71–80 of 209 posts
I didn't want to start another company, so I didn't do it. But if someone had, they'd probably be quite rich now... You would be correct: http://www.news.com/Symantec-snaps-up-antispam-firm/2100-735...
I just want to point out that TurnTide was a Philly area company. Now that I live here, I have to plug it!
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I just want to point out that TurnTide was a Philly area company. Now that I live here, I have to plug it!
Hey, that's how I knew about it. I'm a PA area guy too.
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I think PG's qualification of "very best" is important here. While he has restricted his assessment to programmers, that need not be the case. This is applicable to the very best in any profession. I don't consider myself to be in the category of very best hackers, but I am pretty good, and I have never worried about money. If you have a decent reputation there will always be somebody practically begging for you to t…
"If you have a decent reputation there will always be somebody practically begging for you to take their money to do some work for them." That's not the same as being able to make money working on anything you want to work on. Of course you can make money working for someone else on their boring stuff, that's never been a question. "I have interviewed about 20 programmers and only 1 blew me away. " ...so why was he o…
I've heard something similar before: "Why did Greg and I do something so ludicrous as sneaking into an eight-billion-dollar corporation to do volunteer work? Apple was having financial troubles then, so we joked that we were volunteering for a nonprofit organization." -- http://www.pacifict.com/Story/
Amazing story. Please post it?
Does this not worry anyone? It's basically a statement justifying investment based on confidence, not that an investor is able to reliably guess whether a company will be able to generate PROFIT or not, but that it will be able to generate EARNINGS at all!
this is not investing in two birds in a bush (likely to be profitable). It's investing on the basis of four in the nest (potentially earning money at all!).
that's astoundingly risky. Now, either you believe investors are stupid and risk-insensitive (or risk-blind! not uncommon in a bubble) and will keep investing the same sums of money as they ever have, or you believe they are clever, credit strapped and most certainly not risk insensitive. Option A means a world of pain up ahead for investors and their backers, because we're in a mighty bubble. Option B means PG is wrong (though doubtless he'd like to be right, because it makes flipping seedstage companies from the YC stable a hell of a lot easier)
Based on the total inability of even the biggest players on the scene - e.g.YouTube, Facebook and Bebo - to monetise, I really don't see how the confidence to move to an earning-optimistic (from profit-optimistic) investing mode is at all justified. If anything, earnings are less certain than they ever have been, the slide should be the other way.
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Absolutely. I think the meaning of "hacker" is being diluted, I'm seeing people use it interchangeably with "programmer" on this site. When I think of great hackers, guys like Richard Stallman, Justin Frankel, or DHH come to mind. They're most certainly idealistic and only a couple of emails away from getting hired at Google.
Google is large enough it can take on people with almost any expertise. But what if DHH wanted to get a job hacking the Linux kernel? Or Frankel wanted to get re-hired to AOL to work on the stuff they didn't like? And RMS doesn't even program anymore from what I understand. What you're looking at is freedom due to financial independence. If you're financially independent, you don't have to work someplace you don't wa…
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Google is large enough it can take on people with almost any expertise. But what if DHH wanted to get a job hacking the Linux kernel? Or Frankel wanted to get re-hired to AOL to work on the stuff they didn't like? And RMS doesn't even program anymore from what I understand. What you're looking at is freedom due to financial independence. If you're financially independent, you don't have to work someplace you don't wa…
I'd imagine that if DHH really, truly wanted to work on the Linux kernel, he'd have no trouble getting hired to do so. Or if Frankel really wanted to work at AOL. The objection to hiring them is that given their past programming projects, it's pretty obvious they wouldn't want to work on that. Nobody wants to hire someone who doesn't want to do the job that has to be done.
That's pretty silly. Just because someone is famous for a Ruby project doesn't mean they'd know they first thing about low-level kernel code.
"it's pretty obvious they wouldn't want to work on that"
I'm not talking about working on something they DON'T want to work on. Obviously! I'm talking about working on something that is outside what they are known for, but which is an interest of theirs (hypothetical in this case).
Peter Drucker said much the same thing: profit is the cost of doing business, not the purpose . The true purpose of a business is to provide goods & services to its customers. The "profit motive" is essentially a check on the resources consumed by the business, to ensure that it's not spending resources inefficiently, much as PG mentions in the 2nd footnote. Up until the 1970s, it was common for corporations to be ma…