8 ms·

The Silicon Valley Founder Meat Grinder

242 points by Kaizeras 2mo ago

JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
“presumably under the influence of some strong chemicals” This is a bigger problem in Silicon Valley right now than anyone seems ready to acknowledge.
- hahahaa 2mo ago
  I see the "we work 12 hrs a day 6 days a week" as a euphemism for "we take amphetamines".
  - khazhoux 2mo ago
    Whenever you hear someone say they work 80- (or 100!) hour weeks, you should understand what they mean is they had a few crunch weeks once.
    - achandra03 2mo ago
      A lot of people also equate "face time in the office" to "real work getting done". Especially prevalent in finance circles.
    - andy99 2mo ago
      Or the only thing they do in life is come to the office and then mix life with work so effectively it’s a combination of hanging out with friends, eating free food, and working, but it all goes into the work bucket when claims are made about how much they work. Nothing wrong with that per se, I basically did that in grad school. It’s completely different than actually grinding 100 hours a week though. Also tough to be a part of if you have a life or family outside work.
      - pipes 2mo ago
        Yep, that's what I thought too. I contrast it with an accident and emergency consultant I know in the UK. He actually is grinding 70 hours a week and not compensated for it. He works long hours because there aren't enough staff to cover the reality of what's needed.
      - JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
        I do this several times a year. It’s a lot of fun. You basically camp with colleagues and get a lot of collaborative work done. Then you detach and do your deep thinking. The problem is top performers eventually gain an ego and stop attending, and then it just turns into pathetic signaling.
    - nunez 2mo ago
      ibb folks definitely work this much every week. big law too. medicine, sometimes.
- cmuguythrow 2mo ago
  We will look back at the easy access to amphetamines - especially for children - in a similar light to the opioid epidemic. To be fair, I think they are less harmful than many opiates, but they are still serious drugs and usage has ~doubled in the last 10 years [1]. Anecdotally, it feels so common/casual for people - adults and schoolchildren - to be taking adderall, vyvanse, concerta, etc. Over 20 million subscriptions in the US [1] means thats something like 5-10% of the adult population. 1. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-communications/fda-updating-warnings-improve-safe-use-prescription-stimulants-used-treat-adhd-and-other-conditions https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-communications/fda-upd...
  - bladeacidic 2mo ago
    Will we? Opiates leading to a homeless population not being productive, just looking to get high and be high all day and not do anything other than be a zombie, hits different compared to stimulants that makes people work harder and clean things.
- outside1234 2mo ago
  Elon
- zer00eyz 2mo ago
  > Silicon Valley right now Go back to early 2000's post dot com bubble. The whole of the bay ran on Adderall and Ambien + what ever else one could get their hands on. It was so pervasive that even a decade later you could find Adderall references in Bay Area hip hop. Almost 30 years on, and this still has not really changed.
blobbers 2mo ago
woah woah... a bartender becomes the head of engineering at a high flying start up? This isn't the .com. Did the bartender also go to MIT? Drug fueled founder parties? Orgies? I've clearly been doing silicon valley wrong. Or right, depending on your perspective... but not this? I've seen board game fueled parties where maybe one or two people do drugs, but it remains very nerdy? And no sex parties. Mostly sausage parties? ... so yeah. Do people really know Jims? Because I just read posts about them.
- smuhakg 2mo ago
  > And no sex parties. Mostly sausage parties? Clearly you weren't cool enough to get into the drug-fuelled OpenAI gay sex orgies.
  - JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
    > drug-fuelled OpenAI gay sex orgies What?! Source?
    - smuhakg 2mo ago
      Source: https://futurism.com/researcher-openai-sex-drug-parties https://futurism.com/researcher-openai-sex-drug-parties More prison gay than anything else. I'd go down on a man for a million dollar OpenAI offer even though I'm into women. I don't think commenters here realize how desperate people can become for money.
      - Aurornis 2mo ago
        Weird article. The original Tweet is all about the "hacker house scene" and it refers to some people she met who went on to work for OpenAI. The journalist is trying hard to tie it all back to OpenAI, but the original Tweet only mentions OpenAI as an eventual destination for some of the people involved in what she witnessed. The shared "hacker house" scene in SF is really weird, though. Especially the more you get into EA/rationalist circles. There were groups that were basically cults emerging out of some of them.
hahahaa 2mo ago
Interesting. I am sure there are Jims outside of startup world too. There will be finance Jims and entertainment Jims. Is having a couple of pets and a ridiculous table lifestyle creep. Maybe. I think of lifestyle creep more in terms of you are not saving any money at all. I think that comment is more telling of what is expected of founders and engineers. At least from authors point of view. No life allowed. Definitely don't reproduce. You work, and work so you can work more.
Carrok 2mo ago
Bit of an aside but I found it somewhat amusing that one example the author uses of Jim’s financial recklessness was getting into home brewing. Home brewing is one of the cheaper hobbies available (though like all hobbies you can spend as much as you want). The only real requirements are a bucket and a pot.
- fnord77 2mo ago
  Not if you have a contract brewery make your "creations"
- storywatch 2mo ago
  Now general aviation on the other hand..
  - nunez 2mo ago
    A boat that flies lol
    - storywatch 2mo ago
      Worse, at least with boats most of them are made in this century.
- schrodinger 2mo ago
  How much more likely does becoming a home brewer make you to develop alcoholism, especially for someone who sounds a bit predisposed like Jim?
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jitl 2mo ago
    it’s infinitely easier to become an alcoholic by buying alcohol at a grocery store. brewing is pretty much the least direct most delayed gratification way to get drunk. i guess it can be pretty cheap if you optimize for that but it sounds like jim made enough money and high flying friends it’s unlikely to be major factor.
singingtoday 2mo ago
I've met a few people like that, through what appears to be pure determination, they force success to give up what it has. Very impressive.
- codemog 2mo ago
  Complete bollocks people like PG say before anointing grifters with undeserved power. Has happened all throughout history.
sherburt3 2mo ago
Drugs are bad, mmkay
bicx 2mo ago
You really have to believe your own narrative to do well as a startup founder, even when evidence is initially scant. This likely also has a tendency to slide into self-delusion.
yesimahuman 2mo ago
I mostly stayed clear of the SV world while building and exiting my startup, but people like this came and went through my network constantly. They were always easy to pick out based on how much they glorified certain SV personalities and were desperate for their approval.
