This is what happens when a string player makes it. You want to see some folks having fun or making music after an exit, talk to the horns or rhythm section.
I don't understand this metaphor but I like it anyway.
What no one talks about when running and selling a business
151–160 of 198 posts
Re: What no one talks about when running and selling a business
#152It may be off topic, but this article remembers me of something I read in the The Art of Being Right by Arthur Schopenhauer. He sais that being rigth (in German: Recht haben) and being proven right (in German: Recht behalten) are two different things. Even if you are rigth you can be proven wrong in a debate if you don't know how to be proven right and you can't represent your standpoint. On the other side if you know how to be proven right you don't have to be right all the time.
The OP seems to learned how to be proven right. This may even be a driver of his success. Unfortunately the most of us do not like to be proven wrong all the time and feel offended by people like the OP. Looking at the comments this seems to be true also for the HN folks.
Re: What no one talks about when running and selling a business
#153Ok. All good. So what do we do now? Allow me to humbly suggest these:
1. Help folks struggling to pay rent for a short while. Give them breathing room to get their lives on even keel. You have superhuman powers now. Use it. They'll be thankful. But don't expect anything back in return.
2. Start a soup kitchen in your local neighbourhood and get to know the folks. Each one of us is a Dostoyevski protagonist, swashbuckling hero waging war against our own crazy demons and wild fancy windmills. Ambition and its bitter outcomes are in all of us - not just "entrepreneurs".
3. "Soft adopt" a nephew/niece who is on the verge of falling into the deadly post teenage trap of feeling helpless, hopeless and depressed about their future. Some ideas: sponsor coding camps/programming classes, fund their college education or their sports interests. Encourage, encourage encourage. (Start with the worst off in the family. I am planning to adopt our 23-yo soon-to-be-full-drug-addict nephew unless someone intervenes. He's grown more despondent and depressed after dropping out of college. His troubled childhood and misery of coping with a broken family - parents are now effectively divorced has turned him into a lone outcast. I still remember holding him as a rugrat. I still believe we can cultivate a future he can be proud of.)
4. Lastly, simple thing: when folks invite you over for dinner or barbecues always insist on making the salad or dessert. Make it, don't buy it.
I think in the end you have to decide how you feel about compassion. There are some folks who have an absolute and resolute belief that compassion is a weakness of character. I personally believe compassion makes every one of us Superman.
Re: What no one talks about when running and selling a business
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this was a pretty shallow article. The author comes off as somewhat abrasive personality-wise. He's a natural born leader - we are reassured multiple times - but he seems to repeatedly annoy people in his life and can't figure out how to get 3 or 4 band-mates to follow him. OK. A lot of the money troubles are more about wealth inequality than anything specific to the startup world. When you're wealthy, you ne…
I think conceit and entrepreneurship are often bed fellows. I know it's something I personally struggle with from time to time, especially a kind of meta-conceit where I convince myself I'm not over-proud and all the more awesome because I'm aware of it.
That's a real catch-22.
Re: What no one talks about when running and selling a business
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Learning to be sensitive" is a bit of a cure all. Your best bet is to move somewhere else and pretend to be poor. I know we like to put poor people up on a pedestal, and if we just act the right way, they'll accept you as one of there own, but a millionaire will never be accepted as intimately into a group as a person with similar financial status as them.
Unless someone grew up poor and then made their money very quickly, they'll probably have a very different cultural background, which makes "pretending to be poor" extremely difficult. Poor people will notice that they're different even if they don't know it's because they're rich.
The poor may know they are different but they'll be more likely accepted than a rich person. There are a whole lot of poor people that are odd in some way, it's not hard to blend in.
People seek understanding, not necessarily similarity. Also, like it or not, jealousy plays a big part as to whether someone is accepted or not.
Besides which, the story is about an entrepreneur, who was trying to connect with the type of people he was around when he was not rich.
Re: What no one talks about when running and selling a business
#156He does point out his 'problem' multiple times: too much aggressiveness in channels that are not made for that. This is not limited to millionaires though, you will find many driven people struggling to understand how people with lower drive can 'live like that'. I think some people are cut out to be in a specific role, entrepreneurship, position of power etc, and they feel miserable elsewhere.
As for the money problem, you can avoid most of the problems by not mentioning your wealth to everyone and certainly by not showing it. Keep that for the closest of your bros, no further.
Re: What no one talks about when running and selling a business
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My definition of a friend is someone you can rely on when things goes to shit eg... Being half way across the country and you've just been robbed and they drive 20 hours to pick you up. Yes, that's one possible quality in a friend. Another is making time for _their_ shit as well and it doesn't sound like the author did very much of that. It's also nice to make time for friends without having to deal with either you…
Agree with the dilemma free part. I've found "adult" friendship works like this. Just hang out catch up have fun. Don't call me when your car breaks down, call a tow truck. I won't ask you to help me move, I'll hire movers. The story of your car breaking down is good stuff. Let's talk about it over beers. However, I say that with a realization that poorer people don't operate this way. They are still very much "it ta…
I offer them money. That may sound as jerk, but actually if you're serious and open, they will not blame you even if rejected. There is no real difference between "help me" and "give me money". Once everyone gets it, things become much easier.
On TFA's money part: I wonder if he offered any help to his relatives after he got money. Buy them a present like ps4 for their kids or new tv. Help solving bureaucrative issue. Take them to their comfortable bar for free. No, he goes to poor house and makes jokes about tesla issues. Real jerk.
Re: What no one talks about when running and selling a business
#158I am in my 40s and I work with a young married guy in his mid 20s who i would consider a level 1 software engineer on a scale of 1 to 5. He is a dreamer thinking he can strike it rich with his great startup idea working on it part time because he hears stories of all the people who sold their startups and thinks that's such a glamorous life. First I told him about survivorship bias and laid out basically the same sta…
Founders don't start companies to live a "pretty good life in the top 10%". We do it because we are ambitious, want to solve huge technical and business problems, make our mark, and change the world. We usually have more energy and sleep less than others. We love work. We love our business. Most of us would not want to be corporate "drones". It would be like a living death.
i mainly want to make money. if i can also improve the world, all the better.
Re: What no one talks about when running and selling a business
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "lucked into" thing resonates with me. I've done pretty well and have had a zillion people tell me I got lucky. I used to really resent that. I bootstrapped my company, I took no salary for the first 2-3 years, instead I was out consulting to bring in money so I could pay the people who worked for me. That didn't seem like luck to me. I built technology that most of you use daily, before I came along people thoug…
Bless you. Seriously. It's truly refreshing to hear such genuine humility and perspective. Too many people (on HN, in politics, and in everyday life) work hard, hit it big, then draw a 100% correlation between the two. The reality is that lots of people are working hard, and only a tiny percentage get rich from it. Luck -- birth, education, time, place -- is too often underestimated in the rush to claim personal cred…
humility ? What is this 'humility' you speak of?
There is a war on humility for like 20 years now. Things that people unashamedly say today would label them total lunatics 2 decades ago.
Re: What no one talks about when running and selling a business
#160Sounds like the author has personal problems they're mistakenly ascribing to their work. Many of their assertions are simply not true (It's possible to be confident without "being an asshole"; I know several such people), and it just comes across as written by an unreliable narrator (if I cared about this person's issues, I'd likely be asking the people who shunned him about what happened and see if the stories match…
It sounds like the same article about the same person could have been written the other way round: how being a startup founder hyper-focused on the future helped smooth over social awkwardness, because most of his social interactions were with people with strong financial incentives to get along with him, and his mind was far too occupied with other priorities to feel insecure about the possibility others might envy his material wealth or judge his lifestyle choices.