> yes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 1) make a closed beta (so you have to get an invite to participate).

2) willingly promote pseudonym. Enforce as much as possible single profile, but adopt the "circles" concept from google+

3) pay celebrities to get in.

4) pay a weekly $100 to top 50 "most" active users (where you define what "most" active means. instead of one top 50, it can be five top 10). Pay "internal" money for the rest of the top 100. Internal money is a lot, e.g 1USD is 9999

5) pay top 5 celebrities real money too

6) manufacture your own celebrities.

7) pay "internal" money for every bit of information the user provide (location, "taste", purchase made elsewhere). Make is SUPER easy to report.

8) add games where user can spend the "internal" money

9) add dating

10) add cheap content (ala buzzfeed). and longer form serialized fiction (romance, scifi,erotica...).

11) add "chic" content that user have to pay internal money to get it.

12) gamify content access with "limited exclusive" content and other tricks.

13) pay other sites to adopt your internal money as a way to get "digital" stuff.

14) do an ICO for the "internal" money as soon as it has some traction.

15) be heavily "one-handed editorialized" on opiniated content generation, to cover all possible angles.

16) once there is a bit of traction, make sure to have a few "scandals" for people to want to be "inside" your closed world. Stay an invite-only club.

17) Make a paid API to have an "ecosystem" of add-ons ($100 a year). And take a % of payment (only done with your internal money) to incite ecosystem to charge.

</comment><comment><USER13> Based on history of previous "disruptors" like Microsoft disrupting IBM, Google disrupting Microsoft, Amazon disrupting Sears, etc... the disruption will be _accidental and unplanned_.

When people try to consciously disrupt an entrenched business with massive inertia like Microsoft of 1990s, it fails. Examples include Netscape (hubris of _" the web browser+internet Windows is the new operating system and MS Windows is obsolete"_) or Linux (cue recurring joke of _" 1995 is The Year of Linux Desktop!!!"_). When your agenda is transparent, you just paint a huge bullseye on your back and fail.

Google/Alphabet for the first time in 2017 is about to pass Microsoft in revenue ($100 billion.) It took Google 19 years to do it. When Google started in 1998, they didn't know they would be working on a thing called "Android" in 2006/2007 that makes MS Windows less relevant -- especially for emerging web users outside of USA. Today, a mobile internet user with a cheap Android phone can check email (GMail instead of MS Exchange), look up encyclopedia facts (Wikipedia instead of MS Encarta CD), look up actors in movies (IMDB instead of MS Cinemania CDROMs), etc. Of course, that list includes Google creating a "launch pad" to other websites (PageRank search instead of MSN as web portal). MSN in 1998 was a small part of Microsoft's business. And things like GMail were not in Google's roadmap in 1998.

You can't disrupt Facebook head on with an obvious goal of disrupting them. Instead, you hit them sideways. You disrupt them by doing something else that doesn't look like you're disrupting them. For example, instead of creating a new "social network", you create a micropayments system that's easier than PayPal or Apple Pay. Or you create an entertainment platform with a "social" component as an afterthought. Maybe one of those non-social networks _accidentally becomes_ a new focal point for social gathering and _accidentally_ disrupts Facebook.

Put another way, the startup entrepreneurs that will disrupt Facebook are working in their proverbial "garage" right now -- but they don't know they will disrupt Facebook in the future. (That's because they're not working on an "obvious" social network.) It's good that they don't know that they're competing with Facebook because if they did, they'd trip over themselves with their ambitions and they'd start a battle they can't win. (E.g. Snapchat losing to Facebook's Instagram.)

</comment><comment><USER14> Quick and dirty: you buy a tonload of power to DDOS the he'll out of it (;)).

More serious. I think we are nearing the time this could be done. People are getting fed up by facebook. The complaints you hear frequently all focus on no actual content anymore on timelines but just ads and friends sharing news items, other adds, winner actions, etc. Furthermore, privacy is always said to be a concern (though in truth hardly ever is).

