An essay by John Melonakos
Laws of Startups
Over the last week, I kept track of the laws that were quoted in things I read. Here are some popular ones:
- Parkinson’s Law – work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion
- Murphy’s Law – anything that can go wrong, will go wrong
- Hofstadter’s Law – it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law
- Peter Principle – people will tend to be promoted until they reach their “position of maximum incompetence.” (used in software engineering to describe a dying project which has little by little become too complex to be understood even by its own developers)
- Putt’s Law – technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand
For a more complete list of Eponymous Laws, see Wikipedia.
Which startup laws do you like to quote?