7 ms·

There's no shame in taking LSD or being fired from the company you helped found because you think different as Steve Jobs might say if he were still alive. It's

There's no shame in taking LSD or being fired from the company you helped found because you think different as Steve Jobs might say if he were still alive. It's almost the ultimate homage to Jobs. I'm sure Zhu will be fine. I can't talk to people on LSD. I'm surprised no one told him about set and setting.

spurgu 5y ago
Microdosing is some orders of magnitude different than "being on LSD".
- boringg 5y ago
  Apparently Zhu messed up his dosage and was in fact tripping per article. "numbers and images swelling and shrinking on the screen”
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    >Believing that limited quantities of LSD would improve his pitch, Zhu, who had never before used the drug, decided to try the microdosing plan. He took what he thought was a small amount of LSD shortly before the meeting. Taking a "small amount" LSD for the first time in your life, right before an important meeting, in the vain hope that it will improve your pitch, when you don't even have any idea how it will feel, or what it will do to you, or how long it will last, or even how to medically define and accurately measure a "small amount" of LSD, is astoundingly idiotic and irresponsible. Is that how he runs his whole company? Why bother with development and staging servers? Just log in as root and hack away on the production server!
    - boringg 5y ago
      Yeah doesn't really strike you with confidence in his leadership abilities.
      - nefitty 5y ago
        I wouldn’t want a friend who is tripping on acid to watch my dog, let alone helm a company where billions of dollars are at stake. I understand that he made a dosing mistake, but to pile on this whole thread, what he did was a forehead-smackingly bad decision.
  - 1-6 5y ago
    Is this meeting archived anywhere? I'd like to watch the presentation.
coldcode 5y ago
I am sure he still has his shares, so he can do new things his own way. SV VC is a nasty business. I would love to work for someone like this, but since I just retired, not really a thing any more.
- azinman2 5y ago
  > I am sure he still has his shares I wouldn’t assume this, or that they’re worth the same.
v7p1Qbt1im 5y ago
You can act quite normally when microdosing. If dosed correctly (it takes time to find it and depends on the person) micro-dosing (usually around 5 - 20 ug per dose) an obvious effect in not as apparent as you might expect. For me, 5 to 10 is enough. I don‘t actually want to feel the body high when microdosing. Precisely because it should feel like a normal day. Except your perception, creativity and emotional balance is heightened.
- okareaman 5y ago
  I've never microdosed, but I imagine it's better to do when trying to solve problems in a creative way, not pitch to investors.
  - Sargos 5y ago
    Microdosing is actually one of the best things to help with speaking to large groups or presenting ideas. The increase in creativity and mental clarity helps you make more eloquent points and respond well to questions.
    - mancerayder 5y ago
      What about anxiety?
      - Sargos 5y ago
        I have anxiety and it's helped me. This is all anecdotal but my experience lines up with thousands of others in the microdosing community. The clarity also seems to come from living more in the moment and not always half fretting about the future.
    - elliekelly 5y ago
      > The increase in creativity and mental clarity helps you make more eloquent points and respond well to questions. Is there any science to back this up? The increase in confidence from alcohol makes me dance better... from my perspective, at least. I've read the "productivity boost" from ADHD drugs is similar. It feels like you're doing more/better but you're really doing the same.
rdtsc 5y ago
> you think different as Steve Jobs might say That is exactly the problem. They cargo cult Steve Jobs' personality, fashion or some other aspect, but they don't deliver Steve Jobs kind of results. It ends up being cringey at best and disastrous for their company at worst. I have seen this before with CxOs and owners who decided their company would be "just like Apple" and they would be "just like Steve Jobs". They read how Steve Jobs was an asshole, so they just started acting like assholes towards everyone waiting for the fame and fortune to follow.
- quacked 5y ago
  I don't admire Steve Jobs's personality, but I find myself talking about him all the time, for two reasons: 1) Steve Jobs had a vision for the appearance, function, and marketability of his products, and enforced his tyrannical will on his team until that vision was met, or at least it was impossible to enforce any more. The fact that his vision changed along the way or that he was inconsistent at times isn't as important as the fact that he was a central authority that was allowed to keep the resultant products consistent and stable. People who try to behave like Steve Jobs rarely have the level of vision that he did, and mimic his behavior rather than his principles. 2) Everything the teams under Steve Jobs produced has been cargo-cult mimicked ad nauseam by people today, to the point where every modern software looks like someone tried to redesign Apple software from memory. Unfortunately, it all sucks (compare Jira to Windows 95 Email in terms of form and its relation to function).
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    I hadn't realized this, but one of the reasons I don't have much respect for Elon Musk is he sells himself like he's Steve Jobs, and he has the asshole thing going, but he doesn't have the focus, obsession with detail, and micro-executes, not micro-manages.
    - quacked 5y ago
      I don't get the sense the EM sells himself as SJ, but some of he people I know that have worked a few levels under him definitely don't have the same kind of awed respect SJ's acolytes did, although they respected him a great deal.
nicklecompte 5y ago
The most damaging legacy of Steve Jobs is convincing millions of people that if you’re a genius you have a right to be a huge asshole; and conversely, if you’re being a huge asshole it must be because you’re a genius.
smsm42 5y ago
Trying a new drug for the first time right before a high-stakes meeting sounds incredibly stupid. Couldn't he just allocate a week-end to test it out beforehand? But I don't think he was fired just for that...
- nwsm 5y ago
  Not to mention that LSD does not make you better at communication while on it.. Isn't the trope that leaders go on a hiatus and do LSD for ideation, not for performance?
  - RandallBrown 5y ago
    I believe the idea of micro dosing is that you don't get high, you end up being more focused and perceptive. Seems like he picked a bad time to try it out.
DonHopkins 5y ago
I don't know how it affected Steve Jobs, but Bill Atkinson handled his LSD pretty well. https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hypercard/ https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp... >The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson. >In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California. >I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion reaction as powerful as our Sun. And for the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we are not alone. >I knew that life on planet Earth is not the only pocket of consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced. But we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of creation. >It seemed to me the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propagating to colonize the universe, and life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness. >But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below glowing brightly, each casting a pool of light but surrounded by darkness before the next lamp. As above, so below. >The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by distance and different languages. Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathmeticians, and economists all have separate pools of knowledge, but are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections. >My vision distorted by thick eyeglasses, I witnessed the curvature of the Earth’s horizon, and I felt the pull of gravity toward its center, such that every one of us is standing at the very apex. Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each of us is a leader or captain of the “Blue Marble” team. >How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were captain of a soccer team, I would look for the weak link and work on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper. >It occurred to me the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem, but we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures. But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom myself. >Knowledge, it seemed to me, consists of the “How” connections between pieces of information, the cause and effect relationships. How does this action bring about that result. Science is a systematic attempt to discover the “How” connections. >Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed, the bigger perspective of the “Why” connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one future over another? >I thought if we could encourage sharing of ideas between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually more wisdom might develop. Sort of a trickle-up theory of information leading to knowledge leading to wisdom. >This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard, a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas using new interactive media called HyperCard stacks. >Each card in a HyperCard stack included graphics, text, interactive buttons, and links that took you to another card or stack. Built-in painting tools, drag-and-drop authoring with a library of pre-fab buttons and fields, and simple event based scripting made HyperCard flexible and easy to use. >It took a lot of hard work and a dedicated team to complete this mission. Apple shipped HyperCard in August 1987, and included it free with every Mac so any user could create and share HyperCard stacks. Many creative people expressed their ideas and passions, and several million interactive HyperCard stacks were created. >HyperCard was a precurser to the first web browser, except chained to a hard drive before the worldwide web. Six years later Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience.

