Startup Advice

Reaching the frontier of a field, you will stumble upon something that hasn’t been solved yet, which will make all the difference. Society will reward you for offering something it wants but hasn’t been able to obtain so far.

The way to that point is through trial and error, iterating, and uncovering different truths.

There are plenty of clients who don’t actually want the cheapest choice. They want the best one, and a powerful estimate is the clue they use to choose.

The hardest transition as a founder is going from working directly on the product to not. There’s this joy that comes from sitting down to solve a problem and standing up when it’s done and good. Building a company or managing people is never just done.

Our decentralized approach for decisions passes the torch of responsibility, enabling fast-paced iteration without the need for approval processes. Individuals make urgent, locally optimal decisions. Any misalignments are then ironed out quickly afterward.

Generally, teams think about switching costs as the amount of time and money needed to install one solution and remove another. But true switching costs are much more than that: they include the politics, emotions, career ambitions, esoteric business processes, competing priorities, and sheer laziness that all favor the existing solution. Those for... See more

@joshuaackerman: i have thought about this hacker news comment nearly every day since november ninth twenty seventeen ![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FUqQUNhVIAE5CtF.jpg... See more