My guess is. Attack those. Get real content on. Get people to actually share again their own content instead of others. An keep an eye on privacy.

<comment><USER15> > The complaints you hear frequently all focus on no actual content anymore on > timelines but just ads and friends sharing news items, other adds, winner > actions, etc.

To expand on this idea, one problem that has irked me with YouTube (I know we're talking about Facebook, but bear with me) is the decreasing amount of _original content_ , at least from what I see. (I don't actually have objective data about this, only commenting on what I see from recommendation lists and the homepage). There are way too many content farms that just post videos of "Top 10 X" or "Most shocking Y" or "Z things you need to know about ...". It's almost a form of rent-seeking: these people aren't contributing much to the platform, but want to rake in the ad revenue or likes/views. They don't _create_ , only _re-arrange_.

Objectively speaking, though, _Facebook has seen a decrease in original content_ [0]. People are writing fewer original posts about whatever, and instead just re-sharing things more. It's (in my opinion) a sad trend for any social network; what was once supposed to be about the user has become more about clickbait and celebrities who churn out content.

This was probably one of the greatest contributing factors for me quitting Facebook - even though I had friends from school friended, the platform didn't provide any _value_ in terms of reading more about their lives, seeing the things they were doing or thinking, etc. All they did was re-share clickbait, mainstream articles, or articles that appealed to emotion and "teams" (Democrat/Republican).

If someone out there is to design a competing social network, they should consider explicitly marking posts as "Original" where appropriate. If someone shares disproportionately compared to the amount they write original posts, send them a notification, and possibly scale back their posting abilities so the network doesn't turn into a giant cage of parrots like we have now, just re-posting digital noise.

[0] [http://fortune.com/2016/04/07/facebook-sharing- decline/](http://fortune.com/2016/04/07/facebook-sharing-decline/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The big problem with social networks is that their growth and traction are not strongly correlated with initial financial investment.

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp all famously started off on shoestring budgets. In contrast, large budgets and huge ambitions are probably toxic to building social networks. Google+ and post-acquisition MySpace are two good examples of this.

As a result, the best opportunity for disrupting Facebook is taking the billion dollars and starting a social media-focused venture capital firm. The firm's goal would be to make it easy and risk-free for college students to create mobile-first social experiences.

Hopefully, some of the seed investments will gain traction, and you should have enough of the initial billion dollars left over to provide significant follow-on capital. Ideally, your most promising Facebook competitors will not need to rely on advertising for several years.

After those several years, your top winners will probably be approached by Facebook's corporate development team... and they'll be offering to acquire your most promising portfolio companies. In order to avoid Facebook winning the final round, you'd have to use your influence over your portfolio companies to block any sale to Facebook. I'm not sure how practical this is because it would probably anger the founders, all their employees, and all other shareholders in the company.

Eventually... ten or fifteen years after your VC firm made its first investment... you might have a portfolio company that could stand up to Facebook.

Or you might not.

If this strategy was a sure bet, I'm sure that Google Ventures and CapitalG would already be halfway there.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think before anyone is going to be able to "disrupt" Facebook, you need to take their cash cow away from them. DATA.

I honestly believe the future of social media will be such that (a) user data is stored on a user-controlled [owned?] platform (b) user data is then [based on custom rules set by user] distributed to social networks.

Once the data is decentralized any Joe can then build a network and instantly take advantage of data, since the user will simply "flip a switch" and suddenly all of their data can be transferred / added-to the new network.

<comment><USER18> How does this happen? Users don't care, social network companies don't want to build this.

<comment><USER17> Maybe someone with $1BN, who wants to "disrupt" social network companies, builds it?

I do think (a) if it existed, and (b) it was simple / reliable / durable / secure enough that users had the option, they would care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Disrupting Facebook is not an attack on Facebook anymore. Its an attack on consumption culture that everyone is trapped in. Too keep markets growing you have to turn ppl into mindless consumers. That is Facebook's unintended purpose. Facebook or whatever comes next cannot be replaced cause mindless consumers who need to accumulate things and debt are the basis of todays markets.

