John McAfee AMA | Hacker News Reader

John McAfee AMA

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146 pointsGarbage43 comments

I thought this was good:

> OT, but do anyone know exactly what went wrong with McAfee after the founder left the company?

> It grew, it got big, like every company. When I started, there were 4 of us. Generating $10M/yr, we could have lived happily for our lives on that. VCs came and offered to make it bigger, we had to grow, we didn't have sales, marketing, etc. I gave it away, unless you were a government, corporation, etc. Once I went public, I had 1000 bosses, investors, FTC, SEC, all my time in meetings and interviews. I hired a programmer/day for over a year! I used to spend time taking apart viruses, not I was an accountant. Once a company gets big, it becomes slow, and cannot survive in its current form.

Nice cautionary tail there about ruining something good by trying to go too big

Going public is often the turning point where a 'Good Company' starts to become a 'Bad Company'. It becomes no longer good enough to make a good product.

I didn't think it was that simple in case of McAfee or for that matter in most cases however.

When asked what someone can do to be successful in software:

> That;s a tough one. get out of the box no1. REALLY out of the box. Abandon every social norm, esp those closest to you. Then look at the world with objective eyes. Look what is the thing to do? Every entrepreneur I know (I know Steve Jobs, and he was out of the box) went out of the box. If you can't go work for someone else.

Yeah the older I get the more it becomes clear that there's inherent conflict between following social norms (developing a cushy social life) and achieving something big. Like with being a startup founder I think almost all have to go through intense anti-social periods, admittedly I judge founders as being average or worse if they don't seem to have some anti social or obsessive streak to them.

Kobe is a cool example too, a guy who had a relatively bizarre social life for an NBA player, with a manic obsession about work and improvement. I think he even said "Friends come and go, but banners stay forever." Extreme, but hits on a deeper truth about what all it takes to make it big.

I mean this in the nicest possible way, but that kinda sounds like a justification for being a workaholic.

No need for the patronizing tone... Isn't that an ad hominem? People can abuse this information to justify anti social behavior, but I'm not sure how your point challenges its validity...

Was it patronising? And was it an ad hominem? I didn't really read that into it at all. Just another opinion on one man's opinion.

Huh, I don't know, just seemed like a patronizing way of phrasing something. People do it subconsciously a lot. It's not like it offended or bothered me, was just pointing out that it had such a tone, and noting that conversations or debates are better when people just say things directly.

About the ad hominem, saying something sounds like an excuse isn't addressing the argument made. If OP disagrees with the argument, he's welcome to make arguments that address my own.

Often, work pays off. The Lakers used to try and lock Kobe out of the gym to stop him getting shots up at all hours before dawn. But he persisted and found other ways in.

Seems like he probably could have put a hoop in his driveway or something...

Why would his team not want him to practice?

Because of injury or potential for injury. The team wants Kobe Bryant healthy and on the court, so wants to limit excessive practice to avoid reinjury or new injury.

He would go in at 2am, 4am, etc and put up hundreds of shots. They changed the locks. He would wedge open service doors, etc. Risk was burnout or injury from sheer repetition.

They might've underestimated the sort of character he is. There are some great stories out there about his training habits, the Lakers scouting him as a rookie pre-draft, etc. Contentious character, but hard to deny his focus.

There is one great story of him calling in a trainer to work with him after midnight. They take a break, the trainer understanding they were done for now and going home. Trainer came back in the morning for team training and made smalltalk with Kobe about hopefully he had had a good rest after their workout. Kobe was confused. He'd been there all night training and hadn't gone home.

It is justification for being a workaholic.

There's obsession and then there's workaholism.

The former is something that you're driven to do internally out of great desire for it. The latter is just trying to avoid problems by working.

A book that I thoroughly enjoyed, "The Sports Gene" by David Epstein, he goes into how being a workaholic has been shown to be a genetic trait. As someone who apparently doesn't have the gene, I look at people like Kobe and can just shake my head and wish them luck. I get discouraged knowing that I can bust my ass but predisposition can and will out perform me. So what do I do? I like the advice Killer Mike gives:

> "The best you can be is probably average, so learn to celebrate average more. Buy better beer"

Being at the right place at the right time is also important, if not more important. There are lots of people thinking out of the box everywhere in the world but financial success in software is extremely concentrated at certain geographical locations and time ranges. (Maybe living in a small Eastern European country I feel this more than people living in let's say the Valley.)

TL/DR: out of the box, but in the appropriate (time,location) range

Part of being outside the box is determining what it is the right time for. So for example, 2015 is obviously not the right time to make it big on asteroid mining, but understanding the value, logistics etc... for it could lead you to determine what kind of events would make it the right time. Certainly not a science to this though.

Speak for yourself. I am currently putting 110% into asteroid mining

maybe living in a small Eastern European country is your personal box...

Thinking out of the box is not mutually exclusive with having a social life. I know many artists and musicians who are doing truly groundbreaking stuff. They all violate the social norms, and have unusual lifestyles. But all of them are very well connected (in art, you have to be). Their social networks are very broad, and very strong.

He's not saying to obsess or be a workaholic. He's saying be creative. The way to be creative is to relax and let your thoughts drift.

This is a gem of wisdom:

pair-programming between devs and hackers will allow for instant security feed-back [...] It will be the only possible way to develop ironclad software. Starting with the system architects, there need to be arcdhitectural hackers - all the way through the coding process.

...and reading the other stuff too, he seems to still be knowing what he's talking about!

Yes he is very good at explaining good practice, such as precise instructions on removing software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgf5PaBzyg

What the hell hahahaha

The dude is very likeable and I don't care about him doing illegal drugs (I'm no moralist).

That being said, the accusations that he killed his next door neighbor in Belize and then fled the country are disconcerting...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McAfee#Legal_issues

As someone that lives in a third world country, I think that everything John said about the case (that it was about people wanting bribes) is true.

Also he said people hit him with a baseball bat after putting a helmet on his head, I know even other techniques (a cop friend told me one of the things his corrupt colleagues do is hit people with soap bars inside towels, it also hurts a lot without leaving bruises if you know what you are doing).

I don't think he said this had been done to him. He merely said that's a common 'questioning' technique used in Belize.

In another reply he claims they did it to his post-arrest.

Do you remember the news about ukrainian authorities raiding the office of STALKER devs and demanding to be paid? If shit like this happened in Ukraine (which was a pretty stable country back then), then just imagine what scale of corruption is going on in countries like Belize.

What I liked the most is that they took the time to reply more than the top-level question -- many AMAs I've seen* just answer the top level question and move on to something else.

* disclaimer: I don't read so many AMAs, just the ones I find interesting.

Several AMAs lately have been a PR exercise (like showing up on a talk show)

You mean like Woody Harrelson's RAMPART? :P

Well, this one did feel a bit different, certainly more involved than others.

By the way, how could one buy a beer to this man? With something he said in the AMA I solved something that had bugged me for a long time.

I don't think there's a clean line between for-fun celebrity AMAs and PR exercises. They blend smoothly into each other, and the real division is just whether it trips your personal "authenticity" alarm.

There's an easy well to tell, just look in the OP and see if they're plugging something. John McAfee is not. Woody Harrelson was.

Everyone is plugging something all the time. Just because they're plugging their general popularity rather than a particular movie does not make something unassailably authentic.

I get the feeling from a few of them that the subjects of the AMA don't want to be there and that they're almost forced to do it by their PR. I'm used to the AMAs of old where the subjects really got into it.

It was wild to follow John McAfee a few years back when he was on the run in Beliz. His podcast with Joe Rogan at the time was pretty entertaining and so I'm not surprised to see they are looking to make a movie (not sure if this was mentioned in the AMA, still making my way through it)

Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski To Script John McAfee Film For Warner Bros http://deadline.com/2013/07/scott-alexander-larry-karaszewsk...

Wow really enjoying the level of effort put into these responses

Everything got much better and more exhaustive than I expected.

Possibly drug fuelled..

Regardless if that's true or not, how is that relevant?

Relax, it was funny.

this is the best AMA ever from the most fascinating crazy man in the IT world.

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