Are you building a company, or your credentials? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are you building a company, or your credentials?

#61

Post by nasmorn » Fri, Mar 23, 2012, 4:02 PM UTC

wfrick wrote: post #7

From a societal point of view, I'm a bit troubled. It's an encouraging trend that high talent individuals who would have gone into finance or consulting are considering startups. Should we really be turning them away? That said, I certainly understand your hesitations.

Finance and law are the religion of our time. Those do called high powered people are not the galileos und copernicus of our time, they are the borgias or cardinal richelieu. In each case assuming they rise to the top.

Re: Are you building a company, or your credentials?

#62

Post by eli_gottlieb » Fri, Mar 23, 2012, 6:12 PM UTC

digitalzombie wrote: post #60

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take, complete with caricatures: Businesses think academia generates nothing useful. Not ideas, not programs, just a bunch of papers. Businesses, unfortunately, mostly don't read or follow these papers and dissertations. Academics mostly don't want to "waste time" implementing anything that is, from their point of view, 25-40 years behind the times. For a nice example of the dichotomy at work, look at Golang. It's…

I just want to be fair to business: Sometime they get it right, Erlang is an example. It's great for telecom, and maybe more. Horrible at numerical stuff.

Ehhhh... speaking from experience, Erlang's VM is pretty badly documented. I'll grant them that they built a good PL (other than the godawful syntax) for internal business use, but their lack of interest in making a public product of it is visible.

Re: Are you building a company, or your credentials?

#63

Post by bostonvaulter2 » Wed, Mar 28, 2012, 5:53 AM UTC

mechanical_fish wrote: post #41

bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least it will be obvious when that happens since the startups will start failing.

Are you being funny on purpose? ;) If so, kudos on the deadpan delivery. Quite a few YC startups have already failed to build solid, growing businesses. Most startups do, after all. The good news is that former YC founders generally find other work, sometimes immediately via a talent acquisition of their former YC company. In other words, they cash in on their credentials, some of which obviously come from having bee…

I wasn't trying to be funny. I was on my phone so I didn't elaborate at all. Obviously it is expected that most startups will fail. But the key is that they fail publicly so I think it is easier to get a feel for how serious of a candidate/team there was behind the startup. Additionally I think that people that are just credential seeking will tend to cluster together so I don't expect a large mix of credential-seeking and serious founders together.