16 ms·

Tony Hsieh and the Emptiness of the Tech-Mogul Myth

68 points by tysone 3y ago

tibbydudeza 3y ago
WeWork and Theranos.
cs702 3y ago
Thankfully, the OP isn't one of those long New Yorker pieces that go on and on and on. It's a short review of an autobiography of Tony Hsieh that focuses less on business-building details than on the psychological/personal evolution of a young Asian American man -- who, despite his growing success and adulation by the media, found himself deeply unsatisfied and dependent on booze and drugs. The review ends with this tidbit, which I found insightful: > Hsieh, in the end, was a rich guy who, early in his career, used his Harvard connections and some seed money to buy a series of lotto tickets in the tech boom, and then used his expanding wealth and influence to spread a bunch of marketing, in the form of pseudo-psychology, into the world. He slept with his employees and terrorized his closest friends. His descent into addiction and his untimely death were certainly tragic, but I couldn’t find much to admire about Hsieh in “Wonder Boy,” nor did I understand why I was reading dozens of meticulously reported, almost snuff-film-like pages about his journey into ketamine addiction and mania. None of this means that “Wonder Boy” is a bad or dull book—on the contrary, it should be mandatory reading for anyone who is interested in big tech. But it did not give much of an answer to the question of how and why so much of the press and the public got suckered in by Hsieh’s generation of tech evangelists.
- ubermonkey 3y ago
  >Thankfully, the OP isn't one of those long New Yorker pieces that go on and on and on. Boggle.
  - michaelcampbell 3y ago
    All good; people like different things. I'm with OP on this one, but reasonable people can disagree.
    - ubermonkey 3y ago
      It comes off like an admission of poor attention span.
- yourapostasy 3y ago
  > ...how and why so much of the press and the public got suckered in by Hsieh’s generation of tech evangelists. Perhaps it was the novelty of a new way to generate money to answer the "why", and the greed that follows overwhelming prudential senses to answer the "how"? The "tech evangelism economy" arc has undergone possibly three recent'ish manias / hype cycles by my count, though YMMV: dot-com (1990's), smartphone (2000's), crypto (2010's). I hesitate to count earlier eras like transistor (1970's), microcomputer & software (1980's) because they weren't characterized by as much mass YOLO-like people losing their minds imprudent behavior as I associate with the more recent eras. Or maybe we're in the middle of a nascent hyperinflationary excess like Weimar Germany and we just don't know it yet, I have no idea. There were previous "global consumer economy" and "industrialization economy" arcs with their attendant manias in past centuries, but they all eventually settled into the hum of background noise of everyday life, so I'm guessing the "tech evangelism economy" arc will eventually follow the same maturation lifecycle, and the timing might have something to do with the long-term human adaptation / socialization of advancements. In the meantime, we likely have an "AI economy" mania spinning up to contend with, and maybe biologically-based tech after that.
  - selimthegrim 3y ago
    >I hesitate to count earlier eras like transistor (1970's), microcomputer & software (1980's) because they weren't characterized by as much mass YOLO-like people losing their minds imprudent behavior as I associate with the more recent eras. Ahem. From [1] >>Let me tell you more about the story of the scene in the computer club concerning installation of the first web server. It was about the 100th web server anywhere, and its maintainer accosted me with an absurd chart "proving" the exponential growth of the web -- i.e. a graph going exponentially from 0 to 100ish, which he extrapolated forward in time to over a million -- you know the standard completely bogus argument -- except this one was exceptionally audacious in its absurdity. Yet he argued for it with such intensity and conviction, as if he was saying that this graph should convince me to drop everything and work on nothing but building the Internet, because it was the only thing that mattered! I fended him off with the biggest stick I could find: I was determined to get my money's worth for my education, do my psets, get good grades (I cared back then), and there is no way I would let that be hurt by this insane Internet obsession. But it continued like that. The Internet crowd only grew with time, and they got more insistent that they were working on the only thing that mattered and I should drop everything and join them. That I was an undergraduate did not matter a bit to anyone. Undergrads were involved, grad students were involved, everyone was involved. It wasn't just a research project; eventually so many different research projects blended together that it became a mass obsession of an entire community, a total "Be Involved or Be Square" kind of thing. >>My point is that when the MIT ecosystem really does its thing, it is capable of tackling projects that are much bigger than ordinary research projects, because it can get a critical mass of research projects working together, involving enough grad students and also sucking in undergrads and everyone else, so that the community ends up with an emotional energy and cohesion that goes way, way beyond the normal energy of a grad student trying to finish a PhD. >>There's something else too, though I cannot report on this with that much certainty, because was too young to see it all at the time. You might ask: if MIT had this kind of emotional energy focused on something in the 90's, then what is it doing in a similar way now? And the answer I'd have to say, painfully, is that it is frustrated and miserable about being an empty shell of what it once was. Why? Because in 2000 Bush got elected and he killed the version of DARPA with which so many professors had had such a long relationship. I didn't I understand this in the 90's -- like a kid I took the things that were happening around me for granted without seeing the funding that made them possible -- but now I see that that the kind of emotional energy expended by the Internet crowd at MIT in the 90's costs a lot of money, and needs an intelligent force behind it, and that scale of money and planning can only come from the military, not from NSF. >>when MIT is really MIT it can do more. It is an empty shell of itself when it is merely a collection of merely successful but not cohesive NSF funded research projects. As I was saying, the Boston "ecosystem" has in itself the ability to do something singular, but it is singular in an entirely different way than SV's thing. >>This may seem obscure, a tale of