Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

adgrok.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 147 posts

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#91

Post by thornad »

jrockway wrote: post #85
AmberShah wrote: post #73

As it turns, my kid likes to eat. So, in my oh-so-unique case of having, uh, responsibilities, it would be better for me to have a paying job (even at Goldman Sachs) than to found a startup with zero revenue. Of course, that's assuming they are XOR, which they are not.

Don't worry about it. People feel the need to justify every decision they make to the world. The author of this post didn't want to work at GS, he wanted his own company. But he gave up a couple hundred thousand a year to do that, and people made fun of him, so he felt he needed to justify it. Obviously, there are plenty of people happy collecting their large paycheck every two weeks, or there would be a lot of start…

Which is exactly what he is doing, justifying and using a third party: "Hey , my kid has to eat" Blind leading the blind.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#92

Post by jrockway »

thornad wrote: post #91
jrockway wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry about it. People feel the need to justify every decision they make to the world. The author of this post didn't want to work at GS, he wanted his own company. But he gave up a couple hundred thousand a year to do that, and people made fun of him, so he felt he needed to justify it. Obviously, there are plenty of people happy collecting their large paycheck every two weeks, or there would be a lot of start…

Which is exactly what he is doing, justifying and using a third party: "Hey , my kid has to eat" Blind leading the blind.

Yeah, true. I will break the trend and say that I have little-to-no interest in having my own company, and that I like programming and making money. Working for the bank facilitates this.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#93

Post by rdouble »

jrockway wrote: post #85
AmberShah wrote: post #73

As it turns, my kid likes to eat. So, in my oh-so-unique case of having, uh, responsibilities, it would be better for me to have a paying job (even at Goldman Sachs) than to found a startup with zero revenue. Of course, that's assuming they are XOR, which they are not.

Don't worry about it. People feel the need to justify every decision they make to the world. The author of this post didn't want to work at GS, he wanted his own company. But he gave up a couple hundred thousand a year to do that, and people made fun of him, so he felt he needed to justify it. Obviously, there are plenty of people happy collecting their large paycheck every two weeks, or there would be a lot of start…

there would be a lot of startups and not a lot of Goldman Sachs.

There are a lot of startups and there is only 1 Goldman Sachs...

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#94

Post by antongm »

jakarta wrote: post #34

I wonder if the massive amounts of income he made at Goldman helped provide a safety net for launching his zero revenue startup.

Eh, no.

I'll echo statistics 101: the mean of a distribution is pretty meaningless when it's a very skewed distribution you're talking about. Those average figures don't apply to me.

And I joined GS at precisely the wrong time. Right at the peak, going into the trough.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#95

Post by jbooth »

eru wrote: post #72
jbooth wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly, but assuming it can't be zero-sum leads to absurdity as well. What about high frequency trading? Most of it is zero sum, first one to arb the difference wins. The economy doesn't derive any higher value from it if the difference would've been corrected within a couple seconds (or a few minutes) anyways. It's not the same as buying a burger.

Oh, if you by a burger and sum the benefit over, say, Burger King and McDonald's it's probably constant. If you sum the benefits of arbitrage over the high frequency traders, it's possible (close to) constant, too. But the rest of the world can still benefit (or perhaps suffer in the case of a burger).

Hm, I think we're talking past each other although I'd like to hear more exposition on your comment because it doesn't really make sense to me.

I was talking more from the perspective of someone who's generating cash. Burger King pays suppliers for meat and whatever (or raises cows in their own operation) and you pay them for a burger. You get a burger, they get cash, pay people, value creation all around.

In Wall St, on the other hand, theoretically we should see value creation through efficient routing of capital to the right places and the people who make that happen are rewarded for their effort. In practice, I feel, it's often a video game where they manage to nibble a billion little pieces away from the value-based investors who are actually performing an economic function. So in some scenarios, they're a net drain, rather than part of a robust economy. That's where my zero-sum analogy came in. YMMV.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#96

Post by antongm »

ableal wrote: post #44
jakarta wrote: post #34

I wonder if the massive amounts of income he made at Goldman helped provide a safety net for launching his zero revenue startup.

