8 ms·

I don't like it. This article looks to me like an ad piece. It has very little substance. There is something bothering me in this article and the "startup cult

• te_chris 11y ago
  I know what you mean, this excerpt in particular makes him seem like someone with a very bitter inferiority complex: "So he later saw Amazon as a heroic disseminator of knowledge and progress. “Screw the independent bookstores,” he told me. “There weren’t any near where I grew up. There were only ones in college towns. The rest of us could go pound sand.”" I understand his point, but it seems more like 'I didn't get what I want so fuck you all' rather than something actually productive.
  • lkbm 11y ago
    In his experience, independent bookstores only serve a subset of the population. Amazon serves all the population. If ever there was a good reason to favor Amazon, this seems like one.
• larrys 11y ago
  "This is a huge waste of potential." That is the point that is often lost. I think this everytime I see someone who actually went to school and has a degree in something "serious" (with job security) throwing that away to do a startup idea. Shark Tank even had this. Robert Herjavec egging on a "board certified dental surgeon" to leave his career (was on "Beyond the Tank") to be able to sell (what started out as) Christmas sweaters. [1] The Dentist making a point that it was a tough decision because he had spent 10 difficult years going through Dental school and other training. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/tipsy-elves-shark-tank-success-story-2014-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/tipsy-elves-shark-tank-succes...
• saturdaysaint 11y ago
  Read the last third of the article.
• ebbv 11y ago
  The amount of creativity and intelligence in the valley is only eclipsed by the narcissism.
  • Roritharr 11y ago
    I have to borrow that one in the future.
  • cubano 11y ago
    I hardly think the valley holds a monopoly on narcissism as I pretty much see it everywhere in society nowadays.
    • ThomPete 11y ago
      But with more power to exercise it.
      • ThomPete 11y ago
        What do you disagree with?
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• gopher2 11y ago
  Very little substance? I dunno... what would you have liked to learn? What questions are left unanswered? Maybe I just don't know all that much about Marc Anderson but I thought it was interesting insight into the person.
  • nashashmi 11y ago
    How about something that reflects the title? My insight into Marc is that he is very much a history buff and relates all investments and conversations to a historical perspective. His rant on Carl Icahn was structured Icahn 1990 vs Icahn 2010, for example. Plus, I want greater analysis on his psychology. I am able to gather his analysis on investments that first he draws the big ideal picture of the future and then backs anyone going towards that future.
• angersock 11y ago
  Fuck that. There are companies every day trying to genuinely make the world a better place, like the healthcare IT one that I work for, trying to open up a Steam-like platform to do signal processing in hospitals. Or the not one but two charity fundraising startups bootstrapping in my city. Or the test-grading automation startup in Dallas. And yet, because these companies aren't within walking distance of the Valley VCs, and because they are sometimes tackling industry problems that take more than a year to close a basic deal on (seriously, fuck hospital invoicing and billing), they have enormous trouble getting out of the valley of startup death because no funding available that permits easy growth. And because the local VCs in these cities are looking for easy deals, they just fly over for their day trips to the coast, and ignore what's in their own backyards. So, for fuck's sake, let's not complain about the developers who are trying to eke out a living--let's instead take a long, hard look at the market and society that rewards them, and understand that that is the root of the problem. EDIT: Minor clarification in paragraph two.
  • 7_7 11y ago
    Making a living, as I wrote, is perfectly acceptable. I am not opposed to this. You are right. It's the society and the market that rewards such situations. The ugly sweater startup makes millions but the charity fundraising you mentioned will probably fail. Because one would prefer to look out of fashionly grandma-like cool (?) than help someone else. It's a problem of education in the broad sense, and I don't know, overcoming our natural impulses for egoism, greed and fear ? Sound like clichés but I belive they are at the heart of our problems as a whole.
