13 ms·

Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

604 points by moses1400 14y ago

waterlesscloud 14y ago
The irony is that to 95% of Americans he's led a very successful life. Not that I don't understand the point. It's all relative.
- cglee 14y ago
  When you're in SF/Bay Area and trying to compete with the likes of LinkedIn, Yammer, etc, you're constantly bumping into that top 5%.
  - taybin 14y ago
    There's a tendency to overrate the talent at these well known companies. Remember, LinkedIn didn't salt its passwords...
    - mythz 14y ago
      So? they're worth billions.
      - taybin 14y ago
        What does that have to do with anything mentioned here?
    - briandear 14y ago
      I know plenty of people that salt their passwords, that doesn't mean they have the talent to build a LinkedIn or even realize that the need existed. There's a lot to be said for vision and execution. Attention to every detail has nothing to do with talent. Every single programmer in the history of the world, talented or not makes mistakes, that doesn't reduce their talent. Talent isn't just about technical perfection. While LinkedIn didn't salt their passwords, how many other big-deal innovations did they execute and accomplish?
    - jasomill 14y ago
      And an even worse tendency to assume those with the most successful careers are the most talented.
vaksel 14y ago
someone needs a reality check. if he considers that kind of life "failure", he is going to lead a very depressed life unless he wins a few lotteries
- svdad 14y ago
  couldn't agree more. "i only made a little money" -- enough to have started angel investing in 2004 after exiting paypal. enough money to live in one of the most expensive places on earth, probably without having to work too much? check. a family and (apparently) happy marital relationship? check. moderately successful times working at important companies? check. Sure, it's good to be ambitious and set high goals. But the dude needs to get a grip. If he wants to achieve more, fine. But there's no universal standard by which he's a "failure". At the end of the day it's up to him and he'd do well to admit it.
  - jwhite 14y ago
    A friend once took a 30 minute car ride with two successful people, both multimillionaires, back when that meant something. He asked them how much money they would need to feel financially secure. By the end of the trip they had bid each other up so far that they agreed that it would take a large multiple of their current net worths, just to feel truly safe and independent enough to retire.
bluedanieru 14y ago
Why are none of the sentences capitalized? It makes it difficult to read (so I didn't finish it). What I did read wasn't very interesting anyway, so no big loss.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - scotth 14y ago
    I for one agree with OP. The lack of capitalization made the article more difficult to read. For the record, I am not a brogrammer. Just a regular dude who's used to regular ol' English style standards.
    - briandear 14y ago
      You ought to look at his Keynotes. http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/how-to-pitch-a-vc-aka-startup-viagra-how-to-give-a-vc-a-hardon http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/how-to-pitch-a-vc-aka-s...
- briandear 14y ago
  davemcluredoesntcareaboutfontsorcapitalizationorwhatyouthink.
  - briandear 14y ago
    The downvoters obviously don't know Dave.
    - rdl 14y ago
      Would he really say 12 words where one of them isn't "fuck", though?
      - briandear 14y ago
nedwin 14y ago
Great post Dave, and somewhat inspiring for someone nearing the end of their twenties who feels like he's only just hitting his straps now.
- dmishe 14y ago
  Mid 20, same shit.
tptacek 14y ago
Dave McClure is a Get for Dustin Curtis' Svbtle network. It's fun to watch this thing develop.
- kevinburke 14y ago
  There is a signaling effect from using Svbtle (Their aim is to signal "you are going to be reading good content") but it's hard to understand why you wouldn't want to use your own design and brand for your site. You are ceding control of your online brand to their design framework.
  - Timothee 14y ago
    It's going off-topic, but this is something that has impressed me a lot in the growth of the network: by being part of Svbtle, that means you're leaving the design of your blog and your homepage to Dustin Curtis's design, besides a color and a logo. That he managed to convince that many high-calibre people so fast is very impressive. (especially since they have better things to do than thinking about joining a blog network. Most of them don't need that at all)
  - rdl 14y ago
    Who cares about design and brand for a text blog? svbtle isn't perfect, but fairly acceptable. Sounds like the myspace vs. facebook argument.
  - auston 14y ago
    I humbly disagree: As a writer, I'd like my design handled for me. I just want to be able to write the best piece within reach & present it to the world in a way that will gain mass distribution. Besides that, as a reader, it's easy to detect the Svbtle "look" & know that this article will probably be worth my time.
    - powerslave12r 14y ago
      This is exactly right. As soon as I see that blog theme, I recognize it as 'this is gonna be a good article.' The only nitpick I have about the site is I think the font is 'too wide.' That's just a personal preference of course.
simonsarris 14y ago
Well he's not a late bloomer to the vast majority of people. I think no matter your lot in life, if you're competitive, you get the feeling that you missed out on a lot that you could have accomplished. Stories of kids learning programming at 6, or starting companies at 16, etc, feed into this. Even I feel like I would be much farther "ahead" if I had only started programming before high school, if I had been more gung-ho about college, if I had gone to California in 2010 after graduation instead of remaining in New Hampshire. I don't even know any programmers in person outside of my work. My "network" isn't something to put on a pedestal. And yet by all accounts I live an extremely comfortable life, I wrote enough to get noticed and get a book deal just two years out of college, my friends think I'm of superhuman intellect, I'm able to walk to work every day, etc. I think the kind of worry in this post is a response to the world born out of hyper-competitiveness, and I don't think its a healthy one. It's not a positive message, and the events that could turn it into a positive message for this person, the qualifications for "not being a loser", should never involve anything five or six sigma from the norm. Look around you and relax. You've probably already won.
- count 14y ago
  For the type of competitive folks you talk about (of which I am definitely one), I think the Internet has really changed things - your 'scope' of competition is now 7 billion people, rather than the roughly 400-500 folks you could reasonably know in your 'home town'. Now, even in New Hampshire (to steal your example), you can subconsciously see yourself competing against folks in NYC or San Francisco or Beijing, who have entirely different sets of circumstances, etc. It's almost cliche that the 'hometown hero' will have a hard time in the 'real world' (subject of many movies, etc.), but the Internet makes this play out on a daily basis. Like you say, it's all a matter of perspective. Can you really settle for 'winning' locally, knowing that you're barely competitive globally? I think that's a question many folks struggle with.
  - arohner 14y ago
    Absolutely true. I find the same effect on HN to be even worse. HN now has over 100k uniques/day[1] . That means that on any topic you'd ever like to comment on, odds are good there are many HN visitors who are better at that you are. [1] traffic from last year: http://ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-9feb11.png http://ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-9feb11.png)
blu3jack 14y ago
I'm not quite sure what the point of this blog post is. I guess it's to re-start his blog, and restarting a blog often lacks a good hook, and may be heavy on the backstory. Hopefully this is a starting point, not a destination.
big_data 14y ago
Sounds to me like he is suffering from a social comparison bias. A few peers may have done better than he, but I am sure there are those out there that would say he has done pretty good.
- daveasaurus 14y ago
  I've heard that grad students go through something very similar when they go to grad school: feelings of inferiority and fears of being "exposed" as fake when surrounded by so many other intelligent people. I've never worked for a start-up but imagine the start-up scene works the same given the common stereotypes: success stories of 20-year-olds, hyper intelligent ivy-league drop-outs, etc. I don't know whether they're the rule or the exception to it.
kposehn 14y ago
Wow. As in "holy shit that was inspiring."
soup10 14y ago
Love the optimism and ambition. It hurts to read how hard you are on yourself, but I hope you achieve your goals and relax a little :). Good luck with your incubator.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
prophetjohn 14y ago
This is kind of inspiring. As someone who wrote their first line of code at 25 and won't be able to shed the "intern" title until I graduate at almost 28, it's really easy to feel like I screwed myself over by not being where I am now 5+ years ago. Especially so in an industry where the younger you are the better and there are stories of people in their 40s having a problem finding work. The real kicker is that I actually consider myself a pretty good programmer, at least for my experience level. As stated, I've been programming for about 2 years and I'm the primary contributor on a project that is deemed to be the "number one priority" for our application. But how good of a programmer would I have been had my parents bought me a computer when I was a kid? Or even when I was a teenager? I didn't even really know I liked computers until I was around 21 and even if I knew what the hell programming was then, I definitely wouldn't have been able to afford college. So I guess there's still a decent likelihood that I'll need to be transitioning out of programming less than 15 years into my career, but hopefully there's still plenty of other opportunities for me to do great things for the next 20 or so years after that.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  To be honest, I wouldn't worry too much. Everyone is like "I was programming since I was 10!" Nobody ever asks what they were programming at 10, most people wrote relatively simple stuff until they grew up and got a professional job. Now to wait for replies from people who designed OSes when they were 12 :)
  - briandear 14y ago
    I managed to build a game in BASIC when I was 10. ..and that's about it (other than BBSing and running up the phone bill.)
  - simonbrown 14y ago
    A 12 year old found a vulnerability in Firefox. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/12-year-old-finds-critical-firefox-flaw-earns-3000-bounty/7524 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/12-year-old-finds-critica...
  - Swizec 14y ago
joshmlewis 14y ago
I'm almost 19 and I feel like I'm not moving fast enough sometimes. I've already worked for two successful startups and am in an accelerator program as a designer cofounder. I love what I do and I can honestly say I have one of the best jobs in the world and the people I've met are amazing, I'm just scared of losing out on time. This really made me see that I don't have just a few year window to do well, but it's a life long thing. I would have never guessed I'd be doing what I'm doing now a year ago, and I have no idea what I'll be doing a year from now, but I figure if I just keep doing what I love and building awesome products, I'll always be happy.
- Timothee 14y ago
  Hell yeah you have time! You're only 19 and you seem to know what you want to do for the foreseeable future, have co-founded a company, worked at two successful startups… I have yet to do any of these. (well, maybe I do know what I want to do? Maybe…) You're so ahead of most people, it's almost tempting to downvote you for humblebrag. It's like people who complain because they do only [good measurement of self in a domain] in [said domain]. (I would give a sport example, but I couldn't give you a realistic one)
  - joshmlewis 14y ago
    Yes, like the gorgeous girls that call themselves fat, it pisses me off. I feel like though I've done this, but I'm still not financially secure, I worry about a paycheck, and people still don't respect what I do and think I should be in college. So it just makes me wonder, ya know?
    - Timothee 14y ago
      Don't get me wrong: I'm not blaming you. I think a lot of people, if not most, are insecure or at least unsure about their accomplishments. I feel that it's not really discussed: you might receive kudos from the family, but they're often outside your domain, so "it doesn't count". You might have some kind of role model: "I want to be like that guy", but that guy rarely looks back to acknowledge your accomplishments. (and he's probably looking up to somebody else too) If anybody does, it's mostly people "lower than or equal to" you that do: at best your peers, at worst people who don't really know what they're talking about. So it's hard to see yourself in the proper referential…
prayag 14y ago