spurgu 5y ago

Microdosing is some orders of magnitude different than "being on LSD".

boringg 5y ago
Apparently Zhu messed up his dosage and was in fact tripping per article. "numbers and images swelling and shrinking on the screen”
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  >Believing that limited quantities of LSD would improve his pitch, Zhu, who had never before used the drug, decided to try the microdosing plan. He took what he thought was a small amount of LSD shortly before the meeting. Taking a "small amount" LSD for the first time in your life, right before an important meeting, in the vain hope that it will improve your pitch, when you don't even have any idea how it will feel, or what it will do to you, or how long it will last, or even how to medically define and accurately measure a "small amount" of LSD, is astoundingly idiotic and irresponsible. Is that how he runs his whole company? Why bother with development and staging servers? Just log in as root and hack away on the production server!
  - boringg 5y ago
    Yeah doesn't really strike you with confidence in his leadership abilities.
    - nefitty 5y ago
      I wouldn’t want a friend who is tripping on acid to watch my dog, let alone helm a company where billions of dollars are at stake. I understand that he made a dosing mistake, but to pile on this whole thread, what he did was a forehead-smackingly bad decision.
- 1-6 5y ago
  Is this meeting archived anywhere? I'd like to watch the presentation.

coldcode 5y ago

I am sure he still has his shares, so he can do new things his own way. SV VC is a nasty business. I would love to work for someone like this, but since I just retired, not really a thing any more.

azinman2 5y ago
> I am sure he still has his shares I wouldn’t assume this, or that they’re worth the same.

v7p1Qbt1im 5y ago

You can act quite normally when microdosing. If dosed correctly (it takes time to find it and depends on the person) micro-dosing (usually around 5 - 20 ug per dose) an obvious effect in not as apparent as you might expect. For me, 5 to 10 is enough. I don‘t actually want to feel the body high when microdosing. Precisely because it should feel like a normal day. Except your perception, creativity and emotional balance is heightened.

