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Finding Time to Invest in Yourself

nav.al

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Re: Finding Time to Invest in Yourself

#41

Post by teachrdan »

neonate wrote: post #27
teachrdan wrote: post #22

This fluff piece was written so quickly that the author did not correctly comprehend a two-word quote that he uses: > Coming out of college, Warren Buffett wanted to work for Benjamin Graham to learn to be a value investor. Buffett offered to work for free, and Graham responded, “You’re overpriced.” What that means is you have to make sacrifices to take on an apprenticeship. No, what that means is that, as a fresh co…

It seems to me that the author comprehends the quote perfectly well. His point is that since Buffett was adding negative value to Graham out of the gate, he'd have needed to do something extra to make hiring him worth Graham's while. And that doing that something extra would have been a good investment because of the learning opportunities it would bring. That's the apprenticeship part. Disagree with the argument if…

Perhaps what we disagree on here is semantics. When I read,

> you have to make sacrifices to take on an apprenticeship

I understand that to mean that in order to even apply for / commit to an apprenticeship, you have to make sacrifices. In the context of the rest of his narrative, that means sacrificing a safer, better paying, more conventional career for being a gopher for a would-be titan of Silicon Valley.

Obviously, if you have the chance to be the gopher for an actual titan of industry, it's probably worth any reasonable sacrifice. But that's not what the author is promoting. He's promoting the "hustle 24/7" mentality even as a barista in the hopes that your manager will reward your entrepreneurial sprit--or, more likely, a newbie founder who will at best will exit their startup somewhere in the high six to low seven figures and leave you with little more than a few hundred thousand dollars of opportunity cost.

Re: Finding Time to Invest in Yourself

#42

Post by alexpetralia »

dang wrote: post #33
SandersAK wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to edify and spend that time when you routinely flag and kill my comments. You claim that HN is "better than this" but Naval's post is totally devoid of insight. It is hackneyed and the commentary responding to it is a reflection of that. If you want better commentary on the front page, then do a better job of making the front page articles worth talking about. As to me claiming to know how Naval got rich -…

The last comment of yours that was flagged and killed was six months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20348091 . It was done by users, and rightly so. I have no opinion about Naval one way or the other, but your argument there is flawed. There were tons of people trying to do the same thing at the time. Plenty had privilege and money. Why didn't they all succeed too? To just say "luck" is a non-answer; that'…

It might be useful to think of "luck" as an error term on a regression model, where the covariates are well-known factors (e.g. wealth, ambition, connections) and the error term is everything else.

Given that plenty had privilege and money (i.e. those are the covariates), and many didn't succeed, we'd expect those weren't significant variables.

Many likely had drive, connections, know-how as well. Many of them probably failed too. Again, insignificant covariates.

So what does that leave? The error term: luck.

In other words, during a tech boom like at the turn of the century, there are so many winners (often outsized, which distort many basic statistical assumptions, such as a normal distribution) that is almost futile to try and identify significant covariates.

To speculate here, often with the pretense of certainty, is more often reflective of post-hoc reasoning than actual science.

That, in my opinion, is why "luck" is an adequate answer. We can be fairly sure that certain covariates contribute to success over the long-term in life (i.e. we have a large sample size of being alive, and we can extrapolate from many other people who have lived). It is far harder to do this with nonce hype cycles (infrequent, low-sample size).

Chalking up more success to the error term, "luck", seems perfectly appropriate during such unusual times.

Re: Finding Time to Invest in Yourself

#43

Post by ProAm »

dang wrote: post #21
throw_14JAS wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally see At least, that's what it would take for me to join a startup as first engineer versus starting my own business.

When you say 'first engineer' do you mean literally the first employee, or early (say 1 thru 5)? If the former, what do you think would be appropriate levels for, say, employees 2 thru 5? If the latter, are you arguing that the first 5 employees should be offered 50% of the company? Just to be clear, I'm not disputing the point and don't have a strong opinion. I'm curious where HN users—who include many prospective e…

Even if the first five employees get 50% that will be diluted to ~5% by the time there is any form of satisfactory exit, so while it sounds high, its not crazy either. If the company doesn't exit well the 50% doesn't matter.