</comment><comment><USER20> Create a lottery where the only way to participate is to give up Facebook and join my social network.

Every once in a while (a few months, sometimes once every day, sometimes almost a whole year), there will be a random selection among those who participate and that person will win $1 million.

If you put the money in an index fund, you could potentially do this for a very long time.

</comment><comment><USER21> The thing that kills Facebook will also take out Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and a large chunk of the internet in one fell swoop.

It's going to be decentralized with zero ads or monetization of user data. Its adoption would be best served with an above-board advertising campaign to decimate the public's view of Facebook. It will also leverage an existing company's technology, and merely be a value-add to that company's core business.

</comment><comment><USER22> Try to build something that you think is useful or entertaining for the users. Don't obsess with disrupting a specific company or technology. If FB gets disrupted it will be from an angle nobody expected.

</comment><comment><USER23> You spend all that money on lobbying politicians about the evils of Facebook. You launch multiple ad campaigns on Facebook to target politicians which, over time, brainwashes them into thinking that Facebook is evil and ought to be nationalized... Pay an army of hackers to leak articles into their feeds.

</comment><comment><USER24> Campaign to give Americans the same data protection rights as Europeans.

Campaign to have all these different data protection rights rigidly enforced.

</comment><comment><USER25> Launch a service which takes the best from Fb & Messenger, Instagram & Snapchat (but without a "news" feed), launch a token, reward user activity and new user referals with tokens, generate enough hype and FOMO among key people that enough will start to see a real chance for network effects and thereby for gains in the token value. Sell a narrative of people's right to benefit from their contributions and paint Facebook as greedy beneficiary of 2 billion people's activity for which they don't get anything in return, except a broken democracy.

</comment><comment><USER26> Keep the good of Facebook, throw out the bad, replace it with better.

The good: Connection to and updates from long-unseen friends, family and acquaintances; community organizing; universality.

The bad: Placing our thoughts, ideas, memories, pictures, opinions and habits into a closed, for-profit ecosystem with dubious ethics and the tendency to meddle with the presentation of that content (and the content itself) like a scolding, self-serving parent. Opaque content curation designed, at best, to maximize advertising revenue.

Better: Placing the above in the hands of individual users: self presentation, feed curation entirely under user control.

Existing technologies such as RSS, open IDs and authentication, blogging software, etc, can, glued together with the right protocol TBD, to allow individuals to have more control over their own data and identity, while still allowing all of the good that Facebook and other social media actually bring to the world. Individuals host their own equivalent of the "Facebook wall" (or hire a host), and can subscribe to other "walls". Posting on your "wall" can have different levels of security - available to trusted audience or public, rather like Facebook is. Only, the user owns it. A free, open-source protocol that emphasizes interoperability and user control would allow devs to create any kind of client that suits them.

Revenue through consultation and marketing the deep expertise that comes from knowing the protocol inside out.

</comment><comment><USER27> 2-3 years is extremely short. 5-10 years is much more plausible. Even then, it's tough; Yahoo and IRC has been disrupted like a decade ago and it still lives on.

What I would do is the Snap or Telegram route. FB's weak link is that everything is too public. People can see things like who has read your message, what groups you like, who you are in an argument with. A medium that is less intrusive and lets you build more tight knit communities will be much more popular.

Another problem of Facebook is that it no longer consists of real world friends. It's about acquaintances, not friends. A social media that is more about real friends can do better.

I would actually attack it from the angle of some kind of community - gaming, certain hobbies, sports groups. Make something with similar features to Slack, Telegram, or Discord, but more suited between friends.

A good hint that it's on the right track is that it should initially be a little repulsive to people who use "acquaintance" or "personal branding" kind of social media, like Twitter, Linked In, Instagram.

</comment><comment><USER28> I would copy the Wikipedia model as much as possible. Wikipedia doesn't generate nearly as much data but there must be some way to empower the users with it rather than "stealing" it for your own financial gain. We complain a lot about Facebook for good reason, what I'd like to see is a more responsible platform and I think Wikipedia got a lot of that right.

