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The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

chris-martin.org

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Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#191

Post by munificent »

pmichaud wrote: post #165
ryandrake wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just learned this quote now and I love it. Very true. Much of tech mythology, where we are told "started from nothing" actually started from a place of at least some capital and privilege.

I think in conversations like these most people on the successful side underestimate how valuable the starting advantages were, and most people not on the successful side overestimate how valuable the starting advantages were. Meanwhile almost everyone misunderstands what the advantages really are. People will talk about the $300k loan Bezos started with and think "boy golly, with 300 THOUSAND dollars, I could do any…

> He thought that so very much that never even had to think it consciously.

This is such a huge part of it. Our upbringing gives us our culture and the set of ideas and expectations that form our "default mode" thinking.

If your default mode assumption is that you are capable and have agency, that investing in a long-term project will reliably produce long-term value, and that risks are often worth taking, you are set up to try to build something amazing.

But if your default mode is that you are a pawn at the whims of other people, that whatever you try to build can be easily swept away by chance or bad actors, and that you've got no room to fail, then at best you'll just try to eke out a stable existence with as little risk taking as possible.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#192

Post by m_dupont »

The link between DEI and the rest of the content of the article is not well-articulated at all.

Leaving aside whether one agrees with the premise, his argumentation is disjointed at best.

He is attributing various symptoms of these tech leaders behaviour to them clinging to a bygone world, however he hasn't really articulated any of these symptoms beyond them thinking that "DEI" is the cause of all their problems.

He can't even back it up with a single quote or published piece from one of these tech moguls which displays the opinions that he characterizes them to have.

Articles as sloppy as this shouldn't get 230+ points on hackernews

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#193

Post by monknomo »

Gud wrote: post #157
mandevil wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest thing is about "Amazon was started in a garage" is that Jeff Bezos had worked at hedge fund D.E. Shaw (founded in 1989) from 1990-1994 (that's where he met MacKenzie, she was an admin staff, he was a finance guy). So he had hedge fund money already before he founded Amazon.

Also his granddad was loaded.

I thought it was his stepfather that gave him the ~$250k seed money (which is like $550k in today's money)

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#194

Post by mrandish »

pmichaud wrote: post #165
ryandrake wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just learned this quote now and I love it. Very true. Much of tech mythology, where we are told "started from nothing" actually started from a place of at least some capital and privilege.

I think in conversations like these most people on the successful side underestimate how valuable the starting advantages were, and most people not on the successful side overestimate how valuable the starting advantages were. Meanwhile almost everyone misunderstands what the advantages really are. People will talk about the $300k loan Bezos started with and think "boy golly, with 300 THOUSAND dollars, I could do any…

> He thought he belonged... he thought he could do things and that people would let him.

This is a good point and, in the case of successful startup entrepreneurs, it may not rely solely on how much society grants or denies that belonging. Entrepreneurs tend toward a kind of selective irrationality in how they see themselves and in how they think others see them. Steve Jobs was always the first victim and/or beneficiary of his own reality distortion field. Internally, this lack of self-awareness would tend to help one ignore some of the emotional downsides of belonging being denied and externally to seize more belonging than is being granted - just through sheer chutzpah.

I've heard it said that many successful startup entrepreneurs feel all the insecurity of 'imposter syndrome' without processing any of the 'imposter' part. They tend to think they belong even when they objectively don't. While irrational, annoying and unhealthy, it's hard to imagine this doesn't have some advantages too.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#195

Post by wing-_-nuts »

steveBK123 wrote: post #176
Gud wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also his granddad was loaded.

Yeah an unsurprisingly large percent of self-styled.. self-made billionaires certainly came from close to or actual millionaire backgrounds. I suppose it shouldn't be terribly surprising as being successful requires hard work & a good idea. But it REALLY REALLY HELPS to also have a risk appetite, capital, and connections.. which are what coming from even moderate wealth provides.

>it REALLY REALLY HELPS to also have a risk appetite, capital, and connections.. which are what coming from even moderate wealth provides.

