Comment by barishnamazov
7 hours ago
Law 20 seems to express the state of most startups these days:
> "A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately."
7 hours ago
Law 20 seems to express the state of most startups these days:
> "A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately."
Imagine that you're a highly intellectual, highly technical, and highly responsible person in control of large sums of governmental or corporate money. You don't want to waste the money, you want stellar results (in spacecraft industry, maybe literally so).
Would you assign a large sum of money to a group that cannot present their design clearly, neatly, and concisely? If they are struggling even with that, would you trust them to be good at actually designing a spacecraft soundly, economically, and in a reasonable time?
"If you can't explain it to a five-years-old, you likely do not understand it yourself", said one of the greatest modern scientists, who also was notoriously good at explaining things.
I think that Feynman was talking about preparing a freshman-level lecture for Caltech-standard freshmen, but maybe you have somebody else in mind.
That's what happens when the likely success scenario is selling out to an existing company rather than growing to be a genuinely large and long lived company.
There are beef companies and milk companies, depending on the way they plan to use their cash cow.
(Most VC funding is used to quickly produce a beefy market share, and sell it to those who think they can milk it, or to profitably butcher it.)
Trying to get milk out of the kind of cattle one raises for beef is a pretty good analogy for using an IPO to offload a questionable company onto the public.
Hiring salesmen to talk to other salesmen is always the sleaziest part of doing anything productive. You could say the same thing about opening a restaurant.
Petro Tyschtschenko is a good salesman.
I'd add to that: If you recognize a good design presented poorly, be the one to stand up and present it well, otherwise you will be stuck with the bad one.
This is key to fulfilling a senior tech leadership role and substantially what people expect to pay you for, if you ever wonder what the mysterious "impact" really means.