101–110 of 146 posts
Oh man, I saw this stark contrast during the last YC batch. A friend who supported himself through college on construction jobs, then went through a major surgery (think brain/heart/cancer) left his FAANG job for the startup. His cofounders? A married couple with prime Bay Area real estate purchased by their family abroad, constantly bragged about Stanford (masters, mind you)and CCP connections. Long story short, app…
Is that why he’s a billionaire? Did he decide to set a low standard for himself of becoming a billionaire? Less flippantly, there is no way that someone who is a billionaire has low standards. If they did, wouldn’t they have stopped working at 1 million, 10 million, or perhaps 100 million dollars?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No 1:1s sounds miserable. I don't want to give or receive feedback "constantly", I have other things to do constantly. I want to have a set periodic time where I know I will not be interrupted by my manager "sharing feedback", and will not be interrupting them with my feedback. I suspect that in practice, relatively little feedback is being shared either up or down within such a structure, as people are busy working…
1:1s are okay when you're an IC and have it with your manager. The problem is the flipside is when your manager has many ICs, then it doesn't scale properly. Imagine Jensen having 58 reoccurring 1-1s! In fact I see this with my coworkers, especially PMs, who have their schedules full of 1-1s daily. No doubt there's useful work that gets done in them _sometimes_, but I have doubts its efficiency over the long term wit…
Now, maybe this is fine for someone who manages other executives, where the primary touch points can be, like quarterly budget and strategy reports or something (I honestly have no idea what people like this do day to day, so I'm totally guessing on this...).
But out near the "leaves" of an org, managers exist to support their reports who are doing work day to day, and they can't do that if they have too many reports to spare any time for 1:1s with them.
I think PMs having a bunch of 1:1s, likely comprised mostly of status updates that could be done asynchronously, is a different problem, that we likely agree about.
But managers should have few enough reports that they're able to support them. If their reports want to cancel their 1:1s because they don't have anything to discuss, that's fine, but being unable to get on the schedule regularly is a problem, IMO.
Michael Easter's The Comfort Crisis https://www.amazon.com/Comfort-Crisis-Embrace-Discomfort-Rec...
A Boy Named Sue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHPuY88Ry4
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, I'm with you. I think this "suffering is necessary" point Huang is making is his weakest point. Maybe a more nuanced version of it that I think would be a stronger point is that there is a "sweet spot" of life challenges - not too much, but also not too little - that increase the odds of positive outcomes for people. But as you say, people who experience extreme suffering are much more likely to experience a lif…
The only universal truth is that no thruths are universal. And I think “suffering builds character” in this and its other forms is a perfect example. Yes, extreme suffering will cause long term problems. And yet at the same time, we’re all probably familiar with or know someone who experienced “the gifted student wall” where their natural talent was good enough to carry them to success, right up until the point it wa…
A less resilient person may have a perfectly happy and content life doing things that aren’t as hard, that’s true of most people.
But someone who has something extreme happen to them will have a way higher fucking bar for bad. If you lost your family in war the stress of a startup is nothing to you.
It's more about resilience and what sets the stage for it. He argues resilience is created through suffering (which plays into the idea that if you want to know who will be a good founder, ask about their childhood). It makes me curious though about the direction of the causality - how much is resilience actually about temperament and genetics vs. the environmental experience of suffering. Why do some people become r…
Traumatic early childhood experiences (suffering) can cause profoundly negative, irreversible effects on a child's brain development that will have issues persist well into adulthood and beyond - I don't think his take is scientific. edit: not sure why downvoted, here's a source if you don't believe me: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3968319/
The quote: `I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering’ really hits on the nose for me. My Dad had a successful business after a rough childhood, failing high school. He worked hard and built a successful business. He also really did wish ample doses of pain and suffering on me. And he got his wish. He always thought it was good that I was bullied, that I also failed school, and that everything in life was gen…
This reminds me of the speech Bill Murray’s character gives at the start of Rushmore [0]: > You guys have it real easy. I never had it like this where I grew up. But I send my kids here because the fact is you go to one of the best schools in the country: Rushmore. Now, for some of you it doesn't matter. You were born rich and you're going to stay rich. But here's my advice to the rest of you: Take dead aim on the ri…
The current crop of ultrabillionaires may lack many things but I don't think backbone is on the list. They are as ruthless as any robber baron or industrialist of old. They can buy, sell, and eliminate people and governments as they see fit. Good luck getting close enough to take actual or metaphorical aim.
Thinking of this as startup founder... > “People with very high expectations have very low resilience—and unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” Huang said during a recent interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.” People with family money need much-much less resilience than those without family money. Compare... serial founder w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No Bottle Rocket? I think that is the best.
It's certainly the most raw and personal, to its benefit, but it's too unpolished to be as great as the others. I wish he had remade it like a decade ago, after honing his style and technical talents, and with a right-sized budget. I'd still go see it if he did a remake now, but I doubt it would maintain enough of its spark at this point :)
Royal Tenanbaums is really polished and well done.