You don't become a Silicon Valley celebrity by being shy | Hacker News Reader

You don't become a Silicon Valley celebrity by being shy

mitsloan.mit.edu

52 pointsgcatalfamo14 comments

I wonder what year it will be before the entrenched valley VC types realize that refusing to meet with people unless you have a mutual friend has profound consequences regarding the social and economic class and ethnicity of the people you do business with, and feel compelled to at least pause a moment to contemplate that fact before espousing the practice.

not sure you realize the consequences of what you’re saying. taking an unfiltered approach would simply not scale. 90+% of startups fail. there has to be some quality filtering, even if it does discard some potential. i’d assert the type of startup you’re talking about is even more rare than your average unicorn.

Exactly. This is the "must have a college degree" requirement.... That in itself tells you little, and there's a thousand cases it's the wrong filter, but the volume is so high that there must be some automated filter.

Of course I realize the consequences.

My point is not that there should be no filter, but that this specific filter is deeply flawed. There are a nearly infinite number of other ways to filter the onslaught of requests, your fallacy-of-the-excluded-middle argument notwithstanding.

It’s worth noting that the people in question have astonishing financial resources. Is this really the only and best possible solution under those circumstances?

The default reason for this makes sense: knowing how to find a way to meet people you want to meet is a crucial skill in any startup and if you don't have that skill you'll likely fail so why not use that as an initial criterion, essentially as the first stage of the pipeline? The usual response is that if this were bad, the market would take care of it (someone would start a firm that didn't use this method and would find all the cool startups missed by the others, and at a better valuation to boot). Of course this is applied in other situations, as you said, not just VC investment.

However there has been a market response. YC is the best known such, but other accelerator efforts such as techstars and university accelerators; angel aggregators and the like don't have similar qualification thresholds; those who pass through them have access to more traditional sources of capital.

Title is very misleading and completely obscures the point of the article

clickbait-esque

At some point I thought I wanted to become a VC, but I realized that I have too many nihilistic tendencies to ever want to live a life where my entire schedule is meetings.

I don't understand this title. Shy people usually don't want to be celebrities in the first place.

Actual title: 3 professional life hacks from a billionaire introvert.

Billionaire introvert = Reid Hoffman

It's ok for a submitter to use a subtitle when it's closer to HN's criteria of not being misleading or baity. In this case the subtitle doesn't exactly hit the mark, but the title's pretty baity.

The "3 hacks" is much closer to what the article is about though. The subtitle arouses curiosity and has more power to get people to click, but is less relevant to the content.

Yes, that's the problem. If you or someone can figure out a way to salvage "3 professional life hacks from a billionaire introvert" into a suitable HN title, we can change it above.

Or maybe it's just a fluff article and not worth saving.

I honestly thought the subtitle was a better title about the story being told, since the life hacks don’t really work for common people...

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