11 ms·

As someone who is outside of SF looking in, to me the whole startup culture there seems utterly insane. To me, it seems as though there is some kind of reality

by shruubi 10y ago

As someone who is outside of SF looking in, to me the whole startup culture there seems utterly insane. To me, it seems as though there is some kind of reality distortion field that convinces us all that no matter what we is being worked on or created, it is in some way world changing or "disruptive", despite how stupid it is, or how viable a market there is for what is being made. The funny thing is, organizations that are actually trying to make the world a better place by helping the homeless, poor, disadvantaged etc I've never even heard of. The way I see it is that VC's are all about world changing and making the world a better place, so long as in this better world they can still milk a market for every last penny.

M_Grey 10y ago
It's all about people who've seen how absurdly rich you can get, and want a piece of that. That's all there is to it. The rest is window dressing and empty words to facilitate an IPO, selling the company, or hitting that lucky lottery win in some other way. When it inevitably, eventually implodes, nothing of lasting value will be lost.
- refurb 10y ago
  It's all about people who've seen how absurdly rich you can get, and want a piece of that. That about sums it up. If people suddenly became rich through farming, you'd see people flocking to the mid-west. A lot of people claim a higher calling or passion for tech, but it's mostly just dollar signs in their eyes.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    They're smart enough to know that saying, "This is the new gold rush" would make them look bad, exactly.
  - sp527 10y ago
    I had a passion for tech. Then it was beaten out of me by large, successful tech companies. Some day, the majority of us who are relegated to inane, shitty work will wake up and acknowledge that. So what do you do when you are a capable programmer who isn't rich enough to work on something challenging/interesting/meaningful like electric cars or rockets? Maximize expected value. That's not immoral. That's the shitty reality of being a person of average means.
    - sangnoir 10y ago
      > So what do you do when you are a capable programmer who isn't rich enough to work on something challenging/interesting/meaningful like electric cars or rockets? The list of meaningful things a capable programmer is way longer than that! You dont have to quit yiur dayjob to work on them and get some fulfillment/validation. I'll add: Rockets and electric cars are just at a certain point in their hype-cycles, and you're just drinking the koolaid. I'm 100% certain you'd have your passion for tech beaten out in those industries too, if you worked for the wrong company.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      Fuck passion. There are people who work passionlessly on revolutionary things. Accomplish something you care about, sure, but supporting yourself and a family is also worth caring about.
      - noobermin 10y ago
        You don't need to have to work on something revolutionary to support a family however, or even be a super rich guy. There is wallstreet after all.
    - noobermin 10y ago
      >So what do you do when you are a capable programmer who isn't rich enough to work on something challenging/interesting/meaningful like electric cars or rockets? Why do you have to be rich to work on electric cars or rockets? Many companies are hiring specifically for these technologies.
    - john_other_john 10y ago
      Forgive me if this is without the applicable context, but sp527, I sincerely doubt you are a person of average means. I mean neither to backhanded compliment the abilities of the HN crowd, nor to - as seems increasingly common when I find myself in the change - state interfaces of society, silently denigrate you by implicit reference to privilege I may not have. If you can take my statement literally, that would be superb! I mean, I think the word average when it comes to ability or performance or self assessment is poorly used. Too frequently it is meant as self denigrating before a audience (which, as with above, I did not infer nor deliberately infer from your comment) and when it is used plainly, as in "I'm an average kinda guy" I find it too often misleads one into imagining one's interlocutor is saying they are a unremarkable character personally. It's a safety pitch in a chat up line, for one example of use subset my last classification of "average" use. I take your statement literally in a socio - economic and intellectual sense, but with a skew that probably does put you quite a bit above the census bureau averages in most ways. But what does frustrate me, when self description of "average" is used, is that perfectly "average" people perform quite wondrous feats or succeed with way above the deviation accomplishment, because one is able to trade in life. I have just remembered this, prompted by your comment: when in my early twenties, despite I had received a privileged education, imagined what I could do by trading futures in myself. Take my thirties away and give that time to me now. Forget my personal growth (that was a biggie I left too late, beware!) because now I want