> First, it sets the stage for what was to come, and second, while it was unquestionably a success, it was not my success.
I used to think that success was being successful the way I wanted and I was often frustrated because things were working but not because of the way I wanted them to. Turns out, it's doubly difficult to make things not only work but also work the way I want.
I've since tried to be more open-minded and see wins that perhaps I didn't expect or want still as wins and it's made me feel a lot more successful. One might scoff and say I should hold myself to a higher standard, but at the end of the day, success is only an intrinsic feeling anyways. It's not a measurable metric so I might as well feel better about the progress I'm making.
In the context of the article, the author could see these all as failures, but it sounds like some of these were pretty successful. In fact, the author concludes as much, finding happiness in the "failures". It's all an arbitrary label anyways.
Also interesting that it seems like his relatively minor 1 year stint at pre-IPO Google was successful enough to pay for many other endeavors.
It's a great example of the power laws in startups: it's much more lucrative to have a minor role in a major success than a major role in anything minor.
I think this is actually not as obvious as it seems as equity is also power-law distributed. An executive founder may have 10-50x the equity of a founding junior employee, who themselves might have 10-20x the equity of a key early employee.
The power laws actually cut both ways. I think the optimal path is not entirely obvious without some particular understanding of whether or not you are a stronger player as a leader or a follower.
I would go even further, it would have been much better statistically to work at any of the BigTech companies even in the past 10 years than take a chance at a startup.
Seeing tts outcome of the startups he listed, it would have been much better to work as an enterprise CRUD developer at a bank, insurance company, etc
Ugh, I know this feeling too well. I've been pretty successful in life so far by societal standards but have always felt inferior and like I'm failing. Always. I think partly that's responsible for the drive that enabled earlier success, but it gets old. My first defense when those feelings bubble up is to remember we're all playing a game we can't win!
Yeah, the "success definition" trap is real. For me I was having coffee with a former co-worker who was now a VC because they had been at one of the same companies I had been but had joined "pre-IPO" and so probably had a net worth of 20 - 30 million. They asked what I was looking for and I said "To be successful like you!" and they said, quite seriously, they would prefer to be successful like me. And at that point we talked about the parent's point of how do you define success? This person had money but had lost their their spouse to divorce over 'working too hard' and were now alone. Meanwhile my third kid was on the way and I was doing okay but certainly not "FU money" okay. And yet from their perspective, that was more successful than they felt. That really threw me for a loop.
Totally feel this. I think all people should desire to be wealthy and to keep from being impoverished, but we should not define wealth and poverty simply in terms of our monetary wealth, or lack thereof.
People who have the love of family and friends, a clear conscience, health, their physical needs met, and thankful hearts, are far wealthier than a majority of people in this world who have a large number in their bank account.
Yet in our consumer world, people are continually thinking of their worth simply in terms of the money they have or the money they make. I’ve known many married working moms, who decided to leave the workforce and be homemakers, who constantly felt like their worth diminished because of the decrease in their wealth, not recognizing that the bond they had with their children, was growing stronger and greater, and didn’t recognize how incredibly valuable that truly was.
Note: I’m not saying working moms can’t have strong bonds with their children, I’m talking about specific situations where for them it was hindering their relationships, and their relationships improved but was at the cost of less money.
Sometimes wins are not necessarily measured with financial success. A company can utterly fail and still represent a win. I had one of those.
I started a self-funded tech company around 1998. This was hard tech, hardware and software. And I was the sole engineer doing all the work. This meant 18 hour days, 7 days per week to get the plane off the runway. Two years later, after booking lots of sales, we finally moved out of the garage and I started to hire people. Yes, I ran this beast entirely on my own for two years. A few years later a large well-known company expressed interest in acquiring the technology. The number being floated was in excess of $30MM.
What happened?
Well, 2008 happened. The economic implosion caused this company to second-guess entry into the market we had pursued --which they intended to do by acquiring us. The deal went from being a couple of meetings away from an acquisition to evaporating in front of my very eyes.
The bad news was that the economic downturn truly hurt us over the next couple of years. I had to shut it down in 2010 and lick my wounds.
This thing went from pouring all of our savings and an incredible amount of very hard work into a crazy idea, executing well enough to get a $30MM+ offer to closing the doors and nearly losing it all in the process.
At the time this felt like an abject failure and a waste of ten years of my life. It took me months to get my head back on straight. Today, looking back, I see it as a success. I took an idea from nothing to close to a massive life-changing exit and did so mostly on my own through hard work, grit and determination. That's a success story nobody can take away from me. I learned a lot along the way and most of those lessons were part of success in future endeavors.
Life can be funny and cruel sometimes. You might think you are going through your darkest hours when, in reality, you are growing a solid backbone that will support the rest of your life.
It’s like anecdotes you hear from religious people during a disaster. “I lost five of my kids. But I’m so thankful that God looked out for me and saved one”
Interpreting a difficult event in terms that allow you to move is not “copium”. we all do it all the time to explain our mistakes and weakness regardless of religion.
I don’t think any of these people are saying “I’m so glad my kids are dead” they are saying they are able to see these unfortunate events in a bigger picture.
I’ve had a lot of coffee breaks with highly placed peers who expressed concern because our boss was sure our success came down to one or two attributes and seemed completely blind to all the ways we saved him from himself. If apathy ever took over the team, we would burst into flames because of all of these details.
There’s a great old aphorism that sounds like sarcasm if you don’t understand this: “Take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves.” Any halfway sane team is dominated by people who are all too happy to jump on the Big Things. But for want of a nail, the kingdom can be lost. And if you cannot see his importance, and fire the farrier to hire more knights, then everybody loses.
When you see a successful boss, look around for his successful reports. They're always the ones cleaning up the boss' messes. The truth is that we all need to be saved from ourselves at some point (sometimes as education, other times as hard lessons), but tech culture certainly pushes that far with the "gifted visionary" mythos. A gifted visionary's much vaunted "Ideas > Details" only works when the detail people are there to make it work.
My main lesson from running a startup: don't. And if you do, quit when the going gets tough. Perseverance does not pay off.
Obviously it doesn't always end badly. But we get a massively skewed view from survivor bias.
My life turned out pretty damn well once I got a plain ordinary job working for someone else. But I don't kid myself: when it comes to starting a startup, I did fail. The main lesson I learned was that I was always going to.
I hear this a lot and I think it is good advice because the only person who should actually start a startup is the one who sees this but still does it.
It’s still not worth it. If you can get into a well paying BigTech company, save aggressively and let the time value of money be your friend, it statistically will make much more sense to do that.
I think there are upsides and downsides to starting young. On the one hand, you don't have much to lose, so failure is softer. On the other hand, you're missing some experience that would be useful.
