[HN Gopher] Move Fast or Die: Key Startup Lessons ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-25 23:00 UTC)