to design things 24/7/365. And so on and so forth. I estimated not my ability or relative ability, but looked about at how long (by mere guesstimate) things I admired took to do, when I imagined most on that job were going home normal hours to wives and children, and having weekends and social lives, and the odd sick day or holiday, and maybe only reading two or three work related books a year, max, and certainly not consuming a subset of citeseer in unbroken mind-high caffeinated sessions which cared little to distinguish weeks, let alone days. Quite apart form the fact you are either a engineer or have some capacity in that regard, the bounds of possible optimisation achievable from "a person of average means" I think must be very excellent indeed. How indeed, did mankind excel, when there was just a few of us in any social group hanging about with no tools or fire or built shelter and so on? Someone hit it right out the park, not merely once, but probably a while lot of times in a row, to get us through some earlier developing stages, just as we have some now, particularly in systematising and understanding what all this software lark is really about and how to make all of us good at it, instead of - one wonders - mere self defined _potential_ outlier points around some average. I'm also quite sure, that when you are in your metier, when you are at a fundamental level aware you are where you want to be, you will find relevant skills or muscles or abilities notably at a higher functional level than you ever imagined they could be. Because there is something reflexive, compounding, about the human existence at least I have known, just as equally there can be compounding, confounding negative spirals. I believe there must be a art I have not learned in my 40 some years, of neatly skipping sideways from the spirals and letting one's instincts guide us to where some factor or energy or whatever phenomenon it may be is compounding and positive. If we could so dance with our own entropy, what a dance it would be. But meanwhile, I think "average" is most definitely not always average.
  - wutbrodo 10y ago
    > A lot of people claim a higher calling or passion for tech, but it's mostly just dollar signs in their eyes. AFAICT, tech was full of passionate people (at the very least about building something, if not changing the world), way back before it had the cultural cachet that it now does. As it became increasingly clear that there was a lot of money in tech, what I call (generically) "the finance crowd"[1] flooded in. By which I mean, the masses of more-or-less competent people across the country/world who really don't care too much what they study/work in, as long as it's profitable. The beef I have with thinking like yours is that there are plenty of us still around who were here before working in tech went from being nerdy to (relatively) "cool", and we'll be here if and when it stops being the industry du jour. It kinda sucks when people like you make the leap from "most people these days are chasing dollars and paying lip service to passion" to "anyone who claims they love/believe in what they do is just chasing $$". To this day I know plenty of people who would be here even if it didn't happen to be the currently-booming industry. To be fair, the oblivious author is far guiltier of this than you; he's a perfect example of what he's whining about hating, and if he bothered learning anything about the history of tech in the area, he wouldn't be so quick to assume that those who claim an affinity for it are completely hollow. Though I have to say, getting here years before the rush provides the nice consolation of not having to compete in the ludicrous housing market that the boom + lack of construction has spawned. [1] I may be guilty of making the same over-generalizing mistake about finance, but I know quite a few people who work in finance and have been legitimately passionate about finance as a concept and the technical challenges involved therein since they were pretty young. Every single one of them has had that passion beaten out of them by the industry itself and the people they're surrounded by. By contrast, I still know tons of people in tech turning down big paychecks to just work on stuff that they like working on (I quit my job last year and am taking about a 50% paycut for similar reasons).
- crdb 10y ago
  > It's all about people who've seen how absurdly rich you can get Yes and no. As is often bandied about, the expected value of a career in startups is lower than in many other fields, and yet people do stay after seeing through the myth. A large part of it, at least that I've observed, is the energy, speed of execution, rapid change, the excitement and adventure of the startup world. You willingly give up expected value in exchange for a more interesting life. The stress is part of the fun, the person it moulds you into is something that becomes part of your identity. If the personal risk wasn't real, it wouldn't be fun. The man in the arena etc.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    >Yes and no. As is often bandied about, the expected value of a career in startups is lower than in many other fields, and yet people do stay after seeing through the myth. Hence, "Lottery".
  - jxramos 10y ago