I worked for a startup whose founder was a super young guy who had never had a job before being CEO. He was missing experiences like "what do I hate when my boss does" and so needed to repeat all the same mistakes. This resulted in things like... postmortem reviews with action items like "we should dock people's pay if installs are done incorrectly" instead of "we should ensure that the install crews have the tools they need to do the install correctly". (That action item was one of the few battles there that I won. We gave every installer a toolbox containing the tools to do the job. This improved the success of installs greatly. But who needs a meeting to come up with an "idea" like this?)
At least if young you got the energy, time, usually fewer family obligations, maybe even naive enough to do something others won't (as a good thing) and ... you know if that's the lifestyle you want.
But I hear you starting at zero life experience, that is bad. I would find it pretty painful to work at a start up and have to talk to the founder "bro let's talk about the basics of picking your battles" and do it ... well.
Worse than not trying is trying and experiencing burnout and/or destitution.
When you fail, it can be due to many things. Not everything in the world is controllable. This is one of the reasons why expecting zero ”What ifs” at the end of your post-mortem is unreasonable.
Not having tried sucks. You don't want to be working in startup land resenting your bosses for starting something successful. If you try and fail, you get rid of the "I could have fucking run this!" mentality that will eventually swallow you and you will always hate work. If you try and fail a few times you may humble yourself and love the relative ease of a job and look forward to it because you've been through a gauntlet. Launching anything is difficult, and it's worth going through just for the experience once you get something live.
It depends. Why do you want to start something? Do you really believe in it? I mean there's got to be a certain set of "hell yes" questions that need to be answered in the affirmative.
Otherwise you're not missing much. Work for something that pays well, solve interesting problems, spend time at home with your family and friends. The problem is when you're wanting to start something because someone else did it and don't have the implementation or execution perseverance (or just don't believe in it strongly).
This (very popular) sentiment you have can basically be abstracted into the “fear of missing out” meme. It's an unnecessary predicate, it's founded on presupposition and bias, and it's really detrimental to all serious long term analyses.
There's no proof that this personal feeling should be listened to or given behavioral authority, especially when it suspiciously conforms to the aesthetic that is widely shared by many who end up having only achieved a mundane life, despite “noble” projects launched because of arrogant egos. This social phenomenon which sponsors the freedom and agency of people fit only to be busy drones is wasting global resources on bourgeois affairs. Elon Musk and his eventual epic failure at super-industrialism is a great example of this harmful sinful pride.
The “what if” has only served to help overvalue ordinary potential, when that capability should have been limited to simple tasks, industries, and affairs. It's a mind virus riding on the waves of language and the beastly body of rationality, a false reality having been successfully disguised as a legitimate object to perceive within the cognitive sphere of humanity. It is deviation that surely has contributed to the collapse of the great liberal humanism project, the real goal of democracy and its encompassing civilization having been the quiet and stable enslavement of a massive surplus of dull brains and basic bodies. A mass of uninteresting genetic carriers who would do well to never worry about what is outside the scope of their common destinies.
The dialectic that there can be morbid peace if you would just test out the hypothesis that you can become a great man is an incomprehensibly devised thinking trap that can filter out men who don't know what the fuck is going on in the grand universe.
But God (or simply nature) works in mysterious ways and I'm glad that hubris was created to serve as an instrument for learning what not to ever do. And to materially benefit from, salvaging from the failures of future past technologies being a huge possibility to leverage. Your supposed tragedy is my informed opportunity, to paraphrase Jeff Bezos.
EDIT: If you ever invent warp drive or faster than light travel or functional nuclear fusion, I'll be looking forward to the blueprints of such treasures and strategic advantages ;)
Most people don’t want to start a business. They might fantasize but it’s not something they would enjoy doing. It’s fine to realize you have other goals and to work on them instead.
I'm starting to think you really need to be well connected or at least come from an upper class background to win here.
Steve Jobs is sort of an exception here, not only was he adopted , but he was adopted by a very middle-class family .
I find myself really good at developing small apps, but very bad when it comes to the business side. I would love to find someone to work with who's good with business. But so far I've just been time scammed a few times by morons who come up with insanely impractical ideas .
And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want to give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're able to build the entire thing out from scratch. If you discuss modest technical limitations they'll berate you for corrupting their vision.
> I'm starting to think you really need to be well connected or at least come from an upper class background to win here.
In my local startup community there are a lot of entrepreneurs and small startups founded by MBA students and recent college grads who clearly come from wealthy backgrounds. Nearly all of them either fail quickly or continue for years without getting any traction beyond their parents’ connections’ businesses.
The other side of being wealthy and well connected is that it’s really tempting to fall back on a job with your family connections or to play startup for a few years while burning through “seed” money from the family without the real pressure of needing your startup to succeed.
> And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want to give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're able to build the entire thing out from scratch.
There are a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs who need a cofounder but don’t want to give cofounder equity.
The majority of successful founders and founding engineers I know had past working experience together. There are exceptions, but most of the time when someone goes searching for a cofounder or founding engineers because they don’t have anyone in their network, it doesn’t work out. It can work and does sometimes, but it’s so rare that I’m very surprised to hear success stories.
There are just too many people in the startup community looking to “hustle” their way into an MVP without giving anything up in the process. Also a lot of people who want to be “cofounders” and get 50% of your company in exchange for doing as little work as they can.
I was in a startup Slack for a while. Every other week someone would come in asking for advice about how to evict a deadbeat “cofounder” from their company who had secured 1/2 or 1/3 of the equity but wasn’t contributing anywhere near the other cofounders.
If my normal billable rate is 70$ an hour I might offer a discount if your project is really neat.
But I've never seen that, I've seen people wanting to me to sign contracts would say I will donate time, and these are never people who are realistic about what their chances are. You get all this hype where they claim someone offered them 100K just for the idea, but when you ask for $100 a month to host the server they don't have it .
Steve Jobs was connected: By being raised in Silicon Valley at just the right time. He even had a story (who knows how true it is) of him as a kid looking up Bill Hewlett in the phone book and asking about electronics parts (a frequency counter IIRC) and Bill not only got him the part, but gave him a summer job.
As for business, many successful tech entrepreneurs “learn” it either as they go or by bringing on business experts, but not giving them full control. For larger examples of the latter, see Eric Schmidt as the “adult in the room” for Google, Sheryl Sandberg for Facebook.
Yes, the social aspect is significant. It's not so much about innovating and strategizing as much as it is about playing politics with rich people and hope that they let you build a successful product. Let's face it, rich people make all the decisions. If you're not rich, it's all about socializing and luck for you. It's hard to find a rich person who will let you implement your vision and actually control your destiny. It's demoralizing TBH.
Always baffled me how little commercial sense HNers had when I was growing up and reading this forum.
