Thank you for this advice. We've already planned to sit down with our investor next month to do a proper post mortem. I've also been penning down my thoughts about what went wrong and what went right.
Don't underestimate the value of experience. While failing must certainly have hurt, you have actually learned more than if everything had worked out. Whatever you do, be sure to take a bit of time to regroup before you jump into another high intensity activity like your next startup or someone else's software project with a ridiculous timeline. That way you will recover quicker.
3 failed products across 2 different startups, over a period of about 3 years. I definitely feel I've learnt a great deal over the last few years. I've grown as a developer, but also learnt about things like management and marketing.
I think this is good advice. I've never worked in a corporate environment, and I might get a job just to see what that's like.
I'm definitely going to compile and reflect on all the mistakes I've made over the last couple years.
The success rate for VC-funded startups is historically about 10%. About 20% fail outright. The rest often end up in zombie mode, able to cover their expenses at some reduced level of activity but unable to pay back their investors.
In some ways it's better to fail. You have to stop and go do something else, rather than being on a death march to nowhere.
That site is run by The Onion, which, for a few weeks, claimed to have been bought out by Yu Wan Mei Salvage Fisheries and Polymer Injection Corporation.
This makes me sad for some reason. I'll never forget the sense of wonder I felt the first time I played vanilla WoW.
I found the world to be incredibly compelling and rich, and got really sucked in. The world felt vast, and I spent hours just wandering around and exploring. It was also my first MMO and the thought that I was playing with thousands of other players in real time was amazing.
I didn't particularly care about Titan (it was vaporware from the start IMO), but I've only felt what you're talking about twice since the release of WoW. The first time was in FlyFF - a god awful F2P/P2W korean MMO. It was the epitome of crap but it did let me explore which I feel is something not too present in MMOs nowadays. There is nothing quite like exploring high level zones as a low level, being somewhere you shouldn't be, a constant danger and a feeling of helplessness when you are spotted by a monster.
The second time was recently, in Wildstar. I've had to stop playing it for lack of time but I dearly miss it, it's the only MMO I actually liked since WoW.
I don't quite understand this.
A person's preconceptions is the collection of his previous knowledge about the subject.
What does it mean to have random preconceptions?
I think the point is that you can't remove external constraints from a situation simply by willing it (make the people in the room disappear, make your AI independent of assumptions).
For example the type of neural net chosen, the reinforcement and other parameters, the rules of the game chosen by the creator are all constraints which are not randomly chosen, so randomly choosing the starting state is not necessarily going to remove preconceptions built in to the model, and it is still choosing some starting state, just not an arbitrary one chosen by the creator.
I'm not sure it really applies to this article though, which is about a different problem - saving the time spent worrying about unimportant decisions or those where you don't have enough inputs and choosing to take a random path.
