How often have you seen a good product die? If only they had done x, y or z... Perhaps if they had a team with more or varied experience we might all be better off for their product's continued development.
Now sum up the innovation loss from that one product to all the products that have died for lack of execution. How much global productivity have we lost? As high as 1%/yr? More?
I'm applying this thought experiment to startups, but the same question could be applied to anything where experience plays a role. The topic occurred to me while watching Robert McNamara on Charlie Rose last night on the subject of military strategy (rebroadcasts).
McNamara has all these lessons that he has written up in several books and that were depicted in the movie The Fog of War. In the startup world, we see lesson posts coming through Hacker News daily. Despite the authors' (and often the readers') best intentions, I'm highly doubtful that this attempt at knowledge transfer is having much of an impact.
Certainly, writing up lessons is better than not writing up lessons. And certainly the Internet has helped spread experience faster and more democraticaly, e.g. Stack Overflow. Yet there is only so much you can get across in a hands-off approach.
I think co-opting hands-on experience is the key value of the pre-seed funds like YC and DreamIt. I am a mentor for Dreamit participant Scribnia this summer, and so I've seen this first hand. It is the difference of reading my post on SEO and having me review your specific site in detail.
Don't get me wrong, Ask HN is a great start. I'm just not convinced it is enough to stop the massive productivity loss I think is occurring due to lack of experience. I don't have (or pretend to have) the answers, but here's a couple ideas that popped into my head:
- Startups could more intensely focus on the smart money when raising capital. They are getting people literally financially invested in their companies. If those people have the right experience, the startup has (I hope) motivated them to apply that experience to the company.
- Similarly, startups could co-opt experience by creating other financial incentives. For example, an advisory board where you give each of a few advisors 1%.
What else?
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