FinnLobsien 2mo ago
I think much of this comes down to wanting to be a type of person vs. wanting to do the actual thing. It’s easy to be consumed by “I’m the wealthy San Francisco founder guy” and doing everything that lifestyle requires, including things that may not be good for you.
- Aurornis 2mo ago
  That's a really good way of putting it. I've been to some weird SF events where you immediately recognize that most people there are in their fake it till you make it stage. Then you realize that many of them aren't interested in the part where you have to do a lot of hard work, they just want to be impressive and charming to a broad network so they can insert themselves into the best opportunities that come up. Every startup collects a couple of these hires during their growth phase. Some times it can be really hard to separate the charm, charisma, and credentials from ability to get things done. The smart founders will push these people back out, much like this Jim guy got fired from the startup he managed to get into at the right place at the right time. It doesn't happen immediately, though.
- koolba 2mo ago
  The open source version of this has existed for decades as well. There’s the doers that actually enjoy the craft, want to share what they’ve done, and contribute to things they genuinely find intellectually stimulating. And for each of those true believers there’s many more fly by night wannabes that think it’s some kind of shortcut to social validation.
  - harimau777 2mo ago
    I think that a lot of that may come from the degree to which "contribute to an open source project" has been the advice for almost any job search problem. If people who are just looking for a job have to contribute to open source, then there's to be a lot of people who aren't passionate but have to do it.
    - FinnLobsien 2mo ago
daishi55 2mo ago
I don’t trust anyone who has the general, abstract goal of being a “founder”. If there’s no great idea to go with it, it just seems like vanity. And sure it does work out really well anyway sometimes, but it’s just something I can’t get behind aesthetically.
- iririririr 2mo ago
  that's 99.9 of them. the ones with the strong feelings towards ideas most of the time is already post-idea-du-jour narrative
- dilyevsky 2mo ago
  I met a number of really successful founders who came in just wanting to build a business and found a niche later (sometimes waaay later). I suspect majority of founders with “great ideas” discovered them after the company was started and the great idea they started with wasn’t actually that good
- Johanx64 2mo ago
  > I don’t trust anyone who has the general, abstract goal of being a “founder”. The goal isn't abstract - read it as - goal of "not being a wage-slave" and have a shot at being more. It's an ambition type of thing.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - daishi55 2mo ago
    To what end though? If you want financial freedom, and you’re smart, you’re likely to be much better off just working in big tech vs trying and almost certainly failing to successfully found a company. Of course some people win the lottery, but playing the lottery isn’t a sound strategy for a good life.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
guywithahat 2mo ago
This gets to a point my dad always made when I was neck deep in startups; so many of them felt unserious. People go to the most expensive west coast city, raise money, and then move to the next most expensive east coast city and open a second office. A lot of founders are clearly inexperienced, and to defend their inexperience, hire under experienced teams. It all sort of gets back to the root of the issue, which is that the hardest part is never the engineering, it’s networking and finding product market fit. Finding people who actually get up and do meaningful things is hard, and so Jim’s sneak in under the guise of being an outsider who understands a market and can make things happen.
- moralestapia 2mo ago
  >and to defend their inexperience, hire under experienced teams It's also a bit of "I like you because you're like me" thing plus some "it's useful to me that you're like that". I've seen plenty of startups where the CEO/CTO has been trained to fit under one specific stereotype (common ones these days are: the asian twink, the athlete, the nootropics guy, etc.), and then lots of their friends/hires happen to be of the same or adjacent/compatible stereotypes.
mattbillenstein 2mo ago
Founder culture definitely has fraternity vibes - people with no other discernable talent other than being above average looking and having connections with other similar people end up in positions they have no real idea how to do. In other words, there are a lot of people "playing startup" in the valley - some of the VC money flows too easily and there is always going to be an ecosystem of people to try to put it to work.
- rustfreeforme 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - lostlogin 2mo ago
    In a gold rush, sell spades. But how do you apply that to start up San Francisco. Sell brewing consumables? Orgy stuff? Wood tables?
- Joel_Mckay 2mo ago
  Most people start businesses for tax reasons, and to mitigate financial risks. People dumping discounted equity to hyper-scale on debt is not a business, but just another IPO over-valuation scheme. =3
- dominotw 2mo ago
  main personality trait i want to my kids to have is being a confident extrovert that loves ppl and ppl love. Also make sure to marry for looks if you are not that great in that department. Nothing else even comes to close to these attributes in having a comfortable sucessful life. introverts and cynics get crushed.
jacobgold 2mo ago
There are different kinds of founders in Silicon Valley now. Some are more like founders from the previous generation, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Others are more like Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann. There are lots of earnest, sincere, and interesting founders. There are also lots who probably would've been happier on Wall Street.
xmprt 2mo ago
There's more truth to the "Forbes 30 Under 30 to prison pipeline" than people give it credit.
- make3 2mo ago
  this is just an empirical fact
RivieraKid 2mo ago
It's really hard for me to understand that people who have the chance to achieve basic financial independence (say $1M net worth) don't take that chance and make sure to stay financially independent forever. If you do that, you're almost guaranteed to stay in the top 2% globally for the rest of your life. You've made it in life, at least financially. The approach of not taking advantage of the lucky and privileged situation exposes you to a huge risk that your NW will go down to zero and you never get a second chance.
- polishdude20 2mo ago
  I don't think these people NW ever goes down to zero.
  - make3 2mo ago
    they often go into the minuses I'm sure, spending culture in the US is bananas
- mordechai9000 2mo ago
  I think $1M net worth in the US these days is a nice little nest egg, but not anywhere near financial independence. Unless your needs are simple, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply, and you don't have any dependents.
  - sfRattan 2mo ago