Re: Finding Time to Invest in Yourself

#44

Post by snowmaker »

sethammons wrote: post #37
dang wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say 'first engineer' do you mean literally the first employee, or early (say 1 thru 5)? If the former, what do you think would be appropriate levels for, say, employees 2 thru 5? If the latter, are you arguing that the first 5 employees should be offered 50% of the company? Just to be clear, I'm not disputing the point and don't have a strong opinion. I'm curious where HN users—who include many prospective e…

I land on the idea that the percent is not as important as the raw value if the company hits the targets. 1%? 5%? Of what? If the company plans to get to a $1B valuation, that is different than a company that wants to exit at ~$10M. And since we all know that equity is usually worthless anyway, I think the real way that smaller companies should compete for talent is with other perks. More time off, less days per week…

I think the idea of startups offering perks as a way to compete with big companies is a good one. Being more flexible on how employees work and offering things most big companies don't (fully remote, for example), is one of the things startups can uniquely offer.

The thing about fiddling with liquidation preferences is that it's very hard to change and will have minimal impact on the bottom line for employees. Liquidation preferences only matter in the case of companies that fail, where they might make the difference between making $0 and making a tiny bit of money. Employees will make virtually all of their money on the companies that are successful.

Re: Finding Time to Invest in Yourself

#45

Post by dang »

ProAm wrote: post #43
dang wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say 'first engineer' do you mean literally the first employee, or early (say 1 thru 5)? If the former, what do you think would be appropriate levels for, say, employees 2 thru 5? If the latter, are you arguing that the first 5 employees should be offered 50% of the company? Just to be clear, I'm not disputing the point and don't have a strong opinion. I'm curious where HN users—who include many prospective e…

Even if the first five employees get 50% that will be diluted to ~5% by the time there is any form of satisfactory exit, so while it sounds high, its not crazy either. If the company doesn't exit well the 50% doesn't matter.

What do you think early employee equity should look like relative to founders'? And what should employee #1 equity look like relative to #2, #3, and so on? In a fair world.

Re: Finding Time to Invest in Yourself

#46

Post by dang »

alexpetralia wrote: post #42
dang wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last comment of yours that was flagged and killed was six months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20348091 . It was done by users, and rightly so. I have no opinion about Naval one way or the other, but your argument there is flawed. There were tons of people trying to do the same thing at the time. Plenty had privilege and money. Why didn't they all succeed too? To just say "luck" is a non-answer; that'…

It might be useful to think of "luck" as an error term on a regression model, where the covariates are well-known factors (e.g. wealth, ambition, connections) and the error term is everything else. Given that plenty had privilege and money (i.e. those are the covariates), and many didn't succeed, we'd expect those weren't significant variables. Many likely had drive, connections, know-how as well. Many of them probab…

If I understand you correctly, then "luck" is another word for "we don't know". That's reasonable, but then we shouldn't make strong claims to knowing.

There's a cruder version of this argument, according to which all success is luck. I hear that, or things that sound like it, a lot, but it's too simplistic and usually too self-serving to be plausible. Though many successful people will be the first to tell you they were lucky. (I always remember https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621845)

Re: Finding Time to Invest in Yourself

#47

Post by ProAm »

dang wrote: post #45
ProAm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the first five employees get 50% that will be diluted to ~5% by the time there is any form of satisfactory exit, so while it sounds high, its not crazy either. If the company doesn't exit well the 50% doesn't matter.

What do you think early employee equity should look like relative to founders'? And what should employee #1 equity look like relative to #2, #3, and so on? In a fair world.

