8 ms·

There was a time I believed all corporate activities were based only on merit. Anything not completely merit derived would be illegal. That's what we're made

• falsestprophet 17y ago
  Know rich people? They'll help you get rich too. I can confirm this. Contrariwise, knowing poor people can help you get poor. Such is life.
• paul 17y ago
  You just want to world to recognize you as "having merit" and give you money? You want to be successful, but are unwilling to make any sort of effort? Create something remarkable and people with money will find you.
  • seiji 17y ago
    I see how it can be read that way. By "merit," I meant actual accomplishments and not some ethereal quality of a person or group just sitting idle. I'm glad you chimed in though because you're one of the cases that kind-of fits the model above. From a complete outsider's point of view, it looks like friends giving friends tens of millions of dollars for nebulous reasons. * Disclaimer: Text is a poor medium of communication and usually comes across more hostile in the reader's eyes than intended. There is much levity here.
    • paul 17y ago
      What am I a case of?
      • marshallp 17y ago
        insider dealing
        • paul 17y ago
          How so?
          • marshallp 17y ago
            I'm not implying that you were engaged in anything shady, but your success with friendfeed, you have to admit, was more than the sum of your technical/marketing talent, having friends in high places has to have come into it somewhere, no?
            • paul 17y ago
              Not really -- we didn't know the Facebook team all that well. Your argument would make more sense if we had sold to Google, but even then it would be false. If your point is that people can build future success on top of past success, yes obviously that is true, but there is nothing wrong with that. It means that you need to work at it for a while and not expect people to simply hand you whatever you want because of some imagined "merit". Edit (because there's not reply link for some reason): Where do you think reputation comes from? You have to start by doing something, and over time if you keep doing things that makes you more valuable.
              • marshallp 17y ago
                Well it's not exactly "Create something remarkable and people with money will find you." then. More like 'create something remarkable and have enough reputation or schmoozing ability, and be in the right geograhic area'. Even the 'remarkable' thing is not entirely true. I don't think facebook or microsoft were remarkable, for example, they just hit the right combination of luck and skill at execution. Google on the other hand, was an example of something remarkable when it first appeared.
  • axod 17y ago
    Surely that assumes people with money are good at spotting 'worth'...
    • paul 17y ago
      That problem exists regardless. Who can truly judge "merit"? However, investing has a built-in selective pressure. The people who are good at spotting things that will make money get more money -- the ones that aren't good at it lose money.
    • drusenko 17y ago
      Well, making lots of money is an easy indicator... Otherwise, you make the best bets you can.
• zaidf 17y ago
  Have a project you don't want to do inside of Google? Just quit, make it anyway, then they'll re-hire you with a $5M per head bonus. Way off base IMO. If it was true, there would be very few ex-googler companies failing. And there would be A LOT more acquisitions by Google. I have used Vark. And I think this was a SOLID technology acquisition and well worth $50M. If I was a Vark founder, I'd feel insulted by your post.
  • FreeRadical 17y ago
    Your implying the cost to replicate the technology and gain the same traction would cost Google more then $50m. This is clearly not true, even if you grossly overestimate and assume it takes 20 engineers 6 months each at a salary of $300k each to replicate vark, plus $10m in marketing. It still falls short of $50m. So is the difference the cost of mostly re-acquiring talent? Talent that you had already ascribed a value to when you employed them through assessing their annual performance?
    • zaidf 17y ago
      Your implying the cost to replicate the technology and gain the same traction would cost Google more then $50m. Not quite. I am implying that Google thinks the risk associated with doing it on their own is not worth the $50m for the acquisition. It is way more complex than simply about tech and traction. ie. lets say google can build the same thing for $10M. But hey it might take them 2 years. In the same 2 years, a competition(Microsoft) might acquire Vark and turn it into a billion dollar competitor to google. On the flip side, even if Google can build it for 10M and launch in 6 months, the risk from the other possibility is not worth the 40M in savings.
    • jey 17y ago
      That's the Microsoft approach to building products, and while they meet all of the "feature check-list" of the product they're cloning, they usually somehow fall sort on execution. There's something a bit ineffable that comes with the people who truly grok the problem being solved and pour their heart and soul into solving it.