funding woes at a distant university, but perhaps it is something you should be aware of, because maybe it affects your life. The reason you should care is that when MIT was fully funded and really itself, it was building the foundations of the things that are now making you rich. >>But MIT in its golden age could tackle much, much bigger hills -- the whole community could focus itself on ten years of nothing but pushing a really big stone up a really big hill. The potential energy that the obsessed Internet Crowd in the 90's was pushing into the system has been playing out in your life ever since. They got a really big stone over a really big hill and sent it down onto you, and then you pushed it over little bumps on the way down, and made lots of money doing it, and you thought the potential energy you were profiting from came entirely from yourselves. Some of it was, certainly, but not all. Some of it was from us. If we aren't working on pushing up another such stone, if we can't send something else over a huge hill to crash into you, then the future might not be like the past for you. Be worried. >>So you might ask, how did this story end? If I'm claiming that there was intense emotional energy being poured into developing the Internet at MIT in the 90's, why didn't those same people fan out and create the Internet industry in Boston? If we were once such winners, how did we turn into such losers? What happened to this energetic, cohesive group? >>When I think back, I wonder, why people weren't more scared? When we chose not to register "cool.com" or similar names, why didn't we think, life is hard, the future is uncertain, and money does really make a difference in what you can do? I think this group ethic was only possible because there was a certain confidence -- the group felt itself party to a deal: in return for being who we are, the government would take care of us, forever. Not until the time when the product achieved sufficient product/market fit that it became appropriate to expect return on investment. Forever. [1] https://danluu.com/mit-stanford/ https://danluu.com/mit-stanford/
- inconceivable 3y ago
  the media does it to everyone they can - they raise you up for eyeballs, and then they tear you down for those same eyeballs.
- xhkkffbf 3y ago
  I found this needlessly nihilistic. The public wasn't suckered by Hsieh's generation. Enough of us found shopping for shoes at Zappos to be nice enough that we kept doing it. It was an improvement. A bigger problem is when journalists and the world expect there to be more to the whole story than a simple successful business model.
  - noobermin 3y ago
    >A bigger problem is when journalists and the world expect there to be more to the whole story than a simple successful business model. There are 90 million other unsuccessful business models that look identical to this business model. A remarked on point by the piece is a lot of it is luck, and methods matter only secondarily.
    - prmph 3y ago
      I've been thinking about this for quite a while, and I don't think its luck in the sense that one might think of it. There is something that separates people who care very much about providing real value; they are not common. Yes, thousands of e-commerce businesses might have attempted to take off, and maybe Amazon can be criticized for a lot, but every now and then I ask myself why I still shop from Amazon, and their customer focus wins the day every time. There are many major e-commerce sites (including Best Buy, JC Penney's, etc) which, when I visit without a VPN (and even sometimes with a VPN), will instantly block me simply because I'm located in Ghana. There are some that will not block me, but will cancel any order I make from them, for the same reason. There are many e-commerce businesses you can't readily contact on phone. It takes a business with a strong focus on actually solving a problem well, to actually succeed. Luck is important because this focus on providing value is not usually all that is required. Also, businesses take advantage of lock-in, rent-seeking behavior, reliance on brand reputation, and all sorts of other tricks to survive and thrive. But generally, in situation where reasonably fair competition pertains, the companies that become dominant are those that are actually doing something right to solve problems. Apple is similar. You can criticize them for many things, but I bought a Macbook years ago, and with each passing year I realize my previous problem of having to replace my laptop every two years is solved. I'm getting a new Macbook soon, but not because my daily driver is unusable. Toyota is another example. Now, one might think these business provide some value as a side-effect of their dominant position, but I don't really think so. They became dominant through a combination of strong problem solving focus and yes some luck in not going bust before they could come into their own. Even Honda wen bust a number of times, and still their quality won though.
- PragmaticPulp 3y ago
  > > nor did I understand why I was reading dozens of meticulously reported, almost snuff-film-like pages about his journey into ketamine addiction and mania. None of this means that “Wonder Boy” is a bad or dull book—on the contrary, it should be mandatory reading for anyone who is interested in big tech. The Hsieh story is a sad one, but I really find it disingenuous for this article to suggest that Hsieh is representative of “Big Tech”. Hsieh’s story is so bizarre because he got pulled into a vortex of drug addiction and self-destruction, but that’s not the normal “big tech” experience. It’s getting tiring to read journalist pieces who look at the extreme outliers of tech (Holmes, SBF, Hsieh) and try to tell us that everyone is like this.
  - wootland 3y ago
    > It’s getting tiring to read journalist pieces who look at the extreme outliers of tech (Holmes, SBF, Hsieh) and try to tell us that everyone is like this. I think the message is that these people were created by throngs of investors, media and fan adulation. There's an entire culture of revering people from SBF to Elon Musk to Bill Gates to Marc Andreessen. Some of those people have exploded more spectacularly than others, but the mechanisms and culture that create them are the same.
    - Maximus9000 3y ago
      revering tech CEOs still seems better than the alternative. Outside of HN, most people revere celebs and athletes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_accounts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...
      - morelisp 3y ago
        Why? Taylor Swift seems like at least as good as businessperson as the median FAANG executive, plus has an actual skill.
      - wootland 3y ago
        I strongly disagree. Celebs and athletes are innocuous compared to billionaires and politicians.
