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Ask HN: I'm lonely. Are there any video chat support groups for solo founders?

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Re: Ask HN: I'm lonely. Are there any video chat support groups for solo founders?

#151

Post by vt100 »

rdslw wrote: post #133
songzme wrote: post #42

Personally, whenever I feel lonely I would go volunteer and help people. It makes you feel connected and really puts things into perspective (like, even if your startup doesn't do well, you would still be surrounded by people who enjoys you as a person). Every Saturday, my wife and I volunteer at our local library (northside branch in santa clara) to teach people how to code. We've been doing that for almost a year w…

I trust you're doing for the good, yet it reminded me a story I heard some time ago. Story went like that: I'm a gold miner. Gold mining is cool, everybody wants to gold mine. So I'll teach you FOR FREE how to gold mine, but during first year I offer you to gold mine for me at minimum wage. It's a shity goldmining you're doing, as you're newbie, so that excuses minimum wage, right? And I'm doing teaching for "free",…

You make it sounds like the big corporations that pay developers good salaries are doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. Apple, Google, Amazon, UBISoft, Nintendo, etc. are just as "exploitative". Part of developing your career as a software developer is knowing what you are worth at any point in time, and what your options are, and when to switch to a better option. I get the feeling the parent poster actually cares about maintaining a longer-term mutually beneficial relationship with his student/employees, which is already better than a lot of corporations out there.

Re: Ask HN: I'm lonely. Are there any video chat support groups for solo founders?

#152

Post by sah2ed »

nilsocket wrote: post #134

I always want to be alone, but sometimes I fear, I may end up really being alone my whole life. (I.e., I may never be able to find a partner myself.) I like to talk with someone who has a good character, and probably I prefer a CS partner. I love to have perfection in many things, I don't want to do, anything stupid with my life-partner. This perfection of mine may lead to something bad.

You have to learn that you need to strike a balance between wanting to be left alone (while productive) but not to the point that you are abandoned by friends and loved ones that you become lonely.

You need to make time to do things that will allow you meet new people: visit the library, gym, etc but keep in mind good character is relative. Please accept that although you seem to have the tendency to want to make things perfect before shipping, you'll never to be able to truly ship one.

Oh, and you'll make stupid mistakes. It's unavoidable, that's part of what makes all of us human. Better to accept it and view embarrassing mistakes as a learning opportunity.

Re: Ask HN: I'm lonely. Are there any video chat support groups for solo founders?

#153

Post by j_s »

danschumann wrote: post #69
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you based? If you are in San Francisco, let me know if I can be of help. (my HN name @ gmail, or google my name).

I'm from Oshkosh, WI. There aren't many tech meet ups around here.

You would do better to look in the Appleton area if you don't want to travel far, otherwise Milwaukee/Madison could be worth a trip (especially conferences) and Chicago should have everything.

Rob Walling is in MN right now, might be worth asking this question of him via his podcast, Startups for the Rest of Us. I assume he mostly interacts with his existing network remotely now though, not sure he could offer advice on creating such a network without bootstrapping in-person.

Re: Ask HN: I'm lonely. Are there any video chat support groups for solo founders?

#154

Post by vt100 »

atomicnumber1 wrote: post #143
smilesnd wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any one can learn to code it isn't difficult to learn at all. Just like any one can learn math or english. What makes the difference is what level you can achieve. Just like math goes from elementary school to college level coding has a similar pattern where certain people get stuck in different areas. Hello world would be elementary level building large scalable enterprise application would be college level. You don…

Great answer. How does one find their level?

By continually trying more difficult things. Of course, you may find that as you try more and more difficult things, your skills continue to grow. So your level can keep getting higher and higher. Also, note that some people reach higher levels in specific areas. One person might be amazing at low-level, highly optimized C++ or assembly, while another person might be amazing at building deep learning systems, while a third person might be great at designing hugely scalable and robust distributed web applications. Be curious, try learning a lot of things, find out what interests you, and what you're good at, and see how far you can go down the various rabbit holes.

Re: Ask HN: I'm lonely. Are there any video chat support groups for solo founders?

#155

Post by lttlrck »

kmf wrote: post #14

Seen a couple Slack suggestions – you might fit in well w/ the Hello, Remote crowd: it's a Slack group I put together for remote workers. Lots of startup people there, join us! https://helloremote.life/

Thanks, I signed up, interested to see how this works out :-)

Re: Ask HN: I'm lonely. Are there any video chat support groups for solo founders?

#156

Post by egypturnash »

cylinder wrote: post #51
Waterluvian wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And with one comment on Hacker News I think I understand why people do work at Starbucks. Not sure why that never dawned on me.

So all those people sitting there because they're lonely and want to be around other people ... But they never talk to one another. Weird.

We are not solitary animals; we evolved to be part of tribes and bands. There's a part of us that's just not happy unless there's other humans around.

And it's perfectly cool if we never interact with them. That's fine. Maybe sometimes all we want is to have someone around to be faster than when a lion comes out of the shadows and takes the slowest person down. Even if that, or some metaphorical equivalent of it, is exceedingly unlikely in a coffee shop.

Re: Ask HN: I'm lonely. Are there any video chat support groups for solo founders?

#158

Post by pancho111203 »

songzme wrote: post #42

Personally, whenever I feel lonely I would go volunteer and help people. It makes you feel connected and really puts things into perspective (like, even if your startup doesn't do well, you would still be surrounded by people who enjoys you as a person). Every Saturday, my wife and I volunteer at our local library (northside branch in santa clara) to teach people how to code. We've been doing that for almost a year w…

Might I ask what kind of people attend your classes?

I am thinking on volunteering on an institution which helps people with less social resources.

Your idea sounds like a good way to give those people more possibilities, as you can learn to code without paying anything if you have an internet connection and enough motivation.

What I'm afraid of is asking too much from them. Did your 10 engineers start with some background in computer science or math?

Re: Ask HN: I'm lonely. Are there any video chat support groups for solo founders?

#159

Post by lisper »

Loneliness is a vicious self-perpetuating cycle. It makes you depressed, which makes you want to wallow in self-pity, which makes people not want to be around you, which isolates you, which make you lonelier, which makes you more depressed.

The only way to break the cycle (and I apologize if this sounds harsh, but it's really the only way) is to just give yourself a swift kick in the pants and fucking DO something about it, and I don't mean posting on HN about how lonely you are. You have to actually GO somewhere where there are people and INTERACT with them in a positive way. Smile. Introduce yourself. Take interest in them. Listen. It hardly matters where you go or what you do. Just pick a random meetup near you and go. Or volunteer somewhere. Or just go to a random homeless person and offer to buy them a meal. The key is to project a positive attitude. This will be exceptionally difficult at first because every neuron in your brain is telling you that YOU are the one who needs to be listened to, the world has abandoned YOU, it's all about YOU. Well, guess what: you are not the only one who feels that way. EVERYONE feels that way at one time or another. You have to force yourself past those feelings and smile even though it's the most unnatural thing in the world for you to do right now. It feels like a lie.

But trust me, this feeling will be temporary. It might take more than one session, but eventually the mere act of smiling and listening to people will make them want to interact with you, and THAT will make the depression and the loneliness go away. And after a while it will start to work even when you are alone!

One disclaimer: depression can be very serious. It can be so serious that it does not respond to this kind of self-help. If you try this and it doesn't work, get counseling. There are professionals out there who can help. But whatever you do, don't succumb to the temptation to numb the pain by inaction. You can't get yourself out of a hole by curling up into a ball.

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