Negative: Negative feedback is valuable. If you think an idea is terrible, don’t just downvote, also explain. The trick to giving good negative feedback is doing so with productive goals in mind, which means, rather than saying “this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard”, think about what specifically it is that you think makes the idea infeasible in its current form, and what would turn it into a good, or at least a better, idea.
Keep in mind that negative feedback is a double edged sword. It helps people refine their ideas, and can create success in place of failure. Unfortunately, even in its best forms, it also can easily sap a person’s motivation. It tends to do this on the monkey mind level, not on the analytic level, which is frustrating since negative feedback is such a beautiful tool for the analytic mind. I’ve seen how even the slightest negative feedback can have a huge impact, even stopping people from working on projects that are pretty decent on the whole. There is a minority of people who are relatively unfazed by negative commentary, but most of us can’t help but internalize it somewhat. Agentiness is rare, and something that can be cultivated or trampled with feedback. Being specific is the one of the most helpful things you can do to deliver the most constructive criticism, because the information tends to be more helpful toward solving the problems and less personal.
Another thing that helps avoid killing someone’s motivation is speaking with the assumption that the person you’re talking to is an intelligent human being whose idea could be good if worked out a little further. This is often the case, especially here. When people sense that you anticipate that they’ll come back with an intelligent answer, they often do.
Here’s an example for making negative feedback more specific: Perhaps you think that a person is vastly underestimating the difficulty of raising funds for their idea. I would suggest phrasing it as a question: “How do you propose to get funding for this idea?” You don’t need to convey your doubt in the question, but if you do feel the need to bring it up, do it as specifically as possible: “When I’ve tried fundraising in the past, I found it extremely hard, and extrapolating that, I have a hard time imagining it working for this project. Can you please explain how you see this happening?”
In summary, I think that it is very much worth giving negative feedback, even though it does often harm motivation. Ideas need to be good if they’re going to work, and by giving negative feedback, you are helping people improve their ideas. Even if the person with the idea doesn’t get it or update, it might help bystanders. And there’s a decent chance that the person who you talk to will understand, and you might be able to help a project happen that wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without your well framed remark.
Positive: Validation for good ideas is really helpful. You may think that people who have a good idea know that it’s a good idea already. I know a lot of people, though, who feel a little better and more encouraged—and who are more likely to follow through when given validation. So if you see someone mention something great, be sure to give them a thumbs up. It will be even more powerful if you respond with a comment saying specifically why it’s a good idea, with as much detail as you can manage. Not only will the person feel validated, but other people reading are also more likely to see the value that you see, so the idea is more likely to get funding, refinement, and resources. If this thread goes as I hope, any comment or up/down vote that you make might well have a impact on whether or not a world-improving project gets implemented.
Clarification: Sometimes someone will make a good point that is obvious to you, but not obvious to other people. If you understand a good point that someone has made and you think it’s not likely to get across to others, it’s super helpful if you can restate it clearly and succinctly so that the concept gets conveyed to everyone.
I think the biggest problem with your proposal is that it’s hard to do a startup with founders who don’t know each other well. The founders and early employees will face long hours, stress, and possibly financial woes. Some background history and an interview aren’t enough to ensure that someone won’t flake. The best co-founders are friends who have worked together previously. As Paul Graham says:
And the relationship between the founders has to be strong. They must genuinely like one another, and work well together. Startups do to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock: if it can be pulled apart, it will be.
I think having the common philosophies of Less Wrong would go a long way. It would also be an upside if all people are passionate about the cause and have thought it through in a lot of detail before committing to work together. There is also nothing to say that people can’t get to know each other well before embarking on a project together, even if they do hook up on this blog. Things like Skype and even planes are easy to use in this day and age—if people are truly motivated and taking initiative, they can overcome that sort of obstacle.
The Less Wrong blog already has a very strong filtering effect, plus the other filters just mentioned, so I think that if/when people get to the point of deciding they want to work together, they’ll likely be decent matches. For example, ideas will get chewed on much more thoroughly in this context than most, so I think there is likely to be more consistency of vision between different founding members.
Obviously I’m quite biased having written this post, so I discount my enthusiasm, and am curious about what other issues are that people see.
Looking at other comments, I want to be a little more specific about why I have more hope for this particular forum than an average group of people reading a blog post who could potentially be cofounders together.
