> The problem is that winning in startups is often a tail event, which means reducing blunders doesn't have much impact on the overall probability.
Maybe you could compare it to playing chess against a much higher rated player. In that sense, minimizing your weaknesses is still useful. And looking at the "blunders" the author lists we can definitely say that making these errors is worse than not making them.
One place where this analogy breaks down is that chess is a zero-sum perfect information game. Business is neither zero-sum (competition can encourage innovation and better products) nor perfect information. In chess, we can calculate for each of the candidate moves and have theoretically perfect knowledge of the future state of the board. In business and many other situations, this kind of thing isn't possible. The upshot is that several of the "blunders" the author lists may only turn out to be blunders after the fact.
When playing against much better player there are two possible strategies in practice:
1. try to simpifly position as much as possible and hope for a draw (and inevitably lose the endgame due to playing too passively);
2. complicate position so much that neither you nor your opponent can calculate or understand it, then hope that your opponent will mess up before you will.
Yes I know it's useful. The last line of my comment said that: "Reducing blunders is obviously good in any situation, but is it the dealbreaker for startups? It always depends on the context".
"is it useful?" usually isn't a very interesting question, because a lot of things are obviously useful and yet don't have much of an impact on results.
Maybe you could compare it to playing chess against a much higher rated player. In that sense, minimizing your weaknesses is still useful. And looking at the "blunders" the author lists we can definitely say that making these errors is worse than not making them.
One place where this analogy breaks down is that chess is a zero-sum perfect information game. Business is neither zero-sum (competition can encourage innovation and better products) nor perfect information. In chess, we can calculate for each of the candidate moves and have theoretically perfect knowledge of the future state of the board. In business and many other situations, this kind of thing isn't possible. The upshot is that several of the "blunders" the author lists may only turn out to be blunders after the fact.