If you can’t explain what you do in one paragraph, you’ve got a problem

http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/06/youve-got-a-problem/

by lusob • 14 years ago

57 36 14 years ago

In fairness, I think there's a difference between being too wordy in a description, and not even bothering to try ("My startup is too complex to be described in a paragraph"). The former indicates a lack of discipline, but the latter hints at a sort of naive arrogance.

Both, however, indicate that the founder doesn't fully grasp his own project. That's the bigger issue. If you can't describe an idea clearly and succinctly, you probably haven't mastered the idea in the first place. The selling proposition of an idea shouldn't be an afterthought; it should be baked into the idea itself. After all, great ideas are usually solutions to great problems.

The author makes a good point about not wasting the short time you're given to present something to people who can help you. It's an important point. But to me, it's almost a side issue. It's a symptom of something deeper. If you can't get your head around your own idea, then your idea -- or at least your conception of it -- may have some fundamental problems.

josso• 14 years ago

Mike Lee of Appsterdam, had a talk at at AppsWorld, where he said pretty much the same:

Working at Apple, he had heard the rumors that if you went into an elevator with Steve Jobs, you had to explain what you did and why you were doing it before he left and as such – even though he didn't believe in the rumor – he tried to explain all he did in only 60 seconds.

This is what he answered, when asked for his currently 60-second-speech: "I'm making educational games for kids. […] It's just enough to make you curious and want to have a conversation. […] If your 60 seconds-talk is an attempt to try to cramp as much shit into 60 seconds as you can, you're doing it wrong."

I can only recommend listening to the whole 30-minutes: http://www.apps-world.net/europe/images/stories/audio/dev-d1...

jonnathanson2• 14 years ago

The full version of the Steve Jobs rumor was that he would fire you, on the spot, if he didn't like your answer. To this day, I think it was a myth that they used to spread to the newbies to keep them sharp and focused. And with Jobs's passing, we'll never know the truth now (unless someone was fired in such an encounter, and wants to speak up?).

Regardless of whether one's ass is on the line in an elevator pitch, it's still good advice. Especially because you're going to have to make that pitch about a million times throughout your life. So it's not just about intriguing The Boss; it's about intriguing everybody. (Or not losing everybody's attention, depending on how you want to look at it).

ville• 14 years ago

"Because telling you about Appsterdam, it's real simple. If you wanna make apps, come to Appsterdam, it's awesome. You wanna know more about it? Google it. You wanna know why Appsterdam is a thing, what Appsterdam is all about and what kind of insanity leads a person build their own ecosystem before building a company? That's what I'm going to talk about. And I'm going to talk about it honestly. That means there is going to be some swearing. So if that is going to offend you I suggest you just go ahead and ... leave. For the rest of you: It's real simple. -- Do something that actually fucking matters."

The arrogance and self-importance of the speaker made me quit after 60 seconds.

rhizome• 14 years ago

WHAT KIND OF INSANITY?

bengoodger• 14 years ago

I also think this applies more broadly.

When I was in university, one of the mandatory classes in engineering was Professional Development, and one of the threads in that was writing. They stressed "Soon enough you'll be communicating with people with not enough time to hear what you have to say. Get to the point." Sage advice.

I have to encourage those I work with not to do it, sometimes by ignoring the long-form or just stating that I don't have time to review something so lengthy. For design docs, sometimes a few well considered diagrams really are worth a thousand words.

tomjen3• 14 years ago

Honestly that is a stupid argument -- if you don't have time to understand it the first time, you don't have time to come back when everything is falling apart.

Flip-per• 14 years ago

Wasn't there a news entry some weeks ago where a startup investor made quite contradictory points? That you should keep your eyes open for startups which don't have a clear "message" / punch line? Because these are the ones with the possibly most innovative (but yet not fixed) ideas that are often overlooked by other investors?

lutusp6• 14 years ago

A quote: "Entrepreneur: I just wanted to touch base with you and see if you are taking on new startups right now."

"Me: Can you send me a paragraph and I’ll tell you if it’s something we’d be interested in."

"Entrepreneur: It’s difficult to accurately describe the company, myself, and everything else in a single paragraph. To write something so small but somehow include every important aspect is near impossible, if not impossible. My company is too complex to be described in a single paragraph."

A recipe for failure. This touches on multiple issues, the most important of which is an economy of expression.

Anyone can say his project is too complex for mere mortals to grasp, including people who don't have anything worth describing. But as Einstein said, “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”

Yesterday I saw an article entitled something like "90 things I learned while launching startups." After I got done laughing, I replied that if the author wanted people to read what he had to say, that was about 80 things too many, that he needed to prioritize, but to put it mildly, this wasn't welcome advice.

ehosca3• 14 years ago

I think the point that Einstein was making that you should be able to explain it to a 6 year old but not necessarily expect him to understand your explanation. I would love to hear him explain why e=mc^2 to a 6 year old and then quiz the 6 year old.

lutusp6• 14 years ago

> I think the point that Einstein was making that you should be able to explain it to a 6 year old but not necessarily expect him to understand your explanation.

