> and i hate to be an ass, but ... under whose criteria does rethinkdb qualify for this, anyway?

You're not being an ass. This is a question we struggle to answer every day. (I'd argue that even very successful companies have to struggle to answer it every day if they want to remain successful.)

I think that there are two separate issues here. The first is that many of these lessons came from messing things up with RethinkDB. RethinkDB didn't germinate this way at all -- many of the things we had to fix, and many things we can't fix so we have to live with their consequences daily. These lessons aren't right for everyone (and you can't hit the ballpark on all of them no matter how hard you try), but if I started another company, this is what I'd look out for and strive for. If you want to do something different (like open a dive shop in the Caribbean), that's awesome (really -- I mean that; I always feel a bit of envy for people who take this path). It's just not what I would do if I started another company.

As for RethinkDB augmenting the human condition, this is a lot simpler than it seems. Thousands of people take time out of their day to learn Rethink and build cool things on top of it. In many cases RethinkDB is crucial to their livelihoods (because their products depend on Rethink working). Instead of spending their time on thing X, they spend it on Rethink, which gives everyone here a tremendous sense of joy. Since the adoption is growing extremely rapidly, it's giving us a great platform to reach more people. We have lots of things in mind that will allow people to do things they can't feasibly do today. That's augmenting the human condition.

(You can't look too far out. We're not inventing flying cars, but if we can make scalable web apps accessible to people that couldn't do it before, well, that's augmenting the human condition for them.)

He's most likely only talking about venture-backed startups or those startups that have the potential to be venture-backed but forego it for other reasons. These are obviously not "57 lessons for any business anywhere", especially since there is an entire section called Fundraising.

In that context that's a perfectly reasonable piece of advice. Without an "enormous potential for growth" you're likely not going to get substantial interest from investors or have the kind of outcome that folks joining your "startup" would expect.

If that's the case then your critique is off-point. He was deliberately excluding the those kinds of businesses from his analysis.

A quote from pg that, I believe, says more or less the same thing as the author did, and incidentally kind of apply to your coffeeshop example: "That difference is why there's a distinct word, "startup," for companies designed to grow fast... To grow rapidly, you need to make something you can sell to a big market. That's the difference between Google and a barbershop. A barbershop doesn't scale. For a company to grow really big, it must (a) make something lots of people want, and (b) reach and serve all those people. "

I think the author is describing the vision a startup should have, even before it starts tackling the problem its trying to solve.

Using your coffeeshop example, if the owner's goal is to, one day, change the way people drink their coffee (in a better way that the owner believes), then yes, this vision is worth pursing, and he/she might need to start out as a corner cafe at first. If the owner's goal is to have his/her own corner cafe and have a stable income from it, then its not a startup.

But, as you said, "a huge number of people" and "augment the human condition in a meaningful way" is pretty vague wording, but the intend/meaning of his statement seems reasonable to me.

It's not an impossibly ambitious bar. Many people have cleared it in the past, and many more will clear it in the future (including Slava the OP).

"people have done it" doesn't mean that its a good lesson (or a lesson at all)

i think @beachstartup's point is that the problem with treating this as a "lesson" is that you're imposing a value judgment on other peoples' value creation by saying that what they're doing, possibly their LIFE'S WORK, is NOT WORTH DOING just because they may not "augment the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way".

For example, any failed venture could probably be said "not to augment the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way". Goodbye scientists who are trying to cure cancer but haven't succeeded yet. No offense, patio11, but bingo cards? Come on... try to augment the human condition a bit.

It just comes off as judgmental and moralistic bs.

I would guess people spend billions of hours a year staring at bingo cards. So having nice ones is not a small thing.

I believe his statement was that of mockery or sarcasm when using the "augment" line. Not actually demeaning some of patio11's work. :)

"Augmenting the human condition" is admittedly a bit of a platitude (and a bit grandiose). However your question "under whose criteria does rethinkdb qualify for this?" is exactly the right one and the actual lesson from this statement. No one who's running a business says to themselves "I bet I can get away with not augmenting the human condition." Partly because people's internal monologues don't normally use that sort of diction but also because everyone who's running a business knows that this is the whole point. Most people who fail to accomplish this do so because they don't know what will augment their customer's lives. Figuring out the criteria with which to judge augmentation is the hard part. I could go into details about how I think we're doing this at RethinkDB (although referring to it as "augmenting to human condition" is a bit of an over the top for my tastes) but I think this is the general answer to your question.

even more fun is that you should be simultaneously

1. Getting to ramen profitability with a team of 2 – 4 within six months to a year, AND

2. augmenting the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way.

Well shit... if SV is a community of 2-4 person creating profitable products that augment the human condition every year...

You seem to be misunderstanding him. Perhaps deliberately. But I will clarify this for you anyway. You don't have to do these things simultaneously. You start out with a handful of people, and reach profitability making something small, which ultimately grows into something that changes a lot of people's lives. This is not only possible, but how most successful technology companies started.

my response was flippant and uncalled for. the list is generally great, but for some reason the few times i've seen seemingly moral judgments it makes me bristle.

"augment the human condition", "a huge number of people", and "a meaningful way" are really subjective and arguably VERY few people are doing things that meet those criteria.

those criteria aren't offensive, but the part that flips me was "it's not worth doing". Granted its 4 words in an otherwise insightful piece, but I have a problem with it when people tell others that their life's work is worthless.

People pursue all sorts of activities in their lives, personal and professional, that, by this metric aren't worth doing.

i'm aware, of course, that you've written opinionated pieces that narrowly define "startup" as well, so maybe all those things just aren't startups and don't apply.

Question is whether that corner cafe falls into the category of a startup or not.

starbucks started out this way, in downtown seattle. literally a corner cafe.

but of course this (i believe false) line of reasoning then raises the question of what tiny business couldn't be considered to be potentially an augmenter of the "human condition for a huge number of people", doesn't it?

I think you're still missing the definition of the startup in your reasoning. Starbucks wasn't a startup, and their intention probably wasn't to be the biggest coffee shop chain in the world when they first started. Startups by definition are looking for extreme growth and want to be the biggest "X" of their industry eventually from the getgo. An informed deduction is that you shouldn't make a product that doesn't solve a good large problem if you are a conventional startup.

you are making my point for me.

A mentor of mine drew the line like this (paraphrased) -- a "startup" is a new company with some innovation at its core. Without the focus on innovation, most discussions tend to drift off into categorical murk such as whether mom-n-pop shops are startups, whether the local hardware guy is "an entrepreneur", etc.