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> I have Dropbox account #314 Did you wait until they had 313 accounts before you signed up, or was it by random chance?
Heh. Random chance. Though, my area code is 314, strangely enough. And I've been age 3 and age 14.
This was hilarious :) But I think you left off the one, international word for "totally fucking awesome I don't care where you come from": WOW If anyone says wow, you know you've got a hit.
Most people I talk to about our business are fairly realistic about the challenges we face, or progress thus far, etc.
This strikes me as very true, but irrelevant. As an American I say something positive to every startup founder I encounter, but secretly think they are nuts. Had I met the founders of these companies, below is what I would have thought: Heroku: Sounds nice but impossible to deliver. Even if you do, no one is going to trust their business to your startup's platform. Dropbox: Yet another backup solution that is going n…
Even though you might have been wrong about those successful startups, there are dozens or hundreds of others for which your negative first impression would have been dead on. You shouldn't stop trusting your instincts because you might have been wrong about a small number of high profile companies. As you pointed out, the main issue here is that founders are counting on other people so much for validation of their i…
I'm not arguing for the sake of arguing. I am genuinely perplexed at how monumentally bad outcomes can be produced by a series of rational choices.
The best I figure is the following. I gain my "wisdom" by making mistakes and trying to learn from them. The problem is that the environment from a year ago is quite different from that today. Heck, every passing second yields an environment different from the past. And sometimes (always?), it is the external factors that make the big difference.
Let me illustrate a case in point. When I first saw MIDP/CLDC on a Motorola IDEN phone, I knew this was the future. I spent a lot of time making something of it. Yet, the market wasn't ready (and frankly, neither was the technology). In 2003-2004, I saw .net compact framework on a Compaq iPaq. I was so amazed by the technology that I again spent a lot of resources making something of it. In those days, you'd have to put a bulky sleeve on your iPaq in order to get wifi. Cellular data? Forget about it ... it cost a fortune and the carriers were determined to milk their monopoly to the max. When the iPhone was announced in 2007, I saw it and dismissed it. And it wasn't just me. I was in grad school and had worked in the cell phone industry. Pretty much every smart person I knew told me this was yet another non-event. We all know what happened next to the people who wrote software for the iPhone in the early days.
When I reflect upon this and other similar experiences, I can't help but think that my hard-earned wisdom may have become obsolete without my knowing it. These days I subscribe to a different sage advice that might work better ... "Stay hungry, stay foolish"[1].
[1]: From the last issue of the Whole Earth catalogue as relayed via Steve Jobs in his Stanford commencement speech.
American boss just told me what I had made was awesome. After reading this article this morning I am significantly less flattered than I was last week.
As an Australian I can relate to this. Often American's think I'm putting our startup down, just because I'm not overly excited saying everything is awesome and fantastic. I'm extremely positive and have absolute confidence that we will succeed. But I prefer to look at things objectively and to tackle the problems. However American's translate my language into "my startup sucks". So recently I've been training myself…
I get the impression they think I've just spat in their faces. :)
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Feedback from us Brits is even harder to parse. I always point those who are struggling to this handy table: http://yfrog.com/z/gy5gxvxj
Funny, I've worked for both British and American startup-owners, and I could certainly relate to both charts (yours, and the OP's). I liked the British style more, but that's maybe I'm also Romanian and as the OP also showed we're kind of used to being negative about all things :) Whom I didn't like at all were the French (I did work for such company for a year or so), but maybe that was caused by my former bosses ha…
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Funny, I've worked for both British and American startup-owners, and I could certainly relate to both charts (yours, and the OP's). I liked the British style more, but that's maybe I'm also Romanian and as the OP also showed we're kind of used to being negative about all things :) Whom I didn't like at all were the French (I did work for such company for a year or so), but maybe that was caused by my former bosses ha…
Sorry to hear that (I'm French myself, but have worked in US and now in Netherlands). Apart from arrogant bosses, do you have more gripes about french's work culture? I think we are pretty pessimistic in general, especially compared to americans :-) But I think that's more of a european trait (we call it being honest).