4 ms·

When going through crazy stuff as a founder, I always thing "this is going to make for a very intersting story some day". Looking back I doubt I'll remember the

When going through crazy stuff as a founder, I always thing "this is going to make for a very intersting story some day". Looking back I doubt I'll remember them all and, while keeping things in full throttle, I wonder if I'll ever get to write about anything... My conclusion is that most interesting stories remain burried and we're lucky to see anythign real (as in true stories) surfacing, because people that are crazy enough to enjoy these pains, hardly have any time to write about them. Meanwhile we're presented with a somewhat skewed reality that's both less interesting, less real and overly biased towards glamor. The title of a somewhat :) unrelated book keeps popping in my head "Reality is not what it seems".

Traubenfuchs 2y ago
The right moment to start writing down things you have regretted not to having written down in the past is now.
- random3 2y ago
  the thing with startups as founder / founding teams is that most days are actually good stories - so yes, the best way is to write as you go. the thing is perhaps this is in fact the best way to motivate (or demotivate) the startup craft - you end up learning by drinking from the firehose daily. I believe there are few other types of activities that have such a forcing factor to learn and most are generally some sort of crisis (war, etc.) and so entrepreneurship is likely the least damaging one (at least for everyone else than the team haha)
Retric 2y ago
You’ll recall a surprising number of details if you start trying to write even an outline of stuff down. Many may not have actually happened, but it’s still worth considering even decades later.
chasd00 2y ago
Heh “it could be the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others” - despair.com
neilv 2y ago
Related to many interesting/crazy things being lost to history because the observer/actor is too busy to record them, and the things that do get reported consequently not representing reality... (And maybe a little relevant to the somber news events on this Monday.) Many major religions prohibit making a show of good deeds. You're supposed to do it secretly, so that your intentions are pure. But other people only see when a good deed is reported, so we're getting a distorted version of reality. Some of these are reported for good reasons. But the worst form would be what social media kids are bombarded with: things like the clinically oblivious "influencers" who make videos of themselves exploiting a homeless person with a "charity" stunt. One way to do good, while also letting people be inspired, is to do it anonymously. For example, the donation in a large crowd of them, or the anonymous rich-person's donation to a good cause (not a vanity university department named after yourself!), or any of the countless ways that one person quietly helps someone else. You'll never know most of the times someone else helped you out, and most of the times you helped out someone else will also never be known. That's OK. If you ever have the occasion to jump into an icy lake, to save a busload of photogenic schoolchildren and puppies, then you must try to get out of there right after, before anyone's phone dries out. Then the story will be about people simply doing the right thing, even an amazing thing, and fading back into the crowd. It'll be one of the best stories ever.
- hinkley 2y ago
  There’s an old xkcd joke about how some grand problem in information theory has probably been solved on some mundane business task without the author even knowing what they’ve done.
  - daveguy 2y ago
    This one: https://xkcd.com/664/ https://xkcd.com/664/ (Title text is about some engineer solving P=NP locked up in an eggbeater calibration routine)
  - random3 2y ago
    lol - thaught about this so many times in the past two years as I read thousands of papers and realizing that a poor engineer may have to deal with 2-3 discoveries a day without having the time (nor the math background) to deal with their deeper meaning and every time they see the "grand picture" it gets burried in the backlog maybe even stoned as NIH syndrome.. I always find it funny when some FP programmer ridicules others for not understanding monads, when in fact, those riduculed may have more extensive experience using them without knowing they are called monads. After spending a little more time on both history and philosophy of science, I realized this is generally the rule rather than the exception, across all fields and functions
hinkley 2y ago
I wonder if someone like YC or a16z could manage to hire a journalist or anthropologist to make an honest chronicle of what happens at startups and not turn it into a propaganda piece. Having to explain yourself helps clarify what you’re doing. The time “lost” keeping said person updated might even pay for itself.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  I found the “Startup” podcast to be interesting when they documented real time the founding of Gimlet media, pivoted to other companies and then went back to document their acquisition by Spotify
- random3 2y ago
  +1 on the Gimlet media. Also reading Scott Belsky's "The messy middle" let me match a lot of my experience. I tried to read "Eating Glass: The Inner Journey Through Failure and Renewal" but didn't have the energy/stomach. Re a16z - "The hard thing about hard things" is not bad either. However I think a frequent series short stories over a large period of time, would make for much better content.
p3rls 2y ago
I was thinking just today that Squarespace should contact me and I'll do a commercial for them based on my experiences of creating a webapp and turning it into a business because I was too picky to use a prebuilt CMS etc. I have eight years of nonstop pain and stories to tell.

