Early epiphanies as a late cofounder
blog.jeffzchen.com
Early epiphanies as a late cofounder
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Re: Early epiphanies as a late cofounder
#2I think I can say with fair confidence that I’ve learned more and done more in the last four days than I have in the rest of my 22 years of existence.
-- Isn't this a classic display of cognitive bias?
Re: Early epiphanies as a late cofounder
#3Good read. I especially enjoy the part about smart people having an "idiot mode". I've found that some of my best ideas were derived from silly ones, and the silly ones only came about because I was with friends I could trust.
Re: Early epiphanies as a late cofounder
#4What precisely is a "literal metric fuckton of advice"?
Re: Early epiphanies as a late cofounder
#5How is this any different than "epiphanies as a hacker at a multi-person startup"? The post was well worded and concise, but didn't contain any insights that aren't standard HN rhetoric.
Re: Early epiphanies as a late cofounder
#6Unrelated to the blog article, I hadn't heard of Pixlee until now. The company appears to scrape Instagram and try to measure brand awareness/usage/trends/______ by analyzing the pictures. Probably advertised as "Twitter-like sentiment analysis for Instagram." Image recognition is a hard problem. Good luck to them.
Scraping Instagram? Wow, that just gives me more pause about putting too much personal info on social networks. Will people create a startup that measures risk profiles for insurance companies based on how many beers or cigarettes appear in pictures? Or pictures that include known felons or people with police mug shots? It will be interesting to watch this space.
Re: Early epiphanies as a late cofounder
#7"This week I worked 15 hour days... I believe everyone has something that will motivate them to this level"
Working crazy hours is not a synonym of motivation. You can be crazily motivated and still have a life...
Re: Early epiphanies as a late cofounder
#8What precisely is a "literal metric fuckton of advice"?
Well, we can take as a lower bound for information/energy equivalence as the k.T.ln(2) from Landauer's principle[1], and mass-energy equivalence as e = m.c^2; there would presumably be some inefficiency in converting energy to fuck-energy (call the efficiency epsilon), so that gives us
information = epsilon . mass . c^2 / (k . T . ln 2)
=~ epsilon * 3.13e43 bits
Re: Early epiphanies as a late cofounder
#9I fear this is going to be taken poorly, but this really made an impression on me. This is not a criticism of the author, nor really a condemnation of the lifestyle depicted - but only an observation. I find the "Myths of The Valley" both very interesting and very frustrating. This is about the Myth, not about the author.
This reads like a religious testimony, or a classic Campbell myth.
It begins with scripture from one of the prophets, "Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly, but working for a large company is like being waterboarded. - Paul Graham" then moves to the (self-acknowledged) epiphany where the author expresses how his eyes, once closed are now open. In monomyth terms, its a mix of "the ordinary world", "call to adventure", and "the refusal":
"I’ve learned more and done more in the last four days than I have in the rest of my 22 years of existence." "Until last week, I was pretty convinced that I was a lazy, talentless fuckup." "We are so good at it that we can easily convince ourselves that we are happy doing something when in fact we are not. ... Then I woke up."
We then bring in several of the common Valley mythical elements:
The "all-nighter" - "This week I worked 15 hour days and was disappointed when I got too tired and had to sleep."
The "garage" - "On day one, I ... slept in a garage next to my motorcycle.
We then have, in monomyth terms, the "meeting with the mentor": "On day two I met with one of the biggest investors in the valley."
Testimony as to how life prior seems trivial: "There’s not not enough time to argue about what movies to watch or what restaurants to go to."
And the conclusion where the author warns about being led astray on the journey: "Between the time that I left Facebook and the time I joined Pixlee, I received a literal metric fuckton of advice, from respectable, well-meaning, intelligent people. I compiled all of the advice and in the end, went with my gut."
We're now at the beginning of Act II, I'm honestly (really!) excited to read the next part where we have "tests", "allies" and "enemies" and "the ordeal".
I think the whole startup experience fits with the monomyth quite nicely, and we already have a few epics coming out of the Age of the Valley - the Jobs myth and the Zuckerberg myth, among others - both of which fit the classic pattern pretty well.
Anyway, I wish the author well, it really is an amazing experience!
Re: Early epiphanies as a late cofounder
#10I fear this is going to be taken poorly, but this really made an impression on me. This is not a criticism of the author, nor really a condemnation of the lifestyle depicted - but only an observation. I find the "Myths of The Valley" both very interesting and very frustrating. This is about the Myth, not about the author. This reads like a religious testimony, or a classic Campbell myth. It begins with scripture from…
That was incredibly interesting! The blog is mine, by the way. I'm incredibly flattered that you made such an in depth analysis; frankly I wrote it as nothing more than a happy rant and wanted to share with some fellow hackers and entrepreneurs.
I agree with the sentiment that the Myth of the Valley is interesting and frustrating. Mainly though, I think it gives many smart people a strong sense of purpose (not unlike the prophets and religion in general), and I definitely think that's a good thing.