Dave's dilemma is far too familier to a lot of people in the tech scene in general, and bay area in particular. Bay area attracts the brightest minds from across the globe. All of them have been at the top of their high school classes. They have all been told from a very young age that they are destined to doing something great in life. They not only expect themselves to do better than themselves but pretty much demand it. But when you have so many smart people trying to be more successful than their peers the definition of success changes. The bar rises and just building and selling a successful company doesn't seem good enough. You have to start the next Facebook, or the next Twitter. IMHO, the best measure of success is not absolutes but a relative one. Compare your current self with your self from 2 years ago and ask if you are a better, more successful person. By that measure Dave has done exceptionally well in the past few years.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  Exactly. As I have been doing a lot more financial planning I have started to second-guess whether I want to look for funding in the Valley or bootstrap with a partner. Yes, I think we can be a billion dollar company in 20 years or less with a couple million in investment. Yes, I think we could bring open source ERP into the mainstream. However we aren't in the hot areas of the day. We are entering a market which is dominated by an increasingly small number of vendors (which we see as an opportunity). And according to my model, if we are willing to make a lot less on the first three years, we may be able to reach the billion dollar mark at most 10 years later, and we could do this without losing the freedom of operation--- without pressure to be acquired or go public. So the delimma here is pitching ERP to VC's for money we might not really need that badly, in the hopes that taking money will get us there faster and build new connections, or going on our own. We aren't going to be the next Facebook. We do however expect to become as big as RedHat, perhaps significantly bigger. I don't know what we will do. It will depend on discussions with others on the team yet. I do know though that the decision has become harder than it was before.
  - Tichy 14y ago
    20 years - the world wide web was invented just 22 years ago. In 20 years the world could be completely different from today. How do you even try to predict being a billion dollar company in 20 years?
Timothee 14y ago
Oh, rundmc is Dave McClure? I missed that on the first read. Even though I know he's behind 500Startups, I just didn't even think that he could consider himself a failure. I started to write a comment saying that "the author" was far from being that, but now that I realize who the author actually is, I'm thinking "what?! are you high?". Anyway, I related a lot to the first few paragraphs (maybe until he was about the same age I am now actually, which makes me hopeful :) ): I was good in school, got accepted in the best French engineering school where I discovered as well that "hard work and regular, consistent effort was also required". I did not really produce that hard work and consistent effort. The thing is that I hadn't really thought about what I wanted to do at that point: HS students that are good in Math and Physics go to Engineering schools and that's just what I did. Check. But now what? So I went for Computer Science a bit after eliminating the other options. Then moved to the US still without thinking in terms of career and what I really wanted to do. This has lead to taking jobs in tech but without enough consideration to where it would lead me. So now, after a few years of jobs as "not a developer but something else" and years doing programming as a hobby after work, I realize that maybe I should just find a job as a developer. Problem is that companies look at my resume and it doesn't quite "match" what they're expecting for someone who is that many years after his master. Long story short: I, too, feel like a late bloomer that hasn't filled his expectations from earlier successes. However, I don't run a fund, haven't worked for successful startups and am not friend with Sean Parker. Does that make me a failure? No, but I know I can do better. The good news is that I have 15 years to catch up with you, Dave!
- julien_c 14y ago
  Always good to stumble upon fellow alums from the "best French engineering school" here on HN :)
  - Timothee 14y ago
    I'll say that I tend to be self-conscious about saying "the best school", but it is what it is, right? And, looking at how little it's been serving me over here (in the Bay Area), I should at least be able to say it in a random HN comment… :)
jasonspalace 14y ago
things can sometimes feel so daunting as we toil away night and day for years without end on our hopes and dreams, reading his honesty and admission helps (at least me) put it in perspective that we still have time to keep going relentlessly while we force our dreams to come true (i hope). as long as we are so lucky to be here another day to keep going.
unimpressive 14y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposter_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposter_syndrome Pressure to succeed in ones youth is ubiquitous in certain industries. I think this song about the music industry pretty much sums it up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca9GJ6mMxLw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca9GJ6mMxLw
- opminion 14y ago
  Another possibility is http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/false_modesty http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/false_modesty
drewcoo 14y ago
@Dave: You will never be the person you thought you could have been. You will only be wildly different. And often, wildly, differently . . . successful, as you've shown the world. The same is true for all of us - we're never what we thought we'd be but we dream up new stuffs along the way. Retrospect and all that. It's too easy to look back but all the action is in the future. Look forward and be there. I find I have the same self-crisis about once a week and maybe more often now. Nobody on HN knows me. I haven't shaped anything in the industry. Even if I'm ultimately successful by my own standards, nobody will probably know. I don't care. My stealth agenda won't make me rich or famous or even worth noticing. I just want to fundamentally change the way we test software and the way we think about quality ("the 'q' word" - ugh). Nobody's gonna care about that until a change happens that nobody now thinks is worth pursuing. It doesn't mean that it's not worth accomplishing, though. But that's who I am. You, sir, are not I. You are known and have accomplishments. You're already living the dream. Well . . . some dream. Not mine and I guess not yours. But the point is that you're already doing your thing. Damn the torpedoes! Go as fast and as hard and as broadly (and as whatever you like) as you can in the way you'd like to most. Nobody's going to lift a finger to stop you. People will likely complain one way or another after the fact but at the end of the day all you have left is your life and your loves and there's no other way to measure your success than those things you hold closest to you. Don't give up!
logical42 14y ago
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." -- Teddy R.
ygmelnikova 14y ago
Are these things the compass to success? That's rather depressing. I can relate a little. I dropped out in grade 11. Built N. America's first fully graphical ecommmerce site (1992), Canada's first Windows IIS webserver (sorry), country's first 56K internet access, $10M IPO in 1998, client list includes Eckhart Tolle and Oprah. So what. I recommend you learn success from those that who mastered it over the eons, and they don't live anywhere near Silicon Valley. Here's one example; "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" -- Jesus Christ
- oijaf888 14y ago
  What graphical ecommerce site was that? Given it predates Mosaic and the commercial use of the web I'm surprised its not more well known.
  - ygmelnikova 14y ago
    Before the interweb was popular they had this little thing called a BBS and RoboBOARD/FX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBOARD/FX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBOARD/FX
    - gscott 14y ago
      Here is San Diego at the height of BBS'ing with about 1,100 boards very few used RoboBoard. Must have been much more popular in Canada.
elssar 14y ago
I was with you when I read the title, I was with you upto the point you mentioned that you weren't ready for the consistency & hardwork college requires, and then you went from "someone like me" to "someone who hasn't done as well as the people around him".
shengfengli 14y ago
helloworld
neilk 14y ago
Wow, I sure do hope he finally does that one thing that nobody, absolutely nobody can deny is important -- something as big as, say, a Twitter knockoff for the enterprise. Then he'll never have any nagging doubts about himself ever again. Hey, far be it from me to criticize someone who's trying to make a mark in the world. I myself am just past 40, a former child prodigy, not very successful in Silicon Valley, and still feel I have some creative works in me which are yet to be realized. Where I have sincere worries for Dave is that he doesn't seem to have a specific idea of what would count as success -- other than, maybe, it would be big enough and impress enough people that it would silence his demons. I don't know Dave, but I have a strong suspicion that this is also what led him to slack off at university -- rebelling against this idea that if he isn't the smartest and most successful, he's nothing. Because it makes every minor setback a bitter failure, and even success turns to ashes in your mouth. His mission statement shouldn't be that he wants a better epitaph. Other people get to write his epitaph, and by that time he'll be fucking dead. It's out of his control. What is in his control: whether his life was meaningful to himself. Did it express his unique talents, did it give him and others joy, did it help others? Did he make his own rules about how to evaluate his life or was he a slave to the caprices of fame and fortune? And this is about so much more than just a career. I think I'll just leave this here. A clip from The Wire. "The job will not save you." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b54EEpdv9q8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b54EEpdv9q8
- Domenic_S 14y ago
  > something as big as, say, a Twitter knockoff for the enterprise. It's been done! http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/overview/ http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/overview/
  - randall 14y ago
    I think he was referring to Yammer, and their recent acquisition.
    - neilk 14y ago
      DMC explicitly mentioned Yammer as one of the things that some of his former co-workers had done. (He neglects to consider all the things his other colleagues have done which failed, classic survivorship bias, but that's not my point.) My point is, from a certain perspective, everything looks stupid, and everything has a limited impact, and everything could have been better. Maybe some people who work at Yammer feel they're doing something important, like democratizing information flows within big companies. But it's also a knockoff of various social networking tools for the enterprise. It's a matter of which perspective you choose. DMC looks at Yammer wistfully because it seems like a big score that was within his grasp. But I bet that if DMC had worked at Yammer he'd be picking a narrative closer to this: I worked for a lame knockoff of innovative companies like Twitter and Facebook, and we failed to thrive independently, and in the end we had to be sold to a dying and clueless organization like Microsoft. And I made a little money, but I never achieved a higher executive rank - any idiot could have made the money I did, and it was barely enough to cover a small house in a not-so-great part of Palo Alto. But the real players made serious bank! People that I worked with who didn't seem much smarter than me! I wonder if I will ever do something worthy of the promise I had when I was a child....
freshfunk 14y ago
I think that part of the issue here (that I haven't really seen mentioned) is that when you're so close to others who've been successful but you aren't as successful as them, then it's easy to feel like a failure of some sort. In short, it's easy to feel like an ugly girl when you're standing next to the prettiest girl in class. Dave seemed like something of a child prodigy. Like he said he didn't get an advanced degree. He was around people at PayPal who went on to create $1B+ companies. He's worked with Sean Parker. Those are achievements in themselves. But when you keep that kind of company and you haven't done what they did, it's easy to feel like you're lagging. My old manager from my first job was one of the founders (and current CTO) at Gilt. One of my old college buddies who was also a coworker (under that same manager) went with him early on to build Gilt. Today I consider both of them incredibly successful. In comparison to them, they've achieved way more than I have.
fromdoon 14y ago
Wired.com: How do you maintain your optimism? Musk: Do I sound optimistic? Wired.com: Yeah, you always do. Musk: Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work. Whatever the odds you face, there is nothing in life you cannot achieve, if you have committed yourself wholeheartedly to the cause. Old/Young. Experienced/Inexperienced. Adept/Inept. Knowledgeable/Ignoramus. Prodigy/Late Bloomer. Nothing matters in the end. Cause when we are done and dusted and look back at our time, we will find that it was a journey that couldn't have been any other way. We made it what it was and it lies their for us to cherish. So don't hold yourself back. Nothing in this world is to be done or not to be done. The conscious/unconscious/subconscious rules that we follow every day were not there to start with and they are neither eternal. Go out there and change your world. Become the Newton. Become the Napoleon. Become the Buddha. Become the Gandhi. Remember, there are no rules and there never will be.
