My point is that you're trivializing the problems and insulting all of the people who have been trying to make it work for decades. I too have started successful businesses. What I learned from that was to respect the people doing the actual work, rather than to run around arrogantly blustering, "It isn't rocket science."
Well said. I’ll take this one step further: Anyone who starts a business without putting profitability as one of the top priorities is going to have a hard time.
In fact, it can be disappointing to some engineers to learn how much starting a business requires using off-the-shelf solutions instead of rolling your own implementation and even making compromises with “good enough” code to get things shipped. The entrepreneurs who want to design and code every part of the system by themselves and only ship it when it’s absolutely perfect are the ones who struggle to ever ship a product and get customers.
Social media, HN included, has perhaps skewed public perceptions about things like money, profit, capitalism, and nebulous concepts like “passion”. There’s nothing wrong with starting a business as a business and treating the code as business decisions. In fact, it’s what you want to do if your goal is to get customers and make profit, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
The political argument isn't that you had "nothing" to do with your success. All businesses require help from many factors. You need luck. You need other people (um, like customers, your employees, the gov. for public infrastructure investment, your family, your friends).
It's just egregious to claim that you alone are 100% responsible for your success, like you don't interact in a world with 7+ billion. You're telling me your business doesn't rely any small subset of those people?
I don't doubt that you work hard, or don't deserve your success.
No you're right, as someone who takes these things seriously, I should hold myself to a higher standard than to paint in such broad strokes. Thanks for checking me there.
Allow me to rephrase from a more compassionate perspective:
I don't expect any of these people to devote the type of effort that I have into this knowledge.
But I do wish they knew this stuff, because with even a little bit of this knowledge, they could have the power to make their own restaurant/software shop/insert_small_business more successful than it otherwise could have been... which may even be the difference between them successfully running said business vs. having to take a job they don't like.
Ultimately, it's a be the change you wish to see situation, I suppose.
If you are in the business of selling you are in the business of removing obstacles blocking me from exchanging my money for your goods. It is absolutely not entitlement to expect that to be an ongoing cycle of improvement.
It has been years since this business model has been proven beyond doubt yet there is still no sign of any real attempts to embrace it. In other markets that would be considered feckless but in this case we're expected to believe the reason is 'business is hard'?
This is the core issue I have with comments like this: they refuse to try solving social issues with business. Every time a solution involving business pops up, there's immediately people dismissing it with a comment saying you can't solve societal issues with business, with no proposed alternative solutions either. Ok, you don't want to solve it with business, how then?
A an aside business has been shown to be the best path to solving societal problems, from medicine, to poverty business is that path. Leave government to solve a problem and as the old saying goes you would get the best iron lung money could buy but you would never get a polio vaccine.
Realism doesn't work in business. Business success requires 10 people to try for 1 person to succeed. If those 10 people were realists, they wouldn't try.
You frustration is from your false assumption. Businesses are there to make their owners as much money as possible. This frequently does not involve efficiency.
But imagine you can solve that by having each business run by qualified business people who have a profit motive. The government would be the funding source, set a few high level rules, and otherwise stay out of the mix.
Now imagine you have a new pony. See how easy that is?
Sorry Scott, being able to take labor and capital and make money with it isn't just something you "imagine" and it happens. Really smart, sharp, excellent business guys flail around at this all the time and couldn't make a dime with a lemonade stand. There's simply a lot more to it than people wanting to work and smart business people.
You're doing a lot of skimming, hand-waving, and smoke-blowing. I love Dilbert, and you are an awesome person, but in my opinion these blog entries of yours aren't hitting on so much lately.
Being a fellow grumpy old man, I agree with your sentiment. But I have a niggle about this:
> As if somehow we're pretending that the primary goal isn't to get rich.
I've been starting and running businesses for decades, but never once has my primary goal been to get rich. My business goal has always been to get a sustainable business going that generates reasonable profits.
It makes sense taken seriously. Almost nobody is doing things optimally. There's always room to make more money or save more money or whatever. Figuring those things out is kind of what doing business is. Not trivial at all.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. I'd downvote you if I could, not because I disagree with you, but because this is a strawman.
The author used a low margin, low sucess business example to make a point about what mindset someone should be in to successfully run a business. You took from that the message that anything enjoyable is not sustainable.
"Focus on creating something inherently good --> it will not be sustainable"
You also less directly imply that focusing on profit will necessitate producing an inferior product, again using a specific example to provide a generality.
What I am learning ... is you have a lot to learn. The relatively minor and patently obvious point that there are assholes, players, and politicians in human organizations doesn't give us that much to work with. Moreover, you have defined away most of the context by making good business equivalent to revenue. Meanwhile the interplay between revenue, profit, people has been explained into ground over the years perhaps simplest by Iacocca: There are people, profit, product. Without good people you can't get the other two.
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