okareaman 5y ago
I've never microdosed, but I imagine it's better to do when trying to solve problems in a creative way, not pitch to investors.
- Sargos 5y ago
  Microdosing is actually one of the best things to help with speaking to large groups or presenting ideas. The increase in creativity and mental clarity helps you make more eloquent points and respond well to questions.
  - mancerayder 5y ago
    What about anxiety?
    - Sargos 5y ago
      I have anxiety and it's helped me. This is all anecdotal but my experience lines up with thousands of others in the microdosing community. The clarity also seems to come from living more in the moment and not always half fretting about the future.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    > The increase in creativity and mental clarity helps you make more eloquent points and respond well to questions. Is there any science to back this up? The increase in confidence from alcohol makes me dance better... from my perspective, at least. I've read the "productivity boost" from ADHD drugs is similar. It feels like you're doing more/better but you're really doing the same.

rdtsc 5y ago

> you think different as Steve Jobs might say That is exactly the problem. They cargo cult Steve Jobs' personality, fashion or some other aspect, but they don't deliver Steve Jobs kind of results. It ends up being cringey at best and disastrous for their company at worst. I have seen this before with CxOs and owners who decided their company would be "just like Apple" and they would be "just like Steve Jobs". They read how Steve Jobs was an asshole, so they just started acting like assholes towards everyone waiting for the fame and fortune to follow.

quacked 5y ago
I don't admire Steve Jobs's personality, but I find myself talking about him all the time, for two reasons: 1) Steve Jobs had a vision for the appearance, function, and marketability of his products, and enforced his tyrannical will on his team until that vision was met, or at least it was impossible to enforce any more. The fact that his vision changed along the way or that he was inconsistent at times isn't as important as the fact that he was a central authority that was allowed to keep the resultant products consistent and stable. People who try to behave like Steve Jobs rarely have the level of vision that he did, and mimic his behavior rather than his principles. 2) Everything the teams under Steve Jobs produced has been cargo-cult mimicked ad nauseam by people today, to the point where every modern software looks like someone tried to redesign Apple software from memory. Unfortunately, it all sucks (compare Jira to Windows 95 Email in terms of form and its relation to function).
- dehrmann 5y ago
  I hadn't realized this, but one of the reasons I don't have much respect for Elon Musk is he sells himself like he's Steve Jobs, and he has the asshole thing going, but he doesn't have the focus, obsession with detail, and micro-executes, not micro-manages.
  - quacked 5y ago
    I don't get the sense the EM sells himself as SJ, but some of he people I know that have worked a few levels under him definitely don't have the same kind of awed respect SJ's acolytes did, although they respected him a great deal.

nicklecompte 5y ago

The most damaging legacy of Steve Jobs is convincing millions of people that if you’re a genius you have a right to be a huge asshole; and conversely, if you’re being a huge asshole it must be because you’re a genius.

smsm42 5y ago

Trying a new drug for the first time right before a high-stakes meeting sounds incredibly stupid. Couldn't he just allocate a week-end to test it out beforehand? But I don't think he was fired just for that...

nwsm 5y ago
Not to mention that LSD does not make you better at communication while on it.. Isn't the trope that leaders go on a hiatus and do LSD for ideation, not for performance?
- RandallBrown 5y ago
  I believe the idea of micro dosing is that you don't get high, you end up being more focused and perceptive. Seems like he picked a bad time to try it out.

DonHopkins 5y ago

I don't know how it affected Steve Jobs, but Bill Atkinson handled his LSD pretty well. https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hypercard/ https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp... >The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson. >In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California. >I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion reaction as powerful as our Sun. And for the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we are not alone. >I knew that life on planet Earth is not the only pocket of consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced. But we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of creation. >It seemed to me the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propagating to colonize the universe, and life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness. >But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below glowing brightly, each casting a pool of light but surrounded by darkness before the next lamp. As above, so below. >The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by distance and different languages. Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathmeticians, and economists all have separate pools of knowledge, but are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections. >My vision distorted by thick eyeglasses, I witnessed the curvature of the Earth’s horizon, and I felt the pull of gravity toward its center, such that every one of us is standing at the very apex. Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each of us is a leader or captain of the “Blue Marble” team. >How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were captain of a soccer team, I would look for the weak link and work on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper. >It occurred to me the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem, but we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures. But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom myself. >Knowledge, it seemed to me, consists of the “How” connections between pieces of information, the cause and effect relationships. How does this action bring about that result. Science is a systematic attempt to discover the “How” connections. >Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed, the bigger perspective of the “Why” connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one future over another? >I thought if we could encourage sharing of ideas between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually more wisdom might develop. Sort of a trickle-up theory of information leading to knowledge leading to wisdom. >This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard, a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas using new interactive media called HyperCard stacks. >Each card in a HyperCard stack included graphics, text, interactive buttons, and links that took you to another card or stack. Built-in painting tools, drag-and-drop authoring with a library of pre-fab buttons and fields, and simple event based scripting made HyperCard flexible and easy to use. >It took a lot of hard work and a dedicated team to complete this mission. Apple shipped HyperCard in August 1987, and included it free with every Mac so any user could create and share HyperCard stacks. Many creative people expressed their ideas and passions, and several million interactive HyperCard stacks were created. >HyperCard was a precurser to the first web browser, except chained to a hard drive before the worldwide web. Six years later Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience.