[HN Gopher] Move Fast or Die: Key Startup Lessons
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Move Fast or Die: Key Startup Lessons
Author : tracyhenry
Score : 58 points
Date : 2022-08-25 18:20 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.southparkcommons.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.southparkcommons.com)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| This seems like good advice for startups with high burn in
| competitive markets. However, that may have more to do with the
| "high burn" and the "competitive market" part than the "startup"
| part...
| Maro wrote:
| I worked at FB in 2016-17. The bootcamp _was_ amazing, but we
| didn't go live on day #2. (Maybe this was true earlier.) I think
| I got something live on week #2. Day #2 was not realistic, you
| need to set up the macbook, accounts, receive the bootcamp tasks,
| get some context in a multi MLoC codebase, test locally, commit,
| get it reviewed, then it went live for staff.
|
| Still, the spirit of the post is definitely true. Bootcamp was
| awesome, it indoctrinated us to Move Fast and Break Things, and
| Just Ship It. FB was an amazing company, best company I ever
| worked for.
|
| What others point out, that this doesn't work for all domains;
| it's true. But it's probably true for 90% of the startups here on
| HN. Also, if you're a startupper, esp. one doing the other 10%,
| you better be able to apply critical thinking to advice on the
| Internet..
| tracyhenry wrote:
| FB at 2016-17 isn't a startup anymore. The blog was talking
| about FB at the very beginning.
| ethanbond wrote:
| My bootcamp at FB in ~2015 had like 4 or 5 speakers who didn't
| even show up to their allotted slots.
|
| It revealed a lot about how much FB'ers respect their
| colleagues' time! Pretty gross if you ask me.
| Maro wrote:
| I was in London. As far as I remember, speakers showed up and
| were very professional. I distinctly remember, FB feeled like
| a hedge fund [1] and a startup [2] had a baby.
|
| [1] Lots of people in shirts, lots of people making a lot of
| money, company making a lot of money, free electronics from
| vending machines, lots of perks, etc. [2] Move Fast and Break
| Things, The Quick Shall Inherit the Earth, etc.
| Maro wrote:
| Shameless plug:
|
| https://bytepawn.com/culture-docs-facebook-netflix-and-
| valve...
| myuzio wrote:
| The advice is very much in alignment with the "Zero to One" book.
| They are explaining how they made their startup "successful". But
| that doesn't mean if you follow their foot steps your startup
| will be successful as well.
|
| This line of thinking is not far from the type that leads to
| cargo cult or any other superstitious belief.
|
| So, not necessarily good or bad advice, do whatever works best
| for you, but it's important to measure often to know if things
| are actually working.
| jondeval wrote:
| There are obvious tradeoffs with stability that are being noted.
| These concerns are well expressed here: https://xkcd.com/1428/
|
| But I think the more insidious downside of this mentality in
| practice is that it tends to absolve the product management of
| their responsibility to form a strong opinionated vision of what
| needs to be built over the course many months.
|
| Tactical engineering speed is important, but I would much rather
| work for a company that obsesses over building the right thing
| and knows how to communicate a view of what 'great' looks like.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Are people still writing hagiographies about Facebook?
| elisharobinson wrote:
| A worm on its own is faster than a horse in the mill stone . It's
| bad mindset to think that all software companies are the same ,
| there are some companies which ship things other than CRUD apps
| on the web(shocker !!) .
|
| My main gripe is the statement of ask for forgiveness than
| permission, that mindset does not work on projects like the
| 737max . Anything of value is built by teams and as such hero
| worship should be avoided whenever possible. Good work should be
| rewarded but don't skew the social dynamic to the point of "hero
| said it so it must be true".
| epolanski wrote:
| The 737max is not a company but a product and Boeing isn't a
| startup looking to raise vc money.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| I'm not sure the author should be quite so proud of the results
| of his hard work (i.e., the Facebook user experience). And
| indeed, my own startup experience has shown that the "move fast,
| break things, ask forgiveness not permission" method results in
| burning through $millions of investor cash and frequently
| building products that aren't really that useful or successful?
