alt Hacker NewsAn observation here that wasn't quite made but in my opinion is supported by the narrative.
If you raise enough capital (whether social or financial) to run for 3 years then you can run for 3 years. If your bets are paying off 2 years in you can stick with the plan - no one will care how you used the capital in year 1 and 2 if there is a payoff in year 3.
The risk comes from being wrong.
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> The risk comes from being wrong.
It's definitely a high risk high reward strategy but if you have the context from being the space for years and you've done your due diligence by speaking to your customers before you build things, you reduce the risk significantly.
Of course the risk can never be zero though and luck definitely played a role in past successes.
There is another risk: you run for 2 years and prevent a major problem that would bite the company in year 3 or 4. However because the problem never happened nobody knows how much you saved everyone and so you don't replace all that capital you used up.
Every company I've worked for has regular meetings where they honor the people who stayed late to get the release out the door (I work in embedded systems where upgrades often mean flying someone with a USB stick to a remote location without cell service - thus bug free releases are important since upgrades are expensive). I can't help thinking every time that if the rewarded person had just done their job 6 months ago they wouldn't have had the bug in the first place.