As someone who is part of the culture, I find people who are hardcore Less Wrong types to be much easier to get along with than most people when it comes to conversations that might upset people. Having the common values of truth-even-when-it-hurts and clarity go such a long way toward making communication work and progress happen, among many other great memes. I’ve met a lot of the crowd in person at this point, living in the Bay Area, and find that even with someone I don’t know at all, if they’re coming through that filter, I can talk more freely and openly with them than I can with most people, without worry about offending them or other undesirable consequences.
It is my guess that a lot of the interpersonal conflict that kills start-ups comes down to lack of clarity and poor communication. Friends getting along better fits with this notion, because they would probably communicate better and have more shared values and ways of perceiving the world than strangers.
I believe there are results (linked by Hanson recently?) showing that cofounders do better when they’re selected for merit reasons (i.e. this guy was the best coder we found) rather than identity reasons (i.e. we both went to the same university). It’s also relatively easy to get to know people quickly.
Flakes as cofounders, however, is a critical error that must be consciously avoided. I like your mention of previous projects- whenever someone tells me they think we’d make a good founding pair, I try to look for a small project that we can ship in a few months that will give us a taste of how we work together. I’ve avoided a few mistakes that way.
More general lesson: look at emotional factors about the founders, not just the abstract question of whether the business would be likely to succeed if it’s run by sensible people.
When the idea of that business was first floated, the thing that made me edgiest was actually that the person the storefront was bought from and who had a similar business seemed awfully eager to sell.
This have to be dome implicit or explicit? Creating a startup with someone who just met is I assume, is made primarily for technical reasons, and after that, for emotional ones. Someone will say to a person they are technically prepared but not emotionally?
That’s an interesting question. I might have been reasonably blunt about the situation to the less dominant person if I’d seen the problems coming. On the other hand, she was the less dominant person, and I don’t know whether I could have said anything general that would have helped. If I’d known the outcome of that business in clairvoyant detail (lost money, lost friendship), I think it might have registered, but there was no reason to think I would have known that much.
After it all fell apart, I read in The Millionaire Woman Next Door that it was a sort of business (gift shop) which is especially likely to go under. That might have been useful information. As I recall, the book has bankruptcy rates for different sorts of businesses.
In retrospect, I don’t think they were technically prepared, either—but I didn’t know enough to evaluate that.
I’d be interested in meeting a co-founder on Less Wrong. I’d want to work on some smaller project first—some trivial website or web app, or a browser extension, that could be finished in a relatively short time. That would give me an idea of the prospective co-founder’s skills and work habits. Of course it’s not as much information as I’d like to have, but it’d be a good start.
Anecdotally, Dropbox was founded by two guys who had just met each other.
But yeah, this is probably true in general. Maybe the best we can do is start making friends with people who we might like to start startups with later, as a preliminary step?
I’d like to make friends with a web designer, myself.
“Anecdotally, Dropbox was founded by two guys who had just met each other.”
No, not anecdotal. While I appreciate Paul Graham’s cherry picked examples just like the next person, having looked at the history of hundreds of companies, it is all over the map. In general, you can’t “create” success, you can simple try to avoid or mitigate failure. “People” make great companies, by being great about making it work.
But, sadly, and I really mean, sadly, monetarily successful companies (which may not be great companies) are for the most part simply created by having a product people want to buy. You can have a staff of imbeciles selling sugar to children.
That study was about VCs choosing investments, not startup founders working long, stressful hours side-by-side. I realize there are disadvantages to working with friends, but I’m pretty sure the advantages outweigh them. Paul Graham seems to agree, and he makes a living picking founders.
I agree and add my own personal experience as an anecdote. Business gives different incentives and prompts different applications of power. I no longer have several friends, for most part due to business related problems.
Imagine that Hacker News beat us to the punch and had a “let’s found important startups” thread. Would you be as positive and enthusiastic? HN is geared toward people who know about startup culture. People who have read PG’s essays and spent significant fractions of their lives improving their ability to win at startups.
Compare the HN group to the people who will reply to your post. You’re selecting against people who already have experience doing startups. (Those people already have the experience and social connections necessary to start another company. There’s no reason for them to take a chance on people in this thread.) Also, fluid intelligence is great, but domain experience is much more useful in the case of startups. Finally, it’s important to note that LW posters seem to suffer from akrasia. When the rubber hits the road, LW users seem to flee.
Of course, I have little experience in any of these domains. The LW akrasia correlation is simply my impression, not something based in empericism.