- merklemerkle 14y ago
  On it.
- gosu 14y ago
  What you sound is pleasing to me, but it also makes me anxious. As one of your listed role models might say, I don't know if it's really so helpful to pin such wild hopes to yourself. When I start feeling like a failure, it helps me to stop comparing myself to Napoleons, but rather to focus on exactly who I am now and what I want now, and to live according to my own personal life schedule.
davidandgoliath 14y ago
This I think is a trap we arrive at when we compare ourselves to others. It's safer for one's emotions to compare and contrast yourself to yourself in years prior. The least usable fuel in this industry is depression. Don't subject yourself to it and ignore everyone else. Support them in their endeavors, high-five them in their success but do not compare yourself to anyone else otherwise it won't take but a few days to arrive at the bottom of $some-random-vice and you'll be writing blog posts like this one second-guessing yourself. (I second guess myself daily and often wonder what the hell I'm doing pretending to be a CEO of an IT firm of all things. Yet have managed to remain in business as long as I have -- and help all sorts of people pay their mortgages, support their families and challenge themselves daily in the work they do for me. That's something I derive sheer joy from.) Admittedly the remainder results from my faith, but that's another post altogether.
- sigkill 14y ago
  One thing I've learnt is that we're all making it up as we go. So did our parents. I'm actually amazed that people actually listen to us when we clearly have this weird feeling that "Shit, I have no clue but fuck it let's do it live". You know you've had that feeling as well.
andyl 14y ago
So @Dave isn't Marc Andreesen or Larry Page. So f-ing what. The only tragic thing is that he hasn't figured out yet that work != life. I'm in a similar demographic as @Dave, live in palo alto, near his age. Had some really good successes 10-15 years ago, and nothing since then. My big activities for the past decade have been climbing, skiing and raising my kids. Some of my friends kept working and now have vineyards and foundations. And sometimes it stings that I don't fly private jets or have anything really impressive to brag about. But I had years of board-meetings, soaking up the one-upmanship. Once you become conscious of the non-stop compulsive attention seeking, there is a certain emptiness to it. So I stepped away from that, and I wouldn't trade a vineyard for the experiences I've had. Now I'm starting on a new company, working very hard with high confidence. But if this company doesn't see a monster outcome, I won't feel like a loser. My prime motivation is the products, the people, and the competition, all of which I love. IMHO we are in a golden age of software. To me it feels like being in the major leagues where everyone who participates is lucky as can be.
- kinleyd 14y ago
  I like the original post by @Dave and the honesty that comes through. I also like this reply. Life can feel so frenetic and short on time sometimes, and yet very, very long - too long even - at other times. Time is really a very elastic perception. The bottom line is you need to figure out what you want in life and how you define success. Hopefully at some point we all come to realize that while wealth, power or fame/recognition, etc. are excellent motivators, as an end such goals are rather hollow and empty. If and when one finally realizes that, then it really doesn't matter at what age you realize that, just as long as you've enjoyed what you've spent your time doing, and have picked up some good friends and family along the way. That's when you throw out the self-induced angst and hurry to "achieve something" and just do your thing, living in the moment. Of course, life is much easier the earlier one clues in on this. :)
  - chrisyeh 14y ago
    Scientists have already done great work in this area. "Success" doesn't bring happiness: http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2005/12/meaning-of-life.html http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2005/12/meaning-of-life.html Here's the money quote: "In the book, Deci talks about a study which discovered that humans have six basic aspirations. The first three, the extrinsic aspirations, are to be rich, famous, and good-looking. (Actually, rich/powerful and famous/well-liked, but why ruin a euphonious phrase?) Sound familiar? The second three, the intrinsic aspirations, are to have good relationships with the ones you care about, to achieve personal growth, and to feel like you contribute to your community. Deci's work showed that people who focused on extrinsic aspirations (regardless of whether or not they achieved them) tended to display narcissism, anxiety, and depression, while the people who focused on instrinsic aspirations displayed a strong sense of well-being."
vidarh 14y ago
We compare ourselves with our perceived peer-group. But we tend to self-select peer groups that are not too far from our own level. On the other hand, most of us looks to role models, which are pretty much by definition more successful than ourselves. We rarely compare ourselves to the people we consider we've already firmly surpassed. We might hang out with existing friends that we feel we're more successful than, but we're trying to meet that new potential employer that's above where we think we'll go next; we're trying to hook that huge important client; we're more eager to network with people we see as hugely successful; we want to learn from the people we consider smarter than ourselves, and so on. Not only that, but outside our own circle, the successful people are far more visible. For every successful founder there are hundreds that failed, gave up, never even got a company funded, and so on that we will never hear about. I've been through several startups. Some I co-founded. Others where I was the first guy or first 2-3 people brought in, on substantial equity. Been involved in a number of VC deals. But no big exits. Nothing enough to retire on. Not paid of my mortgage. It'd be easy for me to write a similar post about my career. Lots of companies that could've, should've made it big. Yet, years ago I realized that the moment I founded my first company, I was more successful as a founder or "startup guy" than most people - most people who want to start a company never even try, and fewer succeed. Each subsequent one, I've left some mark or other. So I've not founded another Google. But I've done enough. I want to do more. Lots more. But I've still done enough that I have plenty to be proud of without feeling a need for everyone to know about it. (though he things I'm the most proud of these days no longer have anything to do with my work at all)
Vivtek 14y ago
Shit, except for all the cool places he's worked in the tech industry and all the people he's met, and all the success he's had, and of course the fact he has a lot more money than I do, this guy is me. I hope to God I'm a late bloomer, too.
- elsewhen 14y ago
  he might not be as wealthy as you think: http://www.quora.com/How-much-is-Dave-McClure-worth http://www.quora.com/How-much-is-Dave-McClure-worth
  - Vivtek 14y ago
    A week ago I had seven dollars in the bank. Granted, that was after moving the household to Europe again and I do have accounts receivable, but financially I'm at the point where when I'm not actually underwater I feel successful. Having "a little less than a million" as a pad would reduce my stress considerably.
    - svdad 14y ago
      My wife and I went out for a celebratory dinner recently when our net worth finally turned positive after years of grad school.
      - Vivtek 14y ago
        The question is: did the dinner put you back into the red? If not, maybe it was warranted. :-)
        svdad 14y ago
        Only briefly. :)
eliben 14y ago
"[...] before I ended up with just a broken spirit and a comfortable life." Loved this quote.
gonzo 14y ago
Doc Searls (who enjoyed a lot of success in the late 90s) once said that nobody knew him for anything he did before he was 50.
lifeisstillgood 14y ago
You sound like a man who has found his centre - even if you still Want to go find it somewhere else. I, and many others here appreciate the honesty, and I certainly feel the same way on a daily basis. I wish you good luck with the business, but much much better luck with your family.
gavanwoolery 14y ago
I'm only 30, and I feel like I've made a million wrong turns. There are many people, who at my age, have already created their own billion-dollar company. However, I only work on what I believe in (aside from the mundane work I do to pay the bills), which I readily acknowledge is probably the worst route to traditional (i.e. monetary) success. There are many ways to flip a worthless company for a profit in the software world, but history does not remember people for their wealth, or even (temporary) fame. If I die poor and unknown, I still consider myself a success, because I spent my life doing things that I perceived as meaningful. Find interesting, unsolved problems (not necessarily in software), and pursue them to the end. You will remain a "late bloomer" so long as you live life passively.
- dasil003 14y ago
  I'm guessing very few people have actually created a billion dollar company by the time they're 30. Just sayin.
  - gavanwoolery 14y ago
    I'm a fan of exaggeration ;)
raheemm 14y ago
Compare and despair. Gotta watch out for that!
welcomebrand 14y ago
It's a totally different world these types of people live in to mine. I read the blog post, it was nicely written and a seemingly heartfelt reflection of a mans own position in life but I guess it's difficult to feel he's been anything other than a success already. Perhaps it's all relative and compared to Sean Parker's bank balance he's a dismal failure but to reach 40 and have "a little under a million" in liquid assets and to have been able to dabble in angel investing for several years just doesn't seem that bad a life.
- mapster 14y ago
  Agreed. I count myself fortunate to not live in that keeping up with the Jones mentality, because that is how I read it. A man must measure his worth by who he is, his character, respect given and received, and the love he gives and receives.
lewisflude 14y ago
I'm 19 yet I feel I can relate in some way.
- zpk 14y ago
  You're 19, you have so much ahead of your life ahead of you rather than behind. Go look in the mirror and smile...You can start from scratch today, and in a decade still be ahead of 99.999% of your age group, and even people twice that age as well.
paraschopra 14y ago
Life is not about winning or losing, life is simply an existence where we have to spend time without getting chronically bored. For some it may be startups, for others it may be spending happy times with the family. If you consider anyone else more "successful" than yourself (say a founder of a recently IPOed company), do you think s/he is happier or more satisfied than you are? How about if you get to know the founder recently went through a bitter divorce and also that his board doesn't have faith in him and is actively planning to fire him. Different levels of so called "success" are simply different modes of living, each mode bringing its own nuances or subtleties. From media or personal stories, all we hear about other "successful" people is better parts of their lives. The boring or bad events are seldom talked about. Once you are beyond basic poverty, your basic self (and happiness levels) more or less remains the same (no matter what you do or where you go). It's a myth that "success" _should_ be had and a worthwhile life is the one in which something worthwhile (as defined by the society, and not you) was achieved.
alexkearns 14y ago
At 33, I was single, penniless and back living with my parents. I had spent my twenties partying and getting drunk, somehow managing to carve out a career as a middling journalist during the sober bits. Journalism does not pay well and I was always teetering over the edge of my overdraft limit. In my early thirties, I sobered up a little and noticed that my career was going nowhere. I decided to sack in my reasonably secure job in publishing and move from Manchester (a provincial city in the UK) to the capital London. Big mistake. I struggled to get a job, got into debt and, eventually, in desperation, asked to move in with my parents. So there was I - a guy who had always valued his independence, who had on several occasions even mocked people who lived with mum and dad - staying in a tiny room in his parent's house. I was the epitome of a loser. I am now nearly 40 and my life situation has improved immeasurably. I am married to a wonderful lady, I own a house, I have a couple of reasonably successful projects-cum-start-ups that pay the bills and free me - hopefully forever - from having to work for someone else. I am not a mega-success on the world stage but, compared with where I was at 33, I am in a very good position. I suppose what I am saying here is that one can bloom at anytime, early in life or late in life. I would also add that being a programmer (I got a job as a web developer a couple of years after leaving my parents house) gives one a far greater chance of financial and business success than if you are involved in most other professions. Try doing a start-up if all you know is nursing or stacking shelves. So we are lucky in that we have a skill that can turn-around our lives at potentially any time.
