[HN Gopher] Parker Conrad says founders have been building softw...
___________________________________________________________________
Parker Conrad says founders have been building software wrong
Author : arnejenssen
Score : 11 points
Date : 2024-08-14 19:16 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| arnejenssen wrote:
| Parker Conrad says founders have been building software wrong for
| the last 20 years
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I want a framework built to enable
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangler_fig_pattern
| inheritedwisdom wrote:
| Curious how others feel about this narrative. As an SI we see the
| pain isolated systems cost businesses and the great deal of money
| required to make them fit into a larger ecosystem. That said as a
| rippling customer, their breadth and lack of depth is constantly
| on display. We've had several challenges with there "secondary"
| services. It costs money to be good at everything, my feeling is
| this style of getting off the ground is just as much a capital
| constraint as it is a revenue/gtm one.
|
| He's got a good valuation going selling ideas and figuring out
| how to implement later though...
| vannevar wrote:
| There are a couple of obvious problems with the breadth-first
| approach. While I think everyone would agree that a great
| platform beats a bunch of great one-function apps, building a
| great one-function app is much cheaper and less risky than
| trying to build a platform. The number of people who know
| _some_ narrow problem they can solve better than existing
| solutions is exponentially greater than the number of people
| who know how to build a broad platform that solves most
| problems better than existing solutions. And the reality is
| that most companies who pay for platforms will still buy one-
| function apps if the platform 's functionality is inferior
| enough to replace that aspect. They are much less likely to buy
| another entire platform, however.
|
| I doubt Parker actually personally believes what he's saying
| here, it seems more like marketing from a company that is
| trying to sell a platform than it does the thoughtful opinion
| of an individual.
| quantified wrote:
| I have worked for companies that chased breadth and companies
| that focused. The focused group contained the only real
| successes.
|
| Breadth is a killer. It requires resources (eng, PM, executive)
| that are not available in young companies. Where it was
| pursued, the management imperative to build the broad set of
| capabilities without resourcing meant that almost everything
| sort of sucked. It was in one instance the result of a strong
| founder chasing every shiny buzzword even without a strong
| business justification.
|
| Go with focus, unless you have proven-strong management and
| actual big-tech resourcing.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| Seems to me that building for breadth can trigger
| overengineering. You build functionality that isn't wanted, but
| is a logical consequence of your platform and the other
| functionality that you do have use cases for. This is an
| expenditure of resources with no guarantee that anyone will use
| it. In turn, it's likely that this functionality will harbor bugs
| and design errors, precisely because nobody has really used it
| for anything.
|
| I'm all for building extensible platforms, with scripting and/or
| good APIs, but any effort put into something for which there is
| no definable use case is probably wasted.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Why would anyone even care about what Parker Conrad thinks about
| building software?
|
| I appreciate his company building but he is no John Carmack. So
| sit down bud.
|
| Also why Saas are struggling is not because they were focused on
| something narrow. It's because they were not innovating and
| pushing the edge of technology and VCs were funding the same type
| of company multiple times to reduce risk etc.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-08-14 23:01 UTC)