It's as if no one taught them -- or they just don't have the sense for it? -- that a startup is just a vehicle to make money. There's nothing special about it. You can make lots of money without a "startup." You can make lots of money doing many different things even without a business entity. It's just an abstraction for linguistic convenience.
My biggest wakeup was finding people much less educated and much less intellectually gifted and much less socioeconmically privileged making a lot more money than what could be considered their betters in more prestigious and, on the surface, well remunerated professions.
If you don't want to make money, don't go into business. Stay at your job and grind a career out. If you have the desire to make money, your senses will naturally sharpen as you use them more to achieve that end. Otherwise, if you go and "build a startup" for any other reason than making money you will fail barring extraneous circumstances.
Baffling that this isn't common sense, really. But my fault. I keep forgetting a professional forum is just a proverbial water cooler, where you get to see a wide mix of people in your profession -- and all the different backgrounds, values, ideas, and ways of seeing the world -- most of which are continuous works in progress that culminate only at death.
> But we couldn't figure out a way to procure drivers.
I briefly worked for Grab the company, which was another SE Asia "Uber". Among other things, at one point they procured drivers in Saigon by giving the wives/families free chicken meat. This way, they could prepare the drivers meals to take while they were out on the road all day long.
When going through crazy stuff as a founder, I always thing "this is going to make for a very intersting story some day". Looking back I doubt I'll remember them all and, while keeping things in full throttle, I wonder if I'll ever get to write about anything...
My conclusion is that most interesting stories remain burried and we're lucky to see anythign real (as in true stories) surfacing, because people that are crazy enough to enjoy these pains, hardly have any time to write about them.
Meanwhile we're presented with a somewhat skewed reality that's both less interesting, less real and overly biased towards glamor. The title of a somewhat :) unrelated book keeps popping in my head "Reality is not what it seems".
I wonder if someone like YC or a16z could manage to hire a journalist or anthropologist to make an honest chronicle of what happens at startups and not turn it into a propaganda piece.
Having to explain yourself helps clarify what you’re doing. The time “lost” keeping said person updated might even pay for itself.
I was thinking just today that Squarespace should contact me and I'll do a commercial for them based on my experiences of creating a webapp and turning it into a business because I was too picky to use a prebuilt CMS etc. I have eight years of nonstop pain and stories to tell.
Related to many interesting/crazy things being lost to history because the observer/actor is too busy to record them, and the things that do get reported consequently not representing reality... (And maybe a little relevant to the somber news events on this Monday.)
Many major religions prohibit making a show of good deeds. You're supposed to do it secretly, so that your intentions are pure.
But other people only see when a good deed is reported, so we're getting a distorted version of reality.
Some of these are reported for good reasons. But the worst form would be what social media kids are bombarded with: things like the clinically oblivious "influencers" who make videos of themselves exploiting a homeless person with a "charity" stunt.
One way to do good, while also letting people be inspired, is to do it anonymously. For example, the donation in a large crowd of them, or the anonymous rich-person's donation to a good cause (not a vanity university department named after yourself!), or any of the countless ways that one person quietly helps someone else.
You'll never know most of the times someone else helped you out, and most of the times you helped out someone else will also never be known. That's OK.
If you ever have the occasion to jump into an icy lake, to save a busload of photogenic schoolchildren and puppies, then you must try to get out of there right after, before anyone's phone dries out. Then the story will be about people simply doing the right thing, even an amazing thing, and fading back into the crowd. It'll be one of the best stories ever.
There’s an old xkcd joke about how some grand problem in information theory has probably been solved on some mundane business task without the author even knowing what they’ve done.
> Why don't the banks care? Because they treat the cost of fraud as just another cost of doing business, and they pass it along to you, the consumer. And they do it in a diabolical, stealthy way that you don't notice. But that's another story.
The answer is simpler: it's not that big of a problem to the people that would need to solve it (visa, banks)
Yes, it' billions of dollars per year, but that's on a denominator of trillions.
> In 2022, global payment card transaction volume surpassed $40 trillion, with the U.S. accounting for over $9.5 trillion 1 . If we consider the $5 billion in unauthorized purchases reported by Security.org 2 , the percentage of fraudulent transactions in the U.S. would be approximately 0.05%.
> it's not that big of a problem to the people that would need to solve it
That's not wrong, but it misses the point. It's not worth the bank's time to solve it, but for me it would produce a pretty damn good ROI. All I needed was one entry point into the system, but I couldn't find it.
In the past, my knee-jerk reaction would have been "Yes, exactly!" Then I heard patio11's podcast on debanking[1]. It gave me some interesting views into fraud and compliance and $STUFF. Highly recommended.
Thanks for the encouragement, but I just turned 60. Running a company is too demanding for me to try it again. My ambition now is to be a writer and find an audience that wants learn the easy way things that I had to learn the hard way.
Hey Ron. I've enjoyed following your blogging since we crossed paths 20 years ago at Indiebuyer/Zerolag. I'm happy to hear you're doing well, and wish you the best for the next 20 years.
I thought this was a very powerful meta learning, something that abstracts across all the experiences.
> And I think my current happiness stems mainly from the fact that I like the person I've become, someone who can fail again and again and again and again and still find a way, for the most part, to be happy.
Curious if you have any other learnings that are less specific to a particular endeavour but hold tru/derive from your experiences across all of them
Multiple "diabolical" (his word, not mine) plans to fool people about what the business really is (an attempt to get in the door with one pitch, then pivot to the real plan and steal their lunch) did not work out. Sorry about that, but putting out this post won't help this guy execute on similar plans in the future.
I'm genuinely curious as to what gave you the impression that he intends to try again. I read this as a brief little memoir of a man who has since moved on to bigger and better things.
Competition is fine. Deception, though, is more problematic, and if multiple pitches depend on it (like market a service to brokers to get their info but don't tell them the plan is to eliminate their jobs), people will be on to you if you aren't a very good sociopath. Perhaps look for more win/win opportunities.
There are many reasons to do a startup, but people should only call it a business when the goal is either a tax deduction mitigation and or rapid entry into profit traction.
1. Don't use some clever or hard to remember name with a weird spelling. While easier to Trademark, the users and customers won't differentiate your site from the sea of attention grabbing garbage.
2. If people have zero paying customers, and zero revenue... than the hard fact is they were never in business, and should have founded a nonprofit instead (common for opensource support service entities.)
3. Often copyright and patents are infeasible for small business, and people simply can't build or defend things like a large firm. Thus, initially design products/services to last maybe a year or simply be disposable... When 270 desperate cloners show up to dilute the market sector... people quickly understand why they can't rely on Android, Steam, or Apple ecosystems to protect their bottom line.