- toyg 14y ago
  Are you back in Manchester then? I personally wouldn't call it "a provincial city" (it's very sparse, but overall Greater Manchester is home to 3 million people, on par with Birmingham and Glasgow for the title of "most populous urban conglomerate in the UK" just behind London); of course it's nothing like the capital, but it does provide a fairly good lifestyle at a fraction of London prices. There is usually at least one good restaurant for almost any cuisine you'd care about (except maybe my beloved Erithrean), and any movie worth watching will be at the Cornerhouse at some point. Granada/ITV also attracts quite a few glamorous models, if that's your thing. The only real problem in Manchester is the depressing weather, but it's not like London is so much better in that regard. My point is that London is on a scale shared with very few cities around the world, but that doesn't make all other British cities "provincial" -- some of them are, some of them are not.
rdl 14y ago
Read this article about people who made a bit of money in the first dotcom boom, lost it, and were seeking more again in 2005: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05RATPACK.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05RATPACK.html?_r... Interesting to note how many of them have become billionaires in just a few short years. Peter Thiel, Mark Pincus, Reid Hoffman, ...
jonmc12 14y ago
Silicon Valley is a funny place, a lot like Wall Street where the big winners are viewed to have the absolute qualities of success. In reality, even once you reach a threshold of competency and capability, its still a big gamble and the big winners are the lucky benefactors of Black Swan events. Of course, I'm referring to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's reflection of uncertainty and randomness as it applies to success in investing. On the other hand, Silicon Valley creates a dynamic where things change rapidly and some of the smartest people in the world are constantly pushing the limits. This creates an opportunity where if you are honest with yourself you have to say "I need to get better" - and this self-perception is a gift to be cherished over and over again. No losers when you look at the game this way.. just people who will grow and grow and others who won't.
mvts 14y ago
So you're a loser now when you have a bachelor degree, a job and good health? Times have changed.
michaelochurch 14y ago
I've come to the conclusion that success in business is like the game Rochambeau (Rock, Paper, Scissors). People will argue to death whether it's a game of luck or skill, and often it gets very emotional, with people who've had success attributing it to skill and the rest attributing their lack of success to bad luck. In reality, it's neither. It's a game of strategy in the academic, game-design sense (interaction rather than individual skill as the driver of outcome) but often with very little information that would indicate what the good strategies are. Rochambeau has no randomizer (no dice or shuffled cards) and is a skill game if you can predict the other guy's moves. Iterated, it becomes somewhat of a skill game. Same with business. Iterated, both become games of making choices, often with no idea what good and bad choices are, because useful information is so thin on the ground. Business is obviously not "random" in a true sense, but it's obviously not a pure-skill game because so many idiots get lucky and a lot of really talented people (like DMC) don't. It's a game of making iterated choices, often with little or no information that would inform them, and the luck factor comes out of the opacity. How does this relate to OP? DMC is a highly talented person, but he's in his mid-40s, he's worked in the supposedly meritocratic startup sector (and, as with trading, the definition of success in VC-istan is making money; if you've been in VC-istan for 2 decades and haven't made fuck-you money, you haven't won) and his net worth (as he admitted on Quora) is less than $1m. Given that, it's fair to say that he probably hasn't played his cards right. That doesn't make him unskillful or weak or "a loser"-- far from it, and I'm sure that none of those are true. It doesn't make him any less of a person, or any less smart, than the more successful people. It just makes it a good bet that if he could rewind to 20 and play from there again, he'd have a lot more success. And ultimately, the reason why many of us are sitting here not being rich and outlandishly successful when people of similar or inferior talent smash $500m+ exits is that, when faced with a thousand identical-looking doors, one with a pot of gold behind it, they had the "insight" to pick door #467 while we picked #822 or #134 or #915. Some of us pick #467 at the next opportunity but, of course, the next time the pot of gold is behind #719. I think the best thing to do is to back away from the VC-istan insanity, and pretend all that garbage doesn't exist. As long as I'm growing my skillset by 20 to 25% per year (which is not hard to do, because returns from increasing skill in technology are exponential) I feel like I ought to be happy with that. It can be difficult to be satisfied with this (first world problems) when you see unqualified idiots getting funded in enormous amounts, and then getting acquisitions and EIR gigs as welfare checks because they have powerful friends... so it takes some discipline and maturity not to be annoyed... but sanity is worth it.
dools 14y ago
Fellow failure here. Anyone want to kick off a #failaholics hashtag on twitter?
dctoedt 14y ago
See also "The importance of being prolific" [1], also posted here yesterday [2]. [1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ae-0624-prolific-artists-20120622,0,1889158,full.column http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ae-0624-proli... [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4212680 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4212680
dctoedt 14y ago
Feeling like a (comparative) failure can help one to sympathize with people who really are less fortunate --- you start to realize that maybe it's not entirely their fault.
rockmeamedee 14y ago
For all the self-deprecation in the post, I think we can all empathise, at the very least with: > and so here I am: still standing in the arena, in hand-to-hand combat with demons mostly of my own > making, aiming to make a small dent in the universe. nowhere near a great success story, yet > fighting the good fight and perhaps helping others to achieve greatness as I attempt a bit of my > own.
tvbuzz 14y ago
In 2008, Gladwell wrote an excellent article on this same topic: http://www.gladwell.com/2008/2008_10_20_a_latebloomers.html http://www.gladwell.com/2008/2008_10_20_a_latebloomers.html An excellent quote from the article: "The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition."
hathaway 14y ago
Not sure this guy has much to complain about - wife, kids, money, intelligence, plenty of opportunities. Maybe he just enjoy his life instead of wishing he was some hot shot.
AaronStanely 14y ago
How exactly does his position equate to being a "late bloomer"? Even if he hadn't done everything he did in the last 10 years, he would still have achieved more than 99.99999% of the world population. Think about that to get some perspective. I think he's being ridiculously harsh on himself.
51Cards 14y ago
Wow... late to this article but can only add one thing. The OP is me... (not literally but figuratively in every way). 42 in a week... a whole lot of 'shoulda/coulda' behind me and feeling like an unaccomplished elder in a field of successful kids. His article hit me pretty hard. At the minimum it makes me feel a little less alone in my thoughts. If the OP reads this please feel free to touch base if you would like a fellow late bloomer to chat with.
joering2 14y ago
Boy I felt like reading my own story, except I hadn't had brilliant parents that would give me good genes for a start and force me to be productive instead of lazy (so I wasn't working for huge corps like OP). But regardless this post made me think that if you treat your body well (healthy food, gym, as little stress as possible) and you hadn't had some genetical disadvantages then your brain stay quite young forever, and you are like a fine wine: you age well and gather wisdom all the time. Truly, the only thing stopping OP from learning from his mistakes and trying again, learning and trying again and again is his approach that I may be too old. You are not! How old you are only matters whether you will personally make a big deal out of it or not. Don't let it stop you from trying again.
keeptrying 14y ago
I actually see this as Dave's backwards way of saying: "Whatever your situation right now - its okay. Keep working."
radley 14y ago
I'm confused. In my mind Dave is already a success. I guess he's just in a rut. I read a great book called "How High can You Bounce?" It's all about if you've taken a downturn how can you spin it to your advantage so you rebound better off than where you were before the fall. Knowing this is possible is simply the first step. Think Dave just needs some bounce.
- radley 14y ago
  I'll also add an "Eskimo saying" I learned from West Wing: The best place to store extra food is in someone else's stomach. Dave has built an incredible network in the valley. He's helped 100s of people form companies. Those are a lot of great bonds. Is that not success?
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  "I'm confused. In my mind Dave is already a success." Virtually everyone is a failure depending upon who or what they compare themselves to. The odds against being a pro basketball player are astronomical -- everyone in the NBA is a huge success relative to those who didn't make it, but if they aren't Kobe Bryan, Lebron James or Dwyane Wade they may consider themselves failures. And even the top active guys live in the shadows of Jordan, et al. I'm pretty sure this is the root of dmc's problems. The nature of his work has him surrounded by insane statistical outliers (some of whom are probably more lucky than 'good', though I'm sure there are both). His feeling like less than a success in this situation is unfortunate, but probably a perfectly normal human response.
Rhino55 14y ago
I honestly thought Dave McClure was a multi-millionaire. Apparently not. The rich people I have interacted with and observed are huge dorks. They may be decent, hard-working people, fair, and generous, but they are ultimately dorks. Why? You can ask that of a psychologist, but it all comes down to a big word, "dis-inhibition". Basically if all of the people around you treat you like royalty, you tend to act like a jerk. See "The Emperor's New Groove" for details. Silicon Valley, as the engine / furnace of American Capitalism, could use a lot fewer dorks and lot more hard-working, honest, thoughtful people like Dave. That is all.
jroseattle 14y ago
I really like this post, it resonates with me as well. I have parallels with Dave's story -- mostly figuratively, but still felt like I've been along the same ride with him. The fact that Dave is still going strong at 46 and trying to make a difference shows there is much more substance to him than many others I know in this business. If there is one thing I've observed, it's how the perceived "lack" of success in those who expected great things of themselves have knocked so many people off their perch. Good job, Dave. In my book, the very fact you recognize this in yourself qualifies you as successful.
justanother 14y ago
Clearly, this individual's problem isn't that he hasn't found Shangri-La, it's that he needs a new compass. Dave, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was just hallucinating. Kublai Khan's pleasure dome is right next to you every morning, and she's [presumably] gorgeous. The sun still rises on the bankrupt, and many of them do absolutely fulfilling things with those days, even if it's beating an old game or learning to catch more fish. Or to speak more plainly, cash is but one axis on the graph of success, and often it is the very worst of them. Winning is having the strength to disregard it.
richardw 14y ago
I see a few knocks on Dave. What he should be valuing more, why he should(n't) consider himself successful, what other smart people think about what he said from their own perspective. Well, he opened himself up. In a world where opinions about others are far more numerous than people standing up and saying "this is my story, from the heart. these are my faults and failures, and my dreams". I find that more valuable than 100 posts blowing their own horn. It's the most basic story of all, shared by many, and one of the hardest to write.
rgbrgb 14y ago
But maybe self permanence is not so important. Perhaps it would be more accurate not to associate yourself with your past so much.
mathattack 14y ago
Good luck! A modern Robert Frost....
mathattack 14y ago
Good luck! A modern Robert Frost....
jdrake3 14y ago
Maybe the OP just needs to Embrace the Nagging Voice of Success - http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/05/21/embracing-the-nagging-voice-of-success/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/05/21/embracing-the-nagg....
mcormier 14y ago
Is not capitalizing the first word in a sentence the thing to do now?

