7 ms·

[Me reading the article]: Hrmm, I'm not sure I understand the point of this article. Seems like vague hand wavy advice and platitudes (I mean c'mon "run toward

by eric_b 7y ago

[Me reading the article]: Hrmm, I'm not sure I understand the point of this article. Seems like vague hand wavy advice and platitudes (I mean c'mon "run towards your fear"? Cheese-factor 1000). [Me gets to the end of the article] Oh, Ben has a new book coming out so he needs to shill it. Makes sense.

karl11 7y ago
I think if you have ever actually run a business, his article hits home and has a pretty clear point.
- ramraj07 7y ago
  It hits home even if you haven't. I'd say that I've felt the same tingle when writing code as well. At times when someone asks for a new feature or I'm working on a particular solution to the problem, I'd definitely get the same feeling that this particular abstractions isn't going to cut it, or that this part of the codebase is going to become unwieldy soon. I'd argue a great engineer is someone who can anticipate exactly how a software product is going to evolve, where it will not scale properly in those cases and see if the code they are writing today is potentially going to be a problem then or not (and play a fine line game of not over-engineering vs. preparing for future circumstances).
Zelphyr 7y ago
Running toward your fear isn't hand wavy advice. It is in essence what modern therapy around fear, panic, and anxiety teaches. It's good advice because it works. Running away only makes the problem worse. Be that losing $30M or not being able to walk out of your house.
- Judgmentality 7y ago
  Fear might be the most important emotion from an evolutionary perspective. Pretending you can simply run towards your fears and things will get better is awful, awful advice. I am not saying you should let your fears consume you or that they can never be conquered, but maybe an alcoholic's fear of being in a bar is a healthy thing (there are plenty of other examples but that was the first I thought of after 5 seconds).
  - Godel_unicode 7y ago
    Yeah, "run towards your fear" is similar to "life is a meritocracy". We only hear from the people who it was true for.
    - GauntletWizard 7y ago
      I've found a lot of success in that philosophy, but also some incredible damage. I ran towards my dear for a long time, and mostly it worked out. Even when it failed, it was a learning experience - I knew not to trust, but was no longer afraid of what I had previously feared. There's a huge difference between being afraid and being aware of falsehood/scam/danger. Then I ran into something truly awful, and got drugged (and possibly raped, though I will never know). I've been afraid since then, and it's gonna take me a good long while to shake it off. It has immensely negatively affected my life, and it's made me question my judgement in a lot of situations - because I'm pretty sure the experience is only unique in that the stars aligned, not that the intent, will, and opportunity wasn't there in plenty of previous places, only didn't all line up before. I don't have anything that I can take from it, except a certainty that Chestertons fence is real, and a lot of things that are looked down upon are looked down upon for good reason.
      - asfarley 7y ago
        That last sentence has some real subtext to it. It took me a long time to appreciate Chesterton's fence.
      - warlog 7y ago
        Chestertons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fen...
      - lazyasciiart 7y ago
        Sorry you went through that experience.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- Avshalom 7y ago
  Maybe but running towards "losing 30m" as a fear is a hell of a lot different than not-running-away from "I lost 30m" as a fact.
- papreclip 7y ago
  Re: the $30M, hindsight is 20/20
- fouc 7y ago
  How many people actually crawl towards their fear? Let alone walk or run. It's crazy bananas tough.
- RugnirViking 7y ago
  Be that as it may, given the choice, I would run away from losing $30M dollars regardless.
gwbas1c 7y ago
Yeah, I don't get it. Should have have addressed something with his head of sales, or should he have handled his expanding workforce differently? Or something else entirely? Maybe the point is that ignoring evidence that the market is turning can be a disaster?
- beat 7y ago
  Yes, he should have addressed something with head of sales. He should have recognized the coming downturn and stopped expanding his staff. He should have done other things. His gut was telling him this. But he didn't. He delegated the space problem so he didn't have to think about it anymore. And it cost him $30M that he would desperately need not long later (read The Hard Thing About Hard Things for that story). It's not about ignoring evidence that the market is turning. It's not that specific. It's that your spidey-sense, for lack of a better word - your gut, your sense of fear - is telling you that something is a problem. You can then either engage that problem, or avoid that problem. And if you avoid it, you will screw up. But it's incredibly difficult to face our gut fear. So we don't do it.
  - notyourday 7y ago
    > And it cost him $30M that he would desperately need not long later (read The Hard Thing About Hard Things for that story). That's the problem with companies that raise gobs of money -- zero discipline in spending.
    - beat 7y ago
      It was a different era then. Things are a lot tighter now. Loudcloud was a terrific concept in its day. It could have become what AWS has become. But it was growing because money was just getting poured into dotcom startups. When the money dried up, they were stuck with all this hardware and staff they had needed. It's a credit to Horowitz that he saved even the sliver he did.
bllguo 7y ago
seems to me a16z has been taking quite a bit of reputational damage recently..
alasdair_ 7y ago
Be sure to Lean In when you run towards your fear!
notyourday 7y ago
> Oh, Ben has a new book coming out so he needs to shill it. Makes sense. I'm always baffled that people who flop in the most spectacular way manage to convince others to buy books with advice from them. I distinctly remember an article about a year or so ago touting a new managing partner(?) at a VC who ran his one and only startup into the ground. The logic was "He can help you not to do what he did"
- ImprovedSilence 7y ago
  I mean, isn't a whole big shtick of the Silicon Valley mindset that it tolerates, even celebrates, failure? And insists on learning from it. If you don't make it running a company, maybe you can make it from writing, just don't stop trying to make it. Fall down seven times, stand up eight, etc..
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    That's a great principle, but they key to realize its value is actually learning from it, and one of the most important lessons here is that in startups, spectacular successes are driven by luck. If that one lesson doesn't sink in, then all other "learning from failure" is akin to training your machine learning model on random noise.
  - notyourday 7y ago
    > If you don't make it running a company, maybe you can make it from writing, just don't stop trying to make it. Isn't that confusing what someone who fails should do ( do it again/do something else/try another path) with what those who see it should do ( not listen to whoever failed about how to succeed at doing what the failed person did )?
IAmGraydon 7y ago
I’m pretty sure the point was for him to tell us all that he is an “elite” CEO at the end of the article.
Iv 7y ago
My policy is to not click on articles whose title are unclear. If I am intrigued I read the comments first and generally find out a comment (like yours) explaining this article was a waste of time
- millirem 7y ago
  That's one of the biggest benefits I get out of using HN - pre-selection by taking a quick look at the comments before reading anything.
  - scirocco 7y ago
    Same here. More often than not, there's people in HN who have experience with a topic and can add perspective (and hopefully an impartial view). More than ever, we need to tone down the clickbait, put it to perspective, and understand if it's something we should give attention to. HN does this in a quick manner
    - eriktrautman 7y ago
      It works especially well with click-baity things where someone has helpfully quoted the key bit in the top comment and you can avoid dealing with popup-riddled sites to find it.
  - baxtr 7y ago
    It has become my habit too. I never click the links directly, always comments section first.
    - james_impliu 7y ago
      Does anyone else always feel a weird HN specific fomo - "comments or content... I want both!"
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        I don't. I always go straight for comments, unless I already recognize by the title or domain name that the article is something I'd like to read. Then I skim comments to learn whether the article is worth reading. Even if it isn't, if I want to participate in a thread that's about the article directly (vs. an interesting tangent), I go back and at least skim the article, just to not be that person who comments on TFA without reading it.
hodgesrm 7y ago
The article can be summarized in a single sentence: if you your spidey sense tells you something is wrong, figure out what it is and fix it. It's a good point albeit expressed obscurely. It took me two reads to get it, which seems about average judging from some of the other comments here.