Feedback
Negative: Negative feedback is valuable. If you think an idea is terrible, don’t just downvote, also explain. The trick to giving good negative feedback is doing so with productive goals in mind, which means, rather than saying “this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard”, think about what specifically it is that you think makes the idea infeasible in its current form, and what would turn it into a good, or at least a better, idea.
Keep in mind that negative feedback is a double edged sword. It helps people refine their ideas, and can create success in place of failure. Unfortunately, even in its best forms, it also can easily sap a person’s motivation. It tends to do this on the monkey mind level, not on the analytic level, which is frustrating since negative feedback is such a beautiful tool for the analytic mind. I’ve seen how even the slightest negative feedback can have a huge impact, even stopping people from working on projects that are pretty decent on the whole. There is a minority of people who are relatively unfazed by negative commentary, but most of us can’t help but internalize it somewhat. Agentiness is rare, and something that can be cultivated or trampled with feedback. Being specific is the one of the most helpful things you can do to deliver the most constructive criticism, because the information tends to be more helpful toward solving the problems and less personal.
Another thing that helps avoid killing someone’s motivation is speaking with the assumption that the person you’re talking to is an intelligent human being whose idea could be good if worked out a little further. This is often the case, especially here. When people sense that you anticipate that they’ll come back with an intelligent answer, they often do.
Here’s an example for making negative feedback more specific: Perhaps you think that a person is vastly underestimating the difficulty of raising funds for their idea. I would suggest phrasing it as a question: “How do you propose to get funding for this idea?” You don’t need to convey your doubt in the question, but if you do feel the need to bring it up, do it as specifically as possible: “When I’ve tried fundraising in the past, I found it extremely hard, and extrapolating that, I have a hard time imagining it working for this project. Can you please explain how you see this happening?”
In summary, I think that it is very much worth giving negative feedback, even though it does often harm motivation. Ideas need to be good if they’re going to work, and by giving negative feedback, you are helping people improve their ideas. Even if the person with the idea doesn’t get it or update, it might help bystanders. And there’s a decent chance that the person who you talk to will understand, and you might be able to help a project happen that wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without your well framed remark.
Positive: Validation for good ideas is really helpful. You may think that people who have a good idea know that it’s a good idea already. I know a lot of people, though, who feel a little better and more encouraged—and who are more likely to follow through when given validation. So if you see someone mention something great, be sure to give them a thumbs up. It will be even more powerful if you respond with a comment saying specifically why it’s a good idea, with as much detail as you can manage. Not only will the person feel validated, but other people reading are also more likely to see the value that you see, so the idea is more likely to get funding, refinement, and resources. If this thread goes as I hope, any comment or up/down vote that you make might well have a impact on whether or not a world-improving project gets implemented.
Clarification: Sometimes someone will make a good point that is obvious to you, but not obvious to other people. If you understand a good point that someone has made and you think it’s not likely to get across to others, it’s super helpful if you can restate it clearly and succinctly so that the concept gets conveyed to everyone.
I think the biggest problem with your proposal is that it’s hard to do a startup with founders who don’t know each other well. The founders and early employees will face long hours, stress, and possibly financial woes. Some background history and an interview aren’t enough to ensure that someone won’t flake. The best co-founders are friends who have worked together previously. As Paul Graham says:
Yeah, that’s definitely tricky and a downside.
I think having the common philosophies of Less Wrong would go a long way. It would also be an upside if all people are passionate about the cause and have thought it through in a lot of detail before committing to work together. There is also nothing to say that people can’t get to know each other well before embarking on a project together, even if they do hook up on this blog. Things like Skype and even planes are easy to use in this day and age—if people are truly motivated and taking initiative, they can overcome that sort of obstacle.
The Less Wrong blog already has a very strong filtering effect, plus the other filters just mentioned, so I think that if/when people get to the point of deciding they want to work together, they’ll likely be decent matches. For example, ideas will get chewed on much more thoroughly in this context than most, so I think there is likely to be more consistency of vision between different founding members.
Obviously I’m quite biased having written this post, so I discount my enthusiasm, and am curious about what other issues are that people see.
Looking at other comments, I want to be a little more specific about why I have more hope for this particular forum than an average group of people reading a blog post who could potentially be cofounders together.
As someone who is part of the culture, I find people who are hardcore Less Wrong types to be much easier to get along with than most people when it comes to conversations that might upset people. Having the common values of truth-even-when-it-hurts and clarity go such a long way toward making communication work and progress happen, among many other great memes. I’ve met a lot of the crowd in person at this point, living in the Bay Area, and find that even with someone I don’t know at all, if they’re coming through that filter, I can talk more freely and openly with them than I can with most people, without worry about offending them or other undesirable consequences.
