Are you really asserting that it is possible to know in advance what conditions will make the business venture successful? Or even to know in retrospect which ones made them unsuccessful?
I don't know about this. Even if you could say that (for example) a number of ships hit a particular iceberg, which has now melted, so what? The ocean is full of icebergs.
I wonder if, on average, it might be even more advantageous to try something where everyone agrees there's an obvious barrier to success. What if conventional wisdom is wrong even some of the time, or if that barrier suddenly disappears for its own reasons? I'm pretty sure you can see this pattern in a lot of anomalously successful companies.
No - I state in the post that you can't know this looking forward. You can take educated guesses based on observed patterns though.
Ships don't float around the ocean randomly. They have captains and crews. If they hit an iceberg, there's usually a good reason for it. In the startup world you can track down and talk with founders, CEOs, and investors and pick their brains to understand why something didn't work.
It's very hard to know if something will succeed looking forward. It's easier to know why something succeed looking backwards. To the people who built the business, it's usually pretty obvious why something failed.
The pattern you see in anomalously successful companies is absolutely one of violating conventional wisdom; By definition these companies are outliers because they are successful. But there's always a reason for it. Picking something that people have an aversion to is a great place to start. Figuring out what has changed about the ecosystem or opportunity that may enable it to succeed today where it had previously failed is the critical question to answer.
It's not to say that you can predict everything that could go wrong, but if that one iceberg is still there and it blocks the only route to port (like, what you want to do is still illegal), probably not too smart to jump in a canoe headed that direction.
If you look at the icebergs that were in the way before and they're gone now, it doesn't guarantee success or mean there aren't other obstacles, but at least you know that the previous reasons for failure aren't still insurmountable.
Comments
Are you really asserting that it is possible to know in advance what conditions will make the business venture successful? Or even to know in retrospect which ones made them unsuccessful?
I don't know about this. Even if you could say that (for example) a number of ships hit a particular iceberg, which has now melted, so what? The ocean is full of icebergs.
I wonder if, on average, it might be even more advantageous to try something where everyone agrees there's an obvious barrier to success. What if conventional wisdom is wrong even some of the time, or if that barrier suddenly disappears for its own reasons? I'm pretty sure you can see this pattern in a lot of anomalously successful companies.
No - I state in the post that you can't know this looking forward. You can take educated guesses based on observed patterns though.
Ships don't float around the ocean randomly. They have captains and crews. If they hit an iceberg, there's usually a good reason for it. In the startup world you can track down and talk with founders, CEOs, and investors and pick their brains to understand why something didn't work.
It's very hard to know if something will succeed looking forward. It's easier to know why something succeed looking backwards. To the people who built the business, it's usually pretty obvious why something failed.
The pattern you see in anomalously successful companies is absolutely one of violating conventional wisdom; By definition these companies are outliers because they are successful. But there's always a reason for it. Picking something that people have an aversion to is a great place to start. Figuring out what has changed about the ecosystem or opportunity that may enable it to succeed today where it had previously failed is the critical question to answer.
It's not to say that you can predict everything that could go wrong, but if that one iceberg is still there and it blocks the only route to port (like, what you want to do is still illegal), probably not too smart to jump in a canoe headed that direction.
If you look at the icebergs that were in the way before and they're gone now, it doesn't guarantee success or mean there aren't other obstacles, but at least you know that the previous reasons for failure aren't still insurmountable.