I think a lot of that depends on the field the company is in, how much vision is is brought in by fouders (is it a radically new, risky field that requires true vision, or is it another sass app that is reinventing the wheel while taking out a few of the hassles in current industry, etc...). It also depends on how much talent/skill is brought on by employees 1,2,3... etc... Is it rare expertise that is hard to find, vs just another javascript dev that knows AWS etc.... So to define that is tough, or rather fluid but I think offering employee's 1-5 I would be OK with contracts that say employee's 1 through 5 get 0.8 to 1% share of the company but is non-diluatable. So their equity stays the same regardless of the success of the company. (of course there is room for discussion with an idea like this but hopefully you get the point Im trying to make)

Re: Finding Time to Invest in Yourself

#48

Post by CPLX »

dang wrote: post #25
CPLX wrote: post #9

The first example is basically find a successful person and take a menial job sucking up to them and doing their laundry. Welcome to America 2020

Come on, you guys. HN comments need to be better than this—much better. Please read and follow the guidelines: " Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. " " Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidel…

I fully agree with the general HN guidelines, and believe they've been incredibly effective at making this a smart and civil discussion forum, but I respectfully disagree with this interpretation of my comment.

The original article is very thinly argued, and I do believe it's perpetuating negative dynamics that don't reflect well on the general VC/startup community and the author in particular.

The author of the article is essentially arguing that the only thing that matters is proximity to power, status, and wealth, and one should pursue it at the cost of one's own dignity for almost no renumeration.

Given that the author themselves is in fact powerful, wealthy, and holds high status, his statement should properly be parsed as self-serving propaganda. He's basically saying "find people like me and be their handservant" in as many words. My response contains no more dismissive scorn than his original post.

In my humble opinion, of course.

Re: Finding Time to Invest in Yourself

#49

Post by alexpetralia »

dang wrote: post #46
alexpetralia wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be useful to think of "luck" as an error term on a regression model, where the covariates are well-known factors (e.g. wealth, ambition, connections) and the error term is everything else. Given that plenty had privilege and money (i.e. those are the covariates), and many didn't succeed, we'd expect those weren't significant variables. Many likely had drive, connections, know-how as well. Many of them probab…

If I understand you correctly, then "luck" is another word for "we don't know". That's reasonable, but then we shouldn't make strong claims to knowing. There's a cruder version of this argument, according to which all success is luck. I hear that, or things that sound like it, a lot, but it's too simplistic and usually too self-serving to be plausible. Though many successful people will be the first to tell you they…

I think that's a fair opinion.

The only tweak I'd make is really around sample sizes and statistical significance.

All success _may_ be due to luck (the error term), but we can be fairly confident (say p This is much harder to do with small sample sizes or unusual occurrences. Statistics is based on frequencies, and if we have low frequencies (such as a tech boom), we should be much less confident in the significance of each variable.

This is, presumably, why people intuitively chalk up much success during these times as survivorship bias. It's not that it certainly, absolutely is; rather, it's that we're far less confident on which variables are significant and which aren't. The error term remains.

Again, attributing it to the error term, implies mostly that we shouldn't have too much confidence in our speculations on which traits are significant during such one-off events.

Re: Finding Time to Invest in Yourself

#50

Post by neonate »

teachrdan wrote: post #41
neonate wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that the author comprehends the quote perfectly well. His point is that since Buffett was adding negative value to Graham out of the gate, he'd have needed to do something extra to make hiring him worth Graham's while. And that doing that something extra would have been a good investment because of the learning opportunities it would bring. That's the apprenticeship part. Disagree with the argument if…

Perhaps what we disagree on here is semantics. When I read, > you have to make sacrifices to take on an apprenticeship I understand that to mean that in order to even apply for / commit to an apprenticeship, you have to make sacrifices. In the context of the rest of his narrative, that means sacrificing a safer, better paying, more conventional career for being a gopher for a would-be titan of Silicon Valley. Obvious…

I totally agree that the value of such an apprenticeship depends on how titanic the master is, which means it's mostly not going to be all that valuable.

I still think Naval understood the point about negative value perfectly well.

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