    > Unless your needs are simple, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply, and you don't have any dependents. As a human, your needs are simple[1]. With a $1M net worth, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply. And your dependents can live in that same place, also cheaply. All you need to do is show the Joneses the door out of your mind and never let them back in, nor look toward their lives in envy. [1]: Healthcare being a notable potential exception, depending on the individual.
    - ip26 2mo ago
Aurornis 2mo ago
> Jim had participated in drug-fueled “founder parties”, group orgies and all other crazy experiences in San Francisco. This naturally led to the breakup with his fiancée and a nervous breakdown. The Bay Area is a weird place. There are countless companies staffed by smart people doing amazing things. There are also countless people cosplaying as smart people and founders who are going through all of the motions, but producing little value. In my experience (which is as limited as any other one person's experience) the environments at the companies doing the amazing things are on the boring side. Nobody wants to hear about those because it's uninteresting. So instead all of the public stories are about crazy parties, quick wins, huge exits, and the glamorous stuff. People go there seeking it out. Some get lucky with some early wins, like Jim from this story. But when the time comes to do work, they flounder and get pushed out, also like Jim. It's a big place, though, and there's always some connection willing to hook you up with another referral if you press hard enough. That's the step where the performative, partying people start getting grouped up with other performative, partying people, and it snowballs from there. Meanwhile the real companies are off quietly doing boring work and getting things done, pushing the Jims out if they accidentally get hired or acquired into the fold. It's a weird place.
- vrosas 2mo ago
  SF is such a weird vibe in general. I've watched a lot of founders/tech bros go to burning man for the first time, completely miss the point of it but adopt an air of superiority for attending. I watched a founder weave in his experience on peyote into a company all hands. They also, for reasons I simply cannot fathom, go out and buy a green Range Rover. And as someone who's been in the ENM space for a long time, SF is the LAST city I'd want to experience it in...
  - Aurornis 2mo ago
    > I've watched a lot of founders/tech bros go to burning man for the first time, completely miss the point of it but adopt an air of superiority for attending. I can't say I see a lot of green Range Rovers in other cities, but I assure you this one is universal across places and industries. I have friends who go to Burning Man and don't post anything on their social media or bring it up in conversation because they don't want to be one of those people. Others go once and it becomes 50% of their personality for the next year.
tikhonj 2mo ago
> A few months post-acquisition, he got fired for an allegedly silly reason, but my intuition is that he was coasting hard and couldn’t focus at all because of home office and lifestyle creep. This seems like a pretty dubious conclusion to make from the outside. There are a lot of reasons somebody would get fired after an acquisition. Hell, even if he was coasting, an acquisition followed by a rapid change in environment and culture can cause somebody to lose motivation for a wide range of reasons. Blaming this on "lifetstyle creep" is rather premature and, frankly, pretty judgemental or moralistic. This is downstream of a pretty frustrating belief I've seen repeatedly in the tech industry: that whether a person is "motivated" or "hard working" is some kind of inherent quasi-moral characteristic of the person, rather than something substantially affected by environment. But hey, it's much easier to blame individuals and lean on the perf review process than it is to change organizational culture or leadership!
egonschiele 2mo ago
Real bummer of a story. > He approached me because he was really into startups and wanted to become a tech entrepreneur, and make the big bucks It's a shame that so much of tech culture has become about money. Money was always a part of it, but living in the Bay in 2010, there was more of a focus on building things. But once people started getting rich, especially off bitcoin, it brought in a whole host of people whose primary passion seemed to be money. We moved out in 2018. Still bums me out, SF was my favorite city, and I hoped to live there for a long time, but the values weren't my values anymore.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- camillomiller 2mo ago
  It’s always been a travesty, it was just harder to see through it because back then morals hadn’t been completely dismantled by the last 15 years of whatever the US has become
- Aurornis 2mo ago
  > Money was always a part of it, but living in the Bay in 2010, there was more of a focus on building things. But once people started getting rich, especially off bitcoin, it brought in a whole host of people whose primary passion seemed to be money. This is funny to read because I remember hearing someone complain about the exact same thing in the Bay Area, but their dates were shifted by about 10 years before yours. I think it's kind of like Burning Man, where everyone's favorite experience was their early days when they were young. As you get older, you complain it's gone downhill and the new generation is going for all the wrong reasons.
  - nilkn 2mo ago
    I find people's view is based on how much they're personally "winning" financially. If they're making money, then daily life seems more about building. If they're not making money, then the oppressive cost of living makes money seem all-important in the culture (which, in fact, it is and has been for generations). SF and the Bay Area are constantly shuffling through and recombining ideas. What generated money relatively easily in 2010 would've started becoming low value in 2018, rapidly approaching an asymptote of relative uselessness today. 2018 is about the point where you needed to be pivoting to AI if you really wanted to remain part of the city's "upper class", where money feels like it doesn't matter because it's abundant and automatic. 2010 was the era of mobile apps.
senorcrab 2mo ago
Ultimately this comes down VCs who fund people like this. Can we really believe the established funds look for "independent thinkers" anymore?
- bloodyplonker22 2mo ago
  Most VCs have a relatively short timeline to deploy money by or they will be berated by investors for sitting on it. Therein lies the problem.
camillomiller 2mo ago
Airbnb’s CEO, for example, is a Jim who got lucky
- make3 2mo ago
  Snapchat's famously also is one
  - arionhardison 2mo ago
    His family is also insanely rich and helped him w/ the IP contracts. John W. Spiegel: A prominent business litigation and securities lawyer who graduated from Yale University and worked as a partner at the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson.
mikeaskew4 2mo ago
“Who wants to make some real, positive impact on humanity,” says no one ever, anymore…
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
asveikau 2mo ago
Probably not right to diagnose an allegory, but does it sound to anyone else like Jim might have bipolar disorder?
lmeyerov 2mo ago