Well, I got from the adgrok.com "about the team" page to his sailboat page ( http://svmoksha.com/ , good reading). I presume he's quite familiar with the traditional definition of a boat as a hole in the water one throws money at ...

Oh, God yes.

Thanks for reading the sailing blog.

And that's about the cheapest, smallest boat one could non-suicidally ponder a circumnavigation in, by the way. And even then owning it and sailing it is like taking a cold shower and tearing up $100 bills (to quote the old joke).

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#97

Post by jrockway »

rdouble wrote: post #93
jrockway wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry about it. People feel the need to justify every decision they make to the world. The author of this post didn't want to work at GS, he wanted his own company. But he gave up a couple hundred thousand a year to do that, and people made fun of him, so he felt he needed to justify it. Obviously, there are plenty of people happy collecting their large paycheck every two weeks, or there would be a lot of start…

there would be a lot of startups and not a lot of Goldman Sachs. There are a lot of startups and there is only 1 Goldman Sachs...

That's quite a literal reading of my statement there.

What I meant to convey was the number of employees that Goldman has (a lot), and how many similar companies there are (BAML, JPM, Citi, ...).

A lot of people have chosen the "peon at a big bank" position, and it's probably not because they think that it will make their life less enjoyable.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#98

Post by VolatileVoid »

forensic wrote: post #80
JoelSutherland wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So because your wife give you a 100 happiness factor(tm), you are now indifferent when choosing between jobs that give you a 20 or 80 happiness factor? Or are you saying that your meaningfulness bar is so high that no job can possibly clear it? What if you and your wife worked together? For the most part, we get to choose our lives. I reject the idea that time spent working can't be meaningful.

Or maybe he's saying that access to his wife is dependent on the Goldman Sachs job. If he loses the 20-factor-job he loses the 100-factor-wife.

Definitely not. :)

I'm just saying that - to me - a job is just a means to some end. That end (for me) is providing for my family adequately. That I happen to enjoy what I do is an extra bonus. I'm just saying not to lose sight of why we do what we do. If you start placing too much importance on a job, you let your job define you. IMHO, it's much more empowering to remember that your job is just a tool like any other.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#99

Post by noname123 »

VolatileVoid wrote: post #27

So. This is funny. I actually work at Goldman, work in the system he talks about, and have been doing so for 5 years. You can get numbed by the experience of working here, but you don't have to be. I've become friendly with some of the best hackers I know, and for us, finance always takes a backseat to writing amazing code. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we fail, but we try to never say, "Meh. Good enough." Wall Str…

That's cool. I'm surprised you say that finance always takes a backseat to writing amazing code, though.

In my experience, traders don't want cool new snazzy Google Wave. They want Excel. They don't want cool new Web 2.0 streaming quotes/risk calculations/portfolio calculations, they want VBA macros in Excel.

Even if you are working in actual trading/strategy area and write up your backtester with Python. They want your P/L in Excel. To implement the strategy though, they want it in C++.

Wall Street: Excel for life!

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#100

Post by noname123 »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #8
d_c wrote: post #3

That's quite interesting: " At the risk of getting sued, let me throw you geeks a bone and part the Goldman veil a bit. The Goldman Sachs risk system is called SecDB (securities database), and everything at Goldman that matters is run out of it. The GUI itself looks like a settings screen from DOS 3.0, but no one cares about UI cosmetics on the Street. The language itself was called SLANG (securities language) and wa…

I've had a number of people tell me this system is why GS won the financial crisis. During the financial crisis, GS knew their positions and their risks. They could also calculate the side effects of proposed trades as quickly as their computers could calculate it. This meant the people at the top could actively plan what to do next during the day. In contrast, MS and JPM can only get information like this a few hour…

What about your HFT outfit, Mesh Capital?

How do you guys do real-time P&L and risk calculations? Given the frequency and volume of the orders you guys pump to the market, I imagine that there must be a latency between when you receive ack/fills from market vs. real time market price of your positions. Given that HFT makes or breaks on pennies, cancel/modifying your orders in sync with real-time market info must be critical.

How do you guys solve this problem, both software-wise and telecom-wise? Via colo, but that solves the issue with only latency to trading servers. What about streaming and constructing your own consolidated quote book (because there's latency on CQS)?

Post reply on HN