- zpeti 3y ago
  I think the US needs to come to terms with the fact that it’s eccentric people who create change, and who ultimately stand out in society. This has both bad and good parts. This obsession with how everyone should be perfect and somehow business, media, but really all leaders need to be perfect is a ridiculous notion. It’s also really unhelpful when you dismiss the good parts of someone because they have bad parts. I’m sorry but everyone has good and bad parts, anyone who claims they don’t is a fraud. The good parts should be celebrated, the bad parts not, but you can’t have one without the other.
  - enraged_camel 3y ago
    >> The good parts should be celebrated, the bad parts not, but you can’t have one without the other. I mean, there is bad, and then there is Bad. Drug addiction is the former. Sleeping with one’s underlings is the latter. Or to give another tech leader as an example: it’s one thing to be an annoying twat on Twitter and post bad and even embarrassing memes, another thing entirely to signal-boost TERFs and white supremacists and similar scum.
galacticaactual 3y ago
I remember Every. Single. Thinkfluencer in the mid 2010s shilling this guy as a paragon of leadership and success.
- vishnugupta 3y ago
  This. For a moment I was beginning to feel if it was only me who felt it that way. Just around the time Amazon bought Zappos this dude was hailed as a hero, someone who would rescue the world from Capitalism, who would put employee happiness over profitability and what not. Goes to show how easy the collective memory fades off.
throw4847284 3y ago
In his book, Hsieh wrote about three types of happiness: pleasure, passion, and purpose. Pleasure is the easiest, but most fleeting. Passion can sustain you for years, but eventually will pass. Purpose can last you a lifetime.
- orasis 3y ago
  Why regurgitate an obviously failed philosophy?
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    The thing that really gets me is that he wore button up shirts a lot. Look at where that got him. Dead in a shed from a fire that started from candles. I can't believe people still wear these.
  - nvahalik 3y ago
    Oddly enough, I think what he said still stands, but as one of the sibling comments points out, he didn't take his own advice. Simply knowing what's true, and teaching what is true, doesn't make you a true believer.
    - skeeter2020 3y ago
      Then I guess I'm a philospher too: do what I say, not what I do.
  - tlb 3y ago
    If any time a proponent of a philosophy has a bad life you declare the philosophy failed, there must be very few left.
    - ljlolel 3y ago
      A fault on philosophy. What’s left is the unspeakable Path
    - deleted 3y ago
butterfi 3y ago
I interviewed with Zappos once - the interview started going south when they asked what super hero I was
- arvidkahl 3y ago
  Was Captain Hindsight an option? :D
- mc32 3y ago
  It's weird. Some of these companies are great but they get blinded by their somewhat accidental success and believe they are special and engender aspects of a cult or a clique. That question is something I would expect from a cult where it acts as a shibboleth. Now, yeah, on the other hand it's a nice filter so you only hire people who think that way, but oh, boy, eventually you have to become a regular company.
- version_five 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - w1nst0nsm1th 3y ago
    Dr Manhatan, obviously. Because he has not a super heros mindset in a world of fake super heros and doesn't conform or even try to belong.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Disagree, it's performative "anti-coporate culture" culture. It seems to want to say "hey, we're not stuffy like those other companies", but only ends up implying that the leader's cultural tastes should be shared by the staff.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    That's starting to fade; DEI got fired in droves. Jury's out as to what the next signals will be.
    - 3y ago
grouchomarx 3y ago
>“While surrounded by friends in the Bahamas as a newly minted millionaire, Tony felt a sense of melancholy. What’s next? What is happiness? What am I working toward? he wondered.” can't understand how some of these guys don't have the wherewithal to live in the moment from time to time
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  A reason I'm probably not one of these guys is because my first thought on having a hundred million dollars is to retire and buy a home in a place I can stroll down to catch fish in the surf. Not even kidding. If I had enough money to be set for the rest of my life and do that, say no more.
  - version_five 3y ago
    I wouldn't get there ($100 M) because I would have cashed out when whatever I owned was worth $1 Million. It's all sort of a game of chicken and most people, probably correctly, flinch very early.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Knowing what "enough" is is arguably success. Congrats.
      - red-iron-pine 3y ago
        Casinos, race tracks, and brokerages are full of saps who had a windfall and wanted to hold on just a little longer instead of walking away...
    - kbenson 3y ago
      The same reason it was always spilling to look back at if you had mined bitcoin or kept whatever you mined early or not cashed out when it was cents. The vast majority of people that weren't true believers early would have cashed out in the first few percentages of its rise, because the vast majority of the time the the right thing to do. Tech billionaires are walking embodiments of survivorship bias. It's like if lotto winners went around espousing their strategies for success. Edit: whoops, s/confirmation bias/survivorship bias/, but both are kinda true.
breakingrules 3y ago
[dead]
oatmeal1 3y ago
https://archive.ph/zyfgb https://archive.ph/zyfgb
AlbertCory 3y ago
AFAICT, Zappos tuned into a desire on the part of (mostly) women to buy shoes, and return them for any reason, or no reason. They did a very good job of that for a while, and being in Lost Wages they had access to a different labor pool than Silicon Valley. So calling that "luck" just means you're envious. That said: the rest was a cult, for sure. Whereas the PayPay Mafia went on to do other things, good or bad, he went on to be like a 20-something rock star who suddenly comes into massive riches. Drugs beckon. Hangers-on are eager to hang on.
- darksaints 3y ago
  Zappos never made money. Anyone can sell dollars for a dime using someone else's money...the luck is how he got someone else's money.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    Envy. You're just unlucky, huh?
    - darksaints 3y ago
      No, I’m pretty damn lucky. It’s reductionist to claim envy for anybody that recognizes the role of luck in how their life or anyone else’s life has turned out. Grow up.