Fwiw, without naming names, I helped someone at a hackathon make their first app on something he was passionate about, later found out he had been recently homeless living on an abandoned boat, and now years later, afaict he turned that into a $10m/yr business with ~millions of users Persistence > Intelligence , and being able to code isn't some sort of superiority thing, it's just one skill of many Edit: being able to take risks, and doing so, does lead to higher variance outcomes, so that is something I have also come to appreciate and look for in people. It may look reckless, and attracts weirder people almost by definition, but that is what startups are ultimately about, betting you can do better than the regular path!
- gyanchawdhary 2mo ago
  true :)
- tennisflyi 2mo ago
  > being able to code isn't some sort of superiority thing, it's just one skill of many Nah, bro. You’re elite level intelligence if you can /s
- akurilin 2mo ago
  pg wrote about this a while back: https://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html https://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
- sherburt3 2mo ago
  Sounds a lot like a rich kid pretending they're not a rich kid.
- duxup 2mo ago
  When I decided to code (later in life) I was determined to give it my best shot, not sweat the small stuff, just keep going. Previously I tried to learn but gave up assuming that it just wasn't my thing, but I decided this was my last shot and I was going to make it happen. Some classmates of mine were (like everyone gets) frustrated at one point and actually complained that they were paired up "with those two". Those classmates thought that the other guy and I knew what we were doing and "just got it". Truth was we just kept our hands on the keyboard, had really not made anymore progress than anyone else in class had ... we just kept typing / trying things. Years later I would say I'm still not a talented programmer, I just stay positive, help my coworkers, and keep gong until I make it happen, and as far as my employer is concerned that's pretty great.
janpeuker 2mo ago
Reminds me of this 2015 article "Beware The Pretty People" http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/28/beware-the-pretty-people/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/28/beware-the-pretty-people/ > The establishment scions pouring into tech take on the trappings of subversion, while remaining fundamentally conformist. Meanwhile, rampant success inevitably causes the former tech counterculture to morph into posturing “Prada revolutionaries,” Unfortunately the article ends on praising crypto and surveillance, so this has been going on for a while
- goatlover 2mo ago
  Even better who you know, then you can become wealthy and get away with almost anything, as Epstein realized when he said there are out lots of hard working people who never become rich.
andsoitis 2mo ago
That story has more holes in it than Swiss cheese.
binsquare 2mo ago
Condolences, I've also met a few Jim's in Chicago and some even in big tech once money, privilege came. some opportunities allow people reveal parts of themselves or things they always wanted
TrackerFF 2mo ago
I always found it interesting how different things are in US (well, more so startup hotspots) and Europe. In the US you're simply given more chances if you have the right personality and superficial elements. In so many European countries, unless you happen to have bootstrapped your way into success, you'll be written off as a bozo if you don't have all the correct credentials. Someone like Jim (read: No formal relevant education, no industry experience, only hopes and dreams) would in the very, very, VERY best case get a €100k funding - and that is only if they had other more attractive looking co-founders with them. I mean, it is something everyone knows - but the sheer risk averseness you often see here in Europe is really something.
- EA-3167 2mo ago
  The reality behind that is that the US is much much richer than any single European entity, and that the US is a country founded by Europeans (note that I'm talking about the country, not claiming Europeans are the first to arrive in North America) who felt they'd run out of opportunities back home. Hundreds of years of European migration to the US suggests that social stratification and lack of opportunities outside of the old boy's network remains a problem.
alexashka 2mo ago
There's wage slave layer, nepo baby layer and the in-between. Author has discovered that his 'working hard' to be at the bottom of the in-between layer pales in comparison to the invites others receive for simply showing up. That's how it goes. The real bitch is when you get to spend some time with the hot folks or the nepo babies and realize there's no substance - all they have is a mastery of surface level pleasantries and an incredibly thin skin.
luciana1u 2mo ago
[flagged]
ashu1461 2mo ago
I feel the crux is that there is no shortcut to success, any shortcut which is taken has to be compensated at a later part of your career. Example if you got funding without having product market fit, then you would have to justify that funding at one point on another. One example of this is the current AI companies. Irrespective of how much marketing / hype that exists today, the long term question remains the same. Can they build a sustainable business ?
la64710 2mo ago
In the span of just a few years, he went from nobody to a tech founder - would this have been possible if Jim was not charismatic like the way the author described including being white, tall and being part of that fraternity.
- varjag 2mo ago
  Is he white? The author mentions "exotic-looking".
thraway3837 2mo ago
Hang in there, it's about to get a bit judgmental and harsh: This blog misses quite a few red flags that are obvious to the reader from the very beginning. Jim is an aimless party boy and got a rich gal to sustain his mediocre life. Blew his first success on thrills, cheated on his fiance and was a terrible human being. He then became worse because everyone around him enabled him, and that's just the character he is. He's not the Steve Jobs charisma that people like the blogger think he is. No. Instead, he's a sleazeball sales guy who is a master grifter and conman. Think more Elizabeth Holmes. This isn't at all the typical SV founder meat grinder. There are plenty of boring, hard working, regular family folk who show up 9-5 and pursue their passion projects that got funded. This is how we're all on this site. We like to see these projects succeed and we want to see cool stuff that helps us nerd out. Because that's ultimately what being in this industry is: Making a chunk of metal do some really cool stuff and solve problems that are worth solving. Along the way, it attracted some really unsavory people like Jim who looked at the tech money and wanted a quick piece of the action. It's the same problem we're having with young CS graduates. They have no drive, no passion for this stuff, no obsessive nerding out over the tech. They were told by everyone around them that it was a guaranteed job market and paid well, buy a house, great life. Even without AI coding, I would bet the vast majority of these graduates would have a very difficult time finding a job. Ultimately what we have to realize is that this world is full of people like Jim who get away with stuff because of privilege and great grifting skills. Think about how many actually sustainable ideas you or people you know have come up with and even prototyped. But could never find the funding to make it work. That's how nearly everything got started. Somewhere along the way, we stopped caring about joy and nerdery of it and started chasing the $ :(

