Massive respect for jwz.org for disregarding popular opinion and dropping truth.
Watch a VC use my name to sell a con
111–120 of 313 posts
Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con
#112Oh, C'mon. So I'm not supposed to work hard and get rich because as a side effect that some one else also is? My dad is a cab driver. He really works his life off. Under absolutely dismal financial conditions he and may mom have given their whole lives to bring us out of poverty. They got me and my sister decent education. They did what every poor family in India does. They worked hard, saved money, invested it and g…
Warren Buffett has said “In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable ‘moats’.” Where the castle is a metaphor for the business and the moat its competitive advantage against competitors. The wider the moat the better. My definition of “smart work” is work that simultaneously earns income and widens the moat between you and your competitors by extending your skillset in areas of demand. With eve…
My dad's initial investment to afford a car was nothing. He drove some ones else's car before he got himself one.
My initial investment is college education and daily learnings.
In order to make money/profit you need to apply seed investment and then work over it in time. Either way you will end up working. Its the seed investment that makes the difference here.
In order to work in the petrochemical industry, you really need to account for what seed investment got you there. Once that is in place. Its back to your plain old hard work to grow from there.
It impossible to generate value without working for it.
Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con
#113I love that this is the top story on HN. I only wish that PG got as much flack for his startup economics hype piece[1] and proposition to compress a lifetime's worth of work effort into four years. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
Agreed. Another one who should get some flack is Thiel. He may just be the worst, suggesting kids should forgo a university education and going so far as to actually debate the "issue" whether an education is "worth it". For some of these VC to make money, they have no need to see university degrees. But they have their own interests in mind. And, lo and behold, most of them have university degrees.
I helped vet applications for 20 Under 20 and I'm serving as a mentor for the program, and based on my observations there's nothing cynical about it. As currently structured, the program isn't scalable, but they're just getting started. Let's see what they can do given a few years to get the ball rolling.
Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con
#114Anyone got a readable link please
If you can't read that I wonder what you would have done back in the terminal days when you wouldn't have had an option. Everybody back then seemed to be able to read it with no problem. Maybe youngster's eyesight has become worse for some unexplained reason.
I think it's just what you're used to. When I first saw a Mac I thought it was crazy the way all the windows were white and the text was black. All the white burned my eyes and I thought it was a terrible decision. But obviously everyone can cope with it just fine and it became the norm.
The "oh my eyes" hyperbole about green on black is because people aren't used to it and it is in stark contrast to what "normal" is nowadays--but just use it for an hour and you'll be just fine. I personally think it's a little less straining on the eyes because there's less light hitting your eyes. Lately my terminals and emacs always use a black background.
Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con
#115It's worth pointing out that while Arrington is a VC now, he also started his own company (TechCrunch), worked very hard to grow it for years, and guided it to a nice exit to AOL. So this is not necessarily a case of "do as I say, not as I do." He was famously hard working when he was growing TechCrunch.
Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Isn't this more or less the case for any profits-go-to-owners business model? Almost every industry out there manages to make good profits without their employees having to give up their lives.
"Almost every industry out there manages to make good profits without their employees having to give up their lives." Medicine and law being two exceptions.
Note the pattern: medicine, law, and engineering are 3 industries where the employees carry significant human capital with them (finance is another one, and i-bankers also give up their lives).
I suspect the reason for this is because human capital makes the payoff for additional hours worked non-linear. One cashier working 80 hours a week should be just about as productive as two cashiers working 40 hours a week (a bit more even, because of fatigue). However, one engineer working 80 hours a week is significantly more productive than two engineers working 40 hours a week, because of the overhead required to get the second engineer up to speed and then the communication delays needed to make sure any information makes its way to both engineers.
Note that these professions are paid more as a result, too, because they're not fungible laborers. If that one engineer quits, you are a lot more hosed than if one of your cashiers quits.
The effect of both of this is that professional jobs tend to work longer hours, both because the worker himself is more productive doing so, and because they reap a greater percentage of the rewards for doing so. They have the option of deliberately short-circuiting these incentives, by eg. quitting and traveling the world for a year using savings. I know folks who've done this, and greatly enjoyed it. But it runs counter to societal expectations, so many don't.
Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about working hard or getting rich. It's about working until you've put your health in danger. It's about coding until you're hallucinating. It might be necessary. But it's not laudable. Likewise, with your dad, what's laudable is the result . What's not laudable is the process. I'm sure that your dad would have jumped at the opportunity to make the same amount of money for fewer hours worked every day. In l…
My dad has hypertension. He has a weak digestion(Because of stress). His legs are weak. He wears glasses(Because he battled the glare from vehicles all this life). He also has bad moods all the time(Because of the frustration battling traffic all day). Yet he doesn't give up. That's what it really boils down to. Diseases are a part of life. You have to learn to live beyond and with them. He was lucky that every time…
You're being downvoted because you don't seem to be discussing anything remotely relevant to JWZ's or Arrington's posts. Your father's driving a taxi has absolutely nothing to do with VCs and the startup lottery, the economics aren't even remotely similar. Your father's compensation is tied to the results of his work in a very direct and inseparable way, and it does little to create long-term value for another person -- the cab company (if there really is one, often it's just a dispatch service) can't keep packaging up and selling your father's trips to the airport after he's quit/retired/died/etc..
No one is getting rich off your father's efforts to a massively disproportionate degree. That is not the case for the people JWZ is speaking to.
Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con
#118I love that this is the top story on HN. I only wish that PG got as much flack for his startup economics hype piece[1] and proposition to compress a lifetime's worth of work effort into four years. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
I've not seen eye to eye with PG on everything he has written. But this particular essay is one of my favourites of his. PG laid out an upper bound, which he later clarifies: "If $3 million a year seems high, remember that we're talking about the limit case: the case where you not only have zero leisure time but indeed work so hard that you endanger your health." And his upper limit for hours worked was 2x that of a…
I see it as an experiment in thinking about leverage. If you minimized all the corporate office bullshit, leveraged your work to the max, AND worked hard on top of that, how much could you earn? The baseline becomes your work earnings WITH corp-bullshit, poor leverage, and lackluster effort, and then he extrapolates from that.
Leverage analogy: think schwerpunkt in blitzkrieg. If you amass all your tanks on one sector of the front and crush the opposing line there, then you will have more of an impact than if you spread the same force out over a wider area.
Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Warren Buffett has said “In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable ‘moats’.” Where the castle is a metaphor for the business and the moat its competitive advantage against competitors. The wider the moat the better. My definition of “smart work” is work that simultaneously earns income and widens the moat between you and your competitors by extending your skillset in areas of demand. With eve…
My dad's initial investment to afford a car was nothing. He drove some ones else's car before he got himself one. My initial investment is college education and daily learnings. In order to make money/profit you need to apply seed investment and then work over it in time. Either way you will end up working. Its the seed investment that makes the difference here. In order to work in the petrochemical industry, you rea…
I agree completely. But the point of working smart is to pick a profession where continuous refinement of your skill-set will put you in both higher demand and rarer company.
This is hard to do as a taxi driver. It's hard to do in IT too when you pick the wrong technology stack to specialize in (eg. Flash or VB6) and have to start again back in the pack at some point.
edit - just to expand a little. In my experience, most people get to a point in their career where they think their 'moat' is wide enough. They stop learning or extending their skillset. Now it's important to note that this doesn't necessarily mean they've stopped working hard. They might be pulling 80+ hour weeks. But if it's the same work they've done before, their career is now a cash-cow. In IT this is especially dangerous because the industry evolves so fast, that you can be overtaken by skilled competitors using more efficient technologies.
Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Overall, I loved the "Wealth" essay. I do wonder though if Paul ever considers that the same thing he says about Bill Gates' success could also be said about his own. "Bill Gates is a smart, determined, and hardworking man, but you need more than that to make as much money as he has. You also need to be very lucky." Or perhaps PG thinks his personal success is based purely off his own brilliance with no helpful outsi…
One has to be a lot luckier to make fifty billion dollars than ten million dollars.
Yes, but I doubt it's, say, 50 times luckier. I'll wager it's a lot easier to go from 10 million to a billion than from zero to 10 million.