- enraged_camel 3y ago
  I know many people who used to be in Tony’s orbit, and a few in his inner circle — and describing it as a cult is actually quite accurate.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
naillo 3y ago
Seems kinda unecessary and unfair to write hit pieces on the dead like this
- parthianshotgun 3y ago
  Arguably kinder as the dead won't be terribly bothered by it
  - naillo 3y ago
    Can't defend themselves though.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  Showing how his life ended up could help others from going down this path.
  - UIUC_06 3y ago
    Pick almost any music hero or sports champion and there's your lesson about too much money too early. There is no lack of those stories already.
    - gnicholas 3y ago
      There are many people who would not identify with the path of a musician or sports star, who would find Tony's educational and vocational path to be more in line with their aspirations.
- croes 3y ago
  Only the living suffer, some because of myths about entrepreneurs. Most of the time it's a combination of luck, money and connections. After that money and PE cushion their flaws and errors unless they botch it big time.
- carride 3y ago
  It is a book review, not a hit piece.
deleted 3y ago
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fnordpiglet 3y ago
Tony’s story is a story of untreated bipolar disorder, which often is accompanied by addictions, narcissism, etc. People with bipolar can ride their mania to great success, but as they tilt into unreality they damage themselves. Seeking to reclaim the mania during the depressive phase they turn to drugs, which can induce a fleeting mania. The story of Tony is more a story of the opportunists who exploited his mental illness and fed his mania for their own profit. It’s not an indictment of tech, moguls, myths, or whatever. It’s an indictment of the state of mental health care in the US and the unfettered greed of our fellow man.
- croes 3y ago
  Was there a diagnosis for bipolar ot is just because he was an addict and an narcissist? Like Musk's autism, was it ever officially diagnosed or is it just an excuse for his behavior.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Like most mental health issues they don’t generally discuss the specific diagnosis. But reading in this article and others they discuss manic behavior as well as periods of deep depression. That’s effectively bipolar. The disorder comes about when the mania and depression results in dysfunction, such as addiction. The narcissism comes about because of the intense self interest in both the manic phase and the depressive phase. But I’ve not found a specific diagnosis disclosure anywhere - just as I said explicit discussion of mania and depression. Musk has disclosed specifically he is bipolar. It’s a better explanation of his behavior than autism. The issue is that people with bipolar it’s almost diagnostic they refuse or don’t comply with treatment even when acknowledging their disorder. When you are wealthy you can get away with that, and people around you will even feed your mania to their own benefit.
    - skeeter2020 3y ago
      >> But reading in this article and others they discuss manic behavior as well as periods of deep depression. Ah yes, like all great therapists a diagnosis based on reading 3rd through 6th hand articles. Or maybe just an excuse for being a bad human being.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"But what really separated all the losers from those who had been able to amass a large fortune was a whole lot of lucky breaks in a row." "Zappos, the company that ultimately made Hsieh famous, wasn't his idea." "Over time, Hsieh's interest in junk psychology extended beyond happiness and into even stupider realms. He became obsessed with Neil Strauss's "The Game," the infamous guide for so-called pickup artists which taught men how to manipulate women via techniques like "negging" and "peacocking."" "When Hsieh ultimately embarked on an ambitious project to revitalize downtown Las Vegas and turn it into a new tech hub, he boasted to a reporter about how he had used methods from "The Game" in selling his vision for the city to potential investors." "But ["Wonder Boy"] did not give much of an answer to the question of how and why so much of the press and the public got suckered in by Hsieh's generation of tech evangelists. cD-"
- tlb 3y ago
  As usual, thought leadership is mainly marketing for the business. He made it work well for that purpose. Everyone knew that it was the shoe warehouse with happy employees. It was a clever theme. Talking about shoes wouldn’t have been as compelling.
SilverBirch 3y ago
This touches on something I've been mulling for a while when I read twitter. There's an entire ecosystem of self-proclaimed successful entrepreneurs who parlay that into various fabulous claims. But for me it's always been difficult to isolate luck. In the early days of facebook there were a dozen social media companies that could have become The Future, and there's probably hundreds of people who were around early enough that if they'd been on the winning team they'd have had atleast tens of millions of dollars to show for it. Did they make the difference between Facebook being the winning platform? Maybe? Probably not. Atleast not everyone at facebook in the early days could have been the difference between facebook being a billion dollar behemoth or not. So it seems to me there are atleast some multi-millionaire tech bros who are there entirely by luck. And if you made $10m, $20m, $100m and had early Facebook on your CV? Well you can spend the rest of your days waxing lyrical about how astute and innovative you are and how you're the master of the universe. Hell, you can set up your own VC gig and start putting some of that reputation to work. Are you any good at anything? Probably not. But you're not going to take 100% losses on everything and people are going to pay you a decent chunk to manage their money and get in on those investments that you - a genius thought leader - can identify as being the next sliced bread. At the end of the day even if it goes badly you can probably dump your shit investments on dumb retail investors. You're never going to be broke, and no one knows if you have $10m in the bank or $100m. I guess the only thing you can't do is start a podcast where you're loudly stupid every week, that would be a real dumb move, but other than that based on a little luck you can coast for the rest of your life.
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  chefs kiss Is this ___? This has to be about ___. This is definitely ___.
  - SilverBirch 3y ago
    Any Similarity to Venture Capitalists Living Or Dead Is Purely Coincidental

