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>"How many companies have you started by the time you're 18? If the answer's zero, I wouldn't invest in you," he says of their entrepreneurial verve. Jesus chr
by jen729w 11y ago
>"How many companies have you started by the time you're 18? If the answer's zero, I wouldn't invest in you," he says of their entrepreneurial verve.
Jesus christ, really? That sounds like a hideous childhood to me. Is this what we're becoming, a race of people obsessed with capital and business and work?
Go play in the dirt and ride your bike, kid. Work when you're old.
- prawn 11y agoGoes hand-in-hand with his other quote: "I have made so many massive mistakes of ego, I can't tell you."
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- fezz 11y agoI stopped reading it because it was very clear that his ego is still giant. And it's not surprising that the Steam circus has some of the same ego issues.
- hnmodturds 11y agoand yet they were interviewing him, and not you. his ego accomplished shit, and yours?
- gexla 11y agoI'm sure many of us did some sort of business when we were kids. Trading anything with your friends (cards, etc) is a business, especially if those trades make the value of your collection go up or down. Buying these items new (cards in a pack) could sort of be an investment scheme. If you held onto anything worth money from your childhood, you could call that a buy and hold scheme. Creating in-game value by trading, selling and acquiring items in an MMORPG is a business if you could cash out that value through trading sites. Some kids sell weed and other illegal items.
- sliverstorm 11y agoIf we are taking his words as deliberate, there is a huge difference between offering a small service on a bulletin board and "starting a company".
- johnchristopher 11y ago> I'm sure many of us did some sort of business when we were kids. > Trading anything with your friends (cards, etc) is a business, especially if those trades make the value of your collection go up or down. Buying these items new (cards in a pack) could sort of be an investment scheme. > If you held onto anything worth money from your childhood, you could call that a buy and hold scheme. > Creating in-game value by trading, selling and acquiring items in an MMORPG is a business if you could cash out that value through trading sites. The capacity of some posters on this board to redefine simple and well known words into something entirely different in order to fit a very warped vision of things never ceases to amaze me.
- alan_cx 11y agoYou have just described how politics and media work these days.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoWell, this is a basic skill of a programmer, or even an engineer in general. It's not about fitting a very warped vision, it's about applying different models to the same situation. As long as you keep in mind that you're just applying models, you'll be fine. If you forget about it, you'll end up becoming a politician.
- keyboardwarrior 11y agofeel free to replace model with dogma, when talking about politicians
- gexla 11y agoWhat word is that? Business? Keep in mind that we are referring to children (under the age of 18.) These sorts of transactions are often the first steps into the realization that you can grow value (which could be physical or virtual items) through transactions with others (this could be smart trading or selling something you created.) These first steps could be powerful lessons which may shape their future. If I sell a baseball card and I make a profit, then that profit would likely be recorded on a Schedule C (Form 1040), Profit or Loss From Business. http://www.irs.gov/uac/Schedule-C-(Form-1040),-Profit-or-Loss-From-Business http://www.irs.gov/uac/Schedule-C-(Form-1040),-Profit-or-Los... Just by selling that card, you are a sole proprietorship. If you get creative, you can think of many different ways in which children participate in business activity. ETA: Okay, I get it. My examples aren't of people starting companies. A kid selling baseball cards might be a business, but not a company (company is a group, more than one.) I wonder if that's what he actually meant though. Can a minor even hire employees?
- bbcbasic 11y agoYawn! Anyone can say hyperbolic stuff like that. You have to, to be quoted. E.g. there are only two hard problems in computer science etc.
- 1stop 11y agowell at least with the latter it implies a third problem that could be very broad and cover everything ;-)
- eru 11y agoInvesting in monomaniacs can be much more successful than investing in normal well adjusted people.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoWhich is a problem with incentives around investing, not with normal, "well-adjusted" people. It should be pretty clear now that the market strives to remove all human values not relevant to increasing abstract profit numbers. We are literally losing our humanity over this. And the best thing? If we continue, it may well end up that an automated economy will become a closed loop, running by itself without the need for human input or existence. Some people fear we code up a Paperclip Maximizer, but it could be that we'll accidentally build one in pursuit of profits.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoHasn't this already happened with HFTs? Some terrifyingly large proportion of the money markets runs on pure code already - which is terrifying because we're not even a democracy now, but some kind of bizarre automated profit-seeking cybernetic metacreature.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoCapitalism systematically makes humans into cogs in a machine. Now it replaces the cogs it considers defective (flesh) with ones which cannot fail it (silicon).
- eru 11y agoWhat's a democracy in your book? Who's `we', and were they ever a democracy?
- abides006 11y agoI'll presume you're not someone trying to rationalize their own laziness or manipulate young whippersnappers not to make geezers look bad. For anyone that wants to be a rich founder, almost sensible but definitely effective workaholism can help. The main issue is that only a few people are motivated enough (irrespective of vesting schedule and equity share classes) to get shit done while everyone else wants to look busy or shift work to those sort of folks. They have a name: dead weight freeloaders. Be the fast, effective shit doer because there's no room in awesome for sloppy, lazy crap and excuses like retail employees try to pass off every day.
- applecore 11y ago“Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the-entrepreneurial-generation.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the-entrepr...
- nateabele 11y agoI've hung out with him a few times. He's actually a really fun, down-to-earth guy (he loves cracking really, really stupid jokes). He's also a really passionate, ambitious person, and he's just not capable of dreaming small. When he decides to do something, he's in, 100%, and he values that same kind of ambition in other people. That doesn't mean you have to be a workaholic as a kid, it just means you were passionate enough about something to go out and do something about it (when I was a kid, I started a stupid video game magazine — because it was fun).