🧘♂️Philosophy 101 for Founders
Published: 14-July-2024, Updated 26-Aug-2024
Here are some observations of human/pack behaviour that have been given a label. You might intuitively know or have experienced some of them. Below are a few that i like - slightly paraphrased to help us navigate the ups and downs of startup life.
80/20 Rule (The Pareto Principle): 80% of the work gets done in 20% of the time. 20% of your employees are responsible for 80% of the work. 80% of your revenue is generated from 20% of your customers, and so on.
Occam's Razor: The simplest solution/explanation is usually the correct one. If MySQL can get the job done use it rather than the fancy new database.
Hick's Law: The time it takes for a person to make a decision increases with the number of choices available. The more information you have, the more difficult it becomes to arrive at conclusions. The more features your software has, the more time it takes to go-to-market.
Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill all the time and resources dedicated to it. If you engage 3 people to finish a feature in 30 days, it will take the 3 people nothing less than 30 days to finish it.
Ringelmann Effect: Individual members of a group become less productive as the size of their group increases. The corollary is small teams can produce outsized results.
Law of Diminishing Returns: The marginal utility/revenue/user-growth keeps decreasing as more and more features are added.
Dunning-Kruger Effect: People with lower expertise tend to overestimate their competence and people with higher expertise tend to underestimate their competence. Remember this while recruiting - older people have exceptional wisdom.
Solomon's Paradox: We are better at solving other people's problems than our own, because detachment yields objectivity. It's important to have a list of people you can talk with for feedback or for advice.
Bus Factor: What would have happened to the Python language if Guido van Rossum were hit by a bus in 1994? The 'bus factor' is how many team members can be hit by a bus before the project hits a wall. Another way to put it is; The 'bus factor' is the minimum number of team members that have to suddenly disappear from a project before the project stalls due to lack of knowledgeable or competent personnel. (More about it here.)
Dunbar Number: The Dunbar Number suggests that people can maintain stable social relationships with no more than 150 others. Robin Dunbar (the British anthropologist after whom this is named) explained the principle informally as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar." In startups, this means that once a company grows beyond 150 employees, it may need to adopt more formal systems to keep everyone connected and organized.
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