4 ms·

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 o

by 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.

by cs702 3y ago

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.