Nobody really knows anything

I was re-reading this old Hacker News classic this morning:

Struck by a few observations:

• If you read on further down the thread, the commentor was actually pretty friendly and trying to be helpful to the founder. They had a good civil discussion – he actually ends off with “I only hope that I was able to give you a sneak preview of some of the potential criticisms you may receive. Best of luck to you!”. Unlike the other grumpy, elitist, overly-critical, armchair entrepreneur wannabes elsewhere on the forum, this isn’t one of them. Goes to show how misunderstood the poor guy is.
   
• On hindsight, the commentor was embarassingly wrong. Dropbox went on to be a unicorn startup success. But no one knew any better then in that moment in time. The commentor could have been right, and he’s more likely to be right than wrong at that moment, and Dropbox could have been another statistic of the 90% of startups that failed and nobody cared. The denominator is more important here. We laugh at the dude as if he’s dumb. But he was more right than wrong then, and if we ourselves had to make the judgement call then, it’s more likely we would make the same comments as he did than otherwise.
   
• We use this infamous comment as a reason to shrug off early feedback from armchair critics, and to validate our own ego and product. Truth is, we’ll never know which way it’ll go. It’s all unfolding in the moment, and truth is emergent rather than fixed. Things are a lot more complex than it seems, and more luck is needed than we can objectively observe. On the contrary, it’s dumb to assume otherwise than to assume everything’s in control.

We’re all making it up as we go, and any universal truths we shout about—especially in entrepreneurship—are on shaky grounds at best.

Nobody really knows anything.