Breaking Bad is the Ultimate Startup

https://www.actionmint.com/daily-mint/start-up/breaking-bad-is-the-ultimate-startup

by spinn • 13 years ago

46 50 13 years ago

beat4• 13 years ago

Now how about something about their relationship with the venture capitalist, Gustavo Fring? The efforts they had to go to in order to convince him that they were personally trustworthy, his nefarious plans to steal their IP and put them out of business, etc?

alanctgardner22• 13 years ago

I would actually contrast Fring, the bootstrapper, with Heisenberg, the VC-funded startup. It's clear in the fifth season that Fring had slow growth and scaled his operations gradually, while the newcomers just keep throwing money at the problems. They were agile, but they had very little runway, and they had to keep raising rounds (from Tuco, then Fring) to keep the lights on.

beat4• 13 years ago

So Fring is more of an angel investor? Nah, the level of control he exerts more correctly reflects a VC (or maybe a buyout).

kevinmchugh• 13 years ago

Fring acqui-hired Walt. He built a business for distribution and sales, then acquired the competing company for their brand and talent. (Fring ostensibly had a cook pre-walt, but it's never addressed). He gave Walt a salary instead of ownership. He saw that Walt was a bad cultural fit, and intended to replace him with Gale. Once Fring was gone, Walt and Jesse went back into business, selling their product to Declan, who only had a distribution and sales organization, and, unlike Fring, was not focused on vertical integration.

The metaphor doesn't work around equity, non-competes, etc., unless you know a start-up that uses violence instead of legal documents and arbitration.

itsybitsycoder• 13 years ago

Fring's cook pre-Walt was Gale. When Gale saw the quality of Walt's cook he told Fring there was no way they could compete with that level of expertise.

gpcz4• 13 years ago

While there is some overlap in terms of the mechanics, I would personally refrain from taking this analogy too far. The point behind capitalism is the assumption that people are motivated by money but that the profit motive can be channeled toward ultimately being good for the public. Walt and Jesse's meth empire caused tons of addictions, murders/deaths (both on and off-screen), broke up families, required dishonesty at multiple levels, and was ultimately motivated by ego more than money. Some characters (Gale) also tried to rationalize the damage their product was doing to the world with flimsy arguments about "consenting adults wanting what they want" when each contributor made the choice to get into a business with horrifying societal consequences.

Capitalism has holes in it, and it's up to everyone to make sure they are doing things that are good for the world.

AznHisoka• 13 years ago

How is this any different than Zuckerberg creating FB so he can get all the chicks? Startups are not created solely for money. In fact, some might argue money is just a means to an end: more or better sex

gpcz4• 13 years ago

I'd argue that it's not a startup (maybe a charity or a hobby instead) if you're not trying to monetize.

Whether sex is the ultimate motivation behind human affairs is something I'll leave to the Freudian psychologists.

tedks• 13 years ago

The point behind capitalism is making more money faster.

This is why Zynga and Lockheed Martin exist.

Double_Cast3• 13 years ago

The point behind capitalism is the assumption that people are motivated by money but that the profit motive can be channeled toward ultimately being good for the public.

Uh... who makes this assumption? As far as I know, no economist has ever assumed capitalism was for the "commmon good". The problem with even mentioning the "common good" is that it's subjective. It's sounds great in theory, but exactly who decides what's "good" for everyone else?

imho, Laissez-Faire is like Democracy, except people vote with dollars. So the whole "adults will be adults" idea is actually more accurate.

gpcz4• 13 years ago

Milton Friedman asserts in Capitalism and Freedom that capitalism results in increased product made possible by division of labor and specialization of function, and then goes on to say that freedom itself relies on capitalist society.

There's also Ayn Rand's money speech, where Francisco d'Anconia says, "And when men live by trade -- with reason, not force, as their final arbiter–it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability–and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?"

When I said "good," I meant in terms of freedom, quality of products, and diversity of products. I know those are vague terms as well, but I don't think there's much benefit to going any further into it than that.

pyrrhotech2• 13 years ago

Actually capitalism has no point. It's just the natural system free and selfishly motivated societies develop overtime--it needs regulation to ensure that the utility produced is allocated towards the common good

jheriko3• 13 years ago

actually, capitalism is an idealised philosophy which is easy to follow. its not especially natural as the development of society up until the popularisation of capitalist philosophy will show.

some of what we do now under capitalism is quite considerably worse than anything that came before... specifically around the treatment of unemployed, homeless and 'bottom end of the spectrum' type people where we actively harass them and stop them from surviving because... well i don't really understand that particular desire for blind law and order to the letter, so i don't know.

unemployment was never a real problem until capitalist economy became the norm. a lot of the thinkers of the time foresaw that particular change as well...

steveklabnik2• 13 years ago

This ignores an incredible amount of imperialism by capitalist countries. If capitalism is so natural, why must it be forced on so many indigenous peoples?