by eric_b 7y ago

karl11 7y ago

I think if you have ever actually run a business, his article hits home and has a pretty clear point.

ramraj07 7y ago
It hits home even if you haven't. I'd say that I've felt the same tingle when writing code as well. At times when someone asks for a new feature or I'm working on a particular solution to the problem, I'd definitely get the same feeling that this particular abstractions isn't going to cut it, or that this part of the codebase is going to become unwieldy soon. I'd argue a great engineer is someone who can anticipate exactly how a software product is going to evolve, where it will not scale properly in those cases and see if the code they are writing today is potentially going to be a problem then or not (and play a fine line game of not over-engineering vs. preparing for future circumstances).

Zelphyr 7y ago

Running toward your fear isn't hand wavy advice. It is in essence what modern therapy around fear, panic, and anxiety teaches. It's good advice because it works. Running away only makes the problem worse. Be that losing $30M or not being able to walk out of your house.

Judgmentality 7y ago
Fear might be the most important emotion from an evolutionary perspective. Pretending you can simply run towards your fears and things will get better is awful, awful advice. I am not saying you should let your fears consume you or that they can never be conquered, but maybe an alcoholic's fear of being in a bar is a healthy thing (there are plenty of other examples but that was the first I thought of after 5 seconds).
- Godel_unicode 7y ago
  Yeah, "run towards your fear" is similar to "life is a meritocracy". We only hear from the people who it was true for.
  - GauntletWizard 7y ago
    I've found a lot of success in that philosophy, but also some incredible damage. I ran towards my dear for a long time, and mostly it worked out. Even when it failed, it was a learning experience - I knew not to trust, but was no longer afraid of what I had previously feared. There's a huge difference between being afraid and being aware of falsehood/scam/danger. Then I ran into something truly awful, and got drugged (and possibly raped, though I will never know). I've been afraid since then, and it's gonna take me a good long while to shake it off. It has immensely negatively affected my life, and it's made me question my judgement in a lot of situations - because I'm pretty sure the experience is only unique in that the stars aligned, not that the intent, will, and opportunity wasn't there in plenty of previous places, only didn't all line up before. I don't have anything that I can take from it, except a certainty that Chestertons fence is real, and a lot of things that are looked down upon are looked down upon for good reason.
    - asfarley 7y ago
      That last sentence has some real subtext to it. It took me a long time to appreciate Chesterton's fence.
    - warlog 7y ago
      Chestertons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fen...
    - lazyasciiart 7y ago
      Sorry you went through that experience.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
Avshalom 7y ago
Maybe but running towards "losing 30m" as a fear is a hell of a lot different than not-running-away from "I lost 30m" as a fact.
papreclip 7y ago
Re: the $30M, hindsight is 20/20
fouc 7y ago
How many people actually crawl towards their fear? Let alone walk or run. It's crazy bananas tough.
RugnirViking 7y ago
Be that as it may, given the choice, I would run away from losing $30M dollars regardless.

