I think this premise is reinforced by pg in several of his essays, so it's weird to see such push-back here on HN. Blind faith seems to be, by and large, necessary, especially when fighting against colossal odds (as is often the case in startups).
This kind of "insanity" is the precursor to the relentless determination one needs when leading a scrappy team of underdogs. Pragmatism and level-headedness sound good on paper, but borderline irresponsible risk-taking is what, at the end of the day, gets rewarded. There's no way to convince anyone -- potential employees, co-founders, investors -- without a cult-like aura. If you'll allow me some hyperbolic flair, startup founders are prophets.
Is it possible that the attitude expressed in those essays stems from what is good for founders in the aggregate — that is, pg's pocketbook — rather than what is good for any one particular founder?
I think there may be another way to look at it (even though I'm not actually a massive fan of the way VC works). The "if you don't play, you can't win" argument is a fool's errand if your chances of winning are miniscule. However, if you've already decided to play you're going to need an attitude that ignores your tiny chances of success -- otherwise you are likely to get disheartened and quit.
Your question is fair, but I believe a little misguided.
On one hand, VCs like YC need founders to build companies in order to get excess returns for their LPs.
On the other hand, founders still need to take excessive risks to start a company. Then they need to execute against incredible odds.
I say this as someone who left my job in 2014 to start a company. 14 months later it was over and I'd say that I set myself and family back substantially in the process from both a loss of cash to also a slower career path.
I don't regret the decision, but it does take excessive risk to launch.
I think it's like a lottery. The rational move is not to play: it prevents you from nearly guaranteed losses. It also prevents you from hitting the jackpot.
Obviously, when you interview those who hit a jackpot, they will tell: buy more tickets! Believe blindly in your luck! This is what worked for them.
The trick is that you don't interview much those who kept failing, either by following the scenario, or by deviating from it. They are more numerous but less interesting.
Definitely, running a startup is not pure lottery, execution matters a lot. It's more like poker: a good player will win more often, but you always can do everything right and still lose.
I have seen reasonable people when they try to copy this. Endless back and forths over a idea, risk analysis after risk analysis, hours after hour, and then finally, they do not take the leap, or withdraw midjump, and use that experience to justify the absence of further attempts.
If you want to hire at a startup, check for a mad-prophet-yes, but also check wether he rules unchecked- as in - is there someone to stand up to him execution wise. Otherwise, the good start idea might be sunk by lots execution novelties.
Usually, after the first great leap is done, there is also a silent take over by someone who is better able to manage "dull" execution of standard tasks, necessary for the novel idea.
The key to building an idea seems to be blind faith.
Blind faith is a bad idea. You want to start with an idea and become its biggest enemy for a few weeks. You need to attack it from all angles, talk to potential customers and try to find reasons why it would not work and why you wouldn't want to spend the next 5-10 years of your life building it. If after several weeks you still cannot prove that you have a bad idea then congratulations you have a good idea candidate.
Luck is still going to play a big role in your success but at-least you have a sound starting point.
Does such an idea really exist? One that would truly survive this approach?
It's a bit of a Hackernews meme, but just look at the infamous comment about Dropbox (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224).
Right. You can come up with a million excuses why any idea won't work. Then you look at things like spacex and realize that it took someone trying an idea that by all means should have failed.
I mean you gotta have some insight and rationality to avoid making another pet rock, but it's not hard to find potential flaws. The op above sounds like an engineer commenting on how to be a ceo.
The top reply to that comment is Drew Houston explaining why the first two objections aren’t true and the third one will be fixed in an upcoming release.
Blind faith would have led Drew to ignore the comment out-of-hand and stay focused on plowing forward. (Or try to anyway. Some people don’t know how to avoid distraction when they’re trying to suppress suspicions that they are going down the wrong path.)
Ideas that survive this amount of scrutiny will have many competitors, because they are reasonable. This limits the magnitude of possible success. A foolish idea however, one where almost everybody finds a good reason not to do it will be exceptionally successful for that one blindly faithful fool if the reasons not to do it turn out wrong due to some unpredicted freak coincidence. Blind faith is the lottery approach, can't beat the ROI of a winning lottery ticket.
If Google's founders had done this, they would never have started the business, as at the time search was considered a poor market, already carved up between a few dominant players, and with no effective means of monetisation.
The Google founders kept trudging on because they had seen an anomaly that no one else had observed or no one else was willing to fix.
They had built PageRank for BackRub that proved to be superior in almost every way to the dominant way search engines were built. The dominant way also had a glaring flaw that skewed search accuracy — keyword spam.
In a way, they saw themselves as been on a mission to rectify the anomaly in how search results were currently being computed by demoing to investors just how better their search results were compared to the competition, and in the end, with their help, they managed to succeed.