4. There is zero loyalty without treasure. The only people that care if your firm goes into the red is you, and maybe the small-time shareholders. Most people can't take the constant adversarial posture with problematic staff, opinionated shareholders, and high-demand customers.
Everyone thinks a CEO is lame till you become a CEO for a year or two... Every conversation from that point on is about money or marketing, and most people keen on building things tend to burn out of the role eventually due to social isolation.
5. No company lasts forever, if the operation is a projected liability it is your job to respond accordingly. Even if that means executing an exit strategy, and firing the entire problematic division.
6. Ask business people about their memorable experiences, and not about their money source. The superficial apparent function of a business is usually very different from the actual revenue model.
> Growing up, I had two major life ambitions: to become a tenured university professor, and to found a successful startup company.
why the hell those two?
I eventually - into my thirties- worked out that i wanted to be a good computer programmer, and a good photographer. managed the first, but not the tatter - two bored.
What I mean, is why did you have those ambitions growing up. I don't think most normal young people really can't think what they want to do until later in their lives.
The activity is just what people find interesting and the metric is what you strive toward. Imposing the idea that the only reason you pursue originality is so that they can't get sacked is a very wild take.
That's a weird take, he's talking about youthful ambitions. Tenured professor is a pretty standard bar for academic success, and startup us shorthand for building a scalable tech company from scratch. These seem like perfectly cromulent ambitions to me, not sure how insecurity enters into it or why I would care if it did.
Good question. I could probably write an entire essay about that but the TL;DR is that I thought that tenure and financial independence were the roads to freedom, which is what I really wanted. I also really liked (and still do) the college vibe, being surrounded by interesting people thinking and talking about interesting and weird stuff.
Guess my question is did you have any plans what to do with that freedom? Or did the vision just stop with freedom?
Must be I was less ambitious than you. I too started out with goal of tenure and financial independence. 3 years in on tenure track I figured it was easier just to get financial independence and give myself tenure than to play someone's game.
One I reached financial independence (probably a much lower threshold than your), I didn't have any trouble find trouble finding things to fill my days with fulfilling activities that I had long put off. Always fun stuff to learn.
So interested to learn if it was that you still had something you felt you had to prove? Just plan inertia?
Can really put my finger on it, but what if in "I am (not) a failure" essay in addition "Lesson Learned" for each attempt, you had a "Joy Experienced" (perhaps too corny) section as well.
> did you have any plans what to do with that freedom?
Yes. I was going to solve really hard problems without any pointy-haired bosses standing in my way. I was specifically going to solve AI.
> So interested to learn if it was that you still had something you felt you had to prove?
It started out that way, but now I've ended up feeling like I gave it my best shot, and so I failed because I discovered my own limitations rather than any external circumstances (with the notable exception of Smart Charter). And I'm OK with that.
> what if ... you had a "Joy Experienced" (perhaps too corny) section as well.
What I find has given me the biggest dopamine rush over the years is getting something to work, especially after beating on it for a long time. And that includes small wins like fixing a bug in personal code that no one is ever going to see, or fixing something around the house, or getting something I've written on the front page of HN and seeing it well-received. The best way I can think of to characterize it is that I like to feel useful. I don't think I'm alone in that.
Those with no failures never tried. Now I'm the complete opposite of someone who would usually say that but I believe it to be true. Failure at things is ok, it's just part of doing stuff. Just like death is an outcome of life. Anyone who tells you they have never failed either hasn't ever tried anything or is a liar and protecting their ego. It's ok to admit you made mistakes or failed or that you don't know something.
It’s important to think not in terms of success or failure, but in terms of philosophy and mistakes. If you’re focused on the outcome there isn’t much you can improve on, the reasons for failure are many. Mistakes on the other hand stem from flaws in your philosophy, which you can readily revise. In a lot of the cases presented here, the mistake that stands out is working with the wrong people.
I suppose a truer test of character would have been if I had not had one big win fall into my lap that offset all the non-wins. But one of the messages I was hoping to convey is that one's life trajectory includes a lot of randomness. The best you can hope to do through volitional action is slightly tilt the odds in your favor. But that might be enough.
One point in your story that I think is worthy of kudos is that you left Google. I’m not sure how certain the riches were at that point, but presumably you could have chosen to just ride that wave longer. That’s a really hard thing to do.
Thanks, but my motives for leaving were a lot less kudo-worthy than you might think. When I left in October 2001, success was far from certain. If I knew then what I know now I probably would have stayed, and I probably would have put a lot more effort into climbing the (very steep!) learning curve.
There is one other way in which you are not a failure, and I am sure that I am not alone in thinking about it: I have been reading your words for 15 years, from the time I was a baby CS major. That's really true, e.g., here[1] is a comment from 11 years ago where I mentioned that a lisp you wrote for the Apple //e informed a lisp for the Apple //e that I wrote.
Especially in my college years (2009-2013, ish), the world seemed smaller, and to me, a lot of what you wrote was like looking through a keyhole into the real world. Grown-ups can apparently write lisp at JPL[2]! Google was chaotic[3][4][5][6] to work in 2000, especially if you commuted from Burbank. A name change[7]. And, variously, surveillance, more lisp stuff, etc. Now I'm an adult and I still haven't professionally written lisp, but I'm glad to have read about it anyway.
Anyway, it might surprise you to learn that when I think of your writing, though, I think of your HN comments first. There is a kind of influence that you can only get with a steady, unthanked build-up of seemingly-small contributions over a long period of time. In the right place they compound. I probably cite you to other engineers once a month or so.
The difference between a failure and a success when starting a business is if you can afford (monetarily) to fail. if you can afford it just keep failing till something sticks. If you're not well off, well, too bad.
Isn’t that the whole idea of a business? To make money.
(Sounds like I’m kidding but I’m not really. Many of the richest people were very poor at some point. For example, Andrew Carnegie or Levi Strauss. Also Arnold Schwarzenegger started from nothing in the US.)
The point being made though is that business success is greatly influenced by existing wealth, since it gives you the luxury of being able to absorb the costs and risks involved. People like to give a few rare exceptions to the rule as somehow evidence that this isn't true.
The best analogy I've seen is that starting a business is like playing a game at a carnival. The more tickets you buy, the more attempts you have to win the prize. Meanwhile most folks are the carnival workers, never being able to get a chance to play the game in the first place.
I can also make the counterargument that people who grew up in hardship are more likely to become relentless businessmen. Most of the top richest people in America are immigrants.
Most people don’t start a business because they tell themselves that it won’t work. It’s the hard truth that most people don’t want to hear.
If you read about most founders they don’t become rich due to luck or background or whatever. No most of the time they set themselves a goal and then do EVERYTHING to get there. They don’t care whether their parents had money or not. Or whether the market timing is right. They just do whatever they need to do.
