I see a lot of comments on here about the efficiency of Lyft/Uber's and lots of comments about their overspending.

The new book by Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling, was an eye-opener for me as to how these companies operate and what seems as incredibly inefficient now will all be but forgotten tomorrow when they have complete monopolies over all transportation... The nature of technology makes it winner take all almost always, it's only a matter of time until they can offer other forms of transportation to people. Perhaps people someday won't even own any cars at all especially if it's cheaper to call an autonomous one from your device whenever you need it.

These are interesting times we are living in and these business models are completely counterintuitive to traditional norms of taking small risks and that much is obvious from seeing the business models of Uber/Lyft, WeWork, Airbnb, etc.

You can also find books on audible to listen to that might save you time especially listening to them at a faster speed like 1.5x - Also check out some startup podcasts as well.

Another good book might be Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman.

One thing to keep in mind is not to get distracted by all these items (they are good, but can be useful) but there are no shortcuts.

Most of the largest companies were built without a playbook but with determination and a north star.

Remember to also have fun! Hope this helps somewhat.

Hey HN community! We are Ben and Rune, founders of Mentorcam (https://mentor.cam/), a marketplace where people can access public figures and high-profile individuals for personalized 1:1 advice. These types of individuals tend to be difficult to access and usually don’t make themselves available for advice to people they don’t know, but often get bombarded with inbound requests. By letting them set their own price to answer questions privately via short, asynchronous video messages on our app, we make it feasible to offer individually tailored advice without having to schedule anything.

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Happy to answer questions and read comments!

> From the "never give up" point of view, I've changed my mind, thanks to books like The Lean Startup, Blitzscaling, and my own experience.

It depends on whether you're giving up on the process or the goal. Startups "give up" or pivot on their original and subsequent ideas so often that's it's considered a best practice. This is different from founders giving up on starting a business.

Like you mentioned, the habit is what matters.

I used to think like this. At it's core, it's a variation of "never give up", mixed with "the power of habit".

I agree with "the power of habit" part.

From the "never give up" point of view, I've changed my mind, thanks to books like The Lean Startup, Blitzscaling, and my own experience.

The bottom line message seems to be "keep insisting and you'll be successful". I spent 3+ years working in a game that never took off as a side project. In hindsight, I should have taken the hint of the lack of traction early on and dropped the whole thing. Instead I sank countless hours into a project that never worked out. How many prototypes could I have produced in the same time?

Bottom line, habits are good, so long as we don't mix it up with the concept of "don't give up and you'll be successful".

I think such a story is difficult now unless its a niche small market. Lets say someone start a company and stumble-upon a massive market but decides to grow slow financed by revenue. The problem is others are going to copy the idea and grow fast with VC money and crush the original company. May be possible in the next downturn when VC money dries up

Read Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman - https://hbr.org/2016/04/blitzscaling

Reid Hoffman talks in his book Blitzscaling about the sacrifices a company needs to make so it can scale aggressively fast. And when your job is to lead a team and you join a company that’s blitzscaling, nobody tells you what was sacrificed.

There may be structural problems, missing information, lack of trust between teams, poor defined business goals, lack of a unified engineering or product strategy, communication problems between departments, huge dependencies between teams, a lot of bureaucracy and the list goes on and on. I’ve faced some of these problems. I tried to solve some, I had to accept some and I’m still frustrated with others. Here I'm sharing my experience about how to identify and deal with some of them. But I also want to know yours.