Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Obsessed about outcomes, flexible about how
Some founders get emotionally attached to their vision and refuse to adapt. The best founders see their company as a mission, and they only care about making it work.
That means treating the company as a system and acting to learn how it behaves. Action creates information, and the founder reacts to that information objectively to make progress, regardless of their own emotion.
The ultimate question for a founder is whether they would send their baby down the river if they had to: give up what they love most right now in order to save it later.
Why do people overvalue what they built?
In a 2012 study, researchers Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely asked people to assemble IKEA storage boxes. They then asked how much those people would pay for their own boxes compared with identical pre-assembled ones. The builders were willing to pay about 63 percent more for the boxes they had put together themselves. The researchers named the pattern the IKEA effect.
How do startups turn action into information?
Entrepreneur Eric Ries described a loop he called build, measure, learn in his 2011 book The Lean Startup. A team builds the smallest version of a product that can be tested, watches how real customers respond, and uses what it sees to decide the next step. The approach drew on customer development, a method set out by entrepreneur Steve Blank, and on lean manufacturing at Toyota. Ries first described it in a blog and then expanded it into the book.
How did YouTube begin as a dating site?
YouTube launched in 2005 as a video dating idea called Tune In Hook Up. Few people uploaded dating videos, and the founders opened the site to videos of any kind. Traffic grew quickly after that change. Google bought the company in 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock.
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