Damn it was that easy to obviate financial obligations? Guess the bank also won't care if we stop paying our mortgages?
To give credit to your position, over in Europe they've a generous welfare state yet very few successful startups so there's definitely a huge grindset factor but you're still cashing in on incredible luck or a comfortable economic position to be able to try enough times to score.
This is why the standard issue techbro advice from semi-wealthy "hustlers" who failed upwards on the backs of a few H1B 'founding' engineers is not actionable, I can at least respect the ones who don't bother with the facade.
Many of the richest people also come from places where they COULD afford to fail. Let's be honest, looking at patterns to become wildly wealthy is all survivorship bias, although, if you're well off to begin with, you're more likely to actually survive, and that makes you more willing to give it a shot.
I encourage you to expand on "In the real world, research is not a Platonic quest for objective truth" maybe by writing another article or linking what others wrote on a similar subject.
This is an incredibly common pitfall that people fall into time and again. Hell, even I am getting these vibes with all that recent hype about deep learning - despite I am no stranger to academia (in another area and some years back).
I don't know that I have all that much to say about it. Research is (at least to date) a human activity and so it is necessarily beset with human foibles. It requires resources, so it necessarily involves economics, which necessarily involves politics. It's not rocket science. Anyone who thinks about it for even a moment can figure this out without my help.
> recent hype about deep learning
Does anyone really look at contemporary AI as a Platonic quest for objective truth? It seems to me that there is pretty widespread clarity about the fact that this is mostly a commercial endeavor. If you want to talk about Platonic quests for objective truth we should talk about, say, mathematics or fundamental physics.
> Does anyone really look at contemporary AI as a Platonic quest for objective truth?
I realize I have a tendency to romanticize some of the papers I read even if I fully understand intellectually it is a wrong thing to do. Probably I should try concsiously train myself not to do it or something along these lines.
My experience tells me if I have a question or an issue it's very unlikely to be unique to myself. And (re-)reading an honest or even cynical account about something typically helps e.g. ribbonfarm on corporate hierarchies/politics.
there seems to be a common theme around not believing in the idea/product/people too deeply, thus leading to faulty or mis-step execution. would it be right to say that? a contrast to others who are not a "failure"?
mad respect to you for being open. thanks for sharing.
Smart Charter. I think that might still be a viable business even today, though I have not really kept up with the industry so I don't know.
Ironically, today I have a part-time consulting gig at a company designing network switches, and I see them wrestling with the exact same problems we were tackling 30 years ago. So FlowNet would be a very close second.
> there seems to be a common theme around not believing in the idea/product/people too deeply, thus leading to faulty or mis-step execution. would it be right to say that?
Not sure whether you're asking whether that sentiment exists or if it's correct. But either way, there's no easy answer to that. If you don't believe that's not helpful, but on the other hand, if your beliefs don't align with reality that's not helpful either. It's possible to succeed without strong convictions, and it's possible to succeed with convictions that don't align with reality, but if you have to choose one or the other, believing in yourself is a better than believing in reality if your goal is material success. (Look at Donald Trump.)
Because I'm not a bizdev guy, so when my partner, who was the bizdev guy, had to quit, and we had no customers, the odds of success seemed too low for me to deem it worth the effort to continue.
No. That's another long story. I think bitcoin is basically a scam. (That's another essay I should probably write.)
This is not to say you can't make money at it. People make money on scams all the time. One might argue that it's a foundational element of the American economy. But when it comes to bitcoin, I understand the technology and its attendant risks too well for me to want to play that game.
Also remember that your fail state might be someone else’s success state. Like being part of an IPO that lets you spend the majority of the rest of your career working in your own ideas.
> To this day I'm pretty sure that plan would have worked if we had actually executed it. It was a brilliant plan if I do say so myself. In fact, it was so brilliant that it convinced Richard Branson to acquire the company before we launched for $10M. We started the company as Smart Charter, but we launched as Virgin Charter.
It's noteworthy that he's portraying selling before launch as a failure, and while ultimately the acquirer didn't follow his vision and the business didn't pan out (and perhaps the author never even got to liquidate his shares), it's still arguably more of a success than Loopt (raised $39M, sold for $43.4M), which Sam Altman and his backers had no reservations about portraying as a huge success that springboarded him to YC president and later to AI kingmaker.
Failure here too I guess but my downfall per my experiences in dealing with many who made it to the biggest names in tech is my morality. I can't lie/cheat/steamroll over ppl to get to the top.
I've heard from top investors that the best companies usually get immediate and rapid traction. Sometimes theres a figma story where it takes a while, but thats usually BS. Generally either the product is right, or its not, and you know very quickly.
They usually dont want to tell founders this, they want them to struggle through in the off chance it works
> First, it sets the stage for what was to come, and second, while it was unquestionably a success, it was not my success.
I used to think that success was being successful the way I wanted and I was often frustrated because things were working but not because of the way I wanted them to. Turns out, it's doubly difficult to make things not only work but also work the way I want.
I've since tried to be more open-minded and see wins that perhaps I didn't expect or want still as wins and it's made me feel a lot more successful. One might scoff and say I should hold myself to a higher standard, but at the end of the day, success is only an intrinsic feeling anyways. It's not a measurable metric so I might as well feel better about the progress I'm making.
In the context of the article, the author could see these all as failures, but it sounds like some of these were pretty successful. In fact, the author concludes as much, finding happiness in the "failures". It's all an arbitrary label anyways.
It's a great example of the power laws in startups: it's much more lucrative to have a minor role in a major success than a major role in anything minor.
The power laws actually cut both ways. I think the optimal path is not entirely obvious without some particular understanding of whether or not you are a stronger player as a leader or a follower.
Seeing tts outcome of the startups he listed, it would have been much better to work as an enterprise CRUD developer at a bank, insurance company, etc
Yet in our consumer world, people are continually thinking of their worth simply in terms of the money they have or the money they make. I’ve known many married working moms, who decided to leave the workforce and be homemakers, who constantly felt like their worth diminished because of the decrease in their wealth, not recognizing that the bond they had with their children, was growing stronger and greater, and didn’t recognize how incredibly valuable that truly was.
Note: I’m not saying working moms can’t have strong bonds with their children, I’m talking about specific situations where for them it was hindering their relationships, and their relationships improved but was at the cost of less money.
I started a self-funded tech company around 1998. This was hard tech, hardware and software. And I was the sole engineer doing all the work. This meant 18 hour days, 7 days per week to get the plane off the runway. Two years later, after booking lots of sales, we finally moved out of the garage and I started to hire people. Yes, I ran this beast entirely on my own for two years. A few years later a large well-known company expressed interest in acquiring the technology. The number being floated was in excess of $30MM.
What happened?
