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Comment by gowld | Hacker News Reader

My theory is that entrepeneurship in general, and lean startups especially, relies a lot on "fake it till you make" and sales that rely on heavy bluffing, and poker players are the sort of people that can do that. In web tech, it's especially true, because "lean startup" theory means that you can sell your product before you build it, but you have to bluff to your customers that you have already built it and investors (if any) that you know how to build it... and free-market competition means that since bluffing provides an edge, you must bluff to keep up with your competitors.

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At high level, maybe. But poker is really about process and discipline. Playing poker to create income is a grind.

You sit there for up to 5 hours and do math on odds and make decisions, hand after hand. Every now and then you utilize bluffing or other techniques to bully to win a pot. Then you keep stacking to get a bank roll going so you can get to the next table, the next tier.

The college aged poker kids optimize for it like any engineer. They have spreadsheets tracking EV on time, earnings per hour.

But if you have the discipline and dedication to go through that for a year or so, then yeah, you can sit there and code to problem solve or sit there and go through the hundreds of decisions needed to operate a business.

Absolutely right. I was terrible at online poker since I wanted to have fun playing it. You can't bluff someone who knows the math in the long run. You'll lose all your money.

Bluffing was important to the extent that I had to convince the listener that I understood the topics being discussed when I did not.

In general, I would discourage bluffing in a business like SE Daily. I'm on display for 250 minutes per week. It would be very easy to get caught in a lie.

A few of the topics I know well myself, like networking, can be a pain to listen to. But the overall quality is great, and I realize that you can't be an expert on all topics. I listen to pretty much every episode and rarely skip one. Even the topics I think are of no interest to me often ends up with something useful and interesting. Doing daily shows also allows for a lot of diversity in topics, letting some episodes go really deep or just have a subject covered broadly and intensely like the k8s. I really recommend it to anyone who wants to keep tabs on what is going on.

Bill Gates is a good example of someone that gained a lot of success with a hard bluff: http://www.technoventure.eu/valuation/Bill-Gates-Microsoft.p... (perhaps not the best written retelling, but emphasizes the "bluff" part)

Or, you know, just stealing an interface he didn't create and marketing it as his own, but who's here to split hairs anyway?

Despite the downvotes, I stand by my statement, as an interface designer that pours years of effort into perfecting the arrangement and composition of elements on the infinite canvas, it's not acceptable to me that such things are not protected or even noticed by others.

He did buy it, albeit without revealing the potential it had. I can see differing views on that tactic.

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