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Create good problems to have - by Gordon Brander

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Create good problems to have. You want to build easy things with obvious shortcomings that create problems at scale. Good problems to have are good problems to solve… later. This may seem counterintuitive, it may even seem… immoral, but it works. It’s a corollary to Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. What makes a problem good to have? A good problem to have is a problem that emerges after the flywheel is already spinning. It emerges at scale, under rapid growth. Since the flywheel is already spinning, the momentum of the flywheel can be turned toward solving the problem. A rapidly growing ecosystem will be intrinsically motivated to solve obvious problems of scale. Examples of good problems to have: Running out of IP addresses (incentivized the invention of NAT) Spam a

Create good problems to have. You want to build easy things with obvious shortcomings that create problems at scale. Good problems to have are good problems to solve… later. This may seem counterintuitive, it may even seem… immoral, but it works. It’s a corollary to Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. What makes a problem good to have? A good problem to have is a problem…

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