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The last day

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Re: The last day

#151

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #146
chernevik wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is too late to edit the above. I was trying to convey irritation and even anger, but many seem to think I've gone over the edge to hostile or even threatening. I should written more carefully. Posting while drunk is one thing. Posting angry while drunk is one thing. Veering near someone's personal space while drunk and angry, probably not such a good idea. I apologize for any alarm I caused.

You're frustrated. I'm frustrating to argue with. I totally get it, and I got it at the time. It was funny, so I joked about it a little, but for the record, if anybody cares: I didn't feel threatened. I won't presume you're apologizing to me, but for whatever it's worth, I wouldn't ask for an apology anyways.

[deleted]

Re: The last day

#152

Post by gfodor »

edwinnathaniel wrote: post #87
tptacek wrote: post #54

The amount of privilege built into this "painful failure" is disquieting. Here's a person whose biggest problem in life appears to be that he's in debt and, for the moment, unemployed. But: he was the CEO of a company funded to the tune of 8xFTE, and can thus almost certainly walk into hundreds of VP/Product Management or Business Development roles immediately, all of which will pay him more than any of his technical…

Whenever I'm down or sad, I look up to this video: http://youtu.be/H8ZuKF3dxCY and suddenly I feel better and blessed.

I usually, in all seriousness, search for "Judge Judy" and "Jerry Springer" on youtube, surf through a few videos, and get some perspective.

Re: The last day

#153

Post by pbiggar »

tptacek wrote: post #54

The amount of privilege built into this "painful failure" is disquieting. Here's a person whose biggest problem in life appears to be that he's in debt and, for the moment, unemployed. But: he was the CEO of a company funded to the tune of 8xFTE, and can thus almost certainly walk into hundreds of VP/Product Management or Business Development roles immediately, all of which will pay him more than any of his technical…

> Grand projects fail all the time. Open source projects die. Web communities die. Clubs wind down. Sporting teams disband. I write this so you can angrily tell me that I'm wrong: tell me what's so bad about a tech startup failing in 2012?

Nobody cares about startups themselves, because they are not people. This story is about a person who failed, not a intangible corporate entity. Have some empathy for a kindred spirit, at a bad point in their (fictional) life.

Re: The last day

#154

Post by pbiggar »

patio11 wrote: post #108

If this is in the general vicinity of "Worst. Day. Ever." for you, your life is pretty effing awesome now isn't it. One Thanksgiving a year seems inadequate under the circumstances. (I respectfully suggest that anyone unable to put death of a startup in perspective invest some effort in rekindling ties with folks outside our little bubble. Again, it's Thanksgiving, so you've got a built-in excuse.)

That's a little callous, no (even if it is a fictional character)? Imagine if everything you worked for over the last 5 year dried up, and you had for some reason to go back to life as a salaryman. Not the end of the world probably, but you'd be pretty depressed.

The lack of empathy in this thread bothers me.

Re: The last day

#155

Post by smalter »

tptacek wrote: post #76
chernevik wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuck you. I daresay my problems are somewhat worse than those of the OP's CEO. He isn't in a divorce, doesn't have kids, does he? And yeah, even if my problems are worse, they're still distinctly First World. It isn't as if I have trouble finding potable water for my kids, or have to worry about teenager "soldiers" raping my daughter. So maybe I too am Entitled. And perhaps I too should just Shut Up. But I don't thin…

Again: it's not that there are people in the world who are worse off. There are always people in the world that are worse off. Most people in the world are much worse off than most Americans. It's that most Americans are worse off than this person. This is startup exceptionalism. It is the intersection between nerd exceptionalism and the myth of the heroic entrepreneur, both of which are virulent memes in our culture…

I'm not sure why people can't fit both perspectives in their brains at once.

It sucks, and it's not that bad.

Re: The last day

#156

Post by pebb »

jasonshen wrote: post #31
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't pay your employees with page views. Profits (or revenue, to be a bit more precise), on the other hand, are directly exchangeable for rent, food, payroll, keeping the lights on, and other such necessities. The dollars a farmer uses to make payroll are fungible. It doesn't matter if they came from a stupid government subsidy or a sale at a farmer's market.

You pay your employees with capital, which can come from customers, the government, banks, credit card companies or investors. Most tech startups do not generate a lot of cash in their early stages, which is why they raise capital from investors who purchase equity stake in the company because they believe the company will be valuable down the road. Page views (and more so user signups/engagement) are one metric by w…

Sure, and I bet you buy your food with stock options.