604 points by moses1400 14y ago

The irony is that to 95% of Americans he's led a very successful life. Not that I don't understand the point. It's all relative.

cglee 14y ago
When you're in SF/Bay Area and trying to compete with the likes of LinkedIn, Yammer, etc, you're constantly bumping into that top 5%.
- taybin 14y ago
  There's a tendency to overrate the talent at these well known companies. Remember, LinkedIn didn't salt its passwords...
  - mythz 14y ago
    So? they're worth billions.
    - taybin 14y ago
      What does that have to do with anything mentioned here?
  - briandear 14y ago
    I know plenty of people that salt their passwords, that doesn't mean they have the talent to build a LinkedIn or even realize that the need existed. There's a lot to be said for vision and execution. Attention to every detail has nothing to do with talent. Every single programmer in the history of the world, talented or not makes mistakes, that doesn't reduce their talent. Talent isn't just about technical perfection. While LinkedIn didn't salt their passwords, how many other big-deal innovations did they execute and accomplish?
  - jasomill 14y ago
    And an even worse tendency to assume those with the most successful careers are the most talented.

vaksel 14y ago

someone needs a reality check. if he considers that kind of life "failure", he is going to lead a very depressed life unless he wins a few lotteries

svdad 14y ago
couldn't agree more. "i only made a little money" -- enough to have started angel investing in 2004 after exiting paypal. enough money to live in one of the most expensive places on earth, probably without having to work too much? check. a family and (apparently) happy marital relationship? check. moderately successful times working at important companies? check. Sure, it's good to be ambitious and set high goals. But the dude needs to get a grip. If he wants to achieve more, fine. But there's no universal standard by which he's a "failure". At the end of the day it's up to him and he'd do well to admit it.
- jwhite 14y ago
  A friend once took a 30 minute car ride with two successful people, both multimillionaires, back when that meant something. He asked them how much money they would need to feel financially secure. By the end of the trip they had bid each other up so far that they agreed that it would take a large multiple of their current net worths, just to feel truly safe and independent enough to retire.

bluedanieru 14y ago

Why are none of the sentences capitalized? It makes it difficult to read (so I didn't finish it). What I did read wasn't very interesting anyway, so no big loss.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- scotth 14y ago
  I for one agree with OP. The lack of capitalization made the article more difficult to read. For the record, I am not a brogrammer. Just a regular dude who's used to regular ol' English style standards.
  - briandear 14y ago
    You ought to look at his Keynotes. http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/how-to-pitch-a-vc-aka-startup-viagra-how-to-give-a-vc-a-hardon http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/how-to-pitch-a-vc-aka-s...
briandear 14y ago
davemcluredoesntcareaboutfontsorcapitalizationorwhatyouthink.
- briandear 14y ago
  The downvoters obviously don't know Dave.
  - rdl 14y ago
    Would he really say 12 words where one of them isn't "fuck", though?
    - briandear 14y ago

nedwin 14y ago

Great post Dave, and somewhat inspiring for someone nearing the end of their twenties who feels like he's only just hitting his straps now.

dmishe 14y ago
Mid 20, same shit.

tptacek 14y ago

Dave McClure is a Get for Dustin Curtis' Svbtle network. It's fun to watch this thing develop.

kevinburke 14y ago
There is a signaling effect from using Svbtle (Their aim is to signal "you are going to be reading good content") but it's hard to understand why you wouldn't want to use your own design and brand for your site. You are ceding control of your online brand to their design framework.
- Timothee 14y ago
  It's going off-topic, but this is something that has impressed me a lot in the growth of the network: by being part of Svbtle, that means you're leaving the design of your blog and your homepage to Dustin Curtis's design, besides a color and a logo. That he managed to convince that many high-calibre people so fast is very impressive. (especially since they have better things to do than thinking about joining a blog network. Most of them don't need that at all)
- rdl 14y ago
  Who cares about design and brand for a text blog? svbtle isn't perfect, but fairly acceptable. Sounds like the myspace vs. facebook argument.
- auston 14y ago
  I humbly disagree: As a writer, I'd like my design handled for me. I just want to be able to write the best piece within reach & present it to the world in a way that will gain mass distribution. Besides that, as a reader, it's easy to detect the Svbtle "look" & know that this article will probably be worth my time.
  - powerslave12r 14y ago
    This is exactly right. As soon as I see that blog theme, I recognize it as 'this is gonna be a good article.' The only nitpick I have about the site is I think the font is 'too wide.' That's just a personal preference of course.

simonsarris 14y ago

Well he's not a late bloomer to the vast majority of people. I think no matter your lot in life, if you're competitive, you get the feeling that you missed out on a lot that you could have accomplished. Stories of kids learning programming at 6, or starting companies at 16, etc, feed into this. Even I feel like I would be much farther "ahead" if I had only started programming before high school, if I had been more gung-ho about college, if I had gone to California in 2010 after graduation instead of remaining in New Hampshire. I don't even know any programmers in person outside of my work. My "network" isn't something to put on a pedestal. And yet by all accounts I live an extremely comfortable life, I wrote enough to get noticed and get a book deal just two years out of college, my friends think I'm of superhuman intellect, I'm able to walk to work every day, etc. I think the kind of worry in this post is a response to the world born out of hyper-competitiveness, and I don't think its a healthy one. It's not a positive message, and the events that could turn it into a positive message for this person, the qualifications for "not being a loser", should never involve anything five or six sigma from the norm. Look around you and relax. You've probably already won.

count 14y ago
For the type of competitive folks you talk about (of which I am definitely one), I think the Internet has really changed things - your 'scope' of competition is now 7 billion people, rather than the roughly 400-500 folks you could reasonably know in your 'home town'. Now, even in New Hampshire (to steal your example), you can subconsciously see yourself competing against folks in NYC or San Francisco or Beijing, who have entirely different sets of circumstances, etc. It's almost cliche that the 'hometown hero' will have a hard time in the 'real world' (subject of many movies, etc.), but the Internet makes this play out on a daily basis. Like you say, it's all a matter of perspective. Can you really settle for 'winning' locally, knowing that you're barely competitive globally? I think that's a question many folks struggle with.
- arohner 14y ago
  Absolutely true. I find the same effect on HN to be even worse. HN now has over 100k uniques/day[1] . That means that on any topic you'd ever like to comment on, odds are good there are many HN visitors who are better at that you are. [1] traffic from last year: http://ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-9feb11.png http://ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-9feb11.png)

blu3jack 14y ago

I'm not quite sure what the point of this blog post is. I guess it's to re-start his blog, and restarting a blog often lacks a good hook, and may be heavy on the backstory. Hopefully this is a starting point, not a destination.

big_data 14y ago

Sounds to me like he is suffering from a social comparison bias. A few peers may have done better than he, but I am sure there are those out there that would say he has done pretty good.

daveasaurus 14y ago
I've heard that grad students go through something very similar when they go to grad school: feelings of inferiority and fears of being "exposed" as fake when surrounded by so many other intelligent people. I've never worked for a start-up but imagine the start-up scene works the same given the common stereotypes: success stories of 20-year-olds, hyper intelligent ivy-league drop-outs, etc. I don't know whether they're the rule or the exception to it.

kposehn 14y ago

Wow. As in "holy shit that was inspiring."

soup10 14y ago

Love the optimism and ambition. It hurts to read how hard you are on yourself, but I hope you achieve your goals and relax a little :). Good luck with your incubator.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

prophetjohn 14y ago

This is kind of inspiring. As someone who wrote their first line of code at 25 and won't be able to shed the "intern" title until I graduate at almost 28, it's really easy to feel like I screwed myself over by not being where I am now 5+ years ago. Especially so in an industry where the younger you are the better and there are stories of people in their 40s having a problem finding work. The real kicker is that I actually consider myself a pretty good programmer, at least for my experience level. As stated, I've been programming for about 2 years and I'm the primary contributor on a project that is deemed to be the "number one priority" for our application. But how good of a programmer would I have been had my parents bought me a computer when I was a kid? Or even when I was a teenager? I didn't even really know I liked computers until I was around 21 and even if I knew what the hell programming was then, I definitely wouldn't have been able to afford college. So I guess there's still a decent likelihood that I'll need to be transitioning out of programming less than 15 years into my career, but hopefully there's still plenty of other opportunities for me to do great things for the next 20 or so years after that.

jiggy2011 14y ago
To be honest, I wouldn't worry too much. Everyone is like "I was programming since I was 10!" Nobody ever asks what they were programming at 10, most people wrote relatively simple stuff until they grew up and got a professional job. Now to wait for replies from people who designed OSes when they were 12 :)
- briandear 14y ago
  I managed to build a game in BASIC when I was 10. ..and that's about it (other than BBSing and running up the phone bill.)
- simonbrown 14y ago
  A 12 year old found a vulnerability in Firefox. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/12-year-old-finds-critical-firefox-flaw-earns-3000-bounty/7524 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/12-year-old-finds-critica...
- Swizec 14y ago

joshmlewis 14y ago

I'm almost 19 and I feel like I'm not moving fast enough sometimes. I've already worked for two successful startups and am in an accelerator program as a designer cofounder. I love what I do and I can honestly say I have one of the best jobs in the world and the people I've met are amazing, I'm just scared of losing out on time. This really made me see that I don't have just a few year window to do well, but it's a life long thing. I would have never guessed I'd be doing what I'm doing now a year ago, and I have no idea what I'll be doing a year from now, but I figure if I just keep doing what I love and building awesome products, I'll always be happy.