  • eevilspock 11y ago
    > let's not complain about the developers who are trying to eke out a living You make it sound like developers are not one of the privileged classes in this world, that they can't make money easier and accumulate more of it with less physical, psychological and emotional degradation than the vast majority of the world. That they might "only" be in the top 10% instead of the top 1% does not make it less true. No one in the top 10% has any business complaining except about the condition of the bottom 50%, and then they should be doing something about it, as 7_7 suggests.
• Throwaway1224 11y ago
  Plus his head looks like an egg.
• jgalt212 11y ago
  > I don't like it. This article looks to me like an ad piece. It has very little substance. If this is true, and given the piece is in the New Yorker, it definitely speaks volumes about how much money AH spends on PR.
• Kalium 11y ago
  For myself, I'd love to make the world a better place. I'd also love to have the resources to do it. I could skip the bit where I need resources and go directly to applying an extra human's worth of work to problems that have successfully resisted many human's worth of work... or I could gather resources and bring much more than just me to bear. Right now? Apps are a decent way to gather resources.
  • eevilspock 11y ago
    via Michael Crawford1[1]: When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course, you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners. As a practical matter, a mere failure to speak out upon occassions where no statement is asked or expect from you, and when the utterance of an uncalled for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. Try to raise a voice that will be heard from here to Albany and watch what comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father's, offering you a place at his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if you any of young gentleman have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations, and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well. I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I shall use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought, his ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time. John J. Chapman, Commencement Address to the Graduating Class of Hobart College, 1900 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MichaelCrawford https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MichaelCrawford
• AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  Everyone thinks they make the world a better place. The problem is this is such a useless metric and so vague that they are probably right - for some subset of users. If whatever you are building makes 1 or 2 people's lives easier or a process more efficient, or someone a little happier by using it, then you can say that you legitimately made their world a better place. Problem is the "making the world a better place" mantra brings to mind things like vaccines and the dishwasher etc... not a mobile library for Haskell which makes 20,000 software developer's lives slightly easier. So I am against the phrase in general because it signals a global reach, while realizing it might be true locally.
• beenpoor 11y ago
  I agree whole heartedly. I too often find those claims pretentious. Small percentage of startups actually do it, while vast majority of them just want to make $s and make their life better. Absolutely nothing wrong with it, except their claims. The random guy contributing 100$ to Nepal relief fund ends up more genuine.
• Dirlewanger 11y ago
  There needs to be better incentives for solving the ugly problems of the world. It most likely will not come from the private sector because they see too much short-term gain from the Ubers and Snapchats. Otherwise it will not stop. I wish Gates would get into the SV fray and throw some money around to these problems.
  • nostrademons 11y ago
    That's not what's stopping the ugly problems of the world from getting fixed. My last startup was (yet another) attempt to solve unemployment. As we got closer to the problem with our market research, built an initial product, and tried to sell it, we realized that the field is...well, let's call it "fractally fucked up". The job/employment market is a mess of millions of different actors, all of whom are doing the wrong thing because their incentives are perverse, they lack full information, and they wouldn't act on that information because they don't trust it even if they had it. You can't solve this problem by throwing around money, because you have to change behavior and you only change behavior through long-term, deliberate attention on the part of all of the individual actors. I'd posit that all of the "ugly problems" of this world - unemployment, education, inequality, health care, human rights - result from similar fractally fucked-up systems. It is far, far easier to solve the problem for yourself and a small number of other people than to solve it for everyone. In some cases - like inequality or power dynamics - it's not possible to solve it for everyone, because the definition of the problem changes as you make progress.
    • dang 11y ago
      This comment is deeply insightful, and "fractally fucked up" is a perfect phrase for this. Both halves are necessary and precise. I feel like if everyone would absorb your point, it would cut out the most toxic kinds of negative dismissal that we see in these threads—the kind that assume X would be easy, if only Y weren't so stupid or greedy.
    • bokonist 11y ago
      I would love to read a blog post with further explanation of what you found out when trying to solve unemployment with your startup.