Conversation

Recently learned that Iain M. Banks always wanted to write scifi but initially had trouble getting his scifi published, so he wrote regular fiction which turned out to be successful and then he switched to scifi. There's a lesson there maybe.
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I interpret this as: scifi : regular fiction :: tech startup : ordinary small business. Ordinary fiction is like ordinary small-biz in teaching basic disciplines like managing a budget, sales, inventory etc. A tech startup is innovation on top of that.
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Many tech startup founders stumble because despite having an innovative product idea. They lack ingrained banal business discipline. A tech startup business has to be a business first, otherwise it risks ending up as a VC-subsidized scam. A sci-fi story has to be a story first.
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I've run a 1-person small business for nearly a decade now, but I don't think I could do a tech startup. I lack both the ambition and risk appetite, and sufficiently big ideas to base a business on. With fiction I have the reverse problem.
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I have a bunch of sci-fi ideas in draft stage, but am very impatient about learning and practicing the basic storytelling skills 🤬 I have zero interest in telling ordinary non-sci-fi stories 🤣
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