How to hack your way into a hot startup with no experience

Oo, soory about that.

>why would anyone believe

I'm not asking anyone to believe. I'm asking to have a discussion on the points I bring forward.

>how does that reconcile with your apparent theory that work done for free is valueless

Work done for free has value. I was discussing the psychology & relationship between employer and employee when all employees at the company are already salaried and "new person" comes in and offers to work for free.

>you are using HN to practice sounding confident

That's not the way I would put it. I think (similarly to pg) that points are best expressed tersely, and so I try to keep my writings very brief and to the point.

>sounding like an idiot

Why, thank you.

>Learning to use simple qualifiers like 'in my experience'

Not necessary. This follows from the context.

>being easily tripped up

I don't see where I've been easily tripped up. Though I do enjoy that so many people jumped to respond. Even though almost no one managed or even really tried to refute my points and rather took issue with other things (boohoo you don't have enough experience to be talking about this kind of stuff, etc.)

>Then you will say 'obviously I meant this advice only for y'

This is Hacker News. We're talking tech startups here. Yeah I won't add another paragraph to talk about other industries because it's _obvious_ to everyone what I'm talking about and "Don't work for free" is an oft repeated advice on here anyways.

>'because I made a bunch of stupid assumptions!' but feel too ashamed to say that and start blustering.

I think that none of the assumptions I made are stupid. Though I am starting to notice that if I don't carefully package my opinions I will get a bunch of people in the comments who APPEAR to talk about the points I made, when really they're just annoyed at my attitude. This leads to the kind of circulatory arguing we see here, when my advice is sound but people still feel I should be less confident about my position.

>You might as well say 'database x is always the best choice'.

I would only say something like that if the purpose of the database was very clear from the context. I would never randomly drop such a statement onto HN, because everyone here uses all kinds of different databases. Your analogy is invalid.

>100 monkeys typing could have come up with the world's greatest business plan. However in practice, that does not make it worth people's time to read everything typed by monkeys.

Again an analogy that does not work. However much time however many monkeys spend on trying to understand human psychology they will not make much headway. Though if _I_ as a fellow human, take some time to try and understand human psychology, I do think it is worth the time to hear my points and argue on their merits, no matter if I had 0 or 100 jobs before. If I'm indeed talking gibberish, you're free to try and argue against my points, but since I see you talking about everything BUT my points, I'm assuming that you don't really take issue with them, but rather with me.

I think the most important reason is that Israel is a small and a tight knit country, and so is the startup scene. It helps that the huge majority of talented developers served at very specific army units (the most famous is 8200). This leads to a simple truth - when I interview someone he was probably referred to me through friends or at least I know someone who worked/served with him.

When I read the article I found it funny that Amar was OK with working for free for a few months. Me and almost everyone I know served at least 3 years in the IDF which is pretty much working for free.

I take issue with both your points and with you. I had written up a fairly thorough response, but I'm not interested in talking to someone who is basically trolling for attention. If you don't think your points are interesting enough to discuss on their merits, I guess it's a valid strategy to inject a bunch of extraneous flamebait, but you can hardly expect to be taken seriously for complaining that people address your flamebait presentation instead of your weak argument.

"However, I was too frustrated after being turned down everywhere else (for one reason or another) and realized that on paper, I didn’t look too great (Bachelors Degree in Science and a bunch of failed business ideas)."

Guy recognizes that he doesn't look good enough which is why he is getting No's or no responses, but he believes that he is good enough so he decides to get creative to prove it.

If you are trying hard and they aren't responding, I think you know it's because you aren't making the cut, Vidyard was sending subtle, but very well understood signals that anyone else might do, you try, no response, obviously no clicking with them, so you keep trying, because you still think you can prove something.

It sounds like people want to say either Amar is stupid or Vidyard are dicks, both had their own agenda and clearly sent each other messages about how they felt without necessarily directly saying it. How many "No's" does it take to get to a Yes in sales? Dude is a good salesman.