71–80 of 104 posts
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I see how it can be read that way. By "merit," I meant actual accomplishments and not some ethereal quality of a person or group just sitting idle. I'm glad you chimed in though because you're one of the cases that kind-of fits the model above. From a complete outsider's point of view, it looks like friends giving friends tens of millions of dollars for nebulous reasons. * Disclaimer: Text is a poor medium of communi…
What am I a case of?
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You just want to world to recognize you as "having merit" and give you money? You want to be successful, but are unwilling to make any sort of effort? Create something remarkable and people with money will find you.
Surely that assumes people with money are good at spotting 'worth'...
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insider dealing
How so?
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Not to be snarky, but what is impressive about tagging your question with "SSL" - the exact keyword is in the question. No semantic analysis or NLP required - just simple keyword based entity extraction.
I know, it's not brilliant, but SSL wasn't in a particularly special place in the sentence or anything that would make it easy for a computer to figure it out. Compare that question to something like "I am using Rails. How do I ...?", where a computer would have a pretty easy time of figuring out that Rails is important with some simple parsing logic.
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I'd be curious to know how you use the service. Most of the questions I see asked on it seem pretty poor and uninformative.
It's good with niche questions that only a human could help with. I've had luck with social questions ("where's the yscraper located?") and tech questions ("why's my jscript [code here] breaking in IE6?"). It's like stackoverflow, but "real-time" and not limited to coding questions only.
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How so?
I'm not implying that you were engaged in anything shady, but your success with friendfeed, you have to admit, was more than the sum of your technical/marketing talent, having friends in high places has to have come into it somewhere, no?
If your point is that people can build future success on top of past success, yes obviously that is true, but there is nothing wrong with that. It means that you need to work at it for a while and not expect people to simply hand you whatever you want because of some imagined "merit".
Edit (because there's not reply link for some reason): Where do you think reputation comes from? You have to start by doing something, and over time if you keep doing things that makes you more valuable.
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There was a time I believed all corporate activities were based only on merit. Anything not completely merit derived would be illegal. That's what we're made to believe with all kinds of anti-descriminition laws (you can't ask age, about kids, etc during interviews for example). It turns out, everything is friend based. Know rich people? They'll help you get rich too. Have a project you don't want to do inside of Goo…
Know rich people? They'll help you get rich too. What you may not realize is that everyone is knowable if you put enough effort into it. If you have no drive and no talent, rich people won't be able to help you. There aren't that many driven and talented people out there, so if you're one of them, and you make an effort to meet rich people, they'll help you too.
I beg to differ, if you assume that there are an equal distribution of talented/driven people, then how come there are more millionaires (talented people) in silicon valley than the rest of america, and america more than europe, and europe more than the rest of the world.
More likely is that rich people are cliquey and luckier/lazier/less talented at spotting opportunity/investing than they give themselves credit for (otherwise you'd see a more equal distribution of investment to where the talent is).
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It's good with niche questions that only a human could help with. I've had luck with social questions ("where's the yscraper located?") and tech questions ("why's my jscript [code here] breaking in IE6?"). It's like stackoverflow, but "real-time" and not limited to coding questions only.
like Yahoo! Answers?
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I'm not implying that you were engaged in anything shady, but your success with friendfeed, you have to admit, was more than the sum of your technical/marketing talent, having friends in high places has to have come into it somewhere, no?
Not really -- we didn't know the Facebook team all that well. Your argument would make more sense if we had sold to Google, but even then it would be false. If your point is that people can build future success on top of past success, yes obviously that is true, but there is nothing wrong with that. It means that you need to work at it for a while and not expect people to simply hand you whatever you want because of…
Even the 'remarkable' thing is not entirely true. I don't think facebook or microsoft were remarkable, for example, they just hit the right combination of luck and skill at execution. Google on the other hand, was an example of something remarkable when it first appeared.