68 points by tysone 3y ago

WeWork and Theranos.

Thankfully, the OP isn't one of those long New Yorker pieces that go on and on and on. It's a short review of an autobiography of Tony Hsieh that focuses less on business-building details than on the psychological/personal evolution of a young Asian American man -- who, despite his growing success and adulation by the media, found himself deeply unsatisfied and dependent on booze and drugs. The review ends with this tidbit, which I found insightful: > Hsieh, in the end, was a rich guy who, early in his career, used his Harvard connections and some seed money to buy a series of lotto tickets in the tech boom, and then used his expanding wealth and influence to spread a bunch of marketing, in the form of pseudo-psychology, into the world. He slept with his employees and terrorized his closest friends. His descent into addiction and his untimely death were certainly tragic, but I couldn’t find much to admire about Hsieh in “Wonder Boy,” nor did I understand why I was reading dozens of meticulously reported, almost snuff-film-like pages about his journey into ketamine addiction and mania. None of this means that “Wonder Boy” is a bad or dull book—on the contrary, it should be mandatory reading for anyone who is interested in big tech. But it did not give much of an answer to the question of how and why so much of the press and the public got suckered in by Hsieh’s generation of tech evangelists.

ubermonkey 3y ago
>Thankfully, the OP isn't one of those long New Yorker pieces that go on and on and on. Boggle.
- michaelcampbell 3y ago
  All good; people like different things. I'm with OP on this one, but reasonable people can disagree.
  - ubermonkey 3y ago
    It comes off like an admission of poor attention span.
yourapostasy 3y ago
> ...how and why so much of the press and the public got suckered in by Hsieh’s generation of tech evangelists. Perhaps it was the novelty of a new way to generate money to answer the "why", and the greed that follows overwhelming prudential senses to answer the "how"? The "tech evangelism economy" arc has undergone possibly three recent'ish manias / hype cycles by my count, though YMMV: dot-com (1990's), smartphone (2000's), crypto (2010's). I hesitate to count earlier eras like transistor (1970's), microcomputer & software (1980's) because they weren't characterized by as much mass YOLO-like people losing their minds imprudent behavior as I associate with the more recent eras. Or maybe we're in the middle of a nascent hyperinflationary excess like Weimar Germany and we just don't know it yet, I have no idea. There were previous "global consumer economy" and "industrialization economy" arcs with their attendant manias in past centuries, but they all eventually settled into the hum of background noise of everyday life, so I'm guessing the "tech evangelism economy" arc will eventually follow the same maturation lifecycle, and the timing might have something to do with the long-term human adaptation / socialization of advancements. In the meantime, we likely have an "AI economy" mania spinning up to contend with, and maybe biologically-based tech after that.
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  >I hesitate to count earlier eras like transistor (1970's), microcomputer & software (1980's) because they weren't characterized by as much mass YOLO-like people losing their minds imprudent behavior as I associate with the more recent eras. Ahem. From [1] >>Let me tell you more about the story of the scene in the computer club concerning installation of the first web server. It was about the 100th web server anywhere, and its maintainer accosted me with an absurd chart "proving" the exponential growth of the web -- i.e. a graph going exponentially from 0 to 100ish, which he extrapolated forward in time to over a million -- you know the standard completely bogus argument -- except this one was exceptionally audacious in its absurdity. Yet he argued for it with such intensity and conviction, as if he was saying that this graph should convince me to drop everything and work on nothing but building the Internet, because it was the only thing that mattered! I fended him off with the biggest stick I could find: I was determined to get my money's worth for my education, do my psets, get good grades (I cared back then), and there is no way I would let that be hurt by this insane Internet obsession. But it continued like that. The Internet crowd only grew with time, and they got more insistent that they were working on the only thing that mattered and I should drop everything and join them. That I was an undergraduate did not matter a bit to anyone. Undergrads were involved, grad students were involved, everyone was involved. It wasn't just a research project; eventually so many different research projects blended together that it became a mass obsession of an entire community, a total "Be Involved or Be Square" kind of thing. >>My point is that when the MIT ecosystem really does its thing, it is capable of tackling projects that are much bigger than ordinary research projects, because it can get a critical mass of research projects working together, involving enough grad students and also sucking in undergrads and everyone else, so that the community ends up with an emotional energy and cohesion that goes way, way beyond the normal energy of a grad student trying to finish a PhD. >>There's something else too, though I cannot report on this with that much certainty, because was too young to see it all at the time. You might ask: if MIT had this kind of emotional energy focused on something in the 90's, then what is it doing in a similar way now? And the answer I'd have to say, painfully, is that it is frustrated and miserable about being an empty shell of what it once was. Why? Because in 2000 Bush got elected and he killed the version of DARPA with which so many professors had had such a long relationship. I didn't I understand this in the 90's -- like a kid I took the things that were happening around me for granted without seeing the funding that made them possible -- but now I see that that the kind of emotional energy expended by the Internet crowd at MIT in the 90's costs a lot of money, and needs an intelligent force behind it, and that scale of money and planning can only come from the military, not from NSF. >>when MIT is really MIT it can do more. It is an empty shell of itself when it is merely a collection of merely successful but not cohesive NSF funded research projects. As I was saying, the Boston "ecosystem" has in itself the ability to do something singular, but it is singular in an entirely different way than SV's thing. >>This may seem obscure, a tale of funding woes at a distant university, but perhaps it is something you should be aware of, because maybe it affects your life. The reason you should care is that when MIT was fully funded and really itself, it was building the foundations of the things that are now making you rich. >>But MIT in its golden age could tackle much, much bigger hills -- the whole community could focus itself on ten years of nothing but pushing a really big stone up a really big hill. The potential energy that the obsessed Internet Crowd in the 90's was pushing into the system has been playing