242 points by Kaizeras 2mo ago

“presumably under the influence of some strong chemicals” This is a bigger problem in Silicon Valley right now than anyone seems ready to acknowledge.

hahahaa 2mo ago
I see the "we work 12 hrs a day 6 days a week" as a euphemism for "we take amphetamines".
- khazhoux 2mo ago
  Whenever you hear someone say they work 80- (or 100!) hour weeks, you should understand what they mean is they had a few crunch weeks once.
  - achandra03 2mo ago
    A lot of people also equate "face time in the office" to "real work getting done". Especially prevalent in finance circles.
  - andy99 2mo ago
    Or the only thing they do in life is come to the office and then mix life with work so effectively it’s a combination of hanging out with friends, eating free food, and working, but it all goes into the work bucket when claims are made about how much they work. Nothing wrong with that per se, I basically did that in grad school. It’s completely different than actually grinding 100 hours a week though. Also tough to be a part of if you have a life or family outside work.
    - pipes 2mo ago
      Yep, that's what I thought too. I contrast it with an accident and emergency consultant I know in the UK. He actually is grinding 70 hours a week and not compensated for it. He works long hours because there aren't enough staff to cover the reality of what's needed.
    - JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
      I do this several times a year. It’s a lot of fun. You basically camp with colleagues and get a lot of collaborative work done. Then you detach and do your deep thinking. The problem is top performers eventually gain an ego and stop attending, and then it just turns into pathetic signaling.
  - nunez 2mo ago
    ibb folks definitely work this much every week. big law too. medicine, sometimes.
cmuguythrow 2mo ago
We will look back at the easy access to amphetamines - especially for children - in a similar light to the opioid epidemic. To be fair, I think they are less harmful than many opiates, but they are still serious drugs and usage has ~doubled in the last 10 years [1]. Anecdotally, it feels so common/casual for people - adults and schoolchildren - to be taking adderall, vyvanse, concerta, etc. Over 20 million subscriptions in the US [1] means thats something like 5-10% of the adult population. 1. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-communications/fda-updating-warnings-improve-safe-use-prescription-stimulants-used-treat-adhd-and-other-conditions https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-communications/fda-upd...
- bladeacidic 2mo ago
  Will we? Opiates leading to a homeless population not being productive, just looking to get high and be high all day and not do anything other than be a zombie, hits different compared to stimulants that makes people work harder and clean things.
outside1234 2mo ago
Elon
zer00eyz 2mo ago
> Silicon Valley right now Go back to early 2000's post dot com bubble. The whole of the bay ran on Adderall and Ambien + what ever else one could get their hands on. It was so pervasive that even a decade later you could find Adderall references in Bay Area hip hop. Almost 30 years on, and this still has not really changed.

blobbers 2mo ago

woah woah... a bartender becomes the head of engineering at a high flying start up? This isn't the .com. Did the bartender also go to MIT? Drug fueled founder parties? Orgies? I've clearly been doing silicon valley wrong. Or right, depending on your perspective... but not this? I've seen board game fueled parties where maybe one or two people do drugs, but it remains very nerdy? And no sex parties. Mostly sausage parties? ... so yeah. Do people really know Jims? Because I just read posts about them.

smuhakg 2mo ago
> And no sex parties. Mostly sausage parties? Clearly you weren't cool enough to get into the drug-fuelled OpenAI gay sex orgies.
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
  > drug-fuelled OpenAI gay sex orgies What?! Source?
  - smuhakg 2mo ago
    Source: https://futurism.com/researcher-openai-sex-drug-parties https://futurism.com/researcher-openai-sex-drug-parties More prison gay than anything else. I'd go down on a man for a million dollar OpenAI offer even though I'm into women. I don't think commenters here realize how desperate people can become for money.
    - Aurornis 2mo ago
      Weird article. The original Tweet is all about the "hacker house scene" and it refers to some people she met who went on to work for OpenAI. The journalist is trying hard to tie it all back to OpenAI, but the original Tweet only mentions OpenAI as an eventual destination for some of the people involved in what she witnessed. The shared "hacker house" scene in SF is really weird, though. Especially the more you get into EA/rationalist circles. There were groups that were basically cults emerging out of some of them.

hahahaa 2mo ago

Interesting. I am sure there are Jims outside of startup world too. There will be finance Jims and entertainment Jims. Is having a couple of pets and a ridiculous table lifestyle creep. Maybe. I think of lifestyle creep more in terms of you are not saving any money at all. I think that comment is more telling of what is expected of founders and engineers. At least from authors point of view. No life allowed. Definitely don't reproduce. You work, and work so you can work more.

Carrok 2mo ago

Bit of an aside but I found it somewhat amusing that one example the author uses of Jim’s financial recklessness was getting into home brewing. Home brewing is one of the cheaper hobbies available (though like all hobbies you can spend as much as you want). The only real requirements are a bucket and a pot.

fnord77 2mo ago
Not if you have a contract brewery make your "creations"
storywatch 2mo ago
Now general aviation on the other hand..
- nunez 2mo ago
  A boat that flies lol
  - storywatch 2mo ago
    Worse, at least with boats most of them are made in this century.
schrodinger 2mo ago
How much more likely does becoming a home brewer make you to develop alcoholism, especially for someone who sounds a bit predisposed like Jim?
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- jitl 2mo ago
  it’s infinitely easier to become an alcoholic by buying alcohol at a grocery store. brewing is pretty much the least direct most delayed gratification way to get drunk. i guess it can be pretty cheap if you optimize for that but it sounds like jim made enough money and high flying friends it’s unlikely to be major factor.

singingtoday 2mo ago

I've met a few people like that, through what appears to be pure determination, they force success to give up what it has. Very impressive.

codemog 2mo ago
Complete bollocks people like PG say before anointing grifters with undeserved power. Has happened all throughout history.

sherburt3 2mo ago

Drugs are bad, mmkay

bicx 2mo ago

You really have to believe your own narrative to do well as a startup founder, even when evidence is initially scant. This likely also has a tendency to slide into self-delusion.

yesimahuman 2mo ago

I mostly stayed clear of the SV world while building and exiting my startup, but people like this came and went through my network constantly. They were always easy to pick out based on how much they glorified certain SV personalities and were desperate for their approval.