Perhaps, but (a) I don't think so and (b) we'll never know for sure. :)

I'm pretty sure the point he was making is that most scientific ideas are accessible to concise explanation with no loss of comprehension. Of course, he said this before the time of quantum theories, to which he strenuously objected for the remainder of his life.

> I would love to hear him explain why e=mc^2 to a 6 year old and then quiz the 6 year old.

e = mc^2 is actually pretty easy to explain, if one accepts the premise of energy conservation. But I agree that the read-back from the average six-year-old would at best be mildly entertaining. From a truly bright six-year-old, I would hope to hear something like, "Because all energy has to be somewhere, potential energy makes things heavier."

Retric• 14 years ago

e=mc^2 is the sort form of an equation that includes velocity. Getting a 6 year old to understand energy takes a sloped hill and tossing balls up it. The harder you throw the ball the farther up the hill it goes and the faster it is when it rolls back. To talk about mass take a heaver ball and get the idea that how far up the hill something is * how heavy it is gives some idea how much energy it has at the end. Say knocking stuff over or hitting a wall of sand.

Then describe mass as having energy like a being on top of a vary big hill. If you converted a little bit of mass into energy you have a really fast ball. Like a big ball that's 1/2 way down the really big hill.

This of course assumes an intelligent 6 year old. But, the expression is talking about some six year old not, all of them. You may need to talk about wind resistance as well, but there are some vary good demonstrations for that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndFXXasM6ZE

PS: Honestly, I think after that discussion your intelligent six year old would probably understand it better than your average high-school or even collage student who has no clue there is more than just e=mc^2.

twmb• 14 years ago

Clearly, you didn't even look at the article yesterday, nor any of the comments nor any of the replies to your run and gun comment. That 90 item list was near universally praised.

There are times when people need to expand their attention to read more than a page of writing.

Not everything can be explained so succinctly. Books exist for a reason.

I agree that people need to to be able to explain their companies and what they do in one paragraph - at a high level. But that is a skill that is easily honed by an afternoon of thought... no need to be so dismissive.

lutusp6• 14 years ago

> Clearly, you didn't even look at the article yesterday ...

The problem isn't that I didn't read the article. The problem is that I did. The author should have been renamed Captain Obvious.

> That 90 item list was near universally praised.

I wasn't the only one to point out that it had 80 points too many, or words to that effect.

> Not everything can be explained so succinctly. Books exist for a reason.

But it wasn't a book, it was an online article.

> But that is a skill that is easily honed by an afternoon of thought... no need to be so dismissive.

My post wasn't dismissive, it was critical, and the criticism was legitimate.

michael_nielsen• 14 years ago

According to wikiquote, Einstein never said that:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

lutusp6• 14 years ago

So it seems. Thanks!

JangoSteve2• 14 years ago

You're conflating two entirely different ideas. The point here is that you should be able to explain an idea briefly if you understand it well. In the other article you reference, the author had 90 different ideas to relate. Each point in that article was indeed brief; many of those 90 points were only one sentence.

I read your comment in the other article, and I agree with the consensus that it wasn't helpful (to be brutally honest). There is no hard fast law that says you can never learn more than 10 useful things running a company. In fact, I'd say that assumption would be grossly false. There is also no law saying that out of 90 things learned, 10 things will magically be much more important than the other 80, such that they could be separated and treated with more emphasis.

Your suggestion to the previous author was to separate out 10 of the ideas, and to put the other 80 in a post-script or follow-up. But why? To make it more link-baity? Your suggestion came across as, "Hey, you could get more views if you pandered your writing (nay, your thought process) more to the lowest common denominator of reader."

However, clearly the author a) had no interest in doing that, and b) didn't need to, since they made it to front page of HN!

Frankly, I agree with that author. If I have something useful to say about running my company, then my target audience is people who run their company seriously and who make it their lifelong mission to learn. And those are typically not the people who only read Top-10 lists.

Furthermore, the author's article stood out and was very effective, because, how many 90-point lists do you see posted to HN? In this case, being different worked beautifully for the author.

I'm sure you can see the irony in suggesting to a successful entrepreneur that they might have been more successful in some successful endeavor, had they instead done it like everyone else.

lutusp6• 14 years ago

> Your suggestion to the previous author was to separate out 10 of the ideas, and to put the other 80 in a post-script or follow-up. But why?

So more people will read what he has to say. The basic principle of journalism, online and offline, is "don't bury your lead."

> Furthermore, the author's article stood out and was very effective, because, how many 90-point lists do you see posted to HN?

