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Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

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Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#61

Post by borism »

VolatileVoid wrote: post #39
jamesseda wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is GS is company that wants to "beat the market" meaning someone else in the market is loosing. And Google's goal is to make the worlds information available to everyone and show them ads. Google seems more like a everyone wins company.

Everyone wants to "beat the market." For every dollar McDonalds gets, Burger King is not. For every dollar Microsoft gets, Apple is not. There are no group hugs unless you work for a non-profit (and even then, for every dollar your non-profit gets, some other, equally deserving non-profit is not).

> For every dollar McDonalds gets, Burger King is not. For every dollar Microsoft gets, Apple is not.

I'm pretty sure that's not the case. Apple and Burger King would probably never be what they are today without MSFT or Mac. And perhaps vise versa also.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#62

Post by blehn »

samtp wrote: post #46
TheSOB88 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most guerrillas are not apes, either. (guerrilla war vs. gorilla ape)

Doesn't the expression refer to the 800 lb guerrilla revolutionary? ;)

But if the guerilla were 800lbs, it'd be only 4-5 dudes...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/800_lb_gorilla

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#63

Post by borism »

arethuza wrote: post #13
brown9-2 wrote: post #11

I'm curious about the author's opinion of Liar's Poker, especially the line I got on a plane to New York within the week. I packed my copy of Liar’s Poker for reference. I'm surprised that anyone would read Liar's Poker and think of it as a reference to Wall Street on an inspiration to work there. The "gorilla" culture described by Michael Lewis at Salomon Brothers in the 80s sounds very close to what the author expe…

In The Big Short he mentions that although he never intended Liar's Poker to inspire people to work on Wall Street. However, that's precisely how a lot of people have treated it - he mentions he gets a lot of requests from people who read Liar's Poker and want tips on how to get started on Wall Street.

it's the same with Wall Street (the movie).

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#64

Post by ashishb4u »

VolatileVoid wrote: post #27

So. This is funny. I actually work at Goldman, work in the system he talks about, and have been doing so for 5 years. You can get numbed by the experience of working here, but you don't have to be. I've become friendly with some of the best hackers I know, and for us, finance always takes a backseat to writing amazing code. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we fail, but we try to never say, "Meh. Good enough." Wall Str…

totally agree, its just a job. even if you work with the most hacker-friendly company, you'll eventually rant out the same way someday. Maybe the post should be "Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than a day job" (oh thats a cliche!)

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#65

Post by sspencer »

antongm wrote: post #50
hubb wrote: post #4

that was very well written. "It got to the point that some papers had no authors, and had apparently written themselves. So it goes. No longer with the firm." slightly vonnegut-inspired?

Yes! Glad someone spotted it....

He's not the only one. Every time I see that it morphs in my head to Und so weiter.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#66

Post by jbooth »

rchi wrote: post #36
jamesseda wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is GS is company that wants to "beat the market" meaning someone else in the market is loosing. And Google's goal is to make the worlds information available to everyone and show them ads. Google seems more like a everyone wins company.

The following is from a talk at the New York Public Library. ERIC SCHMIDT: But in fairness to those people[finance people], had they come to Silicon Valley in 1999 they would have received a far greater payoff during our little bubble. So who are we to criticize the Wall Street folks for having their bubble? It was just a bigger bubble. WALTER ISAACSON: Do you think though that Google creates something that’s more re…

Eh, I don't see how candidness and an eagerness to question his own model by Schmidt changes the value proposition at all. Almost all of the time, an ad click is creating value (or a fractional expected value) where there wasn't some before, unless you have a 0% conversion rate.

Meanwhile, a huge chunk of Goldman's activity as I understand it is simply taking the "dumb money" on Wall St. Nibbling the edges, taking pieces of trades by less sophisticated investors. That's not necessarily value creation, and much of the time it can be straight extraction from the rest of the economy.

Not that ads won't get there of course - they're well on their way already with various exchanges. But presently, they have to actually be creating other economic value via conversions in order to exist.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#67

Post by yummyfajitas »

jamesseda wrote: post #45
unshift wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for every dollar of ads google sells, that's a dollar their competitors don't get. they are as cut throat as anybody else, they just do a better job of making computer people feel good about it. ask their sales department if they're an "everyone wins" company.

If G-mail didn't exist I would use yahoo. G-mail is much better for me though. I win and Google wins. Yahoo looses. If GS gets in front of Citi on a trade by 2 seconds GS wins and Citi looses, no one else is involved. Unless those two seconds of "efficiency" help someone?

You are assuming all trades are determined by priority, which is false.

If GS got there first, but Citi cuts in line by offering a better price, the customer also wins.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#68

Post by jbooth »

cynicalkane wrote: post #60
eru wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a very zero-sum model. Do you know, that dollars don't get destroyed by spending them? (And that this doesn't even matter, because it's wealth creation that matters (supply) and not demand?)

I think the point of his comment is to see that viewing trade as zero-sum leads to absurdity.

Certainly, but assuming it can't be zero-sum leads to absurdity as well.

What about high frequency trading? Most of it is zero sum, first one to arb the difference wins. The economy doesn't derive any higher value from it if the difference would've been corrected within a couple seconds (or a few minutes) anyways. It's not the same as buying a burger.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#69

Post by jbooth »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #8
d_c wrote: post #3

That's quite interesting: " At the risk of getting sued, let me throw you geeks a bone and part the Goldman veil a bit. The Goldman Sachs risk system is called SecDB (securities database), and everything at Goldman that matters is run out of it. The GUI itself looks like a settings screen from DOS 3.0, but no one cares about UI cosmetics on the Street. The language itself was called SLANG (securities language) and wa…

I've had a number of people tell me this system is why GS won the financial crisis. During the financial crisis, GS knew their positions and their risks. They could also calculate the side effects of proposed trades as quickly as their computers could calculate it. This meant the people at the top could actively plan what to do next during the day. In contrast, MS and JPM can only get information like this a few hour…

If you know and can speak about enough to do a blog post on this, could you consider it? I'd love to hear more about the different systems capabilities and how that affected the different big houses' ability to trade effectively in a storm.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#70

Post by JoelSutherland »

VolatileVoid wrote: post #42
TheSOB88 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything that takes up half of your waking hours shouldn't be "just" anything.

Really? Quality, not quantity. An hour with my wife is more meaningful to me than half my day at work. No job will make up for that, unless I'm changing the world. So yes. It's just a job. Your (not you specifically, but anyone) startup is just a job.

So because your wife give you a 100 happiness factor(tm), you are now indifferent when choosing between jobs that give you a 20 or 80 happiness factor?

Or are you saying that your meaningfulness bar is so high that no job can possibly clear it? What if you and your wife worked together?

For the most part, we get to choose our lives. I reject the idea that time spent working can't be meaningful.

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