It depends on how many domain experts (N) disagree with you and how much of an expert you are. If you're not an expert in the domain, you can forget about it. If you are, then the chance you should scrap the idea is proportional to N.
With technologies pushing the edge of research, N is typically very small, and being headstrong and willing to take risks and experiment is an essential skill. At some point, you alone are a large enough fraction of N that all of humanity is essentially depending on you to take the risk. If you don't then it might be a very long time until someone equally as capable will.
Aren't most of Elon Musks projects examples of blind f faith? Who would have agreed that starting a new auto manufacturer based solely on electric vehicles was a good idea? A new rocket company? Going up against some of the biggest most established companies with probably the "old boy network" working to prevent entry of newcomers. Seems like blind faith to me.
There is a saying that approximates to:
"your solution is only as good as your understanding of a problem" and this is especially true of Elon Musk.
From your perspective, his projects might look like blind faith.
But from Elon Musk's perspective, he felt he had a better understanding of the viability of those projects to undertake them -- he knew or had a vague idea of which levers to pull that hadn't been pulled in a certain way before, or perhaps new levers had appeared that hadn't been noticed by experts in the field.
This is why humans are different -- our life experiences shape our perspectives and our perspectives shape our understanding. Elon's confidence comes from his better grasp of the challenges to make EV a reality which is why he felt emboldened to tackle the problem anew, where others had failed.
Elon felt his understanding of EV and how they would evolve made him uniquely qualified to invest in an EV venture called Tesla when he was pitched by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003.
And it goes both ways: bankrolling a EV startup at that time was considered crazy.
Elon's personal bankrolling of a rocket company back in 2002 gave off two crucial signals:
1. a money-bag that gets manufacturing (only a handful fit this criteria);
2. a money-bag with the right kind of crazy (an even smaller handful fit this criteria);
that assured Martin and Marc that Elon was the right person they should be speaking to to invest in Tesla, which he did.
Those two signals were necessary for the investor minority at that time to appreciate the value proposition of Tesla. The majority of investors actually laughed off such an investment as what Elon himself characterized as "idiocy squared".
Being aspirational does not imply lack of homework on Elon Musk's part. In fact I would respect Elon Musk a lot less if he did not do his due diligence before starting to work on all of his companies. Faith is tested deeply during most entrepreneurial journeys, which is all the more reason why one needs to do their homework before starting.
Sometimes this works but most times you don't know what you don't know. And because of that you end up discrediting an idea which if you had stayed at would have revealed a new direction that would become a success. In sense the idea becomes a stepping stone for you to see farther and higher.
I run a successful business and have been trying to build nextcept for a while now on the side. I think it's just a needed area. Depth over superficial conversations to find solid people to work with.
Ha. I agree. People these days just seem to respond to outlandish claims over something real like - I’m building a venture network that helps teams come together and here’s an article I wrote about everything I’ve learned so far.
That sounds like a horrible suggestion when considering the stories of most successful start ups. Look at Theranos, it would have died a quick death like this, but ended up being a hugely successful business right up to the point of collapse. And had someone with the tons money and resources solved the core issue a month before the collapse Theranos would be a gigantic success overall. The one mistake of Theranos was committing outright fraud instead of just doing legal bullshiting and being honest about potential critical failings.
The key to building and idea is to ensuring the resources are there to build it, not to kill it while it’s still in the idea phase. No one ever became the founder of a billion dollar company by being cynical early on.
And sure you might think that you save yourself from “wasting 5 years of your life”. It my experience is that founders who work 5 years on establishing a vc backed company that ultimately fail just walk straight on to another leadership role in another company, and they had a great sallery and job for those five years, so what is really wasted?
Oh wow, a Theranos apologist! I can't believe I actually saw one of those in the wild, I'll record it in my logbook.
There's a big difference between "fake it till you make it" and "crime it till you climb it". You can have blind faith in your product, but you can't lie just lie about your business constantly in the hope that maybe one day your lies will be true.
>Look at Theranos, it would have died a quick death like this, but ended up being a hugely successful business right up to the point of collapse.
Your mistake is in conflating "successful business" and "fraud." It was not a successful business until the collapse, it was a successful fraud. In this way, I believe you're promoting a poor ethical standard, one that valorizes crime as long as you get away with it.
Have you or someone you know successfully ran a company for 5 years on an idea that you/they simply had a blind trust on? My goal is not to insult your intelligence. I merely want to point out that this is the strategy I have seen most experienced entrepreneurs around me use.
There is a whole culture of boots-trappers who focus on testing and making pre-sales rather than sinking time on blind faith. I just came home from hanging out with them at
While I agree with the gist of the article I think "blind faith" is misleading. Having faith in your intuition is certainly the key. In my experience intuition comes from pattern recognition and often from recognition of discontinuities. Christopher Alexander, he of "A Pattern Language" has another book, "Notes on the Synthesis of form", in which he discusses what I think can be summarized as: we can tell that something is wrong, but understanding how to fix it is harder. At least that is what I took away.