out in your life ever since. They got a really big stone over a really big hill and sent it down onto you, and then you pushed it over little bumps on the way down, and made lots of money doing it, and you thought the potential energy you were profiting from came entirely from yourselves. Some of it was, certainly, but not all. Some of it was from us. If we aren't working on pushing up another such stone, if we can't send something else over a huge hill to crash into you, then the future might not be like the past for you. Be worried. >>So you might ask, how did this story end? If I'm claiming that there was intense emotional energy being poured into developing the Internet at MIT in the 90's, why didn't those same people fan out and create the Internet industry in Boston? If we were once such winners, how did we turn into such losers? What happened to this energetic, cohesive group? >>When I think back, I wonder, why people weren't more scared? When we chose not to register "cool.com" or similar names, why didn't we think, life is hard, the future is uncertain, and money does really make a difference in what you can do? I think this group ethic was only possible because there was a certain confidence -- the group felt itself party to a deal: in return for being who we are, the government would take care of us, forever. Not until the time when the product achieved sufficient product/market fit that it became appropriate to expect return on investment. Forever. [1] https://danluu.com/mit-stanford/ https://danluu.com/mit-stanford/
inconceivable 3y ago
the media does it to everyone they can - they raise you up for eyeballs, and then they tear you down for those same eyeballs.
xhkkffbf 3y ago
I found this needlessly nihilistic. The public wasn't suckered by Hsieh's generation. Enough of us found shopping for shoes at Zappos to be nice enough that we kept doing it. It was an improvement. A bigger problem is when journalists and the world expect there to be more to the whole story than a simple successful business model.
- noobermin 3y ago
  >A bigger problem is when journalists and the world expect there to be more to the whole story than a simple successful business model. There are 90 million other unsuccessful business models that look identical to this business model. A remarked on point by the piece is a lot of it is luck, and methods matter only secondarily.
  - prmph 3y ago
    I've been thinking about this for quite a while, and I don't think its luck in the sense that one might think of it. There is something that separates people who care very much about providing real value; they are not common. Yes, thousands of e-commerce businesses might have attempted to take off, and maybe Amazon can be criticized for a lot, but every now and then I ask myself why I still shop from Amazon, and their customer focus wins the day every time. There are many major e-commerce sites (including Best Buy, JC Penney's, etc) which, when I visit without a VPN (and even sometimes with a VPN), will instantly block me simply because I'm located in Ghana. There are some that will not block me, but will cancel any order I make from them, for the same reason. There are many e-commerce businesses you can't readily contact on phone. It takes a business with a strong focus on actually solving a problem well, to actually succeed. Luck is important because this focus on providing value is not usually all that is required. Also, businesses take advantage of lock-in, rent-seeking behavior, reliance on brand reputation, and all sorts of other tricks to survive and thrive. But generally, in situation where reasonably fair competition pertains, the companies that become dominant are those that are actually doing something right to solve problems. Apple is similar. You can criticize them for many things, but I bought a Macbook years ago, and with each passing year I realize my previous problem of having to replace my laptop every two years is solved. I'm getting a new Macbook soon, but not because my daily driver is unusable. Toyota is another example. Now, one might think these business provide some value as a side-effect of their dominant position, but I don't really think so. They became dominant through a combination of strong problem solving focus and yes some luck in not going bust before they could come into their own. Even Honda wen bust a number of times, and still their quality won though.
PragmaticPulp 3y ago
> > nor did I understand why I was reading dozens of meticulously reported, almost snuff-film-like pages about his journey into ketamine addiction and mania. None of this means that “Wonder Boy” is a bad or dull book—on the contrary, it should be mandatory reading for anyone who is interested in big tech. The Hsieh story is a sad one, but I really find it disingenuous for this article to suggest that Hsieh is representative of “Big Tech”. Hsieh’s story is so bizarre because he got pulled into a vortex of drug addiction and self-destruction, but that’s not the normal “big tech” experience. It’s getting tiring to read journalist pieces who look at the extreme outliers of tech (Holmes, SBF, Hsieh) and try to tell us that everyone is like this.
- wootland 3y ago
  > It’s getting tiring to read journalist pieces who look at the extreme outliers of tech (Holmes, SBF, Hsieh) and try to tell us that everyone is like this. I think the message is that these people were created by throngs of investors, media and fan adulation. There's an entire culture of revering people from SBF to Elon Musk to Bill Gates to Marc Andreessen. Some of those people have exploded more spectacularly than others, but the mechanisms and culture that create them are the same.
  - Maximus9000 3y ago
    revering tech CEOs still seems better than the alternative. Outside of HN, most people revere celebs and athletes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_accounts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...
    - morelisp 3y ago
      Why? Taylor Swift seems like at least as good as businessperson as the median FAANG executive, plus has an actual skill.
    - wootland 3y ago
      I strongly disagree. Celebs and athletes are innocuous compared to billionaires and politicians.
zpeti 3y ago
I think the US needs to come to terms with the fact that it’s eccentric people who create change, and who ultimately stand out in society. This has both bad and good parts. This obsession with how everyone should be perfect and somehow business, media, but really all leaders need to be perfect is a ridiculous notion. It’s also really unhelpful when you dismiss the good parts of someone because they have bad parts. I’m sorry but everyone has good and bad parts, anyone who claims they don’t is a fraud. The good parts should be celebrated, the bad parts not, but you can’t have one without the other.
- enraged_camel 3y ago
  >> The good parts should be celebrated, the bad parts not, but you can’t have one without the other. I mean, there is bad, and then there is Bad. Drug addiction is the former. Sleeping with one’s underlings is the latter. Or to give another tech leader as an example: it’s one thing to be an annoying twat on Twitter and post bad and even embarrassing memes, another thing entirely to signal-boost TERFs and white supremacists and similar scum.