    I can backup these claims via a third party testimony. I had a friend who worked at Microsoft Redmond for many years and grew tired of the operations a big Juggernaut company and how it can be wasteful and less daring and all the other undesirable behaviors that deep pockets can afford not being in a state of survival. He hopped ship over to LinkedIn to experience a more daring startup lifestyle. According to him it's added a great deal more meaning to his work life. I guess he'll see how things steer under Microsoft's sailing.
- jwatte 10y ago
  Twitter, Facebook, Google, and a bunch of other previous startups do have value. Also more, like Electronic Arts, Oracle, Intel, Salesforce, Apple, ... It's just that the 1000:1 ratio between startup and final enterprise is brutal!
  - lucaspiller 10y ago
    Twitter and Facebook may have value in dollar signs (OK maybe not Twitter right now), but I'd really question how much value they have provided to society as a whole. It seems like all Facebook wants to do is built an ecosystem, lock you in it, and milk you for data they can sell to advertisers.
    - ec109685 10y ago
      Seriously? A billion+ people use Facebook products, many hundreds of millions very happily.
      - collyw 10y ago
        I am sure I have seen research claiming that excessive facebook use makes people less happy.
        wutbrodo 10y ago
        Excessive _damn-near-anything_ makes you unhappy or is otherwise bad for you. That's....pretty much what the word excessive means! The idea that it's possible to use something excessively means it's of little value is just beyond ludicrous.
      - radicsge 10y ago
        Yet if facebook would disappear, nothing would be lost. Somebody would overtake the position in no time. This is not true for real value added companies.
        10y ago
- radicsge 10y ago
  It's not necessarily bad, but as "with great power comes great responsibility" is not followed here, is the real problem. If you are lucky and became incredible reach you should give back to the world. And not just the 0.1% to have media coverage (like facebook did when their cheating got out)... Apple once were the biggest company, yet i dont know anything that would shine any good light on that company... Their last notable act was that their blackmailed the EU.. Thats why i hope no company will overgrow the countries...
  - tod222 10y ago
    > like facebook did when their cheating got out I have no idea what this refers to. Care to elaborate?
pascalxus 10y ago
Entrepreneurs and companies that get started are utterly desparate for solvable problems to solve. The ideas may seem "stupid" to you, but that's only because biggest problems have way too many barriers to entry and are typically guarded by rent seeking government lobbying legislation. Take homelessness. I'm sure there's a technical way to build housing for cheap enough to get people back into houses. But, the government legislation makes it a complete non-starter. There are so many rules and regulations, a potential entrepreneur or existing Company couldn't even begin to dream of creating a solution. It's all Locked up. Homelessness is a problem that is illegal to solve, as so many things are. Trust me, if it were legally possible to create housing that was profitable (low enough cost to cover expenses), I'm sure there would be dozens of builders lining up around the block to do it.
- smogcutter 10y ago
  In what specific ways is homelessness a problem which is illegal to solve?
  - wutbrodo 10y ago
    I'm not the parent commenter, but I've heard this complaint before, and it usually boils down to zoning and some types of development limits drastically reducing the efficiency of the housing market (in terms of provision of housing to the most people). AFAICT, it's not really controversial that land use regulation is a big chunk of what's responsible for the craziest housing markets in the country[1]. An illustrative example is the shocking cost-effectiveness of trailer parks. The fact that the land beneath the trailer generally isn't owned means that they're technically free of a lot of the weird distortions of the regular property market, and thus people who would otherwise be homeless are able to avoid the impossible choice of a house they can't afford or living on the sidewalk. [1] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21647614-poor-land-use-worlds-greatest-cities-carries-huge-cost-space-and-city http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21647614-poor-land-use...
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  The building of cheap houses isn't the problem. Who maintains them? Who enforces the code? Who insures them? Who is liable for them? These are things that "SV" sometimes ignores. That's why these are bigger problems.
WalterBright 10y ago
> milk a market for every last penny. The reason they are able to make money is because they created value that people are voluntarily willing to hand over money for. It is not stealing. If you don't think what they created has value, don't buy it.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway2016a 10y ago
New England is depressingly the opposite. I've seen actual world changing ideas (think curing major disease or advanced robotics) get less attention and funding than a photo sharing app would in SV.