Timothee 14y ago
Hell yeah you have time! You're only 19 and you seem to know what you want to do for the foreseeable future, have co-founded a company, worked at two successful startups… I have yet to do any of these. (well, maybe I do know what I want to do? Maybe…) You're so ahead of most people, it's almost tempting to downvote you for humblebrag. It's like people who complain because they do only [good measurement of self in a domain] in [said domain]. (I would give a sport example, but I couldn't give you a realistic one)
- joshmlewis 14y ago
  Yes, like the gorgeous girls that call themselves fat, it pisses me off. I feel like though I've done this, but I'm still not financially secure, I worry about a paycheck, and people still don't respect what I do and think I should be in college. So it just makes me wonder, ya know?
  - Timothee 14y ago
    Don't get me wrong: I'm not blaming you. I think a lot of people, if not most, are insecure or at least unsure about their accomplishments. I feel that it's not really discussed: you might receive kudos from the family, but they're often outside your domain, so "it doesn't count". You might have some kind of role model: "I want to be like that guy", but that guy rarely looks back to acknowledge your accomplishments. (and he's probably looking up to somebody else too) If anybody does, it's mostly people "lower than or equal to" you that do: at best your peers, at worst people who don't really know what they're talking about. So it's hard to see yourself in the proper referential…

prayag 14y ago

Dave's dilemma is far too familier to a lot of people in the tech scene in general, and bay area in particular. Bay area attracts the brightest minds from across the globe. All of them have been at the top of their high school classes. They have all been told from a very young age that they are destined to doing something great in life. They not only expect themselves to do better than themselves but pretty much demand it. But when you have so many smart people trying to be more successful than their peers the definition of success changes. The bar rises and just building and selling a successful company doesn't seem good enough. You have to start the next Facebook, or the next Twitter. IMHO, the best measure of success is not absolutes but a relative one. Compare your current self with your self from 2 years ago and ask if you are a better, more successful person. By that measure Dave has done exceptionally well in the past few years.

einhverfr 14y ago
Exactly. As I have been doing a lot more financial planning I have started to second-guess whether I want to look for funding in the Valley or bootstrap with a partner. Yes, I think we can be a billion dollar company in 20 years or less with a couple million in investment. Yes, I think we could bring open source ERP into the mainstream. However we aren't in the hot areas of the day. We are entering a market which is dominated by an increasingly small number of vendors (which we see as an opportunity). And according to my model, if we are willing to make a lot less on the first three years, we may be able to reach the billion dollar mark at most 10 years later, and we could do this without losing the freedom of operation--- without pressure to be acquired or go public. So the delimma here is pitching ERP to VC's for money we might not really need that badly, in the hopes that taking money will get us there faster and build new connections, or going on our own. We aren't going to be the next Facebook. We do however expect to become as big as RedHat, perhaps significantly bigger. I don't know what we will do. It will depend on discussions with others on the team yet. I do know though that the decision has become harder than it was before.
- Tichy 14y ago
  20 years - the world wide web was invented just 22 years ago. In 20 years the world could be completely different from today. How do you even try to predict being a billion dollar company in 20 years?

Timothee 14y ago

Oh, rundmc is Dave McClure? I missed that on the first read. Even though I know he's behind 500Startups, I just didn't even think that he could consider himself a failure. I started to write a comment saying that "the author" was far from being that, but now that I realize who the author actually is, I'm thinking "what?! are you high?". Anyway, I related a lot to the first few paragraphs (maybe until he was about the same age I am now actually, which makes me hopeful :) ): I was good in school, got accepted in the best French engineering school where I discovered as well that "hard work and regular, consistent effort was also required". I did not really produce that hard work and consistent effort. The thing is that I hadn't really thought about what I wanted to do at that point: HS students that are good in Math and Physics go to Engineering schools and that's just what I did. Check. But now what? So I went for Computer Science a bit after eliminating the other options. Then moved to the US still without thinking in terms of career and what I really wanted to do. This has lead to taking jobs in tech but without enough consideration to where it would lead me. So now, after a few years of jobs as "not a developer but something else" and years doing programming as a hobby after work, I realize that maybe I should just find a job as a developer. Problem is that companies look at my resume and it doesn't quite "match" what they're expecting for someone who is that many years after his master. Long story short: I, too, feel like a late bloomer that hasn't filled his expectations from earlier successes. However, I don't run a fund, haven't worked for successful startups and am not friend with Sean Parker. Does that make me a failure? No, but I know I can do better. The good news is that I have 15 years to catch up with you, Dave!

julien_c 14y ago
Always good to stumble upon fellow alums from the "best French engineering school" here on HN :)
- Timothee 14y ago
  I'll say that I tend to be self-conscious about saying "the best school", but it is what it is, right? And, looking at how little it's been serving me over here (in the Bay Area), I should at least be able to say it in a random HN comment… :)

jasonspalace 14y ago

things can sometimes feel so daunting as we toil away night and day for years without end on our hopes and dreams, reading his honesty and admission helps (at least me) put it in perspective that we still have time to keep going relentlessly while we force our dreams to come true (i hope). as long as we are so lucky to be here another day to keep going.

unimpressive 14y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposter_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposter_syndrome Pressure to succeed in ones youth is ubiquitous in certain industries. I think this song about the music industry pretty much sums it up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca9GJ6mMxLw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca9GJ6mMxLw

opminion 14y ago
Another possibility is http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/false_modesty http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/false_modesty

drewcoo 14y ago

@Dave: You will never be the person you thought you could have been. You will only be wildly different. And often, wildly, differently . . . successful, as you've shown the world. The same is true for all of us - we're never what we thought we'd be but we dream up new stuffs along the way. Retrospect and all that. It's too easy to look back but all the action is in the future. Look forward and be there. I find I have the same self-crisis about once a week and maybe more often now. Nobody on HN knows me. I haven't shaped anything in the industry. Even if I'm ultimately successful by my own standards, nobody will probably know. I don't care. My stealth agenda won't make me rich or famous or even worth noticing. I just want to fundamentally change the way we test software and the way we think about quality ("the 'q' word" - ugh). Nobody's gonna care about that until a change happens that nobody now thinks is worth pursuing. It doesn't mean that it's not worth accomplishing, though. But that's who I am. You, sir, are not I. You are known and have accomplishments. You're already living the dream. Well . . . some dream. Not mine and I guess not yours. But the point is that you're already doing your thing. Damn the torpedoes! Go as fast and as hard and as broadly (and as whatever you like) as you can in the way you'd like to most. Nobody's going to lift a finger to stop you. People will likely complain one way or another after the fact but at the end of the day all you have left is your life and your loves and there's no other way to measure your success than those things you hold closest to you. Don't give up!

logical42 14y ago

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." -- Teddy R.

ygmelnikova 14y ago

Are these things the compass to success? That's rather depressing. I can relate a little. I dropped out in grade 11. Built N. America's first fully graphical ecommmerce site (1992), Canada's first Windows IIS webserver (sorry), country's first 56K internet access, $10M IPO in 1998, client list includes Eckhart Tolle and Oprah. So what. I recommend you learn success from those that who mastered it over the eons, and they don't live anywhere near Silicon Valley. Here's one example; "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" -- Jesus Christ

oijaf888 14y ago
What graphical ecommerce site was that? Given it predates Mosaic and the commercial use of the web I'm surprised its not more well known.
- ygmelnikova 14y ago
  Before the interweb was popular they had this little thing called a BBS and RoboBOARD/FX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBOARD/FX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBOARD/FX
  - gscott 14y ago
    Here is San Diego at the height of BBS'ing with about 1,100 boards very few used RoboBoard. Must have been much more popular in Canada.

elssar 14y ago

I was with you when I read the title, I was with you upto the point you mentioned that you weren't ready for the consistency & hardwork college requires, and then you went from "someone like me" to "someone who hasn't done as well as the people around him".

shengfengli 14y ago

helloworld

neilk 14y ago

Wow, I sure do hope he finally does that one thing that nobody, absolutely nobody can deny is important -- something as big as, say, a Twitter knockoff for the enterprise. Then he'll never have any nagging doubts about himself ever again. Hey, far be it from me to criticize someone who's trying to make a mark in the world. I myself am just past 40, a former child prodigy, not very successful in Silicon Valley, and still feel I have some creative works in me which are yet to be realized. Where I have sincere worries for Dave is that he doesn't seem to have a specific idea of what would count as success -- other than, maybe, it would be big enough and impress enough people that it would silence his demons. I don't know Dave, but I have a strong suspicion that this is also what led him to slack off at university -- rebelling against this idea that if he isn't the smartest and most successful, he's nothing. Because it makes every minor setback a bitter failure, and even success turns to ashes in your mouth. His mission statement shouldn't be that he wants a better epitaph. Other people get to write his epitaph, and by that time he'll be fucking dead. It's out of his control. What is in his control: whether his life was meaningful to himself. Did it express his unique talents, did it give him and others joy, did it help others? Did he make his own rules about how to evaluate his life or was he a slave to the caprices of fame and fortune? And this is about so much more than just a career. I think I'll just leave this here. A clip from The Wire. "The job will not save you." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b54EEpdv9q8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b54EEpdv9q8

Domenic_S 14y ago
> something as big as, say, a Twitter knockoff for the enterprise. It's been done! http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/overview/ http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/overview/
- randall 14y ago
  I think he was referring to Yammer, and their recent acquisition.
  - neilk 14y ago
    DMC explicitly mentioned Yammer as one of the things that some of his former co-workers had done. (He neglects to consider all the things his other colleagues have done which failed, classic survivorship bias, but that's not my point.) My point is, from a certain perspective, everything looks stupid, and everything has a limited impact, and everything could have been better. Maybe some people who work at Yammer feel they're doing something important, like democratizing information flows within big companies. But it's also a knockoff of various social networking tools for the enterprise. It's a matter of which perspective you choose. DMC looks at Yammer wistfully because it seems like a big score that was within his grasp. But I bet that if DMC had worked at Yammer he'd be picking a narrative closer to this: I worked for a lame knockoff of innovative companies like Twitter and Facebook, and we failed to thrive independently, and in the end we had to be sold to a dying and clueless organization like Microsoft. And I made a little money, but I never achieved a higher executive rank - any idiot could have made the money I did, and it was barely enough to cover a small house in a not-so-great part of Palo Alto. But the real players made serious bank! People that I worked with who didn't seem much smarter than me! I wonder if I will ever do something worthy of the promise I had when I was a child....

freshfunk 14y ago

I think that part of the issue here (that I haven't really seen mentioned) is that when you're so close to others who've been successful but you aren't as successful as them, then it's easy to feel like a failure of some sort. In short, it's easy to feel like an ugly girl when you're standing next to the prettiest girl in class. Dave seemed like something of a child prodigy. Like he said he didn't get an advanced degree. He was around people at PayPal who went on to create $1B+ companies. He's worked with Sean Parker. Those are achievements in themselves. But when you keep that kind of company and you haven't done what they did, it's easy to feel like you're lagging. My old manager from my first job was one of the founders (and current CTO) at Gilt. One of my old college buddies who was also a coworker (under that same manager) went with him early on to build Gilt. Today I consider both of them incredibly successful. In comparison to them, they've achieved way more than I have.

fromdoon 14y ago

Wired.com: How do you maintain your optimism? Musk: Do I sound optimistic? Wired.com: Yeah, you always do. Musk: Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work. Whatever the odds you face, there is nothing in life you cannot achieve, if you have committed yourself wholeheartedly to the cause. Old/Young. Experienced/Inexperienced. Adept/Inept. Knowledgeable/Ignoramus. Prodigy/Late Bloomer. Nothing matters in the end. Cause when we are done and dusted and look back at our time, we will find that it was a journey that couldn't have been any other way. We made it what it was and it lies their for us to cherish. So don't hold yourself back. Nothing in this world is to be done or not to be done. The conscious/unconscious/subconscious rules that we follow every day were not there to start with and they are neither eternal. Go out there and change your world. Become the Newton. Become the Napoleon. Become the Buddha. Become the Gandhi. Remember, there are no rules and there never will be.