• Timothee 17y ago
  There's some truth to what you're saying (I'm afraid), though a lot of it is more general than just "rich people will help you get rich". You'll learn more around smart people and you'll be more likely to be a criminal if your friends pull you into it. But overall your negativity throws me off a bit. One definitely notices when a company with many ex-Googlers is bought by Google. But if you think that's how the world is, nothing really stops you from joining Google: what were these guys doing before joining Google in the first place? Networking definitely helps in a lot of situations (to find a job, to make a deal, to get in touch with the right people), but you can do something to arrive at a place where you can easily network with the right people.
  • axod 17y ago
    I think you're missing the irritation though. Surely it's like the girl who sleeps with the boss gets a promotion. Sure, if you want a promotion you could sleep with the boss too, but it'd be nice if everything was just fair and done on merit. Not everyone wants to sleep with the boss.
    • moe 17y ago
      It'd also be nice if there were no wars and if I had a pony. Sorry, but to me that comes across as whining, and I'm most certainly not from the "rich circles" either.
    • andreyf 17y ago
      I agree that it would be nice, and that's the world most parents try create for their kids. Outside of meticulously engineered/supervised social structures, however, I see little reason for a pure meritocricy to arise, if only for the reason that the concept of "merit" doesn't exist outside of our moral models. And you can certainly get a promotion many ways aside from sleeping with the boss.
    • nostrademons 17y ago
      I found it became significantly less irritating to me when I realized that decision makers simply suffered from an information problem and weren't specifically out to get me. Imagine that you have something lots and lots of people want - say, a few hundred million dollars to give away in venture capital. Naturally, since lots of people want it, you're constantly bombarded by requests. After a short period of time, all these requests start to seem the same. Everybody has their startup baby. They all are absolutely certain that it's going to change the world. Most of them have very little experience and nothing in particular to recommend them. If you're in this situation, what would you do? Every startup looks the same; you don't have enough information to pick one over another. You don't even enough time to begin gathering information to pick one over another. So you winnow the field by picking ones that stand out for some reason. The easiest way is to pick only the ones that come recommended by friends. After all, you have a limited number of true friends, and they know how busy you are, and so they'll only forward on ventures that they really believe have potential. The second easiest way is to pick founders whose names you recognize. Or founders whose past projects have names you recognize. There are a limited number of names that you'd recognize, and most of them are not asking you for venture capital, so this is a fairly safe way to narrow down the field. Other than that, pretty much any way you choose of picking startups will be essentially random. It's like the half-season of House where he was picking his new team and randomly fired half the applicants. You wouldn't think that's fair either, right? Yet how else are you going to determine merit when you have far too many candidates to investigate each one in depth?
• coffeemug 17y ago
  Know rich people? They'll help you get rich too. What you may not realize is that everyone is knowable if you put enough effort into it. If you have no drive and no talent, rich people won't be able to help you. There aren't that many driven and talented people out there, so if you're one of them, and you make an effort to meet rich people, they'll help you too.
  • axod 17y ago
    I think the problem is that some people (Me included) would rather spend all energy making stuff people want, rather than schmoozing people who might buy you. But I do see your point.
    • coffeemug 17y ago
      I think it's better to approach this from a different perspective. "Engineering relationships" doesn't work in general - if you approach people because you want something from them, they'll sense it very easily and push back. It's much better to approach people because you genuinely like them and want to learn from them. Many rich people have a ton of knowledge and experience that most of us don't, and it's genuinely interesting to learn from them. It's no good to expect anything, it's much better to try and learn from them just like from anyone else. If you approach it this way, it becomes an activity with very positive connotations, as opposed to schmoozing.
    • nostrademons 17y ago
      If you spend all your energy making stuff people want, rich people will find you too. The problem is that making stuff people want is really hard, and usually involves going out and finding people that want stuff. If you have real traction - as in people are already buying from you, without you going out and selling them hard - rich people will be knocking at your door trying to get a piece of the action. But then, if people were already buying from you, why would you need rich people?
  • marshallp 17y ago
    "There aren't that many driven and talented people out there" I beg to differ, if you assume that there are an equal distribution of talented/driven people, then how come there are more millionaires (talented people) in silicon valley than the rest of america, and america more than europe, and europe more than the rest of the world. More likely is that rich people are cliquey and luckier/lazier/less talented at spotting opportunity/investing than they give themselves credit for (otherwise you'd see a more equal distribution of investment to where the talent is).