by shruubi 10y ago

M_Grey 10y ago

It's all about people who've seen how absurdly rich you can get, and want a piece of that. That's all there is to it. The rest is window dressing and empty words to facilitate an IPO, selling the company, or hitting that lucky lottery win in some other way. When it inevitably, eventually implodes, nothing of lasting value will be lost.

refurb 10y ago
It's all about people who've seen how absurdly rich you can get, and want a piece of that. That about sums it up. If people suddenly became rich through farming, you'd see people flocking to the mid-west. A lot of people claim a higher calling or passion for tech, but it's mostly just dollar signs in their eyes.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  They're smart enough to know that saying, "This is the new gold rush" would make them look bad, exactly.
- sp527 10y ago
  I had a passion for tech. Then it was beaten out of me by large, successful tech companies. Some day, the majority of us who are relegated to inane, shitty work will wake up and acknowledge that. So what do you do when you are a capable programmer who isn't rich enough to work on something challenging/interesting/meaningful like electric cars or rockets? Maximize expected value. That's not immoral. That's the shitty reality of being a person of average means.
  - sangnoir 10y ago
    > So what do you do when you are a capable programmer who isn't rich enough to work on something challenging/interesting/meaningful like electric cars or rockets? The list of meaningful things a capable programmer is way longer than that! You dont have to quit yiur dayjob to work on them and get some fulfillment/validation. I'll add: Rockets and electric cars are just at a certain point in their hype-cycles, and you're just drinking the koolaid. I'm 100% certain you'd have your passion for tech beaten out in those industries too, if you worked for the wrong company.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    Fuck passion. There are people who work passionlessly on revolutionary things. Accomplish something you care about, sure, but supporting yourself and a family is also worth caring about.
    - noobermin 10y ago
      You don't need to have to work on something revolutionary to support a family however, or even be a super rich guy. There is wallstreet after all.
  - noobermin 10y ago
    >So what do you do when you are a capable programmer who isn't rich enough to work on something challenging/interesting/meaningful like electric cars or rockets? Why do you have to be rich to work on electric cars or rockets? Many companies are hiring specifically for these technologies.
  - john_other_john 10y ago
    Forgive me if this is without the applicable context, but sp527, I sincerely doubt you are a person of average means. I mean neither to backhanded compliment the abilities of the HN crowd, nor to - as seems increasingly common when I find myself in the change - state interfaces of society, silently denigrate you by implicit reference to privilege I may not have. If you can take my statement literally, that would be superb! I mean, I think the word average when it comes to ability or performance or self assessment is poorly used. Too frequently it is meant as self denigrating before a audience (which, as with above, I did not infer nor deliberately infer from your comment) and when it is used plainly, as in "I'm an average kinda guy" I find it too often misleads one into imagining one's interlocutor is saying they are a unremarkable character personally. It's a safety pitch in a chat up line, for one example of use subset my last classification of "average" use. I take your statement literally in a socio - economic and intellectual sense, but with a skew that probably does put you quite a bit above the census bureau averages in most ways. But what does frustrate me, when self description of "average" is used, is that perfectly "average" people perform quite wondrous feats or succeed with way above the deviation accomplishment, because one is able to trade in life. I have just remembered this, prompted by your comment: when in my early twenties, despite I had received a privileged education, imagined what I could do by trading futures in myself. Take my thirties away and give that time to me now. Forget my personal growth (that was a biggie I left too late, beware!) because now I want to design things 24/7/365. And so on and so forth. I estimated not my ability or relative ability, but looked about at how long (by mere guesstimate) things I admired took to do, when I imagined most on that job were going home normal hours to wives and children, and having weekends and social lives, and the odd sick day or holiday, and maybe only reading two or three work related books a year, max, and certainly not consuming a subset of citeseer in unbroken mind-high caffeinated sessions which cared little to distinguish weeks, let alone days. Quite apart form the fact you are either a engineer or have some capacity in that regard, the bounds of possible optimisation achievable from "a person of average means" I think must be very excellent indeed. How indeed, did mankind excel, when there was just a few of us in any social group hanging about with no tools or fire or built shelter and so on? Someone hit it right out the park, not merely once, but probably a while lot of times in a row, to get us through some earlier developing stages, just as we have some now, particularly in systematising and understanding what all this software lark is really about and how to make all of us good at it, instead of - one wonders - mere self defined _potential_ outlier points around some average. I'm also quite sure, that when you are in your metier, when you are at a fundamental level aware you are where you want to be, you will find relevant skills or muscles or abilities notably at a higher functional level than you ever imagined they could be. Because there is something reflexive, compounding, about the human existence at least I have known, just as equally there can be compounding, confounding negative spirals. I believe there must be a art I have not learned in my 40 some years, of neatly skipping sideways from the spirals and letting one's instincts guide us to where some factor or energy or whatever phenomenon it may be is compounding and positive. If we could so dance with our own entropy, what a dance it would be. But meanwhile, I think "average" is most definitely not always average.