</comment><comment><USER29> To answer your questions, people are still on FB today because FB keeps buying its main compatitors buy offering up to 20 billion dollars per deal. WhatsApp, Instagram, etc.

How can you compete with that? Well, just say "no" like Snapchat did and cross your fingers because FB would litteraly copy/past your idea. They would use the couple of billions of dollars from your unsuccessful acquisition in order to hire an army of attorneys and to stop you from any legal action.

From another perspective, It's very hard to disrupt a social graph because it's very simple and pure. There's no need for it to be duplicated which is why FB keeps winning since they were the first who really created it. The rest is just about ads, billions of dollars, random features/startups and a lot of rich people. At the end of the day, the real value/data of FB is a very simple social graph.

</comment><comment><USER23> An automated reward system that pays people not to use Facebook and charges them when they use it.

</comment><comment><USER30> Take that 1B, give a 1000 startup a 1 million bucks and hope one of them hits. Use gauss to help you out. If it follows some distribution there will be a few 2 or 3 standard deviation company in there.

<comment><USER10> VCs are doing that all day. Why do you believe this is going to disrupt Facebook?

<comment><USER31> Because Facebook disrupted a lot of companies and markets using this same strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> There already is a Facebook, why are you trying to disrupt it?

Because it promotes bite-sized and current content over depth? A website that's just a personal to-read queue with a share button.

Because its one-size-fits-all approach that's only suitable for a narrow band of life events? A toolkit for making small community forums where moderators control what sort of posting model and user profile they have but users control which of their profiles are visible from each other.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think this wouldn't actually be that difficult. Lets say it takes ten million to build a Facebook clone. I would take the rest of the money and give it away to the most popular people in the United States. Let's say you give $15,000 to 6,6333,333 and get them to sign something that says they will not use facebook. Eventually everyone wants to be like the popular people and they will wind up joining the service.

</comment><comment><USER34> I honestly don't see how you could use $1bil to _legally_ disrupt Facebook, it just isn't enough money.

Perhaps you could use that money to start another company, not a competitor, and hopefully turn enough of a profit that one day you'll have enough money to either build a competitor or just buy Facebook?

The only thing Zuckerberg cares about is his company, so unless you can threaten that you've got no leverage on him.

</comment><comment><USER35> If you have an arbitrarily large sum of money like $1b, you should have the allure and social connections to assemble a syndicate of financiers and acquire the damn thing. I'd de-list Facebook and make it into a not-for-profit corporation.

In that scenario, I don't think it would be impossible to make it vastly more respectful of user rights and still make enough money without charity to cover its operating costs.

</comment><comment><USER36> If possible invest it in an existing company Facebook can't compete with, for example Wechat/QQ. Use the money to strengthen it's position in neighboring countries where it is competing directly with Facebook and to try to enter poor markets where Facebook doesn't yet have complete market domination (think the places where Facebook tried to introduce Free Basics).

</comment><comment><USER37> Bribe government to erect a Great Firewall, and block Facebook, citing 'privacy concerns', 'reduction of online harassment', 'support of terrorist networks', 'undermining of freedom of speech', 'bad influences of outside cultures', etc... whatever works best for a specific country ;)

</comment><comment><USER38> You need to build a new kind of social network. However, $1B won't help you much with that. You only need to build it and get 100,000 within a couple of months and 10x that number every year by becoming very popular because you have built something that people want. Money can only help you so much, it needs to grow by itself.

</comment><comment><USER39> Create a third party client app that merges and bridges your contacts/feeds/events/etc between facebook, G+, Wechat and whatever. Make it better than the facebook app. Once enough people get accustomed to it, start phasing out facebook by making the experience better for another decentralized network.

</comment><comment><USER40> Is disrupting Facebook is the end game?

Or you think it's a necessary prerequisite to succeed in some of your ideas?

If it's latter - just follow the implementation of your ideas and forget about FB.