Yes, and how many atheists run for president? I suggest you're making a point other than the one you think.

> I'm sure you can see the irony in suggesting to a successful entrepreneur that they might have been more successful in some successful endeavor, had they instead done it like everyone else.

It seems you missed the irony that being a successful entrepreneur doesn't automatically make one a successful writer. I wasn't criticizing the OP's accomplishments, but his way of expressing them.

By your reasoning, Steve Jobs' business successes would have automatically made him a nice person to know, and/or a persuasive writer. But it seems those corollaries are false -- and the first I know to be false from personal experience.

ehosca3• 14 years ago

i find this attitude troubling on a couple of levels...

so we should not pursue to solve inherently complex problems for fear that we won't be able to explain them within the time frame for an elevator pitch? is ADD really that prevalent?

taybin2• 14 years ago

While the problem may be complex, the description of why the problem should be solved should be simple.

ehosca3• 14 years ago

i don't understand, can you explain what it is that you are saying in simpler terms please ?

Alex39172• 14 years ago

"So we should not pursue to solve inherently complex problems for fear that we won't be able to explain them within the time frame for an elevator pitch? is ADD really that prevalent?"

Unfortunately yes. There aren't many hard and fast rules in the startup world, but I think the closest we've got is that it's always better to sacrifice value for better explainability.

If people can't understand it in a sentence then they aren't going to use it. And if you can get them using it then you can always add more functionality later.

Problems that are inherently too complicated to explain in a sentence or two aren't worth solving, at least not for startups. That's why we have government and non-profits.

That's not to say everyone needs to able to grok every implication right off the bat. For my own startup everyone can understand what I'm working on after a sentence, but no one can understand why it's a good idea without reading another three or four paragraphs. That's fine though, because it will be obvious once it's launched without having to read anything.

skb_2• 14 years ago

Problems that are inherently too complicated to explain in a sentence or two aren't worth solving, at least not for startups.

I think the problem comes in trying to explain something to someone (an investor) without domain knowledge. In order to be succinct, you have to make some assumptions. It's sort of like a mathematical proof. Given a sufficiently complex problem, a shorter proof generally makes more assumptions about the reader's knowledge than a longer one.

Customers will generally understand the problem better, since you are presumably working on one of their pain points. So it's easier to explain a solution to them than to investors who probably don't have those same pain points. It's in an investor's best interest to be more open to longer pitches unless they already understand the domain.

Domenic_S• 14 years ago

Complex problems can be explained simply, can't they?

Take Netflix -- solving some insane problems: immense storage, random access of huge files, enormous jumps in the uptime space, etc. Elevator pitch: Stream your favorite shows and movies to tons of devices, instantly.

biot• 14 years ago

General relativity: nothing in the universe can travel faster than light. There are many fascinating consequences of this, including changes in mass and relative time observed by people traveling at different speeds. If this is fascinating to you, sign up for my series of 20 four hour lectures diving into the details.

jusben1369• 14 years ago

"We're going to travel to the moon and harvest a rare mineral only found there. We'll return it to earth and use it as the basis to create a new, entirely clean, replenish-able source of energy." That would be one heck of an undertaking but a 6 (ok, certainly by 8 or 9) would get that.

Zenst• 14 years ago

Very true, if you cant explian your idea in one paragraph then in many ways you don't understand it yourself.

Like first impressions, the first paragraph in anything counts. With that any article that can't be summed up in a headline is more than one article. This one is spot on, even if it is more than one paragraph and laid out so is easier to digest.

btilly• 14 years ago

Short and sweet is necessary to grab someone's attention. Their time is worth more to them than you are, so boil what you have to say down to essentials. And then figure out what essentials you can leave out to make it even shorter.

Of course this is a horrible way to understand a complex topic. When I was preparing http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2012/09/ab-testing-vs-mab-algor... I was concerned about its length. Patio11 told me, If that's too much for people they shouldn't be making decisions on this topic anyhow. He was right.

You MUST be able to boil your pitch down to a tiny seed. But that's just for grabbing people's attention - don't make the mistake of substituting bullet points for thinking when you need to think.

keithpeter• 14 years ago

"...I like three sentences: (1) what we do, (2) who we do it to, and (3) why you should care."

Should (2) be "who we do it for"? Mine goes something like...

1: I teach mathematics 2: I encourage adults who always had problems with school Maths to learn and achieve a qualification 3: Mathematical reasoning is important for sensible decision making both in everyday life and in science and in making political choices

wilfra• 14 years ago

"I try to answer all of my emails and be responsive to any inquiry. This was a random one (of which I get between 25 and 100 each day)."

Now I feel so much less special that he responded to my email :(

d--b• 14 years ago

I bet someone will post an article called "If you can't read more than one paragraph to be interested in a project, you've got a problem"

If you can’t explain what you do in one paragraph, you’ve got a problem

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