FinnLobsien 2mo ago

I think much of this comes down to wanting to be a type of person vs. wanting to do the actual thing. It’s easy to be consumed by “I’m the wealthy San Francisco founder guy” and doing everything that lifestyle requires, including things that may not be good for you.

Aurornis 2mo ago
That's a really good way of putting it. I've been to some weird SF events where you immediately recognize that most people there are in their fake it till you make it stage. Then you realize that many of them aren't interested in the part where you have to do a lot of hard work, they just want to be impressive and charming to a broad network so they can insert themselves into the best opportunities that come up. Every startup collects a couple of these hires during their growth phase. Some times it can be really hard to separate the charm, charisma, and credentials from ability to get things done. The smart founders will push these people back out, much like this Jim guy got fired from the startup he managed to get into at the right place at the right time. It doesn't happen immediately, though.
koolba 2mo ago
The open source version of this has existed for decades as well. There’s the doers that actually enjoy the craft, want to share what they’ve done, and contribute to things they genuinely find intellectually stimulating. And for each of those true believers there’s many more fly by night wannabes that think it’s some kind of shortcut to social validation.
- harimau777 2mo ago
  I think that a lot of that may come from the degree to which "contribute to an open source project" has been the advice for almost any job search problem. If people who are just looking for a job have to contribute to open source, then there's to be a lot of people who aren't passionate but have to do it.
  - FinnLobsien 2mo ago

daishi55 2mo ago

I don’t trust anyone who has the general, abstract goal of being a “founder”. If there’s no great idea to go with it, it just seems like vanity. And sure it does work out really well anyway sometimes, but it’s just something I can’t get behind aesthetically.

iririririr 2mo ago
that's 99.9 of them. the ones with the strong feelings towards ideas most of the time is already post-idea-du-jour narrative
dilyevsky 2mo ago
I met a number of really successful founders who came in just wanting to build a business and found a niche later (sometimes waaay later). I suspect majority of founders with “great ideas” discovered them after the company was started and the great idea they started with wasn’t actually that good
Johanx64 2mo ago
> I don’t trust anyone who has the general, abstract goal of being a “founder”. The goal isn't abstract - read it as - goal of "not being a wage-slave" and have a shot at being more. It's an ambition type of thing.
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- daishi55 2mo ago
  To what end though? If you want financial freedom, and you’re smart, you’re likely to be much better off just working in big tech vs trying and almost certainly failing to successfully found a company. Of course some people win the lottery, but playing the lottery isn’t a sound strategy for a good life.
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guywithahat 2mo ago

This gets to a point my dad always made when I was neck deep in startups; so many of them felt unserious. People go to the most expensive west coast city, raise money, and then move to the next most expensive east coast city and open a second office. A lot of founders are clearly inexperienced, and to defend their inexperience, hire under experienced teams. It all sort of gets back to the root of the issue, which is that the hardest part is never the engineering, it’s networking and finding product market fit. Finding people who actually get up and do meaningful things is hard, and so Jim’s sneak in under the guise of being an outsider who understands a market and can make things happen.

moralestapia 2mo ago
>and to defend their inexperience, hire under experienced teams It's also a bit of "I like you because you're like me" thing plus some "it's useful to me that you're like that". I've seen plenty of startups where the CEO/CTO has been trained to fit under one specific stereotype (common ones these days are: the asian twink, the athlete, the nootropics guy, etc.), and then lots of their friends/hires happen to be of the same or adjacent/compatible stereotypes.

mattbillenstein 2mo ago

Founder culture definitely has fraternity vibes - people with no other discernable talent other than being above average looking and having connections with other similar people end up in positions they have no real idea how to do. In other words, there are a lot of people "playing startup" in the valley - some of the VC money flows too easily and there is always going to be an ecosystem of people to try to put it to work.

rustfreeforme 2mo ago
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- lostlogin 2mo ago
  In a gold rush, sell spades. But how do you apply that to start up San Francisco. Sell brewing consumables? Orgy stuff? Wood tables?
Joel_Mckay 2mo ago
Most people start businesses for tax reasons, and to mitigate financial risks. People dumping discounted equity to hyper-scale on debt is not a business, but just another IPO over-valuation scheme. =3
dominotw 2mo ago
main personality trait i want to my kids to have is being a confident extrovert that loves ppl and ppl love. Also make sure to marry for looks if you are not that great in that department. Nothing else even comes to close to these attributes in having a comfortable sucessful life. introverts and cynics get crushed.

jacobgold 2mo ago

There are different kinds of founders in Silicon Valley now. Some are more like founders from the previous generation, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Others are more like Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann. There are lots of earnest, sincere, and interesting founders. There are also lots who probably would've been happier on Wall Street.

xmprt 2mo ago

There's more truth to the "Forbes 30 Under 30 to prison pipeline" than people give it credit.

make3 2mo ago
this is just an empirical fact

RivieraKid 2mo ago

It's really hard for me to understand that people who have the chance to achieve basic financial independence (say $1M net worth) don't take that chance and make sure to stay financially independent forever. If you do that, you're almost guaranteed to stay in the top 2% globally for the rest of your life. You've made it in life, at least financially. The approach of not taking advantage of the lucky and privileged situation exposes you to a huge risk that your NW will go down to zero and you never get a second chance.

