I quit my job just over 1 year ago to work for myself, to do some consulting work and improve on a website that I had knocked up with a mate over 2 weekends and see where it would take us and we are doing OK.
I felt I got the same treatment as the original poster did (quiet pity & the why's) but I didn't care it was/is low risk and if worse come to worse I will get a job again if I feel things really aren't going the way I want. One of my friends even asked, "do you like money and want to get rich so much that you are willing to leave your job that is stable and go out on your own". I think the assumption for everyone who doesn't know about the love of working with tech is that its done just for the money only not because its so fun and challenging to some of us.
I responded by saying that I actually like money less then he did because I was willing to go for 2 years (if needed) without stable income or money to do the things I like (within and outside of tech), the way I figure, this shows less of a desire for money then someone who wakes up everyday hating what they are doing just for the money when they don't have the kids and a wife ?!
One of the advantaged that I didn't realise about quitting was other then being able to do the work that you want to make $$$ (work that replaces your 9-5) you end up with much more time because you are able arrange your time appropriately and the time wasted on ridiculous meetings, coffee breaks, friday drinks the 2hr total train ride everyday and the complete drain at the end of the day that just leaves you wanting to veg-out after work and not do anything was no longer there. At the moment after I get a piece of work done and I am happy with it I move onto the next thing whether it is a "work related" task or "something fun" (like going to the beach for instance).
When I had that additional time the one big issue I had was trying not to feel guilty about not working on the tasks that I was doing to replace my previous day job and force every bit of work in any free time BUT once I was able to get over this I managed to pick up a new sport a new language and learn many things that I feel has enriched my life so much more.
What i kinda learnt is sometimes you quit work because of the usual HN reasons, to do a startup, work for your self but for me specifically because I didn't have to waste so much time I ended up discovering lots of other things that makes life awesome. Unless i really need it and things go south in a big way, living life with much less salary as before but with this additional freedom is so much better. I guess its good to enjoy this whilst you can for those that can because when kids come along being a responsible adult things will obviously have to be different.
I think you're right on with the monetary bit, statistically every startup/consultancy/independently produced product is a money/time pit waiting to happen. The number of successes in either category is tiny and you really have to do it for reasons other than cash. I spent 4.5 years on my first startup. If I wanted to maximize my income, I would have pursued a career in finance, not started my own company.
As you say, I too find the freedom liberating, but more than that, I find it exciting to work on problems that are personally interesting. To have skin in the game is the best way I've found so far to keep my work interesting and engaging. The fact that I can define my own work-life balance helps too. :)
Yes I remember the 90's and how scary it was (the idea of contracting HIV). I wonder how children born in the 90's see it and whether they still view it as we did when we learnt about HIV and Aids in the 90's.
I also remember as a kid the news when Magic johnson made his announcement and thinking , dam he is gonna die really soon, not knowing that decades later he is still doing well.
May I ask, i felt the same way but I myself am not much of a facebooker who likes t share his life, post on twitter or post on pinterest.
Maybe its just me but all those ideas are the same arn't they ? They just need enough people to participate and it becomes fun, meaning its enough for people to come back. If people all left facebook there would be no reason to post status updates anymore, same goes for twitter. They dont actually have the kind of value that people are willing to open their wallets for (and people dont, im sure if facebook started to charge for their accounts many people would leave). In the case of listnerd isnt it the same. If the marketing efforts are good enough then why couldn't it follow the same trajectory as the other social sharing apps?
Personally I have always wondered why people want to share their life online and hence why I personally dont have an interest in social sharing apps but many people do. Now people are more open online then with their own families and this is just another different way to share so my question is what makes this different then any of the other social (post what im interested in) sites that have been so successful over the last couple of years ?
Don't like the title, should probably be more like "Be flexible with your consistency"
You can't be inconsistent and learn say a language (programming or otherwise), or even learn how to be a good entrepreneur, you got to be consistent and keep at it, just be flexible with the information that you receive and be willing to change your ways if you need to.
If you could pull that off without discrimination that would be an awesome idea. It may cause somewhat of a North/South Korea kind of thing but if it can be done it would be a great data collection exercise that investors, founders can really learn from.
Would be interesting to learn why the black swans have done better then the normal batch, or why the normal batch did better or why it was a 50/50 split.
You might even learn that because a startup is considered as a black swan founders in that group work harder and thus have a higher success rate. This would really put into light debates about how much intelligence vs hard work may effect success rates in the world of startups.
So it seems for investors, the big winners are simply based on luck, there is no logical factor that you can easily pick out that will give you a better chance of winning accept for possibly experience over a number of years that allows you to pick the features of a successful startup that initially doesn't look like they are going to be successful (maybe a glimmer in the founders eyes, something that isn't completely obvious to the general investment population).
But whats the thought process and how does it change given this insight ? It should still be the case that as an investor you still should focus on the best opportunities and try to maximize a decent return from the majority of your investments then focus on picking that facebook, dropbox or AirBnB right, just as you would if you were a trader in the stock market ... otherwise your just gambling ?! Focus on the technicals and data that give you the best odds and just take those trades cause taking trades where you are waiting on information from the fed chairman or draghi without insider info for example (even though they have big pay offs if you swing the right way) will earn you pretty much the same amount of returns as losses in the long term.
