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My First Job Interview was with a Billionaire
- dublinben 12y agoYour site doesn't show anything without javascript enabled. You might want to have some graceful fallback of some kind.
- logfromblammo 12y agoThis is one of my pet peeves. What makes is worse is that if I temporarily enable scripts for the page, there is nothing on it that actually requires scripting. The javascript just displays formatted text. Every HTTP service in existence already does that.
- adambrod 12y agoCurrently you could construct this statically (actually we used to host on S3), but we're building out the desktop app at the same time, so it made sense to host the blog on the same app. This should be rendering HTML server side soon.
- adambrod 12y agoFor sure. It's on the back burner! In the near future it should render all of the html on the server side to eliminate this.
- jseliger 12y agoBrilliant story. That being said, Page should learn to be a better writer. Take this, for example: As for my right ear, I was born deaf in it lol. This was not a fun experience to say the least. Being born deaf in one ear is rarely a cause for "laughing out loud," and the "lol" adds nothing to the first sentence. "To say the least" is a cliché and should be eliminated. Anyone could be guilty of these writing sins and in a large enough sample of my own writing I'm sure someone could find clichés. Nonetheless they're pervasive enough to detract from the piece. It wouldn't be a bad idea to get Write Right! (my favorite short, pithy writing book) and William Zissner's On Writing Well.
- nostromo 12y agoI think there is a time and a place for formal writing, but I liked the :) and the lols in this case. It feels very informal and personal.
- steven2012 12y agoI agree. I thought the writing was really poor and very hard to follow. One moment he's talking about losing his hearing, then his vision and then having Epstein Barr. That being said, it seems like a pretty interesting story, good for him for fighting through his problems!
- mcpat 12y agoI think there's room for the perspectives offered by both formal and informal writing. Given the informal context, reminiscing about first job interviews with friends, I feel that the author wanted to share that setting with us as readers. It may not have been the same decision you would have made, but take it as a chance to learn a new perspective rather than opening with hard criticisms.
- chmullig 12y agoInformal is totally fine, but I found the relatively low writing quality distracting.
- steven2012 12y agoI disagree, I don't think the style was informal, I think it was simply poorly written. There is a difference between the two. The blogger never purported to be a good writer, so I don't fault him for it and I was able to get the gist of what he wanted to say, but it wasn't well written..
- zizee 12y agoBeing born deaf in one ear is rarely a cause for "laughing out loud" I think it was quite clearly intended as sarcasm. the "lol" adds nothing to the first sentence I can agree with you there though, but mostly because I don't like "lol" as a word and not because of the use of sarcasm.
- johnnyg 12y agoYour sign in/sign up doesn't offer an option to sign up...
- kimonos 12y agoNice story!
- typage 12y agothanks, much appreciated
- natecarroll 12y agohey, what was your screenname on pokerstars/ftp/2+2? from the timeline, i'm guessing we played together a lot.
- adambrod 12y agoTom's having trouble logging in (same IP issue?), but he said to email him at tom@blonk.co and he would be happy to chat.
- carrotleads 12y agoI loved the email pitch. Seemed to the point and anyone reading it was clear who you are and what you could do. As Mark Twain said in a letter, "if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter". Still a long way to go for me but I can see my pitches are becoming better. I happy to start with a long winded sentence now and then gradually cut it down.
- 7Figures2Commas 12y agoThere's a good general sales lesson here: "research" is not "preparation", even though they're commonly assumed to be the same thing in practice, as was the case here. It's hard to craft a viable proposition if you don't know your target, but simply knowing your target doesn't mean you have a viable proposition. Ultimately, the OP's pitch to Moritz ("my poker success can be translate to success as a venture capitalist") was interesting enough to land him a meeting, but not compelling enough to close the deal.
- primitivesuave 12y agoCool story, but fix your site! You're missing out on valuable HN exposure because of the general feeling of incompleteness.
- ScubaFarm 12y ago"Stay pathologically optimistic." Love it.
- bbg215 12y agosup bro - nice post.
- rajacombinator 12y ago"Tinder for jobs" ... doublefacepalm.gif. good luck though maybe I'm wrong.