The "blind" part half way applies. You have to have faith that you recognized something that that is out of kilter, and you have to be blind to the fact that you don't know the solution.
Blind faith, with a good sense of when to open your eyes. There is always an element of faith in any venture or risk. But I doubt it is totally blind. If there is evidence that the idea is not working, you have to see it and adjust your plan. Do you think it is not working because your assumption was wrong? Or was it because your execution is flawed? Is it some temporal issue that should get fixed? You have to ask these questions constantly and know why you decided to push on, instead of ignoring everything.
The key to building an idea is inducing blind faith in others.
...imho.
Edit to expound: if you have blind faith in your idea, then when it is about to fail, you will go down with it. If you don't, and it's about to fail, you will recognise this and extract yourself in time to survive.
At that point it's up to your personal moral compass whether you help the others whose blind faith you've built to reach the escape pods.
I do not believe in blind fate, but common sense. You can extrapolate the future following the trends just like Jules Verne did.
Take for example smartphones and tablets. After the "one computer in every desktop" was accomplished, it was obvious that one computer in every pocket was going to be the next big thing.
So companies like Microsoft invested billions of dollars in that (think in Pocket PCs and TabletPCs).
The vision became a reality and today all of us could have a GPS, cameras and more computer power that desktops had 10 years ago incredibly cheap.
We humans tend to believe only in what we can see, but some people just see the future possibilities just like they are realities. It is not like these people, the visionaries, have more faith than normal people, but that they see the future as real as if it exist here.
Of course watching the future as real have lots of problems in real life, specially when this people have to live along people only interested on reality, like doing the laundry or searching for a better "real job" instead of following "dreams".
There is actually research that indicates "luck" isn't as random as we usually imagine. People with certain habits tend to be perceived as "lucky."
Faith literally means believing in something. The idea that believing something will work is simply delusional is inherently problematic.
You may actually have good reasons for believing it will work.
We always have only partial information. That doesn't mean just bulling on ahead, and don't confuse me with the facts, is a good approach. It means that the people who succeed can't necessarily explain their success adequately to satisfy those who would like to follow in their footsteps.
I also would bet that sometimes they don't really want to explain it. Giving away "the secret sauce" may not be in their best interest.
I like the take Mark Burgess gives in In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure where he states that separation of concerns is "a necessary consequence of loss of resolution due to scale ... a strategy for staying sane." Perhaps having scope-blinders and persistence is simply perceived by outsiders as irrational, whereas internally it is an intellectual tool for focus and achievement. Of course, there are drawbacks to mad focus...
Readit News
This kind of "insanity" is the precursor to the relentless determination one needs when leading a scrappy team of underdogs. Pragmatism and level-headedness sound good on paper, but borderline irresponsible risk-taking is what, at the end of the day, gets rewarded. There's no way to convince anyone -- potential employees, co-founders, investors -- without a cult-like aura. If you'll allow me some hyperbolic flair, startup founders are prophets.
On one hand, VCs like YC need founders to build companies in order to get excess returns for their LPs.
On the other hand, founders still need to take excessive risks to start a company. Then they need to execute against incredible odds.
I say this as someone who left my job in 2014 to start a company. 14 months later it was over and I'd say that I set myself and family back substantially in the process from both a loss of cash to also a slower career path.
I don't regret the decision, but it does take excessive risk to launch.
Obviously, when you interview those who hit a jackpot, they will tell: buy more tickets! Believe blindly in your luck! This is what worked for them.
The trick is that you don't interview much those who kept failing, either by following the scenario, or by deviating from it. They are more numerous but less interesting.
Definitely, running a startup is not pure lottery, execution matters a lot. It's more like poker: a good player will win more often, but you always can do everything right and still lose.
> "Live in the future, then build what's missing."
http://paulgraham.com/swan.html
> "The fact that the best ideas seem like bad ideas makes it even harder to recognize the big winners."
If you want to hire at a startup, check for a mad-prophet-yes, but also check wether he rules unchecked- as in - is there someone to stand up to him execution wise. Otherwise, the good start idea might be sunk by lots execution novelties. Usually, after the first great leap is done, there is also a silent take over by someone who is better able to manage "dull" execution of standard tasks, necessary for the novel idea.
Blind faith is a bad idea. You want to start with an idea and become its biggest enemy for a few weeks. You need to attack it from all angles, talk to potential customers and try to find reasons why it would not work and why you wouldn't want to spend the next 5-10 years of your life building it. If after several weeks you still cannot prove that you have a bad idea then congratulations you have a good idea candidate.
