I'm often in the position where I see startups with plans that *don't make sense* to me, as business models or as research programs. Sometimes brilliant people with stellar career track records join these companies. Sometimes they get highly funded. I'm puzzled.
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I think *careful* and *humble* logical arguments *are* valid ways to assess the prospects of an early-stage project. Ultimately, of course, data talks, bullshit walks. But before the final data is in...
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The other possibility, of course, is that smart people join or fund early-stage startups with bad plans because they don't think the stated plan is actually a firm commitment. "If the plan is bad we can just change it later."
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This might make sense in a world with rapid & cheap market feedback, like consumer software. It seems *nuts* in biotech, where you're investing a lot in expensive physical equipment for something that won't pay you for ten years!
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True, if your plan is bad today, you can change it. But that means plan #2, or #3, or whatever, is going to have to actually get you from here to the big goal when nobody else yet has. And so, isn't the quality of plan #1 an indicator of how good the people are at planning?
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Do you think
@elonmusk doesn't have a plan to get to Mars? Like, not a marketing pitch, a plan that is his careful best assessment of the critical path from here to there?Show this thread
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I don’t think most early-stage investors are optimizing for just likelihood of success. They’re optimizing for likelihood * magnitude of success. So sometimes having an unlikely plan that would be hugely profitable if it works is enough for them.
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I work in aging, so "hugely profitable if it works" is a pretty easy target; *everybody* stands to be hugely profitable if they succeed, and "if" is a big question.
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