polishdude20 2mo ago
I don't think these people NW ever goes down to zero.
- make3 2mo ago
  they often go into the minuses I'm sure, spending culture in the US is bananas
mordechai9000 2mo ago
I think $1M net worth in the US these days is a nice little nest egg, but not anywhere near financial independence. Unless your needs are simple, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply, and you don't have any dependents.
- sfRattan 2mo ago
  > Unless your needs are simple, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply, and you don't have any dependents. As a human, your needs are simple[1]. With a $1M net worth, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply. And your dependents can live in that same place, also cheaply. All you need to do is show the Joneses the door out of your mind and never let them back in, nor look toward their lives in envy. [1]: Healthcare being a notable potential exception, depending on the individual.
  - ip26 2mo ago

Aurornis 2mo ago

> Jim had participated in drug-fueled “founder parties”, group orgies and all other crazy experiences in San Francisco. This naturally led to the breakup with his fiancée and a nervous breakdown. The Bay Area is a weird place. There are countless companies staffed by smart people doing amazing things. There are also countless people cosplaying as smart people and founders who are going through all of the motions, but producing little value. In my experience (which is as limited as any other one person's experience) the environments at the companies doing the amazing things are on the boring side. Nobody wants to hear about those because it's uninteresting. So instead all of the public stories are about crazy parties, quick wins, huge exits, and the glamorous stuff. People go there seeking it out. Some get lucky with some early wins, like Jim from this story. But when the time comes to do work, they flounder and get pushed out, also like Jim. It's a big place, though, and there's always some connection willing to hook you up with another referral if you press hard enough. That's the step where the performative, partying people start getting grouped up with other performative, partying people, and it snowballs from there. Meanwhile the real companies are off quietly doing boring work and getting things done, pushing the Jims out if they accidentally get hired or acquired into the fold. It's a weird place.

vrosas 2mo ago
SF is such a weird vibe in general. I've watched a lot of founders/tech bros go to burning man for the first time, completely miss the point of it but adopt an air of superiority for attending. I watched a founder weave in his experience on peyote into a company all hands. They also, for reasons I simply cannot fathom, go out and buy a green Range Rover. And as someone who's been in the ENM space for a long time, SF is the LAST city I'd want to experience it in...
- Aurornis 2mo ago
  > I've watched a lot of founders/tech bros go to burning man for the first time, completely miss the point of it but adopt an air of superiority for attending. I can't say I see a lot of green Range Rovers in other cities, but I assure you this one is universal across places and industries. I have friends who go to Burning Man and don't post anything on their social media or bring it up in conversation because they don't want to be one of those people. Others go once and it becomes 50% of their personality for the next year.

tikhonj 2mo ago

> A few months post-acquisition, he got fired for an allegedly silly reason, but my intuition is that he was coasting hard and couldn’t focus at all because of home office and lifestyle creep. This seems like a pretty dubious conclusion to make from the outside. There are a lot of reasons somebody would get fired after an acquisition. Hell, even if he was coasting, an acquisition followed by a rapid change in environment and culture can cause somebody to lose motivation for a wide range of reasons. Blaming this on "lifetstyle creep" is rather premature and, frankly, pretty judgemental or moralistic. This is downstream of a pretty frustrating belief I've seen repeatedly in the tech industry: that whether a person is "motivated" or "hard working" is some kind of inherent quasi-moral characteristic of the person, rather than something substantially affected by environment. But hey, it's much easier to blame individuals and lean on the perf review process than it is to change organizational culture or leadership!

egonschiele 2mo ago

Real bummer of a story. > He approached me because he was really into startups and wanted to become a tech entrepreneur, and make the big bucks It's a shame that so much of tech culture has become about money. Money was always a part of it, but living in the Bay in 2010, there was more of a focus on building things. But once people started getting rich, especially off bitcoin, it brought in a whole host of people whose primary passion seemed to be money. We moved out in 2018. Still bums me out, SF was my favorite city, and I hoped to live there for a long time, but the values weren't my values anymore.

deleted 2mo ago
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camillomiller 2mo ago
It’s always been a travesty, it was just harder to see through it because back then morals hadn’t been completely dismantled by the last 15 years of whatever the US has become
Aurornis 2mo ago
> Money was always a part of it, but living in the Bay in 2010, there was more of a focus on building things. But once people started getting rich, especially off bitcoin, it brought in a whole host of people whose primary passion seemed to be money. This is funny to read because I remember hearing someone complain about the exact same thing in the Bay Area, but their dates were shifted by about 10 years before yours. I think it's kind of like Burning Man, where everyone's favorite experience was their early days when they were young. As you get older, you complain it's gone downhill and the new generation is going for all the wrong reasons.
- nilkn 2mo ago
  I find people's view is based on how much they're personally "winning" financially. If they're making money, then daily life seems more about building. If they're not making money, then the oppressive cost of living makes money seem all-important in the culture (which, in fact, it is and has been for generations). SF and the Bay Area are constantly shuffling through and recombining ideas. What generated money relatively easily in 2010 would've started becoming low value in 2018, rapidly approaching an asymptote of relative uselessness today. 2018 is about the point where you needed to be pivoting to AI if you really wanted to remain part of the city's "upper class", where money feels like it doesn't matter because it's abundant and automatic. 2010 was the era of mobile apps.

senorcrab 2mo ago

Ultimately this comes down VCs who fund people like this. Can we really believe the established funds look for "independent thinkers" anymore?

bloodyplonker22 2mo ago
Most VCs have a relatively short timeline to deploy money by or they will be berated by investors for sitting on it. Therein lies the problem.

camillomiller 2mo ago

Airbnb’s CEO, for example, is a Jim who got lucky

make3 2mo ago
Snapchat's famously also is one
- arionhardison 2mo ago
  His family is also insanely rich and helped him w/ the IP contracts. John W. Spiegel: A prominent business litigation and securities lawyer who graduated from Yale University and worked as a partner at the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson.

mikeaskew4 2mo ago

“Who wants to make some real, positive impact on humanity,” says no one ever, anymore…

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asveikau 2mo ago

Probably not right to diagnose an allegory, but does it sound to anyone else like Jim might have bipolar disorder?

