First time reading your work, was linked her from The Diff, by Bryne Hobert.
As I read this I thought of the old sport axiom of basketball... You never want to be mediocre. You want to bottom out for draft picks, or go for the title. Going for the middle is death.
Teams in the middle, are expensive, and won't win. You never learn anything from them.
To expand the analogy, better to lose OFTEN with young, high upside players (learn, iterate)
than middle along with known players with no room to improve - (mediocre success)
Very interesting article. Definitely counterintuitive. But playing devils advocate, at least in consumer space it seems like repeatable iterative growth is the name of the game. The proverbial 1.01^182 = 6xx. In this sense isn’t a series an incremental wins (mediocre success) a good thing as long as you have the ability to repeat and rinse and even hit a 50% success rate?
Great article. However I have an alternative view.
Startups are like control systems with feedback impacted by the environment its operating in.
Rather than treating the outcome as a qualitative metric (good|bad, yes|no) , it needs to be transduce'd and fed-back to the input. At best it can turn out to be a virtuous loop (snowball) or a vicious loop (diminish) with baseline thresholds to break the circuit.
The word agile leads to "hurried" and "many more" experiments which in itself can be expensive in terms of cost and time.
Couldn't agree more! That is an excellent way of explaining it. It is way more painful to be in the mediocre realm than failing.
First time reading your work, was linked her from The Diff, by Bryne Hobert.
As I read this I thought of the old sport axiom of basketball... You never want to be mediocre. You want to bottom out for draft picks, or go for the title. Going for the middle is death.
Teams in the middle, are expensive, and won't win. You never learn anything from them.
To expand the analogy, better to lose OFTEN with young, high upside players (learn, iterate)
than middle along with known players with no room to improve - (mediocre success)
I enjoyed this post as well as your deeper dives on data topics. Thanks for sharing Abraham!
You might have mentioned elsewhere — are you spending most of your time investing and advising these days?
A lot of what you say applies to science too, nice stuff Thomas :-)
Very interesting article. Definitely counterintuitive. But playing devils advocate, at least in consumer space it seems like repeatable iterative growth is the name of the game. The proverbial 1.01^182 = 6xx. In this sense isn’t a series an incremental wins (mediocre success) a good thing as long as you have the ability to repeat and rinse and even hit a 50% success rate?
Abraham
Great article. However I have an alternative view.
Startups are like control systems with feedback impacted by the environment its operating in.
Rather than treating the outcome as a qualitative metric (good|bad, yes|no) , it needs to be transduce'd and fed-back to the input. At best it can turn out to be a virtuous loop (snowball) or a vicious loop (diminish) with baseline thresholds to break the circuit.
The word agile leads to "hurried" and "many more" experiments which in itself can be expensive in terms of cost and time.