hey, I'm the author...and that was actually the point. I deemed it worthy to try to dial up the intensity of the tone to be heard, as I figured I would be ignored otherwise.
And then intended to eloquently converse in the comments.
The goal of igniting the conversation was achieved as the facebook thread got almost 300 comments.
The initial idea isn't that important. Entrepreneurs change their idea all the time. In the report we show that consistent companies or ones that scale properly, are more focused on discovering whether their idea makes sense where as companies that scale prematurely are more focused on validating that they are right. And as far as personality, while it's an interesting variable to look at in the future, in the end of the day we just look at whether the company produces results regardless of their predisposition. It's also common wisdom that there are many different kinds of entrepreneurs that have been successful.
Max here—one of the co-authors with Bjoern Herrmann,
The way we've defined premature scaling, "making something users don't want" is included. For example, on the customer interaction metrics, which is what is used for "actual stage" a startup would be in the discovery or validation stages (stage 1 or 2). On the behavioral stage if they're making something people don't want, they're probably focused on streamlining their product or making it more scalable, which is a stage 3, or efficiency stage action. This would cause the startup to show up as a Behavioral Stage 3 / Actual Stage 2 and be labeled as premature scaling, just not the drastic kind, that for example WebVan exhibited — "Behavioral Stage 4 / Actual Stage 1". They had a team that was completely scaled up without even having shipped their product.
Max here—one of the co-authors with Bjoern Herrmann,
The way we've defined premature scaling, "making something users don't want" is included. For example, on the customer interaction metrics, which is what is used for "actual stage" a startup would be in the discovery or validation stages (stage 1 or 2). On the behavioral stage if they're making something people don't want, they're probably focused on streamlining their product or making it more scalable, which is a stage 3, or efficiency stage action. This would cause the startup to show up as a Behavioral Stage 3 / Actual Stage 2 and be labeled as premature scaling, just not the drastic kind, that for example WebVan exhibited — "Behavioral Stage 4 / Actual Stage 1". They had a team that was completely scaled up without even having shipped their product.
Our study contains startups that are in stages across the board, (Discovery, Validation, Efficiency, Scale).
While many of the YC startups don't reach the Scale stage, and maybe don't scale up their team or or raise too much money, they can still prematurely scale the product by over-engineering the product and not doing enough customer development. There are more nuanced case of premature scaling that are also discussed in the report.
"Elon Musk is an amazing entrepreneur but as a World Savior he is probably the World’s most OverRated."