galacticaactual 3y ago

I remember Every. Single. Thinkfluencer in the mid 2010s shilling this guy as a paragon of leadership and success.

vishnugupta 3y ago
This. For a moment I was beginning to feel if it was only me who felt it that way. Just around the time Amazon bought Zappos this dude was hailed as a hero, someone who would rescue the world from Capitalism, who would put employee happiness over profitability and what not. Goes to show how easy the collective memory fades off.

throw4847284 3y ago

In his book, Hsieh wrote about three types of happiness: pleasure, passion, and purpose. Pleasure is the easiest, but most fleeting. Passion can sustain you for years, but eventually will pass. Purpose can last you a lifetime.

orasis 3y ago
Why regurgitate an obviously failed philosophy?
- renewiltord 3y ago
  The thing that really gets me is that he wore button up shirts a lot. Look at where that got him. Dead in a shed from a fire that started from candles. I can't believe people still wear these.
- nvahalik 3y ago
  Oddly enough, I think what he said still stands, but as one of the sibling comments points out, he didn't take his own advice. Simply knowing what's true, and teaching what is true, doesn't make you a true believer.
  - skeeter2020 3y ago
    Then I guess I'm a philospher too: do what I say, not what I do.
- tlb 3y ago
  If any time a proponent of a philosophy has a bad life you declare the philosophy failed, there must be very few left.
  - ljlolel 3y ago
    A fault on philosophy. What’s left is the unspeakable Path
  - deleted 3y ago

butterfi 3y ago

I interviewed with Zappos once - the interview started going south when they asked what super hero I was

arvidkahl 3y ago
Was Captain Hindsight an option? :D
mc32 3y ago
It's weird. Some of these companies are great but they get blinded by their somewhat accidental success and believe they are special and engender aspects of a cult or a clique. That question is something I would expect from a cult where it acts as a shibboleth. Now, yeah, on the other hand it's a nice filter so you only hire people who think that way, but oh, boy, eventually you have to become a regular company.
version_five 3y ago
[flagged]
- w1nst0nsm1th 3y ago
  Dr Manhatan, obviously. Because he has not a super heros mindset in a world of fake super heros and doesn't conform or even try to belong.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Disagree, it's performative "anti-coporate culture" culture. It seems to want to say "hey, we're not stuffy like those other companies", but only ends up implying that the leader's cultural tastes should be shared by the staff.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  That's starting to fade; DEI got fired in droves. Jury's out as to what the next signals will be.
  - 3y ago

grouchomarx 3y ago

>“While surrounded by friends in the Bahamas as a newly minted millionaire, Tony felt a sense of melancholy. What’s next? What is happiness? What am I working toward? he wondered.” can't understand how some of these guys don't have the wherewithal to live in the moment from time to time

MisterBastahrd 3y ago
A reason I'm probably not one of these guys is because my first thought on having a hundred million dollars is to retire and buy a home in a place I can stroll down to catch fish in the surf. Not even kidding. If I had enough money to be set for the rest of my life and do that, say no more.
- version_five 3y ago
  I wouldn't get there ($100 M) because I would have cashed out when whatever I owned was worth $1 Million. It's all sort of a game of chicken and most people, probably correctly, flinch very early.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Knowing what "enough" is is arguably success. Congrats.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      Casinos, race tracks, and brokerages are full of saps who had a windfall and wanted to hold on just a little longer instead of walking away...
  - kbenson 3y ago
    The same reason it was always spilling to look back at if you had mined bitcoin or kept whatever you mined early or not cashed out when it was cents. The vast majority of people that weren't true believers early would have cashed out in the first few percentages of its rise, because the vast majority of the time the the right thing to do. Tech billionaires are walking embodiments of survivorship bias. It's like if lotto winners went around espousing their strategies for success. Edit: whoops, s/confirmation bias/survivorship bias/, but both are kinda true.

breakingrules 3y ago

[dead]

oatmeal1 3y ago

https://archive.ph/zyfgb https://archive.ph/zyfgb

AlbertCory 3y ago

AFAICT, Zappos tuned into a desire on the part of (mostly) women to buy shoes, and return them for any reason, or no reason. They did a very good job of that for a while, and being in Lost Wages they had access to a different labor pool than Silicon Valley. So calling that "luck" just means you're envious. That said: the rest was a cult, for sure. Whereas the PayPay Mafia went on to do other things, good or bad, he went on to be like a 20-something rock star who suddenly comes into massive riches. Drugs beckon. Hangers-on are eager to hang on.

darksaints 3y ago
Zappos never made money. Anyone can sell dollars for a dime using someone else's money...the luck is how he got someone else's money.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Envy. You're just unlucky, huh?
  - darksaints 3y ago
    No, I’m pretty damn lucky. It’s reductionist to claim envy for anybody that recognizes the role of luck in how their life or anyone else’s life has turned out. Grow up.
enraged_camel 3y ago
I know many people who used to be in Tony’s orbit, and a few in his inner circle — and describing it as a cult is actually quite accurate.