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  > A lot of people claim a higher calling or passion for tech, but it's mostly just dollar signs in their eyes. AFAICT, tech was full of passionate people (at the very least about building something, if not changing the world), way back before it had the cultural cachet that it now does. As it became increasingly clear that there was a lot of money in tech, what I call (generically) "the finance crowd"[1] flooded in. By which I mean, the masses of more-or-less competent people across the country/world who really don't care too much what they study/work in, as long as it's profitable. The beef I have with thinking like yours is that there are plenty of us still around who were here before working in tech went from being nerdy to (relatively) "cool", and we'll be here if and when it stops being the industry du jour. It kinda sucks when people like you make the leap from "most people these days are chasing dollars and paying lip service to passion" to "anyone who claims they love/believe in what they do is just chasing $$". To this day I know plenty of people who would be here even if it didn't happen to be the currently-booming industry. To be fair, the oblivious author is far guiltier of this than you; he's a perfect example of what he's whining about hating, and if he bothered learning anything about the history of tech in the area, he wouldn't be so quick to assume that those who claim an affinity for it are completely hollow. Though I have to say, getting here years before the rush provides the nice consolation of not having to compete in the ludicrous housing market that the boom + lack of construction has spawned. [1] I may be guilty of making the same over-generalizing mistake about finance, but I know quite a few people who work in finance and have been legitimately passionate about finance as a concept and the technical challenges involved therein since they were pretty young. Every single one of them has had that passion beaten out of them by the industry itself and the people they're surrounded by. By contrast, I still know tons of people in tech turning down big paychecks to just work on stuff that they like working on (I quit my job last year and am taking about a 50% paycut for similar reasons).
crdb 10y ago
> It's all about people who've seen how absurdly rich you can get Yes and no. As is often bandied about, the expected value of a career in startups is lower than in many other fields, and yet people do stay after seeing through the myth. A large part of it, at least that I've observed, is the energy, speed of execution, rapid change, the excitement and adventure of the startup world. You willingly give up expected value in exchange for a more interesting life. The stress is part of the fun, the person it moulds you into is something that becomes part of your identity. If the personal risk wasn't real, it wouldn't be fun. The man in the arena etc.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  >Yes and no. As is often bandied about, the expected value of a career in startups is lower than in many other fields, and yet people do stay after seeing through the myth. Hence, "Lottery".
- jxramos 10y ago
  I can backup these claims via a third party testimony. I had a friend who worked at Microsoft Redmond for many years and grew tired of the operations a big Juggernaut company and how it can be wasteful and less daring and all the other undesirable behaviors that deep pockets can afford not being in a state of survival. He hopped ship over to LinkedIn to experience a more daring startup lifestyle. According to him it's added a great deal more meaning to his work life. I guess he'll see how things steer under Microsoft's sailing.
jwatte 10y ago
Twitter, Facebook, Google, and a bunch of other previous startups do have value. Also more, like Electronic Arts, Oracle, Intel, Salesforce, Apple, ... It's just that the 1000:1 ratio between startup and final enterprise is brutal!
- lucaspiller 10y ago
  Twitter and Facebook may have value in dollar signs (OK maybe not Twitter right now), but I'd really question how much value they have provided to society as a whole. It seems like all Facebook wants to do is built an ecosystem, lock you in it, and milk you for data they can sell to advertisers.
  - ec109685 10y ago
    Seriously? A billion+ people use Facebook products, many hundreds of millions very happily.
    - collyw 10y ago
      I am sure I have seen research claiming that excessive facebook use makes people less happy.
      - wutbrodo 10y ago
        Excessive _damn-near-anything_ makes you unhappy or is otherwise bad for you. That's....pretty much what the word excessive means! The idea that it's possible to use something excessively means it's of little value is just beyond ludicrous.
    - radicsge 10y ago
      Yet if facebook would disappear, nothing would be lost. Somebody would overtake the position in no time. This is not true for real value added companies.
      - 10y ago
radicsge 10y ago
It's not necessarily bad, but as "with great power comes great responsibility" is not followed here, is the real problem. If you are lucky and became incredible reach you should give back to the world. And not just the 0.1% to have media coverage (like facebook did when their cheating got out)... Apple once were the biggest company, yet i dont know anything that would shine any good light on that company... Their last notable act was that their blackmailed the EU.. Thats why i hope no company will overgrow the countries...
- tod222 10y ago
  > like facebook did when their cheating got out I have no idea what this refers to. Care to elaborate?