If the potential to win big time is counter intuitive what do you trust from data in front of you to make the decision to invest other than the "gut feeling" ?
In any case, i would think with dropbox it never really sounded like a bad idea and the founder/founders (Drew and Arash) sounded very promising even from the start. If this is the case even good bets do pay of big time to :) maybe these are easier to pick then the facebooks where at the time it does look like a bad idea.
Basically, Im curious as how this insight in PG's essay would change how an investor should invest or is it just an FYI and something to keep in the back of your mind as an investor ?
> So it seems for investors, the big winners are simply based on luck...
That's not quite right. It's more a question of taking enough of the right kind of chances in funding the companies that you do fund, as opposed to all the companies you don't fund.
I think of it as the concept of "search space" -- you need to define your search space properly, so that you have a good chance of having some big winners in the search space. You have to define your search space because you can't invest in everything. The investors that do the best job of defining their search space (having the most accurate criteria, best judgment, best mental models, etc.) have the best chance of funding some of the winners -- almost as a side effect.
When you talk to old successful VCs, what they tell you is that they had almost no ability to judge which of the companies they funded would go on to be the big winners in their portfolios at the point of funding them. They only learned that later. The challenge was to get enough of the right kinds of risk "above the line" and then give the portfolio time to develop.
Don't you think you can you pick out some that had zero chance of becoming massive-scale homeruns, because they served sort of a niche market? There are none that were obviously (to me, or apparently to pg and co) going to be unprofitable, but if you want the next Facebook, you're not going to get it by investing in, say, Codecademy, which, as laudable as its goals are, only appeals to newbie coders, who are a tiny slice of the population.
> but if you want the next Facebook, you're not going to get it by investing in, say, Codecademy, which, as laudable as its goals are, only appeals to newbie coders, who are a tiny slice of the population
Well you would just never know. Computer science and software engineering could become part of the basic school curriculum in the next few years. In the news you see that "the 14 year old boy developed an X for the iPhone and is now a millionaire". Enough of these stories could prompt the education system to deem coding as a basic skill like math, english and science. Code academy could end up being the platform that schools use to teach it.
But i guess the chances are slim because as it stands now the population is small though the possibility is there.
Im not sure if you can find many places where they have both in great detal as most machine learning material assume some knowledge in the specific math but you could always write down the terms that you dont understand from any ML material and look it up on khan academy. For all the material you need for Andrew Ng's classes (on coursera) for example you can pretty much find all the required terms (matricies, probability etc) on khan academy
As mentioned probabilities is something you want to get into very early. Its easy to understand at the start and its practical uses in many different computing areas along with many other things in life is priceless.
Good place to start would be to go through khan academy's probability videos.
i somewhat feel this is facebook trying to justify the massive IPO money and hence expanding into other areas that will make use of this money. Its the typical scenario were a company gets more funding then they probably need and in turn leads to that company addressing areas they might not have, given they had less money.
Facebook should get into mobile hardware but not in such a short time. Im sure there is lower hanging fruit they should be aiming for that could help boost their revenue many times over and get them back in the good graces of their shareholders again (if they care about that :) ).
If they get into the mobile space by having their own device it seems like such a high barrier simply to add to their advertising revenue, it almost seems like they are leaving their web and mobile apps business cause in terms of revenue, what they have (in web and mobile apps) is all they can figure out and NOW they need a new platform to expand on ?!
I felt I got the same treatment as the original poster did (quiet pity & the why's) but I didn't care it was/is low risk and if worse come to worse I will get a job again if I feel things really aren't going the way I want. One of my friends even asked, "do you like money and want to get rich so much that you are willing to leave your job that is stable and go out on your own". I think the assumption for everyone who doesn't know about the love of working with tech is that its done just for the money only not because its so fun and challenging to some of us.
I responded by saying that I actually like money less then he did because I was willing to go for 2 years (if needed) without stable income or money to do the things I like (within and outside of tech), the way I figure, this shows less of a desire for money then someone who wakes up everyday hating what they are doing just for the money when they don't have the kids and a wife ?!
One of the advantaged that I didn't realise about quitting was other then being able to do the work that you want to make $$$ (work that replaces your 9-5) you end up with much more time because you are able arrange your time appropriately and the time wasted on ridiculous meetings, coffee breaks, friday drinks the 2hr total train ride everyday and the complete drain at the end of the day that just leaves you wanting to veg-out after work and not do anything was no longer there. At the moment after I get a piece of work done and I am happy with it I move onto the next thing whether it is a "work related" task or "something fun" (like going to the beach for instance).
When I had that additional time the one big issue I had was trying not to feel guilty about not working on the tasks that I was doing to replace my previous day job and force every bit of work in any free time BUT once I was able to get over this I managed to pick up a new sport a new language and learn many things that I feel has enriched my life so much more.
What i kinda learnt is sometimes you quit work because of the usual HN reasons, to do a startup, work for your self but for me specifically because I didn't have to waste so much time I ended up discovering lots of other things that makes life awesome. Unless i really need it and things go south in a big way, living life with much less salary as before but with this additional freedom is so much better. I guess its good to enjoy this whilst you can for those that can because when kids come along being a responsible adult things will obviously have to be different.