Was I employed there?
What are red flags that signal you should walk away from a startup job?
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Re: What are red flags that signal you should walk away from a startup job?
#62I've been through a few startups, but one experience really has stuck with me. I was an early employee in a turnkey software startup built on ideas from a moderately noted researcher in the field the software was designed to sell to. I had known the researcher off and on over the years and he had been brought on as the CTO with the investors bringing in an outside person they knew as the CEO. They were still in "stea…
This should be a longer blog post; especially the turnaround is interesting.
I agree- would definitely be interested in reading that!
Re: What are red flags that signal you should walk away from a startup job?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm really not happy with this assumption that you've got this incredible intuitive part of your mind that can predict things with uncanny accuracy when we can't reason through it. Snap judgements of situations are also well known to be extremely wrong. Ever judged a book by its cover and been wrong? Could your experience here be confirmation bias? You remember the cases where you felt you should run but didn't and i…
It's not that it can predict things it's that it sees things you consciously miss. It's the reason why you might get the feeling someone is lying to you without being able to name every single piece of body language that told you why.
And you can fall foul of an enormous number of cognitive biases because you can also see things that simply aren't there.
Re: What are red flags that signal you should walk away from a startup job?
#64I've been through a few startups, but one experience really has stuck with me. I was an early employee in a turnkey software startup built on ideas from a moderately noted researcher in the field the software was designed to sell to. I had known the researcher off and on over the years and he had been brought on as the CTO with the investors bringing in an outside person they knew as the CEO. They were still in "stea…
This should be a longer blog post; especially the turnaround is interesting.
I've been planning on writing something for a while, but there's still some things going on with some of the IP (now years later) and I've found it hard to write about it in an "internet safe" abstract way.
Re: What are red flags that signal you should walk away from a startup job?
#65"But ALWAYS trust your gut on NOT to do something." Having learnt that lesson the hard way, I whole-heartedly agree. Our "gut" is the equivalent of a supercomputer against the hand-held, battery-powered rational part of our minds. And it is there for a reason. If your "gut" screams at you to just run , you should at least seriously consider walking away. Every time I failed to do so, I came to regret it.
I'm really not happy with this assumption that you've got this incredible intuitive part of your mind that can predict things with uncanny accuracy when we can't reason through it. Snap judgements of situations are also well known to be extremely wrong. Ever judged a book by its cover and been wrong? Could your experience here be confirmation bias? You remember the cases where you felt you should run but didn't and i…
Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink talks about this.
"Gut feeling" is often boils down to a "compressed" rapid response, based on all of our previous experience, without having to go through all the reasoning and debating that we usually do.
Re: What are red flags that signal you should walk away from a startup job?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that it can predict things it's that it sees things you consciously miss. It's the reason why you might get the feeling someone is lying to you without being able to name every single piece of body language that told you why.
And you can fall foul of an enormous number of cognitive biases because you can also see things that simply aren't there .
You don't know enough about the subconscious to make that statement with any conviction.
Re: What are red flags that signal you should walk away from a startup job?
#67Re: What are red flags that signal you should walk away from a startup job?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
And you can fall foul of an enormous number of cognitive biases because you can also see things that simply aren't there .
You don't know enough about the subconscious to make that statement with any conviction.
Do you think that cognitive biases (like anchoring, for example) don't have any evidence for them? Do you disagree that humans have high false positive rates when looking for patterns (like the classic gamblers fallacy)?
Re: What are red flags that signal you should walk away from a startup job?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm really not happy with this assumption that you've got this incredible intuitive part of your mind that can predict things with uncanny accuracy when we can't reason through it. Snap judgements of situations are also well known to be extremely wrong. Ever judged a book by its cover and been wrong? Could your experience here be confirmation bias? You remember the cases where you felt you should run but didn't and i…
Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink talks about this. "Gut feeling" is often boils down to a "compressed" rapid response, based on all of our previous experience, without having to go through all the reasoning and debating that we usually do.
And the quality of that response can be heavily dependent on how much we've been in a similar situation. Daniel Kahneman talks about this in "Thinking, Fast and Slow".
It makes sense that quick reactions can be good if they're responding to things we have done many, many times before. It also makes sense that quick reactions can be very poor if they're responding to things that we've not done much.
Re: What are red flags that signal you should walk away from a startup job?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't know enough about the subconscious to make that statement with any conviction.
Do you think that cognitive biases (like anchoring, for example) don't have any evidence for them? Do you disagree that humans have high false positive rates when looking for patterns (like the classic gamblers fallacy)?
I think you're asking questions so you can find an answer to attack. It's an old and boring way to argue on the internet.
The truth is nothing is perfect, the reason these discussions don't go anywhere is because you're going to insist on finding the imperfections and then try to exploit that to win.
That is your right, but I explained both what it is, and why it's often correct.
I'm just too old to let myself get pulled into one of these discussions, sorry.