Well, 2008 happened. The economic implosion caused this company to second-guess entry into the market we had pursued --which they intended to do by acquiring us. The deal went from being a couple of meetings away from an acquisition to evaporating in front of my very eyes.
The bad news was that the economic downturn truly hurt us over the next couple of years. I had to shut it down in 2010 and lick my wounds.
This thing went from pouring all of our savings and an incredible amount of very hard work into a crazy idea, executing well enough to get a $30MM+ offer to closing the doors and nearly losing it all in the process.
At the time this felt like an abject failure and a waste of ten years of my life. It took me months to get my head back on straight. Today, looking back, I see it as a success. I took an idea from nothing to close to a massive life-changing exit and did so mostly on my own through hard work, grit and determination. That's a success story nobody can take away from me. I learned a lot along the way and most of those lessons were part of success in future endeavors.
Life can be funny and cruel sometimes. You might think you are going through your darkest hours when, in reality, you are growing a solid backbone that will support the rest of your life.
Entrepreneurship is hard. Very hard.
It’s like anecdotes you hear from religious people during a disaster. “I lost five of my kids. But I’m so thankful that God looked out for me and saved one”
I don’t think any of these people are saying “I’m so glad my kids are dead” they are saying they are able to see these unfortunate events in a bigger picture.
There’s a great old aphorism that sounds like sarcasm if you don’t understand this: “Take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves.” Any halfway sane team is dominated by people who are all too happy to jump on the Big Things. But for want of a nail, the kingdom can be lost. And if you cannot see his importance, and fire the farrier to hire more knights, then everybody loses.
You've got battle scars, and stories that are worth their weight in gold. Your experience is probably extremely useful for the right startup.
Obviously it doesn't always end badly. But we get a massively skewed view from survivor bias.
My life turned out pretty damn well once I got a plain ordinary job working for someone else. But I don't kid myself: when it comes to starting a startup, I did fail. The main lesson I learned was that I was always going to.
I hear this a lot and I think it is good advice because the only person who should actually start a startup is the one who sees this but still does it.
But if you're young, got the time ... I think it's worth a shot, or two, or more.
I worked for a startup whose founder was a super young guy who had never had a job before being CEO. He was missing experiences like "what do I hate when my boss does" and so needed to repeat all the same mistakes. This resulted in things like... postmortem reviews with action items like "we should dock people's pay if installs are done incorrectly" instead of "we should ensure that the install crews have the tools they need to do the install correctly". (That action item was one of the few battles there that I won. We gave every installer a toolbox containing the tools to do the job. This improved the success of installs greatly. But who needs a meeting to come up with an "idea" like this?)
But I hear you starting at zero life experience, that is bad. I would find it pretty painful to work at a start up and have to talk to the founder "bro let's talk about the basics of picking your battles" and do it ... well.
Worse than failing is not trying.
You will live your life always wondering “what if”.
When you fail, you will have an answer to the above question and can live in peace.
When you fail, it can be due to many things. Not everything in the world is controllable. This is one of the reasons why expecting zero ”What ifs” at the end of your post-mortem is unreasonable.
Otherwise you're not missing much. Work for something that pays well, solve interesting problems, spend time at home with your family and friends. The problem is when you're wanting to start something because someone else did it and don't have the implementation or execution perseverance (or just don't believe in it strongly).
There's no proof that this personal feeling should be listened to or given behavioral authority, especially when it suspiciously conforms to the aesthetic that is widely shared by many who end up having only achieved a mundane life, despite “noble” projects launched because of arrogant egos. This social phenomenon which sponsors the freedom and agency of people fit only to be busy drones is wasting global resources on bourgeois affairs. Elon Musk and his eventual epic failure at super-industrialism is a great example of this harmful sinful pride.
The “what if” has only served to help overvalue ordinary potential, when that capability should have been limited to simple tasks, industries, and affairs. It's a mind virus riding on the waves of language and the beastly body of rationality, a false reality having been successfully disguised as a legitimate object to perceive within the cognitive sphere of humanity. It is deviation that surely has contributed to the collapse of the great liberal humanism project, the real goal of democracy and its encompassing civilization having been the quiet and stable enslavement of a massive surplus of dull brains and basic bodies. A mass of uninteresting genetic carriers who would do well to never worry about what is outside the scope of their common destinies.
The dialectic that there can be morbid peace if you would just test out the hypothesis that you can become a great man is an incomprehensibly devised thinking trap that can filter out men who don't know what the fuck is going on in the grand universe.
But God (or simply nature) works in mysterious ways and I'm glad that hubris was created to serve as an instrument for learning what not to ever do. And to materially benefit from, salvaging from the failures of future past technologies being a huge possibility to leverage. Your supposed tragedy is my informed opportunity, to paraphrase Jeff Bezos.
EDIT: If you ever invent warp drive or faster than light travel or functional nuclear fusion, I'll be looking forward to the blueprints of such treasures and strategic advantages ;)
Steve Jobs is sort of an exception here, not only was he adopted , but he was adopted by a very middle-class family .
I find myself really good at developing small apps, but very bad when it comes to the business side. I would love to find someone to work with who's good with business. But so far I've just been time scammed a few times by morons who come up with insanely impractical ideas .
And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want to give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're able to build the entire thing out from scratch. If you discuss modest technical limitations they'll berate you for corrupting their vision.
In my local startup community there are a lot of entrepreneurs and small startups founded by MBA students and recent college grads who clearly come from wealthy backgrounds. Nearly all of them either fail quickly or continue for years without getting any traction beyond their parents’ connections’ businesses.
The other side of being wealthy and well connected is that it’s really tempting to fall back on a job with your family connections or to play startup for a few years while burning through “seed” money from the family without the real pressure of needing your startup to succeed.
> And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want to give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're able to build the entire thing out from scratch.
There are a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs who need a cofounder but don’t want to give cofounder equity.
The majority of successful founders and founding engineers I know had past working experience together. There are exceptions, but most of the time when someone goes searching for a cofounder or founding engineers because they don’t have anyone in their network, it doesn’t work out. It can work and does sometimes, but it’s so rare that I’m very surprised to hear success stories.
There are just too many people in the startup community looking to “hustle” their way into an MVP without giving anything up in the process. Also a lot of people who want to be “cofounders” and get 50% of your company in exchange for doing as little work as they can.
I was in a startup Slack for a while. Every other week someone would come in asking for advice about how to evict a deadbeat “cofounder” from their company who had secured 1/2 or 1/3 of the equity but wasn’t contributing anywhere near the other cofounders.
If my normal billable rate is 70$ an hour I might offer a discount if your project is really neat.
But I've never seen that, I've seen people wanting to me to sign contracts would say I will donate time, and these are never people who are realistic about what their chances are. You get all this hype where they claim someone offered them 100K just for the idea, but when you ask for $100 a month to host the server they don't have it .