deleted 3y ago

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naillo 3y ago

Seems kinda unecessary and unfair to write hit pieces on the dead like this

parthianshotgun 3y ago
Arguably kinder as the dead won't be terribly bothered by it
- naillo 3y ago
  Can't defend themselves though.
gnicholas 3y ago
Showing how his life ended up could help others from going down this path.
- UIUC_06 3y ago
  Pick almost any music hero or sports champion and there's your lesson about too much money too early. There is no lack of those stories already.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    There are many people who would not identify with the path of a musician or sports star, who would find Tony's educational and vocational path to be more in line with their aspirations.
croes 3y ago
Only the living suffer, some because of myths about entrepreneurs. Most of the time it's a combination of luck, money and connections. After that money and PE cushion their flaws and errors unless they botch it big time.
carride 3y ago
It is a book review, not a hit piece.

deleted 3y ago

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fnordpiglet 3y ago

Tony’s story is a story of untreated bipolar disorder, which often is accompanied by addictions, narcissism, etc. People with bipolar can ride their mania to great success, but as they tilt into unreality they damage themselves. Seeking to reclaim the mania during the depressive phase they turn to drugs, which can induce a fleeting mania. The story of Tony is more a story of the opportunists who exploited his mental illness and fed his mania for their own profit. It’s not an indictment of tech, moguls, myths, or whatever. It’s an indictment of the state of mental health care in the US and the unfettered greed of our fellow man.

croes 3y ago
Was there a diagnosis for bipolar ot is just because he was an addict and an narcissist? Like Musk's autism, was it ever officially diagnosed or is it just an excuse for his behavior.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Like most mental health issues they don’t generally discuss the specific diagnosis. But reading in this article and others they discuss manic behavior as well as periods of deep depression. That’s effectively bipolar. The disorder comes about when the mania and depression results in dysfunction, such as addiction. The narcissism comes about because of the intense self interest in both the manic phase and the depressive phase. But I’ve not found a specific diagnosis disclosure anywhere - just as I said explicit discussion of mania and depression. Musk has disclosed specifically he is bipolar. It’s a better explanation of his behavior than autism. The issue is that people with bipolar it’s almost diagnostic they refuse or don’t comply with treatment even when acknowledging their disorder. When you are wealthy you can get away with that, and people around you will even feed your mania to their own benefit.
  - skeeter2020 3y ago
    >> But reading in this article and others they discuss manic behavior as well as periods of deep depression. Ah yes, like all great therapists a diagnosis based on reading 3rd through 6th hand articles. Or maybe just an excuse for being a bad human being.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"But what really separated all the losers from those who had been able to amass a large fortune was a whole lot of lucky breaks in a row." "Zappos, the company that ultimately made Hsieh famous, wasn't his idea." "Over time, Hsieh's interest in junk psychology extended beyond happiness and into even stupider realms. He became obsessed with Neil Strauss's "The Game," the infamous guide for so-called pickup artists which taught men how to manipulate women via techniques like "negging" and "peacocking."" "When Hsieh ultimately embarked on an ambitious project to revitalize downtown Las Vegas and turn it into a new tech hub, he boasted to a reporter about how he had used methods from "The Game" in selling his vision for the city to potential investors." "But ["Wonder Boy"] did not give much of an answer to the question of how and why so much of the press and the public got suckered in by Hsieh's generation of tech evangelists. cD-"

tlb 3y ago
As usual, thought leadership is mainly marketing for the business. He made it work well for that purpose. Everyone knew that it was the shoe warehouse with happy employees. It was a clever theme. Talking about shoes wouldn’t have been as compelling.

SilverBirch 3y ago

This touches on something I've been mulling for a while when I read twitter. There's an entire ecosystem of self-proclaimed successful entrepreneurs who parlay that into various fabulous claims. But for me it's always been difficult to isolate luck. In the early days of facebook there were a dozen social media companies that could have become The Future, and there's probably hundreds of people who were around early enough that if they'd been on the winning team they'd have had atleast tens of millions of dollars to show for it. Did they make the difference between Facebook being the winning platform? Maybe? Probably not. Atleast not everyone at facebook in the early days could have been the difference between facebook being a billion dollar behemoth or not. So it seems to me there are atleast some multi-millionaire tech bros who are there entirely by luck. And if you made $10m, $20m, $100m and had early Facebook on your CV? Well you can spend the rest of your days waxing lyrical about how astute and innovative you are and how you're the master of the universe. Hell, you can set up your own VC gig and start putting some of that reputation to work. Are you any good at anything? Probably not. But you're not going to take 100% losses on everything and people are going to pay you a decent chunk to manage their money and get in on those investments that you - a genius thought leader - can identify as being the next sliced bread. At the end of the day even if it goes badly you can probably dump your shit investments on dumb retail investors. You're never going to be broke, and no one knows if you have $10m in the bank or $100m. I guess the only thing you can't do is start a podcast where you're loudly stupid every week, that would be a real dumb move, but other than that based on a little luck you can coast for the rest of your life.

reducesuffering 3y ago
chefs kiss Is this ___? This has to be about ___. This is definitely ___.
- SilverBirch 3y ago
  Any Similarity to Venture Capitalists Living Or Dead Is Purely Coincidental