Jerry Neumann

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

@ByrneHobart They always sent them! And they all told me to let them know if I had any questions. (I thought that was perhaps taking advantage of their generosity, so never did, but I did do the readings they suggested). I'm better at learning by reading than listening though

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

@ByrneHobart It's also hard to find things that meet specific needs...Columbia had no history of tech course when I was looking for one, no entrepreneurship theory classes, etc. Instead I emailed noted profs at other schools and asked for their grad-level syllabi because I wanted to learn

[Andres G. Covilla M. @andrescovilla]

@ganeumann published his analysis of the reactions to "We Have Learned Nothing," his essay about the ineffectiveness of different startup methods taught in the last 20 years. The reactions themselves are the most interesting part.

https://t.co/1kG6GzwAWO

The reactions were predictable: The data is wrong. The methods weren't applied correctly. You can't prove they don't work.

That last objection is the one Popper would have circled.

In The Open Society he identified the central problem with unfalsifiable systems: they are not wrong. They are immune to being wrong. Every failed application becomes evidence of incorrect usage. Every contradicting result gets absorbed as a special case. The theory survives every encounter with reality by explaining reality away.

Neumann's critics are not arguing that the methods work. They are arguing that no data could ever show they don't.

That is not a defence of a methodology. It is a description of an ideology.

Popper's point was that a theory which cannot be falsified is not a stronger theory. It is a weaker one. The strength of a claim is precisely its exposure to being wrong.

The different methodologies being defended as unfalsifiable, self-sealing, immune to aggregate evidence, is not science applied to entrepreneurship.

It is the Open Society problem wearing a business model canvas.

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

@Witold4Change Totally. We can't tell without better experiements. My guess is that offsetting factors can't be the explanation because the success rate is so constant over time: it would be super-coincidental if the improvement from these methods and headwinds from offsets exactly matched

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

@Witold4Change Thanks, I hadn't seen these. I need to re-read the second one...I'm not even sure what they are concluding? I reached out to Tom on the first, asking him what he thought of my essay and how the two square

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

@fred_pope I agree having a working product is table stakes

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

Idk, having watched a couple big SaaS businesses being built, coding was not the bottleneck

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

@cailen Short squeeze!

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

@fred_pope Or vice versa

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

@jamescham I want this but to export the text around audible bookmarks

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

@TheStalwart @KenGardner11 When unobserved I'll sometimes get a root beer float

If root beer don't kill me I don't know what will

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

I no longer have access to a university library and, so, most academic papers

When I am president, any government funding of research (and there will be plenty) will be accompanied with the stipulation that the results must be published open access

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

@benrollert Frank Knight agrees with you! Because of the inherent uncertainty in startups, he thought good entrepreneurs succeeded because they had good "judgment", something that could not be explained in words and only learned through doing (Risk Uncertainty and Profit, 1921)

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

@Witold4Change This is a good point. But

1) If you're proposing there is nothing we can measure, then it's not science, by definition;

2) Even if some small number of companies were seeing more success, we should see *some* change in the success rate unless you believe it's zero-sum

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

@Witold4Change Well, we agree. This is the first thing I say we need to do in the essay. I just say we shouldn't accept things as true that have no proof

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

@Witold4Change Sure. But that paper says there is only one actual empirical trial: the one I referenced in the essay (Camuffo 2020)

[Ari Paparo @aripap]

The complete segment is up on YouTube. Is your phone listening to you? No.

https://t.co/6ZORbUDO6b

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

@Witold4Change Agree! But we do have some intuition that these methods work...that must map to some measure, and I feel like we just haven't thought very hard about it

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

@Witold4Change I mean, I am willing to concede that we may not have measured the right thing. But I am not willing to concede that these things work but they are simply unmeasurable...by that standard, everything can be said to work

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

@Witold4Change But, again, if this is true and those skills are better deployed, shouldn't that show up in some measure?