As for business, many successful tech entrepreneurs “learn” it either as they go or by bringing on business experts, but not giving them full control. For larger examples of the latter, see Eric Schmidt as the “adult in the room” for Google, Sheryl Sandberg for Facebook.
Connected is when your Mom knows the chairman of IBM. Like with Gates.
It's as if no one taught them -- or they just don't have the sense for it? -- that a startup is just a vehicle to make money. There's nothing special about it. You can make lots of money without a "startup." You can make lots of money doing many different things even without a business entity. It's just an abstraction for linguistic convenience.
My biggest wakeup was finding people much less educated and much less intellectually gifted and much less socioeconmically privileged making a lot more money than what could be considered their betters in more prestigious and, on the surface, well remunerated professions.
If you don't want to make money, don't go into business. Stay at your job and grind a career out. If you have the desire to make money, your senses will naturally sharpen as you use them more to achieve that end. Otherwise, if you go and "build a startup" for any other reason than making money you will fail barring extraneous circumstances.
Baffling that this isn't common sense, really. But my fault. I keep forgetting a professional forum is just a proverbial water cooler, where you get to see a wide mix of people in your profession -- and all the different backgrounds, values, ideas, and ways of seeing the world -- most of which are continuous works in progress that culminate only at death.
I briefly worked for Grab the company, which was another SE Asia "Uber". Among other things, at one point they procured drivers in Saigon by giving the wives/families free chicken meat. This way, they could prepare the drivers meals to take while they were out on the road all day long.
Kind of a local spin on tech workers free meals.
My conclusion is that most interesting stories remain burried and we're lucky to see anythign real (as in true stories) surfacing, because people that are crazy enough to enjoy these pains, hardly have any time to write about them.
Meanwhile we're presented with a somewhat skewed reality that's both less interesting, less real and overly biased towards glamor. The title of a somewhat :) unrelated book keeps popping in my head "Reality is not what it seems".
Having to explain yourself helps clarify what you’re doing. The time “lost” keeping said person updated might even pay for itself.
Many major religions prohibit making a show of good deeds. You're supposed to do it secretly, so that your intentions are pure.
But other people only see when a good deed is reported, so we're getting a distorted version of reality.
Some of these are reported for good reasons. But the worst form would be what social media kids are bombarded with: things like the clinically oblivious "influencers" who make videos of themselves exploiting a homeless person with a "charity" stunt.
One way to do good, while also letting people be inspired, is to do it anonymously. For example, the donation in a large crowd of them, or the anonymous rich-person's donation to a good cause (not a vanity university department named after yourself!), or any of the countless ways that one person quietly helps someone else.
You'll never know most of the times someone else helped you out, and most of the times you helped out someone else will also never be known. That's OK.
If you ever have the occasion to jump into an icy lake, to save a busload of photogenic schoolchildren and puppies, then you must try to get out of there right after, before anyone's phone dries out. Then the story will be about people simply doing the right thing, even an amazing thing, and fading back into the crowd. It'll be one of the best stories ever.
Many may not have actually happened, but it’s still worth considering even decades later.
Desire to know more intensifies
That's actually the start of a multi-part series:
https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-cre...
https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-cre...
https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-cre...
https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/cutting-to-chase-repeal-...
https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/a-simple-solution-to-cre...
Keep in mind all that was written twelve years ago and the world has changed a lot since then.
The answer is simpler: it's not that big of a problem to the people that would need to solve it (visa, banks)
Yes, it' billions of dollars per year, but that's on a denominator of trillions.
> In 2022, global payment card transaction volume surpassed $40 trillion, with the U.S. accounting for over $9.5 trillion 1 . If we consider the $5 billion in unauthorized purchases reported by Security.org 2 , the percentage of fraudulent transactions in the U.S. would be approximately 0.05%.
1 - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tudQcmL8lNH49iZZ8wRB88KW...
That's not wrong, but it misses the point. It's not worth the bank's time to solve it, but for me it would produce a pretty damn good ROI. All I needed was one entry point into the system, but I couldn't find it.
The interchange rate on credit cards is high, but "diabolical" is a stretch.
Also, fraud is a very small line item in a credit card P&L. Generally 25bps to 50bps vs credit charge offs which are closer to 3% to 6%.
Source: Ran risk for Bank of America and a credit card fintech.
[1] https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/debanking-pat...
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
iCab: Uber obviously was very successful with this ~same premise
Smart Charter: I assume you can easily book a private jet online now?
Founder's Forge: linking record-keeping and payment is what makes Ramp great; 10 years of fintech innovations made executing this much easier
Spark Innovations: this is basically the premise of Airtable
“If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.” ― W.C. Fields
Quitters never win. Winners never quit. People who never win and never quit are stupid.
Thanks!
> I hope you'll try again!
Thanks for the encouragement, but I just turned 60. Running a company is too demanding for me to try it again. My ambition now is to be a writer and find an audience that wants learn the easy way things that I had to learn the hard way.
> And I think my current happiness stems mainly from the fact that I like the person I've become, someone who can fail again and again and again and again and still find a way, for the most part, to be happy.
Curious if you have any other learnings that are less specific to a particular endeavour but hold tru/derive from your experiences across all of them
1. Don't use some clever or hard to remember name with a weird spelling. While easier to Trademark, the users and customers won't differentiate your site from the sea of attention grabbing garbage.
2. If people have zero paying customers, and zero revenue... than the hard fact is they were never in business, and should have founded a nonprofit instead (common for opensource support service entities.)
3. Often copyright and patents are infeasible for small business, and people simply can't build or defend things like a large firm. Thus, initially design products/services to last maybe a year or simply be disposable... When 270 desperate cloners show up to dilute the market sector... people quickly understand why they can't rely on Android, Steam, or Apple ecosystems to protect their bottom line.
4. There is zero loyalty without treasure. The only people that care if your firm goes into the red is you, and maybe the small-time shareholders. Most people can't take the constant adversarial posture with problematic staff, opinionated shareholders, and high-demand customers. Everyone thinks a CEO is lame till you become a CEO for a year or two... Every conversation from that point on is about money or marketing, and most people keen on building things tend to burn out of the role eventually due to social isolation.
5. No company lasts forever, if the operation is a projected liability it is your job to respond accordingly. Even if that means executing an exit strategy, and firing the entire problematic division.
6. Ask business people about their memorable experiences, and not about their money source. The superficial apparent function of a business is usually very different from the actual revenue model.
Best of luck, =3
why the hell those two?
I eventually - into my thirties- worked out that i wanted to be a good computer programmer, and a good photographer. managed the first, but not the tatter - two bored.
What I mean, is why did you have those ambitions growing up. I don't think most normal young people really can't think what they want to do until later in their lives.
