| ▲ | barishnamazov 17 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." |
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| ▲ | nine_k 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | userulluipeste 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What often happens next is, another party comes up in the middle to manage the interaction between both of you (with the proper bump in the ask price), because there's not only so many decision makers looking for neat presentations and whatnot but also there's only so many teams willing to do the actual work. | |
| ▲ | 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | pklausler 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think that Feynman was talking about preparing a freshman-level lecture for Caltech-standard freshmen, but maybe you have somebody else in mind. | | |
| ▲ | Nevermark 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I would say: You either don't understand your subject, or don't understand your audience, if you can't explain your subject to your audience, at the highest level they can understand, coherently. The average person can understand anything ... at some level. Being able to match that level is positive evidence (but not proof) of competence. Duality: Being unable to match that level is positive evidence (but not proof) of incompetence. | |
| ▲ | nine_k 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think if you understand something really well (anything: the law of gravity, the Curry-Howard isomorphism, electrolytic dissociation, general relativity,...), you can find a bunch of comparisons, or metaphors, or other ways to explain it so that an interested five-years-old will get a rough idea. A very rough idea indeed, but one that could allow them to ask qualitatively reasonable questions, and that forms an intuition which helps during a real study. | | |
| ▲ | summa_tech 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | The "interested" part does a lot of lifting though. It's really hard to explain things to uninterested people. If the person you are explaining your project to is not interested in the technical side, presumably under the rather confused but popular theory that technical aspects are not relevant to technology ventures, you'll not be making headway. It's much better to just make up some dollar numbers and run with that. |
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| ▲ | potato3732842 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | nine_k 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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.) | | |
| ▲ | potato3732842 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | martin-t 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | sho_hn 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | noduerme 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
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