Statements like this always turn me off. I guess it's because it breaks the illusion that Sam and everyone else at YC are normal people like most of us. They're not. They're INSANELY wealthy by any reasonable standard.
Not to sound contemptuous, but are there really people out there who consider the folks running YC "normal people?"
"the day-to-day experience of most people in this country" is nothing like any of the things Altman, PG, Livingston etc... experience on a daily basis.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-have-less-th...
The buckets aren't well sized there.
Sam's startup --like for many here-- was not a roaring success. Few of the entrepreneurs and engineers here on HN have an extra $10m in the bank after an experience like that.
I still think that this is a great (fantastic and maybe even unprecedented, depending on how serious he is about the duration) move by YC, though. I really hope that they nail the concept of research being different from shipping products, though-- the mentality that research is a product that has to be shipped out has largely killed the scientific research community of academia, warping it into a horrendous paper-churn for survival.
I still hope to find ways to put out useful information that will benefit people who are more "normal" than I am and I do have my concerns about the world being designed and run by so many people who absolutely cannot relate to the day-to-day experiences of most of their target audience/customers. But I don't know that hoping for "normal" people to do the design work is in any way useful.
I don't know what the answer is, but it seems like a lost cause to want people to do brilliant design work and also be normal. If you are that brilliant, you simply are not normal. Period.
It'd be more to the point to say that it's a reminder than YC is part of an institution where a small class of people (investors and founders) routinely take home millions, while rank and file employees (even with employee #1, 2, 3...) get to only watch as the CEO and investors play with their Maclarens and spend their millions on whatever they're passionate about.
He dropped out of Stanford, founded Loopt (which raised $30 million and then acqui-sold for $43 -- and I'm sure Sequoia got the bulk of it), was then made a YC partner and finally appointed president. His Wikipedia page says he's made some angel investments in successful companies like AirBNB, but my question is: "With what money?" Maybe he sold some private shares of these companies at some point. There's nothing wrong with that. But again where did the original money come from? Family?
I just don't get it. Please explain to me how dropping out of college and having your only startup fail leads to (a) being handed one of the most prestigious and influential positions in SV and (b) having so much money you can donate $10 million dollars like it's chump change. How does that make any sense in this universe?
pg started YC and deserves all the credit for basically inventing the accelerator archetype. He can do whatever he wants and I guess he thought sama was the best guy for the job. Maybe he is. Heck, I'll even admit that I think he's done a good job so far, although I also think plenty of people would be equally adept at watching a golden goose lay eggs.
I think SV -- and YC especially -- perpetrate a few huge myths which cause people to have unrealistic expectations of their lives and ventures. ("There aren't enough engineers!", for example. Just last week, sama was saying how easy it is to live in SV if you work at Facebook, make a $150k+ salary and got a $75k signing bonus... a situation he was pawning off as "average" but is actually highly above average.) These lofty, then unfulfilled expectations then cause depression in vast amounts of people, both inside the Valley and out.
To me, sama is a colossal SV myth, incarnate. "Look! If you're smart enough, you can rocket to the moon! Even if you drop out of school and your only startup fails!"
I don't understand the full story, apparently, but I just hope people aren't fooled. There is more than meets the eye, here.
I made single-digit millions from the Loopt acquisition. Almost all the money I've made has been as an investor. I got lucky in that the first few investments I made in 2009 (very small dollar amounts) were really good, so I was able to raise capital to keep investing at a much larger scale with other peoples' money. I didn't have much liquidity until last year.
Takeaway 1: the easiest, lowest-risk way in the world to make a lot of money is to get fees for investing other peoples' money.
Takeaway 2: if you make money that way I think you should give a lot of it away.
Takeaway 3: FWIW this is a lot of money for me, but it's what I most want to support.
As a side note, I was pointing out that living in SV is becoming possible only if you get a job like that one, and that that's really a problem.
But hot damn! If you've been so successful people are literally having a hard time believing it's true... that's... that's... I don't even know.
But the older I've gotten, the more I've realized that life is about opportunities. If you want them, you have to put yourself in the position to get them (as sama did). More importantly, you have to make the best of them (as sama has). But many, many people who don't deserve opportunities get them (inheritance, for example) and many, many people who do deserve them, don't get them. They did all the right things... they simply were never given a shot by bosses, would-be cofounders, investors, etc. (Cue "Lose Yourself".)
A question I've been pondering a lot recently is the power of talent and whether or not it'll eventually rise to the top. How efficient is our society at finding "the best"? I tend to believe that someone as ridiculously talented as, say, Elton John, will always emerge. But then you hear the story of how someone like Matthew McConaughey was discovered (director of Dazed and Confused found him in a bar at 2am and said come to the set tomorrow -- zero acting experience) and you want to slap yourself.
And if you get into the genetic and familial lotteries (how smart you are, how good looking you are, are you black?, etc), then you'll just go completely crazy when you realize how unfair the world is.
In any case, from his answer, it looks like sama is a talented guy who put himself in the right position to succeed and is now an outlier on the normal curve. Good for him. It's gotta be somebody, might as well be him.
http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_career_planning_part1.html
Anyway, if you would like any more than baseline success (where baseline success = working really hard to get into a profession with barriers to entry, like lawyer or doctor), you will have to deal with risk and uncertainty. You can't account for life without accounting for luck.
But life is long, and over the long-term, luck has a way of averaging out. And then the big question is how well did you capitalize on the luck you were given? A lot of people put themselves in positions where they have no chance of getting lucky, because they don't like the vulnerability and uncertainty that comes with realizing just how much of their life comes down to luck. That pretty much guarantees that they'll only be exposed to the unlucky events.
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>I think it's very interesting phenomenon that he values this research more than the lives of other people,
It's possible to make a donation to research something that isn't curing cancer for example but still impact the lives of people.