On the Fetishism of Capital and Prestige
sorryhumans.com
On the Fetishism of Capital and Prestige
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: On the Fetishism of Capital and Prestige
#2It goes without saying on HN that not playing the VC-driven-startup game is the tougher road of the two options. That being said I have the utmost admiration and respect for those who are working hard to give us a more role models to follow in this mold.
----
Btw completely off topic, but the red square on white background design immediately evoked images of Campbell soup in me, at which point I realized the magnitude and importance of their branding and visual identity.
Re: On the Fetishism of Capital and Prestige
#3> The Valley is not a world run by 20-somethings bringing about the future, it is a world run by the same people who run the real world - the financiers.
It's surprising to me that anyone would think otherwise. Weighted for risk, the winning play in Silicon Valley is not to take a Thiel fellowship and go found a startup. It's to do what Thiel did--take a pair of prestigious Stanford degrees into the finance sector. It's the VC's that are the ones reliably cashing their paychecks.
(This is not a moral judgment about whether this status quo is right or wrong. I'm long past the point where I see the status quo as anything more than something that "is.")
Re: On the Fetishism of Capital and Prestige
#4It goes without saying on HN that not playing the VC-driven-startup game is the tougher road of the two options. That being said I have the utmost admiration and respect for those who are working hard to give us a more role models to follow in this mold. ---- Btw completely off topic, but the red square on white background design immediately evoked images of Campbell soup in me, at which point I realized the magnitud…
[deleted]
Re: On the Fetishism of Capital and Prestige
#5Note to the author: your Twitter account doesn't seem to exist?
Re: On the Fetishism of Capital and Prestige
#6I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top.
- Frank Moore Colby
Re: On the Fetishism of Capital and Prestige
#7So the "businesses" you looked at when you were 17 and 18, did you actually do any development on them? Or by "not going anywhere", do you mean you never crossed the first hurdles (financing, media exposure, etc)? I'm fascinated by the idea that you can build million dollar ideas while dealing with the demands of school and (presumably) a social life.
I wonder if having a third business by age 20 leads to ADD-driven Entrepreneurship. Not to knock your age, but you can't ignore the truth that your longest "project" has probably lasted a semester. The full experience of high school, which surely feels like an eternity (I know it did to me at that age, as it represented 20% of my life span!), is less time than it took for some of the most successful businesses to attain profitability.
So what's your timespan for success? I guess I question the ability to even have the perspective to drive not only product development, but the business development it takes to bring a company to profitability at your level of life experience.
Re: On the Fetishism of Capital and Prestige
#8Yes, taking VC money is a double-edged sword; that's basically the long and the short of it. However, it's a great thing that investors will line up to throw millions at a nascent tech start-up, especially if you want to spend your life building big companies.
VCs obviously have a lot of power and influence in the Valley because many businesses need a big chunk of start-up capital and they have it, and they own fractions of many companies and sit on boards. The fact that they are influential isn't a reason not to associate with them.
Bootstrapping your business and paying your engineers' salaries out of your revenue rather than investment is admirable. I'd like to try it sometime.
The main thing to recognize is that when you take money from investors, you are claiming the business is a good business. Successful fund-raising is not derisking, it is you explaining the risk and why you will succeed.
Re: On the Fetishism of Capital and Prestige
#9> The Valley is not a world run by 20-somethings bringing about the future, it is a world run by the same people who run the real world - the financiers. It's surprising to me that anyone would think otherwise. Weighted for risk, the winning play in Silicon Valley is not to take a Thiel fellowship and go found a startup. It's to do what Thiel did--take a pair of prestigious Stanford degrees into the finance sector. I…
"It's surprising to me that anyone would think otherwise."
Not really if you think about it. Many experiences from the outside seem like one thing until you go through them yourselves.
You might think Starbucks is all about coffee "why would anyone pay $4.00 for a ..." but if you are a frequent Starbucks customer you then realize it's about a sugar fix, community (if you spend time there and get to know the regulars), habit and a host of other things you might not realize at the outset.
New people are introduced to new things all the time with a fresh slate.
I would find it quite surprising for any 17 year old or even a 50 year old who hasn't paid attention closely to know what the real game is (in anything).
I remember as a young child the shock I had finding out that there were dishonest policemen or other authority figures who committed crimes.
People get a good chuckle at newbies for sure (laughing nervously because they were all newbies at one point).
Re: On the Fetishism of Capital and Prestige
#10A VC fundable startup is one in which you KNOW you can turn $1 into $20. Once you figure out how to do this, you will want as much money as possible to make that happen as many times as you can. That's when VC's are needed. You take VC money for growth, not for ideation or market validation. Before you find your business model you should stick to bootstrapping, angel investing and just keep iterating until you figure it all out.