pascalxus 10y ago

Entrepreneurs and companies that get started are utterly desparate for solvable problems to solve. The ideas may seem "stupid" to you, but that's only because biggest problems have way too many barriers to entry and are typically guarded by rent seeking government lobbying legislation. Take homelessness. I'm sure there's a technical way to build housing for cheap enough to get people back into houses. But, the government legislation makes it a complete non-starter. There are so many rules and regulations, a potential entrepreneur or existing Company couldn't even begin to dream of creating a solution. It's all Locked up. Homelessness is a problem that is illegal to solve, as so many things are. Trust me, if it were legally possible to create housing that was profitable (low enough cost to cover expenses), I'm sure there would be dozens of builders lining up around the block to do it.

smogcutter 10y ago
In what specific ways is homelessness a problem which is illegal to solve?
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  I'm not the parent commenter, but I've heard this complaint before, and it usually boils down to zoning and some types of development limits drastically reducing the efficiency of the housing market (in terms of provision of housing to the most people). AFAICT, it's not really controversial that land use regulation is a big chunk of what's responsible for the craziest housing markets in the country[1]. An illustrative example is the shocking cost-effectiveness of trailer parks. The fact that the land beneath the trailer generally isn't owned means that they're technically free of a lot of the weird distortions of the regular property market, and thus people who would otherwise be homeless are able to avoid the impossible choice of a house they can't afford or living on the sidewalk. [1] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21647614-poor-land-use-worlds-greatest-cities-carries-huge-cost-space-and-city http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21647614-poor-land-use...
forgetsusername 10y ago
The building of cheap houses isn't the problem. Who maintains them? Who enforces the code? Who insures them? Who is liable for them? These are things that "SV" sometimes ignores. That's why these are bigger problems.

WalterBright 10y ago

> milk a market for every last penny. The reason they are able to make money is because they created value that people are voluntarily willing to hand over money for. It is not stealing. If you don't think what they created has value, don't buy it.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

throwaway2016a 10y ago

New England is depressingly the opposite. I've seen actual world changing ideas (think curing major disease or advanced robotics) get less attention and funding than a photo sharing app would in SV.