Your Power Tools Got Worse On Purpose | Who Really Owns DeWalt, Craftsman, and Milwaukee? How TTI and Stanley Black & Decker took the same playbook in opposite directions. One invested $206M in R&D and grew to 4,000 workers. The other is $6 billion in debt and closing its hometown factory.

THIS IS A FANTASTIC STORY

How TTI and Stanley Black & Decker took the same playbook in opposite directions.

www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-power...

Just lost my university library access. Kind of crushed, actually

From now on “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” shall be known as SL-17 for conciseness

Reaction Wheel helping the workers own the means of production since 1997

This was a decision. Most of my writing is heavily footnoted (see, for instance, most of the essays at reactionwheel.net) but this is a general readership magazine so...tradeoffs

The main point of the essay is this: it's been years, the ideas are quite prevalent, there is no data to refute the null hypothesis. I think this is hard to disagree with. And then there is speculation on my part, which everyone is free to disagree with

And, of course, the ideas don't need to be universally applied to have *some* effect. Even if, say, 10% of founders used them, there should be *some* visible effect. But, yes, we need more data, and that's the first thing I ask for

The theories are widely known, as pointed out in the essay and the ideas are well-documented and relatively simple; the books are well-written. So, if the ideas are not used it is because founders find they have little value (assuming they are rational)

I tried to address the fourth point by saying we need paradigms to guide further study. The fifth point is tricky but is, in my mind, unlikely

I think it just proves part of my thesis: if they are wrong, they'd prefer not to know

Startup Punditry’s 25 Years of Failure Startup pundits sold us a failed science of entrepreneurship. The Red Queen offers something better.

I have heard through the grapevine that my latest essay is pissing off the powers-that-be in silicon valley so, to stay in their good graces, don't read it colossus.com/article/we-h...

Startup Punditry’s 25 Years of Failure Startup pundits sold us a failed science of entrepreneurship. The Red Queen offers something better.

This is a brilliant essay from @ganeumann.bsky.social: “Startup Punditry’s 25 Years of Failure”.

I have thoughts.

colossus.com/article/we-h...

Trial and Error, Part 1 An exploration of trial and error.

As a side note, one of my ongoing interests is the structure of trial and error. Your essay is interesting to that. I wouldn't normally recommend this, because it sucks, but maybe you could read the below. There's something there that somebody should run with reactionwheel.net/2022/08/tria...

I think it is also worthwhile, though, to try to optimize the chances for an individual entrepreneur. Especially as someone who spent 15 years teaching entrepreneurship to would-be founders! This, I think, is a harder problem

Thanks for the essay. I agree that at a societal level, the success rate of individual entrepreneurs is not the best measure, and that making failure (more) acceptable will optimize towards a different definition of success. SV does this already, though not in a coordinated way, of course

I did, btw, try to check this by looking at the shape parameter of YCs power law distribution of outcomes, but this also seems to have gotten worse (shape parameter got bigger). But I didn't have the data to check this with any confidence so I left it out

I'm taking the rest of the day off, but will read tomorrow

Liked this as usual with your writing. In a rare disagreement, the argument about failure rates doesn't seem right to me. Wouldn't targeting expected returns be better?

It might be _necessary_ to have a high enough failure rate to maximize returns. Recently posted: benoitessiambre.com/fail.html

I say in the essay that this might be better for VCs. Has it raised the expected value for entrepreneurs? I don't think we know? (Haven't read your essay yet.) But that is definitely not what is promised by the pundits and believed by the entrepreneurs

Thanks for reading. I'm off to see if there's still any snow in these mountains

Chart of survival rates of startups by year. It shows that survival rates after 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, and 10 years have stayed steady for 30 years since 1995

This chart has been bothering me for a while. Why, with all the new methods we have to build startups, have failure rates stayed the same? So I wrote about it

colossus.com/article/we-h...

Happy Cinco de Patrick

Or half and half

The great thing about writing something for three months and then hammering it until all the stupidity I can find is driven out, is that the resulting ten minute read sounds way smarter than I actually am

Happy St. Patrick's Day, New York.

Startup Punditry’s 25 Years of Failure Startup pundits sold us a failed science of entrepreneurship. The Red Queen offers something better.

If you're a subscriber to Colossus, you can read my new essay today, otherwise you'll have to wait colossus.com/article/we-h...

My dad once said the only reason they allowed betting on horses was because horses couldn't talk

or cracked wheat

Went to Whole Foods, couldn’t find split peas

Everything is a real job if you slack hard enough

Still not beating the null hypothesis