lmeyerov 2mo ago

Fwiw, without naming names, I helped someone at a hackathon make their first app on something he was passionate about, later found out he had been recently homeless living on an abandoned boat, and now years later, afaict he turned that into a $10m/yr business with ~millions of users Persistence > Intelligence , and being able to code isn't some sort of superiority thing, it's just one skill of many Edit: being able to take risks, and doing so, does lead to higher variance outcomes, so that is something I have also come to appreciate and look for in people. It may look reckless, and attracts weirder people almost by definition, but that is what startups are ultimately about, betting you can do better than the regular path!

gyanchawdhary 2mo ago
true :)
tennisflyi 2mo ago
> being able to code isn't some sort of superiority thing, it's just one skill of many Nah, bro. You’re elite level intelligence if you can /s
akurilin 2mo ago
pg wrote about this a while back: https://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html https://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html
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sherburt3 2mo ago
Sounds a lot like a rich kid pretending they're not a rich kid.
duxup 2mo ago
When I decided to code (later in life) I was determined to give it my best shot, not sweat the small stuff, just keep going. Previously I tried to learn but gave up assuming that it just wasn't my thing, but I decided this was my last shot and I was going to make it happen. Some classmates of mine were (like everyone gets) frustrated at one point and actually complained that they were paired up "with those two". Those classmates thought that the other guy and I knew what we were doing and "just got it". Truth was we just kept our hands on the keyboard, had really not made anymore progress than anyone else in class had ... we just kept typing / trying things. Years later I would say I'm still not a talented programmer, I just stay positive, help my coworkers, and keep gong until I make it happen, and as far as my employer is concerned that's pretty great.

janpeuker 2mo ago

Reminds me of this 2015 article "Beware The Pretty People" http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/28/beware-the-pretty-people/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/28/beware-the-pretty-people/ > The establishment scions pouring into tech take on the trappings of subversion, while remaining fundamentally conformist. Meanwhile, rampant success inevitably causes the former tech counterculture to morph into posturing “Prada revolutionaries,” Unfortunately the article ends on praising crypto and surveillance, so this has been going on for a while

goatlover 2mo ago
Even better who you know, then you can become wealthy and get away with almost anything, as Epstein realized when he said there are out lots of hard working people who never become rich.

andsoitis 2mo ago

That story has more holes in it than Swiss cheese.

binsquare 2mo ago

Condolences, I've also met a few Jim's in Chicago and some even in big tech once money, privilege came. some opportunities allow people reveal parts of themselves or things they always wanted

TrackerFF 2mo ago

I always found it interesting how different things are in US (well, more so startup hotspots) and Europe. In the US you're simply given more chances if you have the right personality and superficial elements. In so many European countries, unless you happen to have bootstrapped your way into success, you'll be written off as a bozo if you don't have all the correct credentials. Someone like Jim (read: No formal relevant education, no industry experience, only hopes and dreams) would in the very, very, VERY best case get a €100k funding - and that is only if they had other more attractive looking co-founders with them. I mean, it is something everyone knows - but the sheer risk averseness you often see here in Europe is really something.

EA-3167 2mo ago
The reality behind that is that the US is much much richer than any single European entity, and that the US is a country founded by Europeans (note that I'm talking about the country, not claiming Europeans are the first to arrive in North America) who felt they'd run out of opportunities back home. Hundreds of years of European migration to the US suggests that social stratification and lack of opportunities outside of the old boy's network remains a problem.

alexashka 2mo ago

There's wage slave layer, nepo baby layer and the in-between. Author has discovered that his 'working hard' to be at the bottom of the in-between layer pales in comparison to the invites others receive for simply showing up. That's how it goes. The real bitch is when you get to spend some time with the hot folks or the nepo babies and realize there's no substance - all they have is a mastery of surface level pleasantries and an incredibly thin skin.

luciana1u 2mo ago

[flagged]

ashu1461 2mo ago

I feel the crux is that there is no shortcut to success, any shortcut which is taken has to be compensated at a later part of your career. Example if you got funding without having product market fit, then you would have to justify that funding at one point on another. One example of this is the current AI companies. Irrespective of how much marketing / hype that exists today, the long term question remains the same. Can they build a sustainable business ?

la64710 2mo ago

In the span of just a few years, he went from nobody to a tech founder - would this have been possible if Jim was not charismatic like the way the author described including being white, tall and being part of that fraternity.

varjag 2mo ago
Is he white? The author mentions "exotic-looking".

thraway3837 2mo ago

Hang in there, it's about to get a bit judgmental and harsh: This blog misses quite a few red flags that are obvious to the reader from the very beginning. Jim is an aimless party boy and got a rich gal to sustain his mediocre life. Blew his first success on thrills, cheated on his fiance and was a terrible human being. He then became worse because everyone around him enabled him, and that's just the character he is. He's not the Steve Jobs charisma that people like the blogger think he is. No. Instead, he's a sleazeball sales guy who is a master grifter and conman. Think more Elizabeth Holmes. This isn't at all the typical SV founder meat grinder. There are plenty of boring, hard working, regular family folk who show up 9-5 and pursue their passion projects that got funded. This is how we're all on this site. We like to see these projects succeed and we want to see cool stuff that helps us nerd out. Because that's ultimately what being in this industry is: Making a chunk of metal do some really cool stuff and solve problems that are worth solving. Along the way, it attracted some really unsavory people like Jim who looked at the tech money and wanted a quick piece of the action. It's the same problem we're having with young CS graduates. They have no drive, no passion for this stuff, no obsessive nerding out over the tech. They were told by everyone around them that it was a guaranteed job market and paid well, buy a house, great life. Even without AI coding, I would bet the vast majority of these graduates would have a very difficult time finding a job. Ultimately what we have to realize is that this world is full of people like Jim who get away with stuff because of privilege and great grifting skills. Think about how many actually sustainable ideas you or people you know have come up with and even prototyped. But could never find the funding to make it work. That's how nearly everything got started. Somewhere along the way, we stopped caring about joy and nerdery of it and started chasing the $ :(