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >I'm not sure the author should be quite so proud of the
| results of his hard work
|
| Well, that's a problem for every for-profit company, right?
|
| If TikTok goes from attracting 5 minutes of attention a day
| from its users to 10 minutes, then that's great for TikTok. If
| it gets to 12 hours a day, then that's a civilization-ending
| disaster. If a coal mining company extracts and burns every
| cubic meter of coal in the Earth's crust then we all die. Etc
| etc.
|
| Companies want to grow and compete, and that's good, since it's
| resulted in literally all human progress, and is why we're no
| longer living in dirt huts and dying at 30 from cholera. But
| taken to the extreme...
| daenz wrote:
| I think it's important to consider the context for this advice,
| which is introduced in the opening: dwindling funding and
| competition out to kill your company.
|
| Presumably, the advice that follows is a direct result of those
| _constraints._ However, if you don 't have those constraints, I
| don't think you need to grind yourself to the bone.
|
| Yes, there will always be competition looking to eat your lunch.
| Is getting to market first and fastest the most important thing?
| Depends on the product. All-encompassing social media platform?
| Yes. High quality saas tool? Perhaps not. In most markets,
| there's always room for competitors, and even if you become an
| underdog, producing stable, affordable, high quality software can
| make you a serious competitor to a company 10x the size who is
| constantly breaking things and pissing off their users.
| bruce511 wrote:
| I feel like one success story doesn't necessarily make it good
| advice for everyone else.
|
| Maybe in the world where your customer base is flexible
| (students), and where your product "doesn't really matter", then
| hey, why not break it from time to time. The penalty for failure,
| is well, zero.
|
| In a different context though small errors can result in very
| large penalties, even extinction. In which case this strategy
| will (and certainly has many times) failed.
|
| Advice without context is dangerous. Before adopting any advice
| (especially "how we did it" stories from survivors) it's worth
| really understanding the external factors that aided in that
| success.
| TheNewsIsHere wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree with your comment. The "move fast and
| break things" mentality works for the banal and unimportant,
| but not for the significant or important.
|
| Who cares if a social media site is offline for a day? Society
| will be fine. Users will be fine. Is anyone really going to
| miss a random social media post lost due to misbehaving code?
| Probably not on balance.
|
| But if you're attempting to build a quality, say, EMR/EHR, or
| some kind of industrial control software, or a password
| manager, you have certain duties that are completely
| incompatible with that mentality.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Every time peoples life, health and well-being depend on your
| action advocating for "move fast and break things" should be
| reason for immediate termination. The severance package can
| be negotiated later.
| int0x2e wrote:
| While I agree with you generally, one could make the
| argument that if your aim is to drastically disrupt some
| domain, you may wish to adopt a riskier but faster path
| even if you're working in a safety-critical field, because
| the "slow and safe" route means more lives lost /
| negatively impacted while you slowly perfect your solution.
|
| If you'd humor my extreme utilitarian view for a minute, I
| would argue both autonomous self driving and some medical
| endeavors could save many more lives if we, as a society,
| said "you get a budget of 10k. 10k lives you can severely
| negatively impact to deliver impact greater than that
| number" - basically giving you an investment/debt you repay
| to society via your future impact. Currently, traffic
| fatalities are at ~38k/year in the US (with over 2M/year
| injured), and the numbers for leading medical causes are
| staggering (heart disease ~700k/year, cancer ~600k/year,
| etc.). I would argue our current processes for
| breakthroughs in areas where health or safety are involved
| simply lean too far towards the "safe" end of the spectrum.
|
| One anecdote I can share is a friend who worked for over a
| decade on a system where patients could buy a medical test
| at a pharmacy, take a urine sample at home, and get lab
| quality results using their phone's camera. The tech was
| ready in their first year of running. They built a suite of
| validations and tested things across hundreds of phone
| models, they really did their part well because they truly
| care. Getting things FDA approved and in patients' hands
| took much longer, because the processes are extremally slow
| and designed to reduce risk by almost all means necessary.
| While that's a good idea in theory, it didn't stop a scam
| like Theranos (because when you're intentionally dishonest
| rules don't always help), and it did make it so my friend's
| company took a lot longer before being able to get fast,
| accurate, test results for many different metrics to rural
| and poor communities where lab testing can be an issue...
| hef19898 wrote:
| Theranos isbthe exception proofing the FDA right, the 737
| Max is the exception proofing the FAA right. And no,
| there is no such thing as a "budget" of lost lives to
| further innovation. That approach is just deeply cynic,
| and should ve in itself ground to _not_ work in any of
| those industries. The 737 Max and Theranos do show so
| that there already to many people with that exact mindset
| out and about. And while Theranos didn 't cause any death
| (at least not that I am aware of), the MAX indeed did.
| All for profit, all for moving fast. For me, that is
| simply not acceptable.
