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Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

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Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#111
post #58

So @Dave isn't Marc Andreesen or Larry Page. So f-ing what. The only tragic thing is that he hasn't figured out yet that work != life. I'm in a similar demographic as @Dave, live in palo alto, near his age. Had some really good successes 10-15 years ago, and nothing since then. My big activities for the past decade have been climbing, skiing and raising my kids. Some of my friends kept working and now have vineyards…

I like the original post by @Dave and the honesty that comes through. I also like this reply. Life can feel so frenetic and short on time sometimes, and yet very, very long - too long even - at other times. Time is really a very elastic perception.

The bottom line is you need to figure out what you want in life and how you define success. Hopefully at some point we all come to realize that while wealth, power or fame/recognition, etc. are excellent motivators, as an end such goals are rather hollow and empty. If and when one finally realizes that, then it really doesn't matter at what age you realize that, just as long as you've enjoyed what you've spent your time doing, and have picked up some good friends and family along the way. That's when you throw out the self-induced angst and hurry to "achieve something" and just do your thing, living in the moment. Of course, life is much easier the earlier one clues in on this. :)

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#112

I've come to the conclusion that success in business is like the game Rochambeau (Rock, Paper, Scissors). People will argue to death whether it's a game of luck or skill, and often it gets very emotional, with people who've had success attributing it to skill and the rest attributing their lack of success to bad luck. In reality, it's neither. It's a game of strategy in the academic, game-design sense (interaction ra…

So, we have a bunch of identical-looking options and cannot know which pays out better beforehand. It sounds to me like we should apply the Multi-Armed Bandit algorithm to the problem.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#114

I've come to the conclusion that success in business is like the game Rochambeau (Rock, Paper, Scissors). People will argue to death whether it's a game of luck or skill, and often it gets very emotional, with people who've had success attributing it to skill and the rest attributing their lack of success to bad luck. In reality, it's neither. It's a game of strategy in the academic, game-design sense (interaction ra…

People have been arguing the same thing about investing for a long time: is it a game of luck or skill?

On one hand, there are academics saying it's always mostly luck, and their typical argument goes roughly like this: Say 100,000 orangutans enter a coin-flipping contest in which 'heads' wins and 'tails' loses; so around 50,000 orangutans will win on the first throw; of those orangutans, around 25,000 will also win on the second throw; and of those, around 12,500 will also win on the third row; and so on, until after ten throws, there will be close to 100 orangutans who will have won every throw in a row due only to pure luck -- just like investors who have only a string of hits in their track record.

On the other hand, there are successful investors like Warren Buffett who say that luck is a factor in the short run, but skill becomes the more important factor over long periods of time. You can read his detailed response to the 'orangutan argument' in this article he wrote for Columbia Business School's magazine in 1984: http://www4.gsb.columbia.edu/null?&exclusive=filemgr.dow...

Edit: corrected typo.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#116

I've come to the conclusion that success in business is like the game Rochambeau (Rock, Paper, Scissors). People will argue to death whether it's a game of luck or skill, and often it gets very emotional, with people who've had success attributing it to skill and the rest attributing their lack of success to bad luck. In reality, it's neither. It's a game of strategy in the academic, game-design sense (interaction ra…

Thank you for this post. I'm in nearly the same boat (41 years old, < 1M net worth, on my fifth startup with < 100k to show for those efforts) and watching seemingly complete idiots pass me by. I'm too old to be infuriated by the vagaries of chance, however, it does make me wonder if I've done something wrong. I suspect that the numbers are slightly skewed - that there are far fewer people having wild success than the media would have us believe.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#117

I've come to the conclusion that success in business is like the game Rochambeau (Rock, Paper, Scissors). People will argue to death whether it's a game of luck or skill, and often it gets very emotional, with people who've had success attributing it to skill and the rest attributing their lack of success to bad luck. In reality, it's neither. It's a game of strategy in the academic, game-design sense (interaction ra…

So, we have a bunch of identical-looking options and cannot know which pays out better beforehand. It sounds to me like we should apply the Multi-Armed Bandit algorithm to the problem.

I think the truth of it is just that (and few people will admit to this) it's better to be a VC. They're diversified. Some fail out and never get rich, but they get to play more chances.

There's nothing generally wrong with not getting rich, but there are certain things people only do in order to get rich, and VC-istan startup life is one of them. If you're a writer and you make $100,000 per year mid-career, you're kicking ass, because most people never get anywhere near that point. If you're a stock trader or VC-istan denizen (whether engineer or founder) and that's where you are mid-career, you're a fuckup.

