Yak Farming In Tibet

Yak Farming In Tibet

The name of this essay is "Yak Farming in Tibet." I know it's a terrible name. It sounds like something Yogi Berra would say. But I couldn't come up with a better one.

I don't have any idea what you're supposed to do with yaks. If you were going to start a business, what would you do with them? Even if your goal were just to make money, why would you raise yaks? Still, there are people in Tibet who do raise yaks. And they don't seem to be making a living at it either. How can that be?

Here's how it can be: the people raising yaks are not trying to get rich. They are trying to survive; yak farming is their way of doing so in a difficult environment.

The most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has. If someone didn't care enough about a problem to solve it before you started working on it, they still won't care once you've finished. You'll have spent all that time working on something irrelevant. It's hard enough getting people to care about problems that do exist. Don't create imaginary ones.

So when you go looking for problems, find real ones, ones that already

I have been asked a number of times about the economics of yak farming in Tibet. I usually reply that I am a software guy, not an expert on yak farming. But this does not seem to faze my questioners, who wonder if I can't at least speculate about the matter.