| TheNewsIsHere wrote:
| I agree with you fully. However, the way I read int0x2e's
| comment was as a theoretical example of the logic they
| were putting forth. Not as advocacy for actually taking
| that tact.
|
| Typically we empower governments with restraints to
| prevent them from allowing those tactics, and for good
| reason. (Even if in reality it is imperfect).
| 1e-9 wrote:
| > Who cares if a social media site is offline for a day?
| Society will be fine. Users will be fine.
|
| Not just fine... better off.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Worked to get into space with SpaceX. ULA is trying the old
| approach. We can look at the difference live.
| hef19898 wrote:
| None of the SpaceX ideas where actually that new, rockets
| lanfed already decades earlier. That ULA got complacent is
| a differwnt story, ULA is far from being the only
| competitor of SpaceX outside of US government launches.
|
| Not tgat SpaceX isn't imoressive, it is. They did move woth
| less _beauraucracy_ , not with more risk. Kind of like the
| Covid vaccines, less red tapes speeds things up. Otherwise,
| SpaceX seems to be rather conservative ubder Shotwell's
| leadership as far as safety is concerned.
|
| Dpace flight is, funny enough, less regulated that
| commercial aviation and tue aero part of aerospace.
| hbrn wrote:
| While what you're saying is generally true, one should also
| keep in mind that people (especially engineers) are extremely
| biased and tend to drastically overestimate the cost of
| mistakes.
|
| Github Actions went down yesterday, disrupting the service for
| thousands of companies. They also went down today.
|
| And yet, if they didn't have the "move fast" mindset, they
| probably wouldn't have Actions as a product in the first place.
| criddell wrote:
| > one should also keep in mind that people (especially
| engineers) are extremely biased and tend to drastically
| overestimate the cost of mistakes.
|
| Perhaps that's true of _software_ engineers but I don 't
| think it's true for Professional Engineers. That's one of the
| reasons I wouldn't consider most people who call themselves
| software engineers to be an engineer at all.
| [deleted]
| clpm4j wrote:
| 'developer' and 'programmer' really are more apt terms -
| 'engineer' sounds more impressive though
| epolanski wrote:
| So does vice president instead of manager or executive
| assistant instead of secretary.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Wait until you meet sales engineers
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > ...That's one of the reasons I wouldn't consider most
| people who call themselves software engineers to be an
| engineer at all.
|
| Few people who call themselves (non-software) engineers
| today are running locomotives. Words can evolve over time.
| karthikb wrote:
| > one should also keep in mind that people (especially
| engineers) are extremely biased and tend to drastically
| overestimate the cost of mistakes
|
| I've found the opposite to be true, especially with engineers
| moving from pure software to founding companies in regulated
| industries such as aerospace or medical devices.
| hbrn wrote:
| Good point, though I'd say the major factor is dealing with
| hardware, not necessarily being regulated. You can't just
| push a hotfix to a million of on-premise devices with one
| click.
| lumost wrote:
| The challenge here is that many startups will ultimately fail
| to produce anything at the early stages. A big company/startup
| can spend months or even years debating the feature in question
| with minimal consequence.
|
| The startups advantage is to simply be faster. A slow startup
| is worse off than a division in a big company.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _I feel like one success story doesn 't necessarily make it
| good advice for everyone else._
|
| Heh, reminds me of this tweet:
| https://nitter.net/apenwarr/status/1440656518701932554 /
| https://twitter.com/apenwarr/status/1440656518701932554
| yashap wrote:
| I think it's generally true that product shipping speed is very
| important for startups. You'll always have competition, having
| the best product is crucial to "winning", that means you have to
| be faster than your competitors.
|
| However, speed has to be balanced against things like:
|
| - Doing customer research/building the right things
|
| - Stability (high uptime, few bugs)
|
| - "Workflow regressions" (not explicit bugs, implementing a
| change correctly, but not realizing it breaks a key workflow for
| key customers)
|
| For a B2C social network, speed dominates those factors. Ship a
| lot, keep the successful features and prune others, customers
| tolerate the rapid change and a moderate level of bugs and
| outages.
|
| However, for a B2B Enterprise startup, where your software is
| absolutely mission critical for your customers, and you MUST have
| a great reputation to do more sales, it's distant. Those other
| items are really important too, and you do have to sacrifice some
| speed for them.
|
| Even for mission critical Enterprise startups, I think you still
| have to emphasize speed a lot to "win", but it can't dominate
| things like stability, customer research and workflow
| regressions. You have to sacrifice a moderate amount of speed for
| those things.
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