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People find themselves drawn to the unlikely startup success stories because they have a beautiful allure to them: if I spend every night tucked away writing co

People find themselves drawn to the unlikely startup success stories because they have a beautiful allure to them: if I spend every night tucked away writing code and focusing my entire life around my work, then maybe I, too, can be the next Zuckerburg! Even though this narrative is hugely removed from the realities of startup life (most college startups go nowhere, the most successful founders tend to be in their middle age with significant financial stability, etc), it is still romanticized by founders and startup employees and other people who really should know better. So then why do they buy it? To get people to work harder for you. Spending every waking moment in front of a customer or a computer screen eating bulk ramen sounds like a great montage scene in the movie you'll have an EP credit in, and this distorted reality is even easier to sell to impressionable young college grads who have maybe .1% of the equity (in options!) that founders and VCs get to keep. Why are jeans and hoodies the fashion choice of founders? Because if everyone is used to dressing like a poor college student, they tend not to notice how little they're truly being compensated. This isn't some big founder/VC conspiracy, it's complicit common sense.

mbrock 11y ago
Random thought. People also do WANT a "romantic" or "interesting" or "passionate" life or whatever you want to call it. All the talk about "work/life balance" and "stable income" and stuff is uninteresting to this mentality because in one sense all it is is a preference for stability, a kind of conservatism. I know people who have abandoned career altogether to go around busking, and they LOVE the "hustle" even when it sucks in objective terms. They love the sense of urgency, the sense of being on their own space fighter like in Firefly. With funded startups it's a bit different because you still have daddy in the board room handing out your allowance, but that's secondary. I can imagine someone semi-consciously optimizing their life in such a way as to avoid middle class normality as much as possible. If you want to get financially independent without doing "boring" stuff like working a stable career and investing in index funds, the notion of a wildly successful startup is perfect: you get to be interestingly poor for years, and then you can suddenly get fuck-off rich, with no intermediate period of dull stability. Presumably after that you can go off and build canoes with your friends or whatever it is you "really" want to do. Except that probably, for reasons David and others outline, the plan will fail and drag you into decades of pure hypocritical misery.
- habitue 11y ago
  This is an interesting thought, I like it
- deadlast 11y ago
  You still have to be able to eat.
djrogers 11y ago
> Why are jeans and hoodies the fashion choice of founders? Because they're comfortable, familiar, and they can get away with it? I think it takes a particularly cynical and angry mind to stretch the choice of clothing to be a tool of oppression on the part of the founders.
- ridgeguy 11y ago
  They're also inexpensive and low-overhead. I'm glad to have the luxury of working in jeans and tee shirts. Cuts way down on ironing and laundry, frees up time.
  - gaius 11y ago
    Time to spend working with no overtime pay?
    - krallja 11y ago
      Starching and ironing dress shirts is work (done for your employer's benefit) that is completely unpaid.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  If you research any culture at any time period, you will find clothing as a method of control. Medieval European countries often banned commoners from wearing violet, because the color was expensive and the ruling class wanted to reinforce the idea that the nobility were fundamentally different and better. Same goes for Jews in nazi Germany's being forced to wear yellow stars. The way you get someone to dress influences the way they think. It's the same as buying a few pizzas for your employees to get them to code till sunrise instead of paying them proper overtime. Impressionable college grads with little work experience elsewhere will take that kind of behavior for granted, and assume it is the cost of their (measly) equity. Essentially, you want them to be suckers. Comfortable suckers.
  - argonaut 11y ago

mbrock 11y ago

Random thought. People also do WANT a "romantic" or "interesting" or "passionate" life or whatever you want to call it. All the talk about "work/life balance" and "stable income" and stuff is uninteresting to this mentality because in one sense all it is is a preference for stability, a kind of conservatism. I know people who have abandoned career altogether to go around busking, and they LOVE the "hustle" even when it sucks in objective terms. They love the sense of urgency, the sense of being on their own space fighter like in Firefly. With funded startups it's a bit different because you still have daddy in the board room handing out your allowance, but that's secondary. I can imagine someone semi-consciously optimizing their life in such a way as to avoid middle class normality as much as possible. If you want to get financially independent without doing "boring" stuff like working a stable career and investing in index funds, the notion of a wildly successful startup is perfect: you get to be interestingly poor for years, and then you can suddenly get fuck-off rich, with no intermediate period of dull stability. Presumably after that you can go off and build canoes with your friends or whatever it is you "really" want to do. Except that probably, for reasons David and others outline, the plan will fail and drag you into decades of pure hypocritical misery.

habitue 11y ago
This is an interesting thought, I like it
deadlast 11y ago
You still have to be able to eat.

djrogers 11y ago

> Why are jeans and hoodies the fashion choice of founders? Because they're comfortable, familiar, and they can get away with it? I think it takes a particularly cynical and angry mind to stretch the choice of clothing to be a tool of oppression on the part of the founders.

ridgeguy 11y ago
They're also inexpensive and low-overhead. I'm glad to have the luxury of working in jeans and tee shirts. Cuts way down on ironing and laundry, frees up time.
- gaius 11y ago
  Time to spend working with no overtime pay?
  - krallja 11y ago
    Starching and ironing dress shirts is work (done for your employer's benefit) that is completely unpaid.
rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
If you research any culture at any time period, you will find clothing as a method of control. Medieval European countries often banned commoners from wearing violet, because the color was expensive and the ruling class wanted to reinforce the idea that the nobility were fundamentally different and better. Same goes for Jews in nazi Germany's being forced to wear yellow stars. The way you get someone to dress influences the way they think. It's the same as buying a few pizzas for your employees to get them to code till sunrise instead of paying them proper overtime. Impressionable college grads with little work experience elsewhere will take that kind of behavior for granted, and assume it is the cost of their (measly) equity. Essentially, you want them to be suckers. Comfortable suckers.
- argonaut 11y ago