Furthermore, appeal to nature is a fallacy. Most of human history could be viewed as us trying to do BETTER than what's natural.

beat4• 13 years ago

Saying capitalism has a moral component is like saying thermodynamics has a moral component.

Sadly, confusing beauty with morality has been a failing of Western thought since at least Aristotle. Just because capitalism is elegant doesn't mean it's "good" in a moral sense (or "evil" in a moral sense either).

gpcz4• 13 years ago

I suspect that we agree more than disagree. What I meant was that we implement capitalism to generally get abundance of things like food and medicine that we consider good for society (to the point of calling them "goods"), but that individuals need to constantly examine and take responsibility for the morality of their actions under the system.

rz2k• 13 years ago

My understanding of Adam Smith would have him strongly disagree with you that there is a moral component, however his definition of morality may differ from yours.

Avitas• 13 years ago

Not only that, there were enormous amounts of risk. Although the writers had Walt and Jesse live through obscenely and overwhelmingly deadly circumstances, these types of events rarely happen. Sure, there's the one-in-a-billion Sgt. York that deftly beats impossible odds.

The real value in this particular analogy is for the author of the original article, not the reader.

camus2• 13 years ago

The only thing one can learn from Breaking Bad is you eventually get killed dealing illegal drugs, and put your family in danger.

There is nothing romantic in BB,it's a gruesome description of a world you might want to avoid at all cost.

jmduke• 13 years ago

At risk of derailing the original article, this is a really interesting point. Both Breaking Bad and Mad Men are shows that go at lengths to depict how flawed, unhappy, and usually outright immoral their protagonists are, but both Walter White and Don Draper are the target of a lot of escapist fantasies. (Try searching on Twitter for #TeamWalt.)

shashashasha• 13 years ago

It reminds me of this essay, on Breaking Bad and culture:

"But despite these cautionary endings, they don’t sell Scarface and Godfather t-shirts at every tourist shop in Manhattan because people like to remind themselves about the dangers of hubris. Stories and the characters in them are more than lessons, and a narrative’s most ideologically weighty elements don’t map onto a seventh grade worksheet about major themes. Long after we’re done watching we hold moments with us: shot angles and character dynamics, snippets of dialog and unquestioned premises. The point of critically examining cultural objects like Breaking Bad isn’t to place them in categories good or bad, to predict the ending, or even to decode what’s “really” happening; the point is to pay attention to our attention, to look at how it’s being held, on what, and how someone’s making money on it. If pop criticism is to be good for anything, it’s that."

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/walter-white-supremacy/

Ellipsis753• 13 years ago

To be honest, as Breaking Bad is purely fiction I'm not even sure if you can "learn" that you'll get killed from dealing drugs.

dragonwriter4• 13 years ago

People learn from fiction all the time, though BB isn't exactly fiction that is designed for pedagogical value.

georgemcbay• 13 years ago

Kinda glossed over the part where he died alone, hated by everyone he ever loved.

thearn4• 13 years ago

Meh, feels like a bit of a stetch. But still a better analogy then those consultants who try stretch and apply "The Art Of War" to everything in the business world.

neakor• 13 years ago

Oh… how I miss that show :(

benologist• 13 years ago

Yay another startup whose genius marketing plan is write startup-articles for HN.

codeonfire• 13 years ago

Breaking bad had a lot to say about work in general. You have to fight for your income and to be free from enslavement by your fellow man. Also it shows the downside of being highly and uniquely skilled.

untog2• 13 years ago

Does that mean Walter White is the Ultimate Startup CEO? A man so driven by his ego that he puts his entire family in mortal danger, blackmails former business partners, alienates his co-founder and ends up dying alone as a result of his own hubris?

Actually that might be accurate.

bly• 13 years ago

Spoiler alert?

untog2• 13 years ago

If you haven't seen Breaking Bad then you really need to avoid any discussion topics about it. The ending has been widely discussed pretty much everywhere (including other places in this discussion, though comically not in the article itself)

cmsimike• 13 years ago

Reminds me about this [0] about why (some) psychopaths make create CEOs.

[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-som...

mistercow• 13 years ago

The Onion pretty much covered this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvGCYyZPYPg

leerodgers• 13 years ago

Great show, but this is a bit of a stretch.

chasing• 13 years ago

"Glurge" isn't the right word... But there's got to be some term for this genre of syrupy and mostly content-free articles about start-ups.

rusabd• 13 years ago

Keep in mind that BB is ultimately a fiction. The bad traits WW poses does not necessary means if you follow that path you will do exactly the same bad things.

I see this story as cautionary tale for underdogs to not try to break free out of grips of existing "natural" state. Try and pay for the consequences. Just get second job and try to be happy

Breaking Bad is the Ultimate Startup

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