merklemerkle 14y ago
On it.
gosu 14y ago
What you sound is pleasing to me, but it also makes me anxious. As one of your listed role models might say, I don't know if it's really so helpful to pin such wild hopes to yourself. When I start feeling like a failure, it helps me to stop comparing myself to Napoleons, but rather to focus on exactly who I am now and what I want now, and to live according to my own personal life schedule.

davidandgoliath 14y ago

This I think is a trap we arrive at when we compare ourselves to others. It's safer for one's emotions to compare and contrast yourself to yourself in years prior. The least usable fuel in this industry is depression. Don't subject yourself to it and ignore everyone else. Support them in their endeavors, high-five them in their success but do not compare yourself to anyone else otherwise it won't take but a few days to arrive at the bottom of $some-random-vice and you'll be writing blog posts like this one second-guessing yourself. (I second guess myself daily and often wonder what the hell I'm doing pretending to be a CEO of an IT firm of all things. Yet have managed to remain in business as long as I have -- and help all sorts of people pay their mortgages, support their families and challenge themselves daily in the work they do for me. That's something I derive sheer joy from.) Admittedly the remainder results from my faith, but that's another post altogether.

sigkill 14y ago
One thing I've learnt is that we're all making it up as we go. So did our parents. I'm actually amazed that people actually listen to us when we clearly have this weird feeling that "Shit, I have no clue but fuck it let's do it live". You know you've had that feeling as well.

andyl 14y ago

So @Dave isn't Marc Andreesen or Larry Page. So f-ing what. The only tragic thing is that he hasn't figured out yet that work != life. I'm in a similar demographic as @Dave, live in palo alto, near his age. Had some really good successes 10-15 years ago, and nothing since then. My big activities for the past decade have been climbing, skiing and raising my kids. Some of my friends kept working and now have vineyards and foundations. And sometimes it stings that I don't fly private jets or have anything really impressive to brag about. But I had years of board-meetings, soaking up the one-upmanship. Once you become conscious of the non-stop compulsive attention seeking, there is a certain emptiness to it. So I stepped away from that, and I wouldn't trade a vineyard for the experiences I've had. Now I'm starting on a new company, working very hard with high confidence. But if this company doesn't see a monster outcome, I won't feel like a loser. My prime motivation is the products, the people, and the competition, all of which I love. IMHO we are in a golden age of software. To me it feels like being in the major leagues where everyone who participates is lucky as can be.

kinleyd 14y ago
I like the original post by @Dave and the honesty that comes through. I also like this reply. Life can feel so frenetic and short on time sometimes, and yet very, very long - too long even - at other times. Time is really a very elastic perception. The bottom line is you need to figure out what you want in life and how you define success. Hopefully at some point we all come to realize that while wealth, power or fame/recognition, etc. are excellent motivators, as an end such goals are rather hollow and empty. If and when one finally realizes that, then it really doesn't matter at what age you realize that, just as long as you've enjoyed what you've spent your time doing, and have picked up some good friends and family along the way. That's when you throw out the self-induced angst and hurry to "achieve something" and just do your thing, living in the moment. Of course, life is much easier the earlier one clues in on this. :)
- chrisyeh 14y ago
  Scientists have already done great work in this area. "Success" doesn't bring happiness: http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2005/12/meaning-of-life.html http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2005/12/meaning-of-life.html Here's the money quote: "In the book, Deci talks about a study which discovered that humans have six basic aspirations. The first three, the extrinsic aspirations, are to be rich, famous, and good-looking. (Actually, rich/powerful and famous/well-liked, but why ruin a euphonious phrase?) Sound familiar? The second three, the intrinsic aspirations, are to have good relationships with the ones you care about, to achieve personal growth, and to feel like you contribute to your community. Deci's work showed that people who focused on extrinsic aspirations (regardless of whether or not they achieved them) tended to display narcissism, anxiety, and depression, while the people who focused on instrinsic aspirations displayed a strong sense of well-being."

vidarh 14y ago

We compare ourselves with our perceived peer-group. But we tend to self-select peer groups that are not too far from our own level. On the other hand, most of us looks to role models, which are pretty much by definition more successful than ourselves. We rarely compare ourselves to the people we consider we've already firmly surpassed. We might hang out with existing friends that we feel we're more successful than, but we're trying to meet that new potential employer that's above where we think we'll go next; we're trying to hook that huge important client; we're more eager to network with people we see as hugely successful; we want to learn from the people we consider smarter than ourselves, and so on. Not only that, but outside our own circle, the successful people are far more visible. For every successful founder there are hundreds that failed, gave up, never even got a company funded, and so on that we will never hear about. I've been through several startups. Some I co-founded. Others where I was the first guy or first 2-3 people brought in, on substantial equity. Been involved in a number of VC deals. But no big exits. Nothing enough to retire on. Not paid of my mortgage. It'd be easy for me to write a similar post about my career. Lots of companies that could've, should've made it big. Yet, years ago I realized that the moment I founded my first company, I was more successful as a founder or "startup guy" than most people - most people who want to start a company never even try, and fewer succeed. Each subsequent one, I've left some mark or other. So I've not founded another Google. But I've done enough. I want to do more. Lots more. But I've still done enough that I have plenty to be proud of without feeling a need for everyone to know about it. (though he things I'm the most proud of these days no longer have anything to do with my work at all)

Vivtek 14y ago

Shit, except for all the cool places he's worked in the tech industry and all the people he's met, and all the success he's had, and of course the fact he has a lot more money than I do, this guy is me. I hope to God I'm a late bloomer, too.

elsewhen 14y ago
he might not be as wealthy as you think: http://www.quora.com/How-much-is-Dave-McClure-worth http://www.quora.com/How-much-is-Dave-McClure-worth
- Vivtek 14y ago
  A week ago I had seven dollars in the bank. Granted, that was after moving the household to Europe again and I do have accounts receivable, but financially I'm at the point where when I'm not actually underwater I feel successful. Having "a little less than a million" as a pad would reduce my stress considerably.
  - svdad 14y ago
    My wife and I went out for a celebratory dinner recently when our net worth finally turned positive after years of grad school.
    - Vivtek 14y ago
      The question is: did the dinner put you back into the red? If not, maybe it was warranted. :-)
      - svdad 14y ago
        Only briefly. :)

eliben 14y ago

"[...] before I ended up with just a broken spirit and a comfortable life." Loved this quote.

gonzo 14y ago

Doc Searls (who enjoyed a lot of success in the late 90s) once said that nobody knew him for anything he did before he was 50.

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

You sound like a man who has found his centre - even if you still Want to go find it somewhere else. I, and many others here appreciate the honesty, and I certainly feel the same way on a daily basis. I wish you good luck with the business, but much much better luck with your family.

gavanwoolery 14y ago

I'm only 30, and I feel like I've made a million wrong turns. There are many people, who at my age, have already created their own billion-dollar company. However, I only work on what I believe in (aside from the mundane work I do to pay the bills), which I readily acknowledge is probably the worst route to traditional (i.e. monetary) success. There are many ways to flip a worthless company for a profit in the software world, but history does not remember people for their wealth, or even (temporary) fame. If I die poor and unknown, I still consider myself a success, because I spent my life doing things that I perceived as meaningful. Find interesting, unsolved problems (not necessarily in software), and pursue them to the end. You will remain a "late bloomer" so long as you live life passively.

dasil003 14y ago
I'm guessing very few people have actually created a billion dollar company by the time they're 30. Just sayin.
- gavanwoolery 14y ago
  I'm a fan of exaggeration ;)

raheemm 14y ago

Compare and despair. Gotta watch out for that!

welcomebrand 14y ago

It's a totally different world these types of people live in to mine. I read the blog post, it was nicely written and a seemingly heartfelt reflection of a mans own position in life but I guess it's difficult to feel he's been anything other than a success already. Perhaps it's all relative and compared to Sean Parker's bank balance he's a dismal failure but to reach 40 and have "a little under a million" in liquid assets and to have been able to dabble in angel investing for several years just doesn't seem that bad a life.

mapster 14y ago
Agreed. I count myself fortunate to not live in that keeping up with the Jones mentality, because that is how I read it. A man must measure his worth by who he is, his character, respect given and received, and the love he gives and receives.

lewisflude 14y ago

I'm 19 yet I feel I can relate in some way.

zpk 14y ago
You're 19, you have so much ahead of your life ahead of you rather than behind. Go look in the mirror and smile...You can start from scratch today, and in a decade still be ahead of 99.999% of your age group, and even people twice that age as well.

paraschopra 14y ago

Life is not about winning or losing, life is simply an existence where we have to spend time without getting chronically bored. For some it may be startups, for others it may be spending happy times with the family. If you consider anyone else more "successful" than yourself (say a founder of a recently IPOed company), do you think s/he is happier or more satisfied than you are? How about if you get to know the founder recently went through a bitter divorce and also that his board doesn't have faith in him and is actively planning to fire him. Different levels of so called "success" are simply different modes of living, each mode bringing its own nuances or subtleties. From media or personal stories, all we hear about other "successful" people is better parts of their lives. The boring or bad events are seldom talked about. Once you are beyond basic poverty, your basic self (and happiness levels) more or less remains the same (no matter what you do or where you go). It's a myth that "success" _should_ be had and a worthwhile life is the one in which something worthwhile (as defined by the society, and not you) was achieved.

alexkearns 14y ago

At 33, I was single, penniless and back living with my parents. I had spent my twenties partying and getting drunk, somehow managing to carve out a career as a middling journalist during the sober bits. Journalism does not pay well and I was always teetering over the edge of my overdraft limit. In my early thirties, I sobered up a little and noticed that my career was going nowhere. I decided to sack in my reasonably secure job in publishing and move from Manchester (a provincial city in the UK) to the capital London. Big mistake. I struggled to get a job, got into debt and, eventually, in desperation, asked to move in with my parents. So there was I - a guy who had always valued his independence, who had on several occasions even mocked people who lived with mum and dad - staying in a tiny room in his parent's house. I was the epitome of a loser. I am now nearly 40 and my life situation has improved immeasurably. I am married to a wonderful lady, I own a house, I have a couple of reasonably successful projects-cum-start-ups that pay the bills and free me - hopefully forever - from having to work for someone else. I am not a mega-success on the world stage but, compared with where I was at 33, I am in a very good position. I suppose what I am saying here is that one can bloom at anytime, early in life or late in life. I would also add that being a programmer (I got a job as a web developer a couple of years after leaving my parents house) gives one a far greater chance of financial and business success than if you are involved in most other professions. Try doing a start-up if all you know is nursing or stacking shelves. So we are lucky in that we have a skill that can turn-around our lives at potentially any time.