I would guess to be free to pursue interesting ideas, and then make money off them.
just my opinion, and not to badmouth, but this sounds like a somewhat insecure person.
Tenured (metric) + professor (activity).
He defined his, same as you did:
Good (metric) + programmer (activity)
The activity is just what people find interesting and the metric is what you strive toward. Imposing the idea that the only reason you pursue originality is so that they can't get sacked is a very wild take.
Good question. I could probably write an entire essay about that but the TL;DR is that I thought that tenure and financial independence were the roads to freedom, which is what I really wanted. I also really liked (and still do) the college vibe, being surrounded by interesting people thinking and talking about interesting and weird stuff.
Guess my question is did you have any plans what to do with that freedom? Or did the vision just stop with freedom?
Must be I was less ambitious than you. I too started out with goal of tenure and financial independence. 3 years in on tenure track I figured it was easier just to get financial independence and give myself tenure than to play someone's game.
One I reached financial independence (probably a much lower threshold than your), I didn't have any trouble find trouble finding things to fill my days with fulfilling activities that I had long put off. Always fun stuff to learn.
So interested to learn if it was that you still had something you felt you had to prove? Just plan inertia?
Can really put my finger on it, but what if in "I am (not) a failure" essay in addition "Lesson Learned" for each attempt, you had a "Joy Experienced" (perhaps too corny) section as well.
Yes. I was going to solve really hard problems without any pointy-haired bosses standing in my way. I was specifically going to solve AI.
> So interested to learn if it was that you still had something you felt you had to prove?
It started out that way, but now I've ended up feeling like I gave it my best shot, and so I failed because I discovered my own limitations rather than any external circumstances (with the notable exception of Smart Charter). And I'm OK with that.
> what if ... you had a "Joy Experienced" (perhaps too corny) section as well.
What I find has given me the biggest dopamine rush over the years is getting something to work, especially after beating on it for a long time. And that includes small wins like fixing a bug in personal code that no one is ever going to see, or fixing something around the house, or getting something I've written on the front page of HN and seeing it well-received. The best way I can think of to characterize it is that I like to feel useful. I don't think I'm alone in that.
Americans are weird :)
As I understand it, the competitor in this space is Anaplan.
Especially in my college years (2009-2013, ish), the world seemed smaller, and to me, a lot of what you wrote was like looking through a keyhole into the real world. Grown-ups can apparently write lisp at JPL[2]! Google was chaotic[3][4][5][6] to work in 2000, especially if you commuted from Burbank. A name change[7]. And, variously, surveillance, more lisp stuff, etc. Now I'm an adult and I still haven't professionally written lisp, but I'm glad to have read about it anyway.
Anyway, it might surprise you to learn that when I think of your writing, though, I think of your HN comments first. There is a kind of influence that you can only get with a steady, unthanked build-up of seemingly-small contributions over a long period of time. In the right place they compound. I probably cite you to other engineers once a month or so.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6199857#6200414 [2]: https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080212170839/https://xooglers.... [4]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090408003924/http://xooglers.b... [5]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090408013612/http://xooglers.b... [6]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090408003913/http://xooglers.b... [7]: https://flownet.com/ron/eg-rg-faq.html
In the sense that infinite monkeys will eventually put out Shakespeare. In reality, money and time are both limited ;-)
(Sounds like I’m kidding but I’m not really. Many of the richest people were very poor at some point. For example, Andrew Carnegie or Levi Strauss. Also Arnold Schwarzenegger started from nothing in the US.)
The best analogy I've seen is that starting a business is like playing a game at a carnival. The more tickets you buy, the more attempts you have to win the prize. Meanwhile most folks are the carnival workers, never being able to get a chance to play the game in the first place.
Most people don’t start a business because they tell themselves that it won’t work. It’s the hard truth that most people don’t want to hear.
If you read about most founders they don’t become rich due to luck or background or whatever. No most of the time they set themselves a goal and then do EVERYTHING to get there. They don’t care whether their parents had money or not. Or whether the market timing is right. They just do whatever they need to do.
To give credit to your position, over in Europe they've a generous welfare state yet very few successful startups so there's definitely a huge grindset factor but you're still cashing in on incredible luck or a comfortable economic position to be able to try enough times to score.
This is why the standard issue techbro advice from semi-wealthy "hustlers" who failed upwards on the backs of a few H1B 'founding' engineers is not actionable, I can at least respect the ones who don't bother with the facade.
....because there isn't enough wealth where they're from to absorb a lot of failures.
Hence they come to the land of opportunity where there are gamblers with money to gamble.
Also, there are a lot more poor people than startup founders.
Hm, there must be more to it.
This is an incredibly common pitfall that people fall into time and again. Hell, even I am getting these vibes with all that recent hype about deep learning - despite I am no stranger to academia (in another area and some years back).
> recent hype about deep learning
Does anyone really look at contemporary AI as a Platonic quest for objective truth? It seems to me that there is pretty widespread clarity about the fact that this is mostly a commercial endeavor. If you want to talk about Platonic quests for objective truth we should talk about, say, mathematics or fundamental physics.
I realize I have a tendency to romanticize some of the papers I read even if I fully understand intellectually it is a wrong thing to do. Probably I should try concsiously train myself not to do it or something along these lines.
My experience tells me if I have a question or an issue it's very unlikely to be unique to myself. And (re-)reading an honest or even cynical account about something typically helps e.g. ribbonfarm on corporate hierarchies/politics.
mad respect to you for being open. thanks for sharing.
Ironically, today I have a part-time consulting gig at a company designing network switches, and I see them wrestling with the exact same problems we were tackling 30 years ago. So FlowNet would be a very close second.
Not sure whether you're asking whether that sentiment exists or if it's correct. But either way, there's no easy answer to that. If you don't believe that's not helpful, but on the other hand, if your beliefs don't align with reality that's not helpful either. It's possible to succeed without strong convictions, and it's possible to succeed with convictions that don't align with reality, but if you have to choose one or the other, believing in yourself is a better than believing in reality if your goal is material success. (Look at Donald Trump.)
This is not to say you can't make money at it. People make money on scams all the time. One might argue that it's a foundational element of the American economy. But when it comes to bitcoin, I understand the technology and its attendant risks too well for me to want to play that game.
It's noteworthy that he's portraying selling before launch as a failure, and while ultimately the acquirer didn't follow his vision and the business didn't pan out (and perhaps the author never even got to liquidate his shares), it's still arguably more of a success than Loopt (raised $39M, sold for $43.4M), which Sam Altman and his backers had no reservations about portraying as a huge success that springboarded him to YC president and later to AI kingmaker.
They usually dont want to tell founders this, they want them to struggle through in the off chance it works