61–70 of 113 posts
Stop worrying about what other people think, and focus on making a great product or service. If you make something great, people will want a piece of it no matter if they like you personally or not. Also, getting all emo and throwing a public temper tantrum railing against the people whose help you might need someday isn't doing you any favors. Get back to work.
Though I admit I wasn't quite expecting a personal Tumblr post to make it to Hacker News.
This is likely to have been raised before, but the two are similar in many ways: vast and fragmented with many paths to and definitions of success, prone to fads, full of both hard workers and poseurs, controlled near the top by gatekeepers who pride themselves, correctly or not, on evaluating potential success, jealousy of success, rules that apply to the majority of aspirants and smaller players but not the minority of the very successful, people who look with disdain at others' choices, seeing those choices as more important than they really are, etc.
So it is good to realize that, just as in music, success is context-dependent, and one's popularity with the current stars and hangers-on is a weak indicator of success, and it's good to act on that realization in a useful way, including planting a stake in the ground saying "I'm done with that."
That said, once one's self-confidence and happiness are restored it's also good to not completely reject all aspects of whatever and whoever are popular. Unless someone is a close competitor (in which case they must be crushed or scared off to other pastures ;) ), why not wish for their success and celebrate it? Similarly, conferences are a great way to learn, to teach, and to meet those with the same interests, and so long as attending the conference is not only about being seen by others as attending a conference (or, say, being invited to a panel), and going does not interfere with work, why shouldn't one go?
[1] http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/6415-girl-talk/ [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5235168
You can curse us all you want. I curse things at random all the time. But then get back to work. The challenge you've briefly engaged with isn't a problem; it's a market opportunity. While the "it" crowd is repeatedly failing to achieve any lasting success with their completely pointless photo-sharing applications running on their 4th successive new storage backend (was mysql, then mongo, then homebrew, now postgres;…
Yes, but not the one you describe, I think. The opportunity is for someone to present a coherent mental model for what's going on in tech that will fit so well that, even as it undresses VCs and startups in all their pointless glory, they will thank you for the insight. Someone who gets most of the large-scale points right is Carlota Perez. I think that her ideas can and should be applied to the "attention economy", ubiquitous computing, and human psychology, particularly with a certain moral bent that admits, for example, that moving someone's attention from what is more valuable to that person to what is less valuable for them (but more valuable to you), is wrong.
P.S. Homebrew is a package manager for osx, not a storage backend.
You can curse us all you want. I curse things at random all the time. But then get back to work. The challenge you've briefly engaged with isn't a problem; it's a market opportunity. While the "it" crowd is repeatedly failing to achieve any lasting success with their completely pointless photo-sharing applications running on their 4th successive new storage backend (was mysql, then mongo, then homebrew, now postgres;…
>it's a market opportunity. Yes, but not the one you describe, I think. The opportunity is for someone to present a coherent mental model for what's going on in tech that will fit so well that, even as it undresses VCs and startups in all their pointless glory, they will thank you for the insight. Someone who gets most of the large-scale points right is Carlota Perez. I think that her ideas can and should be applied…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in the industry so I get what you're saying here - but I'm pretty sure most VCs and your customers are going to be mighty confused. You should try and simplify a 'what we do' message that is easier to understand. The first 30 seconds of introduction to your concept is the most important - make sure people can understand it!
Indeed! We've rarely had a confused customer thankfully.
Generally, being profitable precludes a company from getting "silly [high] valuations" & buzz in Silicon Valley. Unless they're really, really profitable. Big valuations usually stem from not knowing how much a company will make once they start charging for stuff. So the "it" crowd works itself into a frenzy and VCs take a big gamble. But once you make a dollar, all the mystery is gone. You're judged & valued pretty…
This interview with Girl Talk [1] posted on the thread about Wanz [2] shows, to an outsider, a lot of parallels between the music and startup scenes. This is likely to have been raised before, but the two are similar in many ways: vast and fragmented with many paths to and definitions of success, prone to fads, full of both hard workers and poseurs, controlled near the top by gatekeepers who pride themselves, correct…