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No More “Insight Porn”

jakobgreenfeld.com

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Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#181

Post by soulofmischief »

vidarh wrote: post #92
MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #28

I got super lucky. I started a company and didn’t really have any meaningful traction. I was about to shut it down. Walking out of the grocery store one night after work, I passed by my former manager when I was an intern. We got to talk for about 30 seconds, mentioned my company, she asked me to email her. I did, and that very quickly led to my first big customer which makes me about double what a FAANG swe would ma…

My first company got its investment because one of my co-founders talked about it to a random stranger at a bar, who turned out to have money burning in his pocket. I second your advice to get lucky. Most of my 27 year career has followed as a domino from that. Once we'd paid back his investment and exited (for a pittance; the ISP marked we'd entered had become impossible for a small player), his lawyer happened to g…

The initial part has a large element of luck, but to be fair it was also because your co-founder was busy networking in public spaces.

And most of the events after that sound like the fruits of being skilled, agreeable and available.

Luck played a part, but don't sell yourself short. :)

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#182

Post by saalweachter »

rjtavares wrote: post #163
saalweachter wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If "luck" is a dirty word in the startup world, I would at least like acknowledgement that the pathways to success are frequently not replicable . Sure, nothing is certain, but some career paths are much more replicable than others. Maybe not everyone can work at a FAANGAMMATRON, there's a certain amount of luck, but "get a big tech job, work it for twenty-thirty-forty years" is still a fairly replicable path to mode…

> You can look at the types of actions people took to get a big tech job (...) and there's probably a double-digit percent chance of you being able to replicate it. You think more than 700 million people can get a big tech job?

... X0% of the people who can replicate the path, can replicate the results, is the guess I'm pulling out of my ass. Not X0% of the global population.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#183

Post by madrox »

There is very little advice that's good, but if you make a living producing content, you gotta get your quota up. The algorithm prioritizes new content. People want something to read every day over coffee, even if there's nothing new to read that's good.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#184

Post by superasn »

The corollary being that people who are not peddling insight porn are often dismissed and have much much harder time to get their content shared.

I mean on one hand there is this guy with an incredibly feel good story about how all you have to do is just fill the gaps between the problem and solution and get rich. Then on the other hand there is this guy giving advice that looks like a steep uphill climb from your comfort zone where you to measure every single unique issue in your product and call customers 10 times a day to understand what's not working and why they're leaving, etc.

Most people will pick A since it makes em feel good and such wisdom like "if your why is big enough the how takes care of itself "

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#185

Post by soulofmischief »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #60
MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #28

I got super lucky. I started a company and didn’t really have any meaningful traction. I was about to shut it down. Walking out of the grocery store one night after work, I passed by my former manager when I was an intern. We got to talk for about 30 seconds, mentioned my company, she asked me to email her. I did, and that very quickly led to my first big customer which makes me about double what a FAANG swe would ma…

Note: you had to be kind and nice enough for the former boss to care enough to: - ask you to email - read it and understand what you do - follow up and spend the company's money edit: simplicity

One of my friends went to space and had her life radically changed last year, and the opportunity entirely arose from the fact that she is one of the kindest and nicest people you will ever meet, and if you were tasked with filling the seat on that rocket, she'd be on the top of your list.

She got "lucky" in the sense that narrowly surviving bone cancer as a kid gave her a compelling story, but it's everything she did after getting cancer, and her conviction to follow her dreams, which led to the opportunity.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#187

Post by pwinnski »

anon25783 wrote: post #135

A crackhead never says "I have no money, I guess I'm not smoking any crack today". Instead, they will go to an abandoned building and strip all the copper wiring out of it. Don't let a crackhead out-hustle you today.

This would be horrible advice if it were not completely useless. As it is, it's only disgusting.

I don't find it inspirational, and there is nothing actionable.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#188

Post by mkl95 »

Actual insight can be tough to hear. No one wants to be told they would be doing better if they had worked their ass at some innovative company early in their career instead of taking an office job with a lower ceiling. Learning they can pull off some "life hack" to become rich will give them a much needed dopamine boost.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#189

Post by etothepii »

MilnerRoute wrote: post #146
danaris wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can increase your "luck surface" by doing certain things ....and your chances of being able to do those things (without severe risk of poverty and homelessness) are increased dramatically by having been lucky enough to be born wealthy, or at least upper-middle-class.

Someone once seriously proposed making the final determining decision for who gets into Harvard be based on...a random drawing. (From an oversized pool of qualified applicants.) The idea was students wouldn't go through the rest of their life thinking they'd prevailed in a meritocracy, and had earned and deserved every bit of their future success. They'd always have to acknowledge: some of it was pure luck.

It has the additional added benefits:

- accepts that the admission team is not infallible.

- allows for the drawing pool to be more representative of some target demographic if one believes that the selection panel has inherent bias.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#190

Post by pwinnski »

strken wrote: post #52

It's genuinely useful to know that making $X a year is the same as Y clients paying $(X / Y / 52) a week, if you've never thought about a business in concrete terms before. Obviously this is old and repetitive if you're a working software engineer who's been reading HN for years and has seen a ton of motivational LinkedIn bullshit, but it's the kind of thing a career councillor might go over to make running a busines…

I often don't know whether my potential business partner has integrity, in which case this advice wouldn't help me.

If I do know, then this advice is so obvious as to be meaningless. Unless I'm an idiot, in which case, again, this advice wouldn't help me.

There is some merit in the very inexperienced learning different ways to think about revenue. "You can choose to target one or two big contracts or many smaller contracts, and those have the same result" is useful advice, not that either one is necessarily easier than the other.

But "don't choose a business partner who's crooked" seems tautological and empty.

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