toyg 14y ago
Are you back in Manchester then? I personally wouldn't call it "a provincial city" (it's very sparse, but overall Greater Manchester is home to 3 million people, on par with Birmingham and Glasgow for the title of "most populous urban conglomerate in the UK" just behind London); of course it's nothing like the capital, but it does provide a fairly good lifestyle at a fraction of London prices. There is usually at least one good restaurant for almost any cuisine you'd care about (except maybe my beloved Erithrean), and any movie worth watching will be at the Cornerhouse at some point. Granada/ITV also attracts quite a few glamorous models, if that's your thing. The only real problem in Manchester is the depressing weather, but it's not like London is so much better in that regard. My point is that London is on a scale shared with very few cities around the world, but that doesn't make all other British cities "provincial" -- some of them are, some of them are not.

rdl 14y ago

Read this article about people who made a bit of money in the first dotcom boom, lost it, and were seeking more again in 2005: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05RATPACK.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05RATPACK.html?_r... Interesting to note how many of them have become billionaires in just a few short years. Peter Thiel, Mark Pincus, Reid Hoffman, ...

jonmc12 14y ago

Silicon Valley is a funny place, a lot like Wall Street where the big winners are viewed to have the absolute qualities of success. In reality, even once you reach a threshold of competency and capability, its still a big gamble and the big winners are the lucky benefactors of Black Swan events. Of course, I'm referring to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's reflection of uncertainty and randomness as it applies to success in investing. On the other hand, Silicon Valley creates a dynamic where things change rapidly and some of the smartest people in the world are constantly pushing the limits. This creates an opportunity where if you are honest with yourself you have to say "I need to get better" - and this self-perception is a gift to be cherished over and over again. No losers when you look at the game this way.. just people who will grow and grow and others who won't.

mvts 14y ago

So you're a loser now when you have a bachelor degree, a job and good health? Times have changed.

michaelochurch 14y ago

I've come to the conclusion that success in business is like the game Rochambeau (Rock, Paper, Scissors). People will argue to death whether it's a game of luck or skill, and often it gets very emotional, with people who've had success attributing it to skill and the rest attributing their lack of success to bad luck. In reality, it's neither. It's a game of strategy in the academic, game-design sense (interaction rather than individual skill as the driver of outcome) but often with very little information that would indicate what the good strategies are. Rochambeau has no randomizer (no dice or shuffled cards) and is a skill game if you can predict the other guy's moves. Iterated, it becomes somewhat of a skill game. Same with business. Iterated, both become games of making choices, often with no idea what good and bad choices are, because useful information is so thin on the ground. Business is obviously not "random" in a true sense, but it's obviously not a pure-skill game because so many idiots get lucky and a lot of really talented people (like DMC) don't. It's a game of making iterated choices, often with little or no information that would inform them, and the luck factor comes out of the opacity. How does this relate to OP? DMC is a highly talented person, but he's in his mid-40s, he's worked in the supposedly meritocratic startup sector (and, as with trading, the definition of success in VC-istan is making money; if you've been in VC-istan for 2 decades and haven't made fuck-you money, you haven't won) and his net worth (as he admitted on Quora) is less than $1m. Given that, it's fair to say that he probably hasn't played his cards right. That doesn't make him unskillful or weak or "a loser"-- far from it, and I'm sure that none of those are true. It doesn't make him any less of a person, or any less smart, than the more successful people. It just makes it a good bet that if he could rewind to 20 and play from there again, he'd have a lot more success. And ultimately, the reason why many of us are sitting here not being rich and outlandishly successful when people of similar or inferior talent smash $500m+ exits is that, when faced with a thousand identical-looking doors, one with a pot of gold behind it, they had the "insight" to pick door #467 while we picked #822 or #134 or #915. Some of us pick #467 at the next opportunity but, of course, the next time the pot of gold is behind #719. I think the best thing to do is to back away from the VC-istan insanity, and pretend all that garbage doesn't exist. As long as I'm growing my skillset by 20 to 25% per year (which is not hard to do, because returns from increasing skill in technology are exponential) I feel like I ought to be happy with that. It can be difficult to be satisfied with this (first world problems) when you see unqualified idiots getting funded in enormous amounts, and then getting acquisitions and EIR gigs as welfare checks because they have powerful friends... so it takes some discipline and maturity not to be annoyed... but sanity is worth it.

dools 14y ago

Fellow failure here. Anyone want to kick off a #failaholics hashtag on twitter?

dctoedt 14y ago

See also "The importance of being prolific" [1], also posted here yesterday [2]. [1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ae-0624-prolific-artists-20120622,0,1889158,full.column http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ae-0624-proli... [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4212680 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4212680

dctoedt 14y ago

Feeling like a (comparative) failure can help one to sympathize with people who really are less fortunate --- you start to realize that maybe it's not entirely their fault.

rockmeamedee 14y ago

For all the self-deprecation in the post, I think we can all empathise, at the very least with: > and so here I am: still standing in the arena, in hand-to-hand combat with demons mostly of my own > making, aiming to make a small dent in the universe. nowhere near a great success story, yet > fighting the good fight and perhaps helping others to achieve greatness as I attempt a bit of my > own.

tvbuzz 14y ago

In 2008, Gladwell wrote an excellent article on this same topic: http://www.gladwell.com/2008/2008_10_20_a_latebloomers.html http://www.gladwell.com/2008/2008_10_20_a_latebloomers.html An excellent quote from the article: "The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition."

hathaway 14y ago

Not sure this guy has much to complain about - wife, kids, money, intelligence, plenty of opportunities. Maybe he just enjoy his life instead of wishing he was some hot shot.

AaronStanely 14y ago

How exactly does his position equate to being a "late bloomer"? Even if he hadn't done everything he did in the last 10 years, he would still have achieved more than 99.99999% of the world population. Think about that to get some perspective. I think he's being ridiculously harsh on himself.

51Cards 14y ago

Wow... late to this article but can only add one thing. The OP is me... (not literally but figuratively in every way). 42 in a week... a whole lot of 'shoulda/coulda' behind me and feeling like an unaccomplished elder in a field of successful kids. His article hit me pretty hard. At the minimum it makes me feel a little less alone in my thoughts. If the OP reads this please feel free to touch base if you would like a fellow late bloomer to chat with.

joering2 14y ago

Boy I felt like reading my own story, except I hadn't had brilliant parents that would give me good genes for a start and force me to be productive instead of lazy (so I wasn't working for huge corps like OP). But regardless this post made me think that if you treat your body well (healthy food, gym, as little stress as possible) and you hadn't had some genetical disadvantages then your brain stay quite young forever, and you are like a fine wine: you age well and gather wisdom all the time. Truly, the only thing stopping OP from learning from his mistakes and trying again, learning and trying again and again is his approach that I may be too old. You are not! How old you are only matters whether you will personally make a big deal out of it or not. Don't let it stop you from trying again.

keeptrying 14y ago

I actually see this as Dave's backwards way of saying: "Whatever your situation right now - its okay. Keep working."

radley 14y ago

I'm confused. In my mind Dave is already a success. I guess he's just in a rut. I read a great book called "How High can You Bounce?" It's all about if you've taken a downturn how can you spin it to your advantage so you rebound better off than where you were before the fall. Knowing this is possible is simply the first step. Think Dave just needs some bounce.

radley 14y ago
I'll also add an "Eskimo saying" I learned from West Wing: The best place to store extra food is in someone else's stomach. Dave has built an incredible network in the valley. He's helped 100s of people form companies. Those are a lot of great bonds. Is that not success?
georgemcbay 14y ago
"I'm confused. In my mind Dave is already a success." Virtually everyone is a failure depending upon who or what they compare themselves to. The odds against being a pro basketball player are astronomical -- everyone in the NBA is a huge success relative to those who didn't make it, but if they aren't Kobe Bryan, Lebron James or Dwyane Wade they may consider themselves failures. And even the top active guys live in the shadows of Jordan, et al. I'm pretty sure this is the root of dmc's problems. The nature of his work has him surrounded by insane statistical outliers (some of whom are probably more lucky than 'good', though I'm sure there are both). His feeling like less than a success in this situation is unfortunate, but probably a perfectly normal human response.

Rhino55 14y ago

I honestly thought Dave McClure was a multi-millionaire. Apparently not. The rich people I have interacted with and observed are huge dorks. They may be decent, hard-working people, fair, and generous, but they are ultimately dorks. Why? You can ask that of a psychologist, but it all comes down to a big word, "dis-inhibition". Basically if all of the people around you treat you like royalty, you tend to act like a jerk. See "The Emperor's New Groove" for details. Silicon Valley, as the engine / furnace of American Capitalism, could use a lot fewer dorks and lot more hard-working, honest, thoughtful people like Dave. That is all.

jroseattle 14y ago

I really like this post, it resonates with me as well. I have parallels with Dave's story -- mostly figuratively, but still felt like I've been along the same ride with him. The fact that Dave is still going strong at 46 and trying to make a difference shows there is much more substance to him than many others I know in this business. If there is one thing I've observed, it's how the perceived "lack" of success in those who expected great things of themselves have knocked so many people off their perch. Good job, Dave. In my book, the very fact you recognize this in yourself qualifies you as successful.

justanother 14y ago

Clearly, this individual's problem isn't that he hasn't found Shangri-La, it's that he needs a new compass. Dave, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was just hallucinating. Kublai Khan's pleasure dome is right next to you every morning, and she's [presumably] gorgeous. The sun still rises on the bankrupt, and many of them do absolutely fulfilling things with those days, even if it's beating an old game or learning to catch more fish. Or to speak more plainly, cash is but one axis on the graph of success, and often it is the very worst of them. Winning is having the strength to disregard it.

richardw 14y ago

I see a few knocks on Dave. What he should be valuing more, why he should(n't) consider himself successful, what other smart people think about what he said from their own perspective. Well, he opened himself up. In a world where opinions about others are far more numerous than people standing up and saying "this is my story, from the heart. these are my faults and failures, and my dreams". I find that more valuable than 100 posts blowing their own horn. It's the most basic story of all, shared by many, and one of the hardest to write.

rgbrgb 14y ago

But maybe self permanence is not so important. Perhaps it would be more accurate not to associate yourself with your past so much.

mathattack 14y ago

Good luck! A modern Robert Frost....

mathattack 14y ago

Good luck! A modern Robert Frost....

jdrake3 14y ago

Maybe the OP just needs to Embrace the Nagging Voice of Success - http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/05/21/embracing-the-nagging-voice-of-success/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/05/21/embracing-the-nagg....

mcormier 14y ago

Is not capitalizing the first word in a sentence the thing to do now?