Actually, I'm simplifying quite a bit. Most people in VC-istan don't necessarily want to get rich personally in the same way that traders do, but they want to become the social equals of the VCs and established founders. They want their ideas to be taken seriously, and that unfortunately requires social status. So there is a bit of difference. A derivatives trader who makes $25 million and retires could give fuck-all about social status, whereas most VC-istan types would rather have a mediocre financial outcome if it got them access and status. They'd rather be at $2 million net worth with the contacts to try another "game changer" startup than $25m without it. Still, though few people will admit this, VC is a better life. You already have status and access, and if you want to start a company as a Real Founder, you can do that any time you wish.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#118
post #23
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the type of competitive folks you talk about (of which I am definitely one), I think the Internet has really changed things - your 'scope' of competition is now 7 billion people , rather than the roughly 400-500 folks you could reasonably know in your 'home town'. Now, even in New Hampshire (to steal your example), you can subconsciously see yourself competing against folks in NYC or San Francisco or Beijing, who…

Absolutely true. I find the same effect on HN to be even worse. HN now has over 100k uniques/day[1] . That means that on any topic you'd ever like to comment on, odds are good there are many HN visitors who are better at that you are. [1] traffic from last year: http://ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-9feb11.png )

I still have somehow trouble with these high numbers. By looking at the front page, the points for top stories are still staying relatively at the same level. These relatively low numbers of votes makes it still seem to be a relatively close community but maybe just many of the new visitors can't be bothered to participate.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#119
post #50

Wow, I sure do hope he finally does that one thing that nobody, absolutely nobody can deny is important -- something as big as, say, a Twitter knockoff for the enterprise. Then he'll never have any nagging doubts about himself ever again. Hey, far be it from me to criticize someone who's trying to make a mark in the world. I myself am just past 40, a former child prodigy, not very successful in Silicon Valley, and st…

> Wow, I sure do hope he finally does that one thing that nobody, absolutely nobody can deny is important -- something as big as, say, a Twitter knockoff for the enterprise. Then he'll never have any nagging doubts about himself ever again.

In my experience, the degree to which you're successful has no effect on those doubts. I've put out a number of highly successful pieces of software, had a ton of attention in the press (technical and not), etc; I still feel like I'm largely failing to live up to my abilities, and that I peaked when I was 17. Maybe I need something hyper-successful that makes me a ton of money, but I doubt even that will kill the doubts.

At the end of the day, it just comes down to saying "this is what I've done, and who cares if I could've maybe, possibly done better?" but that's not so easy.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#120
post #114

I've come to the conclusion that success in business is like the game Rochambeau (Rock, Paper, Scissors). People will argue to death whether it's a game of luck or skill, and often it gets very emotional, with people who've had success attributing it to skill and the rest attributing their lack of success to bad luck. In reality, it's neither. It's a game of strategy in the academic, game-design sense (interaction ra…

People have been arguing the same thing about investing for a long time: is it a game of luck or skill? On one hand, there are academics saying it's always mostly luck, and their typical argument goes roughly like this: Say 100,000 orangutans enter a coin-flipping contest in which 'heads' wins and 'tails' loses; so around 50,000 orangutans will win on the first throw; of those orangutans, around 25,000 will also win…

I've worked in game design. I once built a card game (Ambition) with the express purpose of taking card-luck out of the game as much as possible. (To make a long story short, I was in Budapest and left all my German board games at home, so I had to make do with a deck of cards.) Bridge solves this problem by duplication. (Bridge is an immensely deep and skillful game, but there's a lot of card-luck when the players are skilled, so when it's played in tournaments where outcomes are taken seriously, they duplicate it; each team plays the same sets of hands and is scored on its relative performance.) Poker solves it by changing the definition (it is a skill game, over hundreds of hours; people have enough patience to play for long enough for it to converge). However, for an obscure recently-invented game that no one had heard of at the time, and even now might have a few hundred players worldwide, neither of these (duplication or the "it converges over time" argument) is a credible option. Taking card-luck out of a trick-taking game is very hard to do, and this led down a rabbit hole of analyzing game designs for the "luck/skill" question. The conclusion I came to is that the mere concept of such as a continuum is a massive oversimplification. What I found with Ambition is that, while the card-luck was largely taken out of this 4-player trick-taking game, there was a lot of unpredictable strategic influence that doesn't always have to do with a player's individual skill (which, in my mind, is an asset of the game.)

In any game of more than 2 players, there's a third element: strategy. That's a mix of both. People are pursuing their own interests and sometimes it affects other players disproportionately. Or, we might be sitting together at a 3-player game and I win, even though you're a better player, because that 3rd player is either lousy or unpredictable and does things that hand me advantages. (The most extreme example of this is the "king-maker scenario" where a player can't win but gets to choose the winner.) Puerto Rico, although very skillful and deep, is notorious for its table-position effect.

For an aside, part of what makes German-style board games is this strategic "interaction term" resulting neither from chance nor from individual skill alone. Pure skill games like Chess are a bit dry, in the sense that if the skill levels are different by much, the outcome is predictable: the more skillful player will win pretty much every time. German-style games leverage this third "strategic" factor to make games that aren't very luck-driven (you never feel "screwed by the dice") but that also don't have the same winner every time.

This is why most of the "serious" mind-sport games are two-party games. In Chess, if your opponent's strategy hurts you, then he (by definition) had a better strategy and therefore played more skillfully. In Bridge, any player's strategic affect on your outcome is likewise indicative: if your teammate hurt you through a strategic interaction, then you're not as good a team. In luckless 2-player games, the party that wins is the party that played better. In 3+ player games, this isn't always true.

Economic and business games are like that. They're massively multiplayer, which means that there are a lot of strategic-interaction teams that can't be attributed to skill or luck, and the quality of information most people have isn't very high. This is especially true in technology where, by definition, we're trying to do things that haven't been done before. That makes it fun, but also really, really noisy.

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