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I find his hyper-self-deprecating tone at the beginning of the talk to be a little off-putting. He's obviously fairly qualified considering that he managed to s
by ruswick 14y ago
I find his hyper-self-deprecating tone at the beginning of the talk to be a little off-putting. He's obviously fairly qualified considering that he managed to secure a job at Github (which is a very well respected company that is, at least anecdotally, incredibly selective with their employees) and was invited to speak at a school. He obviously must have inordinate tallent or we wouldn't be reading these slides.
In addition, the slides were pretty unsubstantive. He took ~70 slides to convey 1) startups are fun; and 2) don't be a sociopath and/or a recluse.
- jarjoura 14y agoHarsh! To be fair, it's meant for students at the university to see a real-life success story from their program. My school had these all the time and used them as a way to keep people engaged.
- dalke 14y agoHow often do students learn about real-life failure stories? For famous historical examples with books about them: GO Corp (1990-era pen computing) and the Chandler project (personal information manager, mid 2000). I've personally found some stories about failures to be quite informative, because they help show failure modes I had never suspected. But I had to learn about most of these post-school.
- mnicole 14y agoTotal opposite for me, I enjoyed the presentation a lot and he wrote about way more than you're giving him credit for (risk-taking, emotions, power of perseverance; the exact thing a college student would want to know). As for the self-deprecation; humility is a great trait in someone, it's always reassuring to know successful people still have doubts about themselves. I also enjoyed the fact that I could read the slides and not need to listen to the audio or read a transcript to get the sum of the talk. I generally just want to get to the meat of something and, without actually being at the real talk, I feel like I got a good story out of it. As for the length, flipping through that many slides when you're presenting is different than just reading them online; you keep the audience engaged by moving their attention around in reasonably short bursts.
- shuzchen 14y agoTo be fair, slides usually accompany a talk. If he stood there and just read off the slides verbatim, yeah, that'd be lacking in substance. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that his actual presentation went into more depth.
- baddox 14y agoI find that his self-deprecating tone provides a welcome contrast to his usual boundless smugness.