If it's former - it's a worthless goal. Sort of like negative publicity - <USER2> just gives more attention (and power) to something you want to eliminate.

</comment><comment><USER41> I have a dynamic graph visualization library. For too long, we've been content with contact lists. I want to create a dynamic visualization, one that journalists can use to point to referenced people in a story. With a billion dollars, I wouldn't have to do all the development myself.

<comment><USER41> To follow that up, I would create interactive 4D visualizations of important institutions like congress, and of course the corporate historians could use it to visualize their companies' histories, perhaps sparing us the hassle of filling out job application fields all the time.

<comment><USER21> Check out Kumu[0], it's similar to what you're talking about.

Also a piece of advice about graph visualizations: never show your user a raw graph vis of any kind, because it's UX suicide. If I had a dollar for every time I've seen CS grads make a force-directed graph vis and think it constituted something usable, I'd be rich.

[0] [http://www.kumu.io](http://www.kumu.io)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> 1\. Keep your money. 2\. Wait five to ten years. Facebook will implode on its own. 3\. ? 4\. Profit.

</comment><comment><USER43> Start an exclusive social network at a high-prestige, aspirational, regionaly- centered, vital, active, relations-oriented, demographic: HARVARD.

And magnify all the negatives of Facebook.

Read danah boyd's accounts of how MySpace fell to Facebook in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER44> _> > You have $1BN, how do you disrupt Facebook?_

You will raise not $1B but $100 BILLION if you can convince investors that you'll disrupt FB. The problem is....you know what it is.

</comment><comment><USER45> Even with $10 billion it would still be nearly impossible. For example, iPhone/ipod vs Zuna and Bing vs. Google

<comment><USER46> Google+ vs fb

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> In theory you could use the money to destroy the data center, like physically get rid of the data, like in MR robot

</comment><comment><USER48> Give me the money and sign my NDA and I'll tell you all about it.

</comment><comment><USER49> Buy reddit, add a messaging feature and you're on your way.

<comment><USER50> Reddit is worth more than 1bn though. Heard they were almost worth 2bn.

<comment><USER51> You don't need all the shares, only 51%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Social media app with Top 8

</comment><comment><USER53> Can I do something illegal?

</comment><comment><USER54> Create the Kin Foundation.

</comment><comment><USER55> Buy shares in Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER56> Guerrilla warfare.

</comment><comment><USER57> Recreate Myspace.

<comment><USER58> I can say that early myspace seemed a lot more fun to me because it was somewhat customizable. I recall being able to put html elements, banners, change colors, and make it somewhat unique to my own tastes. As far as I know, there isn't much like that these days, certainly not FB. I think that uniqueness value is missing from today's socials.

<comment><USER59> From what I remember, the clean, non-customizable interface was one of the main reasons FB surplanted MySpace for a lot of people.

One thing I learned from designing websites is that no one goes to your site for it's artistic design. If your site looks great then it won't hurt. But, if the design gets in the way of accessing the information they're there to find, people will hate it.

MySpace was a perfect example of this, from what I recall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> This is a provocative question. To make the responses more cohesive, can you define your meaning of "disrupt" for us?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, good point! I added some clarification. It's a little vague, but also intentionally so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Not remotely enough money to take on Facebook. They'd simply squash you. Google couldn't do it and they have far deeper pockets.

</comment><comment><USER4> Start paying people to hang out with their friends?

</comment><comment><USER62> Pay influencers a few grand to join?

</comment><comment><USER63> What a waste of a billion.

</comment><comment><USER64> Step 1.) Watch this teaser [https://vimeo.com/231250659](https://vimeo.com/231250659) and this breakdown [https://vimeo.com/231242634](https://vimeo.com/231242634)

Step 2.) Visit [http://www.idol.fund](http://www.idol.fund)

Step 3.) Send message to email@example.com to get the password.

Step 4.) Get access to pitch deck

Step 5.) Prepare check

I'll not only disrupt them, I'll bankrupt the core revenue foundations of Silicon Valley itself.

</comment><comment><USER65> nice try, Mark.

