Looking at start-up companies from the SSS strategy of Texas Poker

Now a lot of people like Texas Poker. Aston Motes, the Dropbox's first employee, has left Dropbox in the second half of last year. Motes has written an article in his blog about a startup from the point of view of a Texas poker SSS strategy. Texas Poker has a small chip strategy (short stack Strategy, hereinafter referred to as SSS), SSS is mainly for players with a small number of chips to enter the game, aggressive. Players play only a higher percentage of hand cards, choose to raise even all in. If the hand is not good, just fold it. Startups are actually similar to the small chip players who just got on the table. They are full of anticipation, and compared with the players who have accumulated a lot of chips on the pitch, they have few chips and few resources. Probably most people want to be the player with a lot of chips. However, in a highly volatile table with huge uncertainties and benefits, it is not always good to have multiple leverage strategies. There are a number of options in this round, such as fold (fold), call, raise (raise), check and then raise, or check after the opponent raises the fold and so on. For instance. For Dropbox, it was originally a player with little chips in the market. Google is typically a big chip player. According to Motes, when he was an intern in Google in 2006, he had heard Google Drive Google, and the product wasn't available until 2012. There is no way to know what's going on inside Google, and one possible reason is that Google has too many different directions for this product to choose from, leading to slow product growth. For example, Google's internal potential for thinking includes: Does a web-based company need to make a desktop app? Data backup is this a flooded market? And between 2007 and 2012, the only action Dropbox this little chip team was job. Dropbox has completed the company's establishment, product launches and millions of users as they wander through different strategic options. During this period, Google is able to release Drive and eat to belong to Dropbox cake, after all, Google has a wealth of development operations resources. For startups, the only thing that can compete with Giants is speed and focus. This is similar to the SSS that the SSS strategy is to focus on itself, to see if his hand is good enough, rather than to analyze the opponent's risk appetite. Dropbox is different from Google.The product is clear, and there is no policy choice in many directions like Google. Even if the Dropbox team wanted to pursue other idea, their resources could not support them. Motes said that if they had more resources at the time, they would try to make mistakes in different directions and consider a variety of strategies, but it was likely that the strategy chosen after the trial and error was still wrong. The SS strategy works mainly because it avoids the player losing too much money and only bets on the winning hand cards. And this strategy will get some fold equity. Fold Equity can simply understand the probability that your opponent will fold up against your raise, and you have the potential to profit before the showdown. Why does this hand have this Fold equity? The real reason is that you have a very different utility curve from your opponents (especially those big chips). If you are a small chip player, then any small gain you can win is a big win. Most startups will die, and if you can make a little bit of a niche in one of these areas, it's better than nothing. To put it another way, it's just that big companies don't care these little players at first, and it doesn't matter if they lose some small markets. Unfortunately, these small Territories, neglected by them, are likely to be the starting point for their future decline. With the SSS strategy, you usually end up with a game soon. Because usually, there are only a few times that you can always raise a hand, and then win a grand slam or lose the light, and all the other cases are directly folded. There is uncertainty in poker, even if you have a pair of a, there is no guarantee of victory, the same is true of start-up companies. In fact, the SSS strategy is half the probability of success, and the failure rate of start-up companies far higher, entrepreneurial failure is a common thing. On the other hand, the consequences of a startup failure are much smaller than the consequences of a poker failure, especially if you're not using your own money to start a business. And, as long as you are a reliable team, the most efficient and best use of these funds rather than casual treatment, even if the next project failure, he will likely be willing to vote for you. Fortunately for Dropbox, it grew and did not die. At some point the Dropbox team also realizes that the company is not as resource-hungry as it was at the beginning of its inception, and that as the nomination increases the company will get more resources from all sides, and these resources also allow the company to be more calm in its response to larger challenges. From these points of view to become a big chip player is very cool, a little regret is that when you become a big chip player, the previous small victories brought by the joy will be greeted and is chasing the victory diluted. Motes, Dropbox's first employee, shared the idea early this year, leaving Dropbox in the second half of last year. The reason for leaving is that he misses the project at first, the kind that is building a belief that it will grow very fastThe excitement of the product. So he left to look for the next thing he wanted to be in. Do not know that you read here, have you found anything worthy of you?