Luck is still going to play a big role in your success but at-least you have a sound starting point.
I mean you gotta have some insight and rationality to avoid making another pet rock, but it's not hard to find potential flaws. The op above sounds like an engineer commenting on how to be a ceo.
Blind faith would have led Drew to ignore the comment out-of-hand and stay focused on plowing forward. (Or try to anyway. Some people don’t know how to avoid distraction when they’re trying to suppress suspicions that they are going down the wrong path.)
They had built PageRank for BackRub that proved to be superior in almost every way to the dominant way search engines were built. The dominant way also had a glaring flaw that skewed search accuracy — keyword spam.
In a way, they saw themselves as been on a mission to rectify the anomaly in how search results were currently being computed by demoing to investors just how better their search results were compared to the competition, and in the end, with their help, they managed to succeed.
With technologies pushing the edge of research, N is typically very small, and being headstrong and willing to take risks and experiment is an essential skill. At some point, you alone are a large enough fraction of N that all of humanity is essentially depending on you to take the risk. If you don't then it might be a very long time until someone equally as capable will.
From your perspective, his projects might look like blind faith. But from Elon Musk's perspective, he felt he had a better understanding of the viability of those projects to undertake them -- he knew or had a vague idea of which levers to pull that hadn't been pulled in a certain way before, or perhaps new levers had appeared that hadn't been noticed by experts in the field.
This is why humans are different -- our life experiences shape our perspectives and our perspectives shape our understanding. Elon's confidence comes from his better grasp of the challenges to make EV a reality which is why he felt emboldened to tackle the problem anew, where others had failed.
Elon felt his understanding of EV and how they would evolve made him uniquely qualified to invest in an EV venture called Tesla when he was pitched by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003.
And it goes both ways: bankrolling a EV startup at that time was considered crazy.
Elon's personal bankrolling of a rocket company back in 2002 gave off two crucial signals:
1. a money-bag that gets manufacturing (only a handful fit this criteria);
2. a money-bag with the right kind of crazy (an even smaller handful fit this criteria);
that assured Martin and Marc that Elon was the right person they should be speaking to to invest in Tesla, which he did.
Those two signals were necessary for the investor minority at that time to appreciate the value proposition of Tesla. The majority of investors actually laughed off such an investment as what Elon himself characterized as "idiocy squared".
Although not all the time.
So decision is still a big chance, either way
The key to building and idea is to ensuring the resources are there to build it, not to kill it while it’s still in the idea phase. No one ever became the founder of a billion dollar company by being cynical early on.
And sure you might think that you save yourself from “wasting 5 years of your life”. It my experience is that founders who work 5 years on establishing a vc backed company that ultimately fail just walk straight on to another leadership role in another company, and they had a great sallery and job for those five years, so what is really wasted?
There's a big difference between "fake it till you make it" and "crime it till you climb it". You can have blind faith in your product, but you can't lie just lie about your business constantly in the hope that maybe one day your lies will be true.
Your mistake is in conflating "successful business" and "fraud." It was not a successful business until the collapse, it was a successful fraud. In this way, I believe you're promoting a poor ethical standard, one that valorizes crime as long as you get away with it.
https://www.microconf.com
I don't see why blind faith is necessary for the majority of ideas.
The "blind" part half way applies. You have to have faith that you recognized something that that is out of kilter, and you have to be blind to the fact that you don't know the solution.
...imho.
Edit to expound: if you have blind faith in your idea, then when it is about to fail, you will go down with it. If you don't, and it's about to fail, you will recognise this and extract yourself in time to survive.
At that point it's up to your personal moral compass whether you help the others whose blind faith you've built to reach the escape pods.
Take for example smartphones and tablets. After the "one computer in every desktop" was accomplished, it was obvious that one computer in every pocket was going to be the next big thing.
So companies like Microsoft invested billions of dollars in that (think in Pocket PCs and TabletPCs).
The vision became a reality and today all of us could have a GPS, cameras and more computer power that desktops had 10 years ago incredibly cheap.
We humans tend to believe only in what we can see, but some people just see the future possibilities just like they are realities. It is not like these people, the visionaries, have more faith than normal people, but that they see the future as real as if it exist here.
Of course watching the future as real have lots of problems in real life, specially when this people have to live along people only interested on reality, like doing the laundry or searching for a better "real job" instead of following "dreams".
Faith literally means believing in something. The idea that believing something will work is simply delusional is inherently problematic.
You may actually have good reasons for believing it will work.
We always have only partial information. That doesn't mean just bulling on ahead, and don't confuse me with the facts, is a good approach. It means that the people who succeed can't necessarily explain their success adequately to satisfy those who would like to follow in their footsteps.
I also would bet that sometimes they don't really want to explain it. Giving away "the secret sauce" may not be in their best interest.