</comment><comment><USER66> show me the money.

</comment><comment><USER18> First step: ask HN how to do it Who's your investor?

<comment><USER18> Sorry if that sounded mean. But I don't think the responses to this question are likely to be very useful. It's a hard problem, and if someone actually thinks they have a solution to it, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot to share it instead of finding funding to build it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Build something that's got most of the well-known features of Facebook, plus/minus whatever you feel like you need to change with regard to privacy, business model, decentralization, etc. You can do all of this for much, much less than $1B. The only thing you're missing is two billion users.

Use the remaining funds to stir up sensational controversies that make people wary of Facebook, lobby governments around the world to harass Facebook, and offer monetary awards to get influential groups of people (e.g. schools) to switch to your platform. Once you've got a bit of momentum, spend the last few million dollars to hire a bunch of shady guys to take out Facebook's leadership and infrastructure -- either physically, with bombs and guns, or virtually, with very powerful malware. By the time they recover (if ever), you're the one who has two billion users.

This is how you destroy a company when you're actually intending to do so.

For the rest of us who don't want to get our hands dirty with guns and viruses, I suspect that $1B and the lofty goal of disrupting Facebook are actually going to get in the way. Facebook won't be disrupted by something that's trying too hard to disrupt them. Zuckerberg will see the competition coming from a mile away and respond with $2B, $3B, or more.

The key is to come up with something that's so completely different from Facebook that they'll have a hard time even seeing you as legitimate competition. You fly under their radar, make no headlines, and refrain from making ambitious statements like "I want to disrupt Facebook" until you've created a whole new market and they can't pivot to compete with you.

The reason the illegal solution above works is because Zuckerberg doesn't expect to be assassinated on his morning jog. Do something that's just as unexpected, only legally this time.</comment>


Consulting Firm Aquihire? - <AUTHOR>

I run a consulting firm that I've grown over the last 4 years to be just over $2M/year. We have 11 employees. One of my biggest clients, who makes up about 50% of my business, has been pursuing an aqui-hire for a while, and recently, they've asked me to name my price. So far the only term they've put down is that they want to buy 100% of the company, and lock myself and a few of the other key employees in with profit sharing, etc. I'm on the fence about this, I like the idea of the payout, and having larger budgets to work with and being able to work one exciting new products. The idea is for my company to remain independent, just change ownership, and pivot from a consulting company to a product company.<p>1) Should I do this? 2) How do I protect our environment so my team can continue to function well together? 3) We're just on the verge of making our own products, should I throw in the towel now? 4)How do I price the acquisition given where we are now? <comment><USER2> Off topic, but I am interested in the steps you took in building this type of business. Would I be able to get in touch with you? If so, just shoot me an email. firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER3> I did something similar to this a few years back, email me at firstname.lastname@example.com if you'd like to discuss in detail.

</comment><comment><USER4> You can always build it up again with the money you make. Cash out, but don't undersell it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can you give more details about what services you are offering?

The cautious side of me says the following:

Will the morale of you and your employees change? If so, then what will happen is that you'll sell out and your employees may not get the financial windfall that you get, they get demoralized and quit and the whole thing winds up falling apart and your 11 employees leave.

But that doesn't matter just because you cashed out, right?

Will you and your team retain the autonomy and freedom you (may) have now?

What about the other 50% of your business that you may be dropping? What is the potential upside if you were to focus on growing that side of the business?

You're looking to sell out to the client company who comprises 50% of your rev for what?

THe larger budgets come with tethers to the scope and constraints of those who own the budget... so just because they are larger doesn't mean you have more freedom with them... in fact, if they are significantly larger - you may have MORE scrutiny and reporting and metrics etc...

Finally, only you can answer this - but take a very cautious stance and don't forget all the trade offs...</comment>


Amazon.com: Send to Kindle for PC (Mac also available) - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?docId=1000719931 <comment><AUTHOR> I think the Send to Kindle for Mac is new (released yesterday?) but I only just noticed it for PC... how late am I?</comment>