It is my guess that a lot of the interpersonal conflict that kills start-ups comes down to lack of clarity and poor communication. Friends getting along better fits with this notion, because they would probably communicate better and have more shared values and ways of perceiving the world than strangers.
I believe there are results (linked by Hanson recently?) showing that cofounders do better when they’re selected for merit reasons (i.e. this guy was the best coder we found) rather than identity reasons (i.e. we both went to the same university). It’s also relatively easy to get to know people quickly.
Flakes as cofounders, however, is a critical error that must be consciously avoided. I like your mention of previous projects- whenever someone tells me they think we’d make a good founding pair, I try to look for a small project that we can ship in a few months that will give us a taste of how we work together. I’ve avoided a few mistakes that way.
Something I learned from watching a nearby train wreck: The emotionally dominant person in a partnership should not be a compulsive spender.
Indeed.
More general lesson: look at emotional factors about the founders, not just the abstract question of whether the business would be likely to succeed if it’s run by sensible people.
When the idea of that business was first floated, the thing that made me edgiest was actually that the person the storefront was bought from and who had a similar business seemed awfully eager to sell.
This have to be dome implicit or explicit? Creating a startup with someone who just met is I assume, is made primarily for technical reasons, and after that, for emotional ones. Someone will say to a person they are technically prepared but not emotionally?
That’s an interesting question. I might have been reasonably blunt about the situation to the less dominant person if I’d seen the problems coming. On the other hand, she was the less dominant person, and I don’t know whether I could have said anything general that would have helped. If I’d known the outcome of that business in clairvoyant detail (lost money, lost friendship), I think it might have registered, but there was no reason to think I would have known that much.
After it all fell apart, I read in The Millionaire Woman Next Door that it was a sort of business (gift shop) which is especially likely to go under. That might have been useful information. As I recall, the book has bankruptcy rates for different sorts of businesses.
In retrospect, I don’t think they were technically prepared, either—but I didn’t know enough to evaluate that.
In general, it’s hard to get good advice.
I’d be interested in meeting a co-founder on Less Wrong. I’d want to work on some smaller project first—some trivial website or web app, or a browser extension, that could be finished in a relatively short time. That would give me an idea of the prospective co-founder’s skills and work habits. Of course it’s not as much information as I’d like to have, but it’d be a good start.
Anecdotally, Dropbox was founded by two guys who had just met each other.
But yeah, this is probably true in general. Maybe the best we can do is start making friends with people who we might like to start startups with later, as a preliminary step?
I’d like to make friends with a web designer, myself.
“Anecdotally, Dropbox was founded by two guys who had just met each other.”
No, not anecdotal. While I appreciate Paul Graham’s cherry picked examples just like the next person, having looked at the history of hundreds of companies, it is all over the map. In general, you can’t “create” success, you can simple try to avoid or mitigate failure. “People” make great companies, by being great about making it work.
But, sadly, and I really mean, sadly, monetarily successful companies (which may not be great companies) are for the most part simply created by having a product people want to buy. You can have a staff of imbeciles selling sugar to children.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/06/good-friends-can-make-bad-business-partners.html
That study was about VCs choosing investments, not startup founders working long, stressful hours side-by-side. I realize there are disadvantages to working with friends, but I’m pretty sure the advantages outweigh them. Paul Graham seems to agree, and he makes a living picking founders.
I agree and add my own personal experience as an anecdote. Business gives different incentives and prompts different applications of power. I no longer have several friends, for most part due to business related problems.
Imagine that Hacker News beat us to the punch and had a “let’s found important startups” thread. Would you be as positive and enthusiastic? HN is geared toward people who know about startup culture. People who have read PG’s essays and spent significant fractions of their lives improving their ability to win at startups.
Compare the HN group to the people who will reply to your post. You’re selecting against people who already have experience doing startups. (Those people already have the experience and social connections necessary to start another company. There’s no reason for them to take a chance on people in this thread.) Also, fluid intelligence is great, but domain experience is much more useful in the case of startups. Finally, it’s important to note that LW posters seem to suffer from akrasia. When the rubber hits the road, LW users seem to flee.
Of course, I have little experience in any of these domains. The LW akrasia correlation is simply my impression, not something based in empericism.
They linked the article today! You can see their comments here.