Re: The last day

#157

Post by adventured »

chernevik wrote: post #74
tptacek wrote: post #54

The amount of privilege built into this "painful failure" is disquieting. Here's a person whose biggest problem in life appears to be that he's in debt and, for the moment, unemployed. But: he was the CEO of a company funded to the tune of 8xFTE, and can thus almost certainly walk into hundreds of VP/Product Management or Business Development roles immediately, all of which will pay him more than any of his technical…

Fuck you. I daresay my problems are somewhat worse than those of the OP's CEO. He isn't in a divorce, doesn't have kids, does he? And yeah, even if my problems are worse, they're still distinctly First World. It isn't as if I have trouble finding potable water for my kids, or have to worry about teenager "soldiers" raping my daughter. So maybe I too am Entitled. And perhaps I too should just Shut Up. But I don't thin…

Interesting post, except the part about pain not being rational.

Both emotions and specifically pain can absolutely be rational. There's no inherent separation between the rational and the emotional.

Crying when your loved ones die is, for one example, a very rational thing for a person to do; that is a rational emotional response to pain.

Re: The last day

#158

Post by koide »

tptacek wrote: post #77
jordanb wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's about perspective Is it fair to expect someone in his position to have perspective? I think if you ask him about the failure six months or a year later, a resilient person would be able to put it in perspective, but not while it's happening.

I don't know, because we're not talking about a specific person. But the entity that I know only from reading this article, the one sitting on a desk picking at his company's vanity sticker and thinking that nobody in the world can know how he feels, I think he could use a little perspective. It is exactly clear to me how unhappy this sentiment makes startup people on HN, and that's fine. I take no offense.

The point is that this line of reasoning can be applied to whatever painful event suffered by anybody who's better than "most people" and especially gasp "most Americans."

Where do you draw the line and why there and not elsewhere? What's "proper pain"?

To be honest, I'm somewhat on your side and tend to take the "shut up and grow up already" mentality regarding people whining (suffering) about painful life events, but that view does not answer the above question reasonably, it just ends up denouncing whatever you personally cannot withstand or are annoyed with.

Re: The last day

#159

Post by aidenn0 »

koide wrote: post #158
tptacek wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, because we're not talking about a specific person. But the entity that I know only from reading this article, the one sitting on a desk picking at his company's vanity sticker and thinking that nobody in the world can know how he feels, I think he could use a little perspective. It is exactly clear to me how unhappy this sentiment makes startup people on HN, and that's fine. I take no offense.

The point is that this line of reasoning can be applied to whatever painful event suffered by anybody who's better than "most people" and especially gasp "most Americans." Where do you draw the line and why there and not elsewhere? What's "proper pain"? To be honest, I'm somewhat on your side and tend to take the "shut up and grow up already" mentality regarding people whining (suffering) about painful life events, b…

It's fine to have pain, but to say "nobody can understand this pain" when huge numbers of people are almost certainly worse off is hyperbole.

Re: The last day

#160

Post by vidarh »

tptacek wrote: post #54

The amount of privilege built into this "painful failure" is disquieting. Here's a person whose biggest problem in life appears to be that he's in debt and, for the moment, unemployed. But: he was the CEO of a company funded to the tune of 8xFTE, and can thus almost certainly walk into hundreds of VP/Product Management or Business Development roles immediately, all of which will pay him more than any of his technical…

It's disconcerting how many people didn't get the point of your comment.

I've had failed startups too. For my first one I ended up paying out of my own pocket, to tidy things up in an orderly fashion, and I and my cofounders all took up a (reasonably small) loan to pay back some other debts. It sucked. It hurt. I've certainly at times have felt like nobody could know my pain too.

But then the following week we went to work at our new employer, found for us by our original investors lawyer, at a salary 3 times what we'd been able to afford to pay ourselves at our startup.

Was my pain not real despite the obvious privilege of being in a position where I could call on people to find me a job making substantially above the national average before we'd even wound down, at the age of 22? Of course not.

But there's a vast difference between feeling like that for a bit vs descending into self pity and whining when one is in a situation where even a moments reflection about the position one is in would show that you're in a position vastly better than most, and that indeed there probably are billions out there that have known pain just as bad or worse.

I don't understand why so many reacts so strongly to this perspective.

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