Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My First Job Interview was with a Billionaire

blonk.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 26 posts

Re: My First Job Interview was with a Billionaire

#11

Post by adambrod »

logfromblammo wrote: post #9
dublinben wrote: post #2

Your site doesn't show anything without javascript enabled. You might want to have some graceful fallback of some kind.

This is one of my pet peeves. What makes is worse is that if I temporarily enable scripts for the page, there is nothing on it that actually requires scripting. The javascript just displays formatted text. Every HTTP service in existence already does that.

Currently you could construct this statically (actually we used to host on S3), but we're building out the desktop app at the same time, so it made sense to host the blog on the same app. This should be rendering HTML server side soon.

Re: My First Job Interview was with a Billionaire

#13

Post by mcpat »

steven2012 wrote: post #7
jseliger wrote: post #3

Brilliant story. That being said, Page should learn to be a better writer. Take this, for example: As for my right ear, I was born deaf in it lol. This was not a fun experience to say the least. Being born deaf in one ear is rarely a cause for "laughing out loud," and the "lol" adds nothing to the first sentence. "To say the least" is a cliché and should be eliminated. Anyone could be guilty of these writing sins and…

I agree. I thought the writing was really poor and very hard to follow. One moment he's talking about losing his hearing, then his vision and then having Epstein Barr. That being said, it seems like a pretty interesting story, good for him for fighting through his problems!

I think there's room for the perspectives offered by both formal and informal writing.

Given the informal context, reminiscing about first job interviews with friends, I feel that the author wanted to share that setting with us as readers.

It may not have been the same decision you would have made, but take it as a chance to learn a new perspective rather than opening with hard criticisms.

Re: My First Job Interview was with a Billionaire

#15

Post by carrotleads »

I loved the email pitch. Seemed to the point and anyone reading it was clear who you are and what you could do.

As Mark Twain said in a letter, "if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter".

Still a long way to go for me but I can see my pitches are becoming better. I happy to start with a long winded sentence now and then gradually cut it down.

Re: My First Job Interview was with a Billionaire

#16

Post by zizee »

jseliger wrote: post #3

Brilliant story. That being said, Page should learn to be a better writer. Take this, for example: As for my right ear, I was born deaf in it lol. This was not a fun experience to say the least. Being born deaf in one ear is rarely a cause for "laughing out loud," and the "lol" adds nothing to the first sentence. "To say the least" is a cliché and should be eliminated. Anyone could be guilty of these writing sins and…

Being born deaf in one ear is rarely a cause for "laughing out loud"

I think it was quite clearly intended as sarcasm.

the "lol" adds nothing to the first sentence

I can agree with you there though, but mostly because I don't like "lol" as a word and not because of the use of sarcasm.

Re: My First Job Interview was with a Billionaire

#17

Post by 7Figures2Commas »

There's a good general sales lesson here: "research" is not "preparation", even though they're commonly assumed to be the same thing in practice, as was the case here.

It's hard to craft a viable proposition if you don't know your target, but simply knowing your target doesn't mean you have a viable proposition. Ultimately, the OP's pitch to Moritz ("my poker success can be translate to success as a venture capitalist") was interesting enough to land him a meeting, but not compelling enough to close the deal.

Post reply on HN