Traubenfuchs 2y ago

The right moment to start writing down things you have regretted not to having written down in the past is now.

random3 2y ago
the thing with startups as founder / founding teams is that most days are actually good stories - so yes, the best way is to write as you go. the thing is perhaps this is in fact the best way to motivate (or demotivate) the startup craft - you end up learning by drinking from the firehose daily. I believe there are few other types of activities that have such a forcing factor to learn and most are generally some sort of crisis (war, etc.) and so entrepreneurship is likely the least damaging one (at least for everyone else than the team haha)

Retric 2y ago

You’ll recall a surprising number of details if you start trying to write even an outline of stuff down. Many may not have actually happened, but it’s still worth considering even decades later.

chasd00 2y ago

Heh “it could be the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others” - despair.com

neilv 2y ago

Related to many interesting/crazy things being lost to history because the observer/actor is too busy to record them, and the things that do get reported consequently not representing reality... (And maybe a little relevant to the somber news events on this Monday.) Many major religions prohibit making a show of good deeds. You're supposed to do it secretly, so that your intentions are pure. But other people only see when a good deed is reported, so we're getting a distorted version of reality. Some of these are reported for good reasons. But the worst form would be what social media kids are bombarded with: things like the clinically oblivious "influencers" who make videos of themselves exploiting a homeless person with a "charity" stunt. One way to do good, while also letting people be inspired, is to do it anonymously. For example, the donation in a large crowd of them, or the anonymous rich-person's donation to a good cause (not a vanity university department named after yourself!), or any of the countless ways that one person quietly helps someone else. You'll never know most of the times someone else helped you out, and most of the times you helped out someone else will also never be known. That's OK. If you ever have the occasion to jump into an icy lake, to save a busload of photogenic schoolchildren and puppies, then you must try to get out of there right after, before anyone's phone dries out. Then the story will be about people simply doing the right thing, even an amazing thing, and fading back into the crowd. It'll be one of the best stories ever.

hinkley 2y ago
There’s an old xkcd joke about how some grand problem in information theory has probably been solved on some mundane business task without the author even knowing what they’ve done.
- daveguy 2y ago
  This one: https://xkcd.com/664/ https://xkcd.com/664/ (Title text is about some engineer solving P=NP locked up in an eggbeater calibration routine)
- random3 2y ago
  lol - thaught about this so many times in the past two years as I read thousands of papers and realizing that a poor engineer may have to deal with 2-3 discoveries a day without having the time (nor the math background) to deal with their deeper meaning and every time they see the "grand picture" it gets burried in the backlog maybe even stoned as NIH syndrome.. I always find it funny when some FP programmer ridicules others for not understanding monads, when in fact, those riduculed may have more extensive experience using them without knowing they are called monads. After spending a little more time on both history and philosophy of science, I realized this is generally the rule rather than the exception, across all fields and functions

hinkley 2y ago

I wonder if someone like YC or a16z could manage to hire a journalist or anthropologist to make an honest chronicle of what happens at startups and not turn it into a propaganda piece. Having to explain yourself helps clarify what you’re doing. The time “lost” keeping said person updated might even pay for itself.

scarface_74 2y ago
I found the “Startup” podcast to be interesting when they documented real time the founding of Gimlet media, pivoted to other companies and then went back to document their acquisition by Spotify
random3 2y ago
+1 on the Gimlet media. Also reading Scott Belsky's "The messy middle" let me match a lot of my experience. I tried to read "Eating Glass: The Inner Journey Through Failure and Renewal" but didn't have the energy/stomach. Re a16z - "The hard thing about hard things" is not bad either. However I think a frequent series short stories over a large period of time, would make for much better content.

p3rls 2y ago

I was thinking just today that Squarespace should contact me and I'll do a commercial for them based on my experiences of creating a webapp and turning it into a business because I was too picky to use a prebuilt CMS etc. I have eight years of nonstop pain and stories to tell.