4 ms·
OK, let's cut it down to just the quote from Levchin: "[Mayer] is by far the hardest working person in Silicon Valley. She gave birth to twins and then
by aaronbrethorst 10y ago
OK, let's cut it down to just the quote from Levchin:
"[Mayer] is by far the hardest working person in Silicon Valley.
She gave birth to twins and then traded emails with me about a
feature of a product she was launching in a week, within, from
what I could tell, 20 minutes of giving birth. She is intensely
committed to her cause. She’s awesome."
Per Levchin: Marissa Meyer is awesome because she emailed Max Levchin about a product twenty minutes after giving birth.
You can draw whatever conclusions you want to from that, but that sounds wildly unhealthy to me, and is nothing I would ever want anyone working for me—or anyone I work for—to venerate.
- dang 10y agoYou completely changed the subject by hopping to a nearby prospective outrage and then getting outraged about it. And then you rewrote the outrage into your own higher-snark phrase, just in case the reader didn't get how outraged you are. That's not a convincing response to a call for more careful thinking. In fact, it's arguably not thinking at all. It's a game of labels, seeking an emotional payoff.
- aaronbrethorst 10y agopaganel: "investors like Levchin do not care one iota about what said start-up founders will do with their lifes after all is said and done" dang: "You can't possibly know what iotas someone else cares about" aaronbrethorst: Here's a quote that describes what Levchin cares about. greglindahl: "Here you have a Huffington Post editor getting extremely close to putting words into someone else's mouth" aaronbrethorst: Here's just the quote that describes what Levchin cares about. dang: "You completely changed the subject" I give up.
- dang 10y agoThe error is that your quote doesn't cover every iota he cares about. That's like searching a list to make sure it has no odd numbers in it and stopping when you find 42. We don't commonly make that kind of mistake while programming, but we do commonly make it while venting. Many users come to internet forums to release pent-up emotional energy at their favourite symbolic targets. Monkeys do that too, only with feces rather than words, and not on the internet. We're all monkeys in this respect (edit: i.e. I don't mean to pick on you personally), so I don't believe HN can be immune to this (not for a while anyhow). But I do think we can do a little better. The point here is not about Max Levchin, of course. The point is that feces-throwing is extremely predictable (that's part of its pleasure) and therefore extremely tedious. It cuts against the mandate of this site, which is to gratify intellectual curiosity—the polar opposite of tedium.
- patrec 10y agoInsulting people as shit slinging monkeys and quibbling about yet unknown iotas reads like a transparent deflection from losing the argument. Look, I agree that outrage signalling and unsubstantiated imputation of value systems on specific people are generally toxic -- but how does this help? To any normal person not caught up in some weird startup death cult the quotes proffered suggest that Max Levchin is probably not about maximizing your physical and mental health at expense to your economic output. This seems fair to point out, even if it could have been formulated better.
- dang 10y ago> I agree that outrage signalling and unsubstantiated imputation of value systems on specific people are generally toxic -- but how does this help? Since you agree with this, we agree on the only thing I'm arguing for. What helps is (a) not doing it, (b) trying not to do it, and/or (c) being conscious that one is doing it— in that order.
- Gatsky 10y agoWhat have we learned here except the futility of guessing what famous people are thinking? dang is right to call out this vacuous behaviour.