I graduated in 2008, and I watched classmates make the 'insane' decision to risk it all and go off and try to found startups. Inevitably, some failed, but to my shock it wasn't the end of the world for them? In one case the 'bank of mom and dad' paid rent until they got back on their feet, and in the other, they moved into an ADU in their parent's back yard.

That's when it hit me that those folks took risks because they could afford to. I was worried about winding up sleeping under a bridge. That concern was as foreign to them as the thought of having a safety net to fall back on was to me.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#196

Post by layer8 »

dzink wrote: post #91

Some potential causes of the scarcity of breakthroughs in the last 10 years: 1. "What got you here won't get you there." The problems that need solved today might require a different mindset/level of experience and that may not be in people with enough time or circumstances to build, or enough likeness to the old model be funded by VCs. 2. Distractions galore - Social media and trillions poured into the distraction e…

Good points, but what happened to 5 and 6?

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#197

Post by arduanika »

jparishy wrote: post #41

To me this seems pretty apt, and probably more generalizable. The world is claimed. There is no glory to come from being the first anymore, and that is too big a bummer for a lot of Great Men. I think future progress will be the composition of skills, as mentioned in the article. Or we go backwards and just take things from each other. pc has an article about a related topic in my view: https://patrickcollison.com/fa…

> The world is claimed.

Isn't it such a strange coincidence that you can imagine all of the things that have ever been invented in the past, and none of the things that will be invented in the future?

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#198

Post by Roritharr »

K0balt wrote: post #131
avg_dev wrote: post #25

I didn't agree with everything, but I did with a lot; in particular this: > As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no garages in the trailer park. Not sure who Julie is, but I think she's spot on.

This is a sort of perplexing subject for me. I grew up pretty poor. We had a well, but not running water. We flushed with a bucket, bathed out of a trash can-cum-water barrel. We subsistence hunted. We had vehicles that mostly ran, most of the time. Yet I can see that I was , in fact, born into privilege. Not a privilege of money, but a privilege of priority, skills, and acceptance of risk. My parents prioritized one…

This is gut-wrenching to read from Germany.

I grew up with a mentality of "you can't do that, there's a rule against that" and had to slowly break out of it as much as I could. Just knowing that there's people like you out there makes me happy. I applaud your freedom.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#199

Post by munificent »

systemstops wrote: post #186

"If these are the conditions under which passionate creative problem solving thrives, then of course we must recover them to make software great again. But they are not." This doesn't make any sense. Obviously those conditions lead to incredible thriving in the past. This guy is basically arguing that because it doesn't work now (in a super diverse globalized world) that it never actually worked. These are the same k…

There is an infinitely long list of things that were part of the environment when that kind of passionate creative problem solving in software was thriving.

What the author is saying is that not all of those properties were causative to make software great again.

Do we need people to have enough of a safety net to take risks with entrepreneurship? Yes. Do we need enough regulation to prevent entrenched companies from using regulatory capture to stifle competition while having little enough regulation that small companies can spin up and be nimble? Yes.

Do we need to be listening to N'Sync, wearing JNCOs, watching Beavis and Butthead, and drinking Crystal Pepsi? Probably not. Those were in the air, but not causative.

And, certainly, I see little evidence to support the implicit claim in "anti-woke" that somehow sexism, homophobia, and racism were causative factors that enabled entrepreneurialism to thrive a few decades ago.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#200

Post by dougb5 »

larusso wrote: post #93

I often contemplated about people like Zuckerberg who had massive success with the first thing they built and then have to come to terms that not everything they touch turns to gold. I wonder what kind of feeling that must be if your greatest success happened in your 20th. How do you measure your successes then?

My cynical answer: I think they reframe their history to see it as a series of ever-larger successes -- with some setbacks maybe. They avoid introspection that might lead to the unpleasant conclusion that they have actually gone off the rails and caused societal harm since their initial success. By and large their net worth has continued to increase, and that's the measure that they're comfortable with associating with success, and they see that as validation. Plus, they are surrounded by people who have the same incentives to lie to themselves and to each other.
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