gwbas1c 7y ago

Yeah, I don't get it. Should have have addressed something with his head of sales, or should he have handled his expanding workforce differently? Or something else entirely? Maybe the point is that ignoring evidence that the market is turning can be a disaster?

beat 7y ago
Yes, he should have addressed something with head of sales. He should have recognized the coming downturn and stopped expanding his staff. He should have done other things. His gut was telling him this. But he didn't. He delegated the space problem so he didn't have to think about it anymore. And it cost him $30M that he would desperately need not long later (read The Hard Thing About Hard Things for that story). It's not about ignoring evidence that the market is turning. It's not that specific. It's that your spidey-sense, for lack of a better word - your gut, your sense of fear - is telling you that something is a problem. You can then either engage that problem, or avoid that problem. And if you avoid it, you will screw up. But it's incredibly difficult to face our gut fear. So we don't do it.
- notyourday 7y ago
  > And it cost him $30M that he would desperately need not long later (read The Hard Thing About Hard Things for that story). That's the problem with companies that raise gobs of money -- zero discipline in spending.
  - beat 7y ago
    It was a different era then. Things are a lot tighter now. Loudcloud was a terrific concept in its day. It could have become what AWS has become. But it was growing because money was just getting poured into dotcom startups. When the money dried up, they were stuck with all this hardware and staff they had needed. It's a credit to Horowitz that he saved even the sliver he did.

bllguo 7y ago

seems to me a16z has been taking quite a bit of reputational damage recently..

alasdair_ 7y ago

Be sure to Lean In when you run towards your fear!

notyourday 7y ago

> Oh, Ben has a new book coming out so he needs to shill it. Makes sense. I'm always baffled that people who flop in the most spectacular way manage to convince others to buy books with advice from them. I distinctly remember an article about a year or so ago touting a new managing partner(?) at a VC who ran his one and only startup into the ground. The logic was "He can help you not to do what he did"

ImprovedSilence 7y ago
I mean, isn't a whole big shtick of the Silicon Valley mindset that it tolerates, even celebrates, failure? And insists on learning from it. If you don't make it running a company, maybe you can make it from writing, just don't stop trying to make it. Fall down seven times, stand up eight, etc..
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  That's a great principle, but they key to realize its value is actually learning from it, and one of the most important lessons here is that in startups, spectacular successes are driven by luck. If that one lesson doesn't sink in, then all other "learning from failure" is akin to training your machine learning model on random noise.
- notyourday 7y ago
  > If you don't make it running a company, maybe you can make it from writing, just don't stop trying to make it. Isn't that confusing what someone who fails should do ( do it again/do something else/try another path) with what those who see it should do ( not listen to whoever failed about how to succeed at doing what the failed person did )?

IAmGraydon 7y ago

I’m pretty sure the point was for him to tell us all that he is an “elite” CEO at the end of the article.

Iv 7y ago

My policy is to not click on articles whose title are unclear. If I am intrigued I read the comments first and generally find out a comment (like yours) explaining this article was a waste of time

millirem 7y ago
That's one of the biggest benefits I get out of using HN - pre-selection by taking a quick look at the comments before reading anything.
- scirocco 7y ago
  Same here. More often than not, there's people in HN who have experience with a topic and can add perspective (and hopefully an impartial view). More than ever, we need to tone down the clickbait, put it to perspective, and understand if it's something we should give attention to. HN does this in a quick manner
  - eriktrautman 7y ago
    It works especially well with click-baity things where someone has helpfully quoted the key bit in the top comment and you can avoid dealing with popup-riddled sites to find it.
- baxtr 7y ago
  It has become my habit too. I never click the links directly, always comments section first.
  - james_impliu 7y ago
    Does anyone else always feel a weird HN specific fomo - "comments or content... I want both!"
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      I don't. I always go straight for comments, unless I already recognize by the title or domain name that the article is something I'd like to read. Then I skim comments to learn whether the article is worth reading. Even if it isn't, if I want to participate in a thread that's about the article directly (vs. an interesting tangent), I go back and at least skim the article, just to not be that person who comments on TFA without reading it.

hodgesrm 7y ago

The article can be summarized in a single sentence: if you your spidey sense tells you something is wrong, figure out what it is and fix it. It's a good point albeit expressed obscurely. It took me two reads to get it, which seems about average judging from some of the other comments here.