Remembering my days in the pit...
Remembering my days in the pit...
“The trick to being a great founder… is your ability to be presented with a problem unlike anything you’ve seen before and solve it very quickly.
When Sam Altman was CEO of Y Combinator, they were looking at 20,000+ companies per year and tracked the founder qualities that correlated with certain startup outcomes. In no particular order, Sam believes the following qualities matter most:
1. Clarity of vision. “Can the founder explain what they do and why? If the founder can’t explain it clearly to us, then (a) they’re not going to be able to recruit, hire, sell, talk to the press; and (b) it means they’re not the kind of person who is a really clear thinker in general and that’s so important to a business.”
2. Determination & Passion. “There are founders who don’t take no for an answer and bend the world to their will and those are the ones we want to fund. Then there are founders that every time they run across a small impediment just turn around. Unfortunately you run into so many impediments every day that if you’re the kind of person who just turns around, that’s really a problem. You also have to really believe that what you’re doing is important. The best companies are always mission-oriented.”
3. Raw intelligence.
4. The ability to get things done quickly. “It’s not entirely accurate to say that speed and quality of decision-making correlate exactly with startup success but it’s not a bad first approximation. Being quick, decisive, and getting things done quickly—if you look at our data, that would just correlate almost exactly with all of our successful founders. And other founders that look on paper like they should be really successful but fail are often missing this one trait.”
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This is a relic from the times when software had a physical form, you could hold it in your hand.
It's good to learn from your mistakes.
It's better to learn from other people's mistakes.
Your mistakes aren’t the best teacher—just the most expensive.
You can start at the bottom of the mountain and make every mistake from scratch on the way to the top, or you can take a sherpa with you and master the best of what other people have already figured out.
The successful learn vicariously; the foolish insist on first hand pain.
Don’t try to figure everything out on your own. Hire advisors who’ve been there before and can offer insights you wouldn’t get otherwise. Test advisors before committing—do a workshop to see how they add value before making a long-term hire. And always be evaluating if they’re still contributing.
A couple of days ago I had just finished coding a feature in EZchecklist that I'd wanted to do for a long time. It took about 5 hours to get working, and it looked good, but the underlying coding was so ugly that I couldn't bear it if anyone ever saw it. The odds of someone seeing the ugliness were extremely remote, but before I went to sleep I promised myself to rewrite the code so that it was more presentable (to myself, at least).
That opportunity came the next morning because I just couldn't live another day with all that ugly code living inside my computer, even though it was invisible to the world except me, of course. Another five hours and it was done. Two hundred plus lines of code replaced with 39 lines.
Feeling much better about the transformation, I then had the thought that chatGPT 4.o might be able to do better, so I copied and pasted the code into the AI and asked it to optimize it... if it can. AI got it down to about 18 lines and did it in about 5 seconds, tops, but it's not as easy to follow as my code. Sure, it would run a bit faster but speed is not the issue here.
Having a coder to coder chat with AI about the various approaches to the problem was amazingly educational. For me. I doubt AI learned anything, and sure didn't have that warm fuzzy feeling of getting something to work.
Maybe I'll go back later and implement AI's optimized coding. Maybe not. There's something to be said for pride of human workmanship rather than the sterile perfection of AI.
And I'm happy that, at 82, my mind is still capable of learning new approaches to coding.
Note: I asked AI to illustrate the concept. It took about 10 seconds. I couldn't have done it in 10 years.