Comment by borski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by borski | Hacker News Reader

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It’s really quite simple; Silicon Valley is maybe the one place in which I have ever found nearly everyone I meet has a “pay it forward” attitude. It is infectious, and it means that as a “no name” startup founder, you have nearly infinite access to advice and capital, as long as you are convincing enough and tell a good story. There is no immediate expectation of return. I spent most of my life living in NYC, and I originally started Tinfoil in Boston (and went to school at MIT). Both cities are “startup hubs,” but the same attitude doesn’t exist. Boston was particularly bad about “what’s in it for me?” being the common theme of any conversation.

The upshot is that now I volunteer my time often, and for free, to help others who are just starting out. I cannot predict who will be the next Google, but I enjoy helping smart founders, and I enjoy giving back in the same way I was given to.

A few relevant essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ronco.html

This categorically doesn't fit my experience here in Boston. The overwhelming majority of the people I know professionally are eager to help however they can.

I would caveat that with the note that there is rather less appreciation of bullshitters, so startups with a lot of wank to them might have a harder time being taken seriously. But if you're serious, and you're nice, people will absolutely fall all over themselves to do you a solid.

Fair. I suppose my sample set is those who have moved away from there to the valley, so it’s self-selecting, but it was my experience as well.

I should add that the valley doesn’t have much of an appetite for bullshitters either, despite what the media would have you believe. Mistakes happen, because there’s a lot more money here, but by and large bullshitters do not get helped or funded.

In my experience, the only bullshitters who are successful have knowledge in key domains anyways. Running a company is hard, and you have engineers who think it's just math.

Clinkle is a perfect example of this.

Elon Musk is the best counterargument to your claim.

I think that would depend a lot on how you define "bullshitters".

Outright knowing scams? I'd agree with you.

Startups with no plausible business model, a bunch of buzzwords and hopes and dreams and no clear elucidation of why anyone would become their customer? Seemingly endless fields of those in the valley.

> but by and large bullshitters do not get helped or funded

Theranos

> Mistakes happen

YC's latest batch has a "drop-in replacement" for WordPress that is actually a rewrite-your-app headless CMS with little differentiation from every other headless CMS and a "don't worry, you don't need to know how to code to automate crypto trading, we definitely aren't watching for which models work!"

Bullshit abounds. And YC is supposed to be the smart-and-decent money.

TBH, one of the really nice things about living around here is that if I take a meeting with a funded company they almost certainly hit at least some bar of seriousness. All successful companies? Definitely not, but there is a lot less chaff for me to filter through.

Wait... you’re saying that someone’s a scammer just because they are working on a CMS?

As a business? Yeah, probably. Who’s gonna pay for that when there’s good free ones.

Why would anyone pay for Dropbox when they could just use rsync? It’s free!

No. I'm saying they're bullshitters (and ones with dishonest marketing, to boot--go look at the CosmicJS Show HN and tell me that it doesn't make the part of you that cares about honesty start itching).

You don't have to be running a scam to be a bullshitter. But you do have to have an undeserved and unwarranted sort of presentation, and you likely don't have much cattle to go with that hat.

You seem to be equating “high risk” with bullshit. That’s not the case - the appetite for risk is higher here, that’s true. But it’s not like companies can just stand up and have money thrown at them; due diligence is real, though mistakes do happen.

Theranos, Juicero, Ubeam, Y combinator flying motorbike, Airware, Jawbone, pretty much any "AI" or even machine learning company that isn't overtly a consulting firm, pretty much any autonomous vehicle startup that isn't a mapping company.... Most of the companies which have "succeeded" in the post-2008 landscape have been pretty feeble; it's not like Uber or AirBnB are tech companies. They're phone apps that enable people to defy taxi and hotel laws.

FWIIW I've known Byrne for years, and was shocked when he moved to the Bay Area.

Like I said, mistakes happen. Investors in the valley are willing to take larger risks, and by virtue of there being more money, there will be more mistakes. There are mistakes in Boston too. I don’t know the statistics, but I would bet it’s proportional, though perhaps not because the risk appetite is lower.

Twilio, Stripe, Pure Storage, Nutanix, Slack, Dropbox, Box, SpaceX...

Some of these companies could never have started in Boston, because finding capital would have been impossible. It isn’t always technological advantage that wins, but UX or biz model, or any number of other things related to execution.

> Boston was particularly bad about “what’s in it for me?” being the common theme of any conversation.

I'm really surprised to hear that said of the city where RMS wrote GNU while living in his car. Not my experience there at all.

The difference between GPL and BSD-like, to me , is that GPL says "what's in it for me?" Whereas BSD-like is "here you go take this for free, I may or may not got anything back for giving you my contribution."

More like "What's in it for the (end) USER?" What better way is there for a developer to pay it forward than to pass on all the rights they got (freedom to modify and inspect the software) to the end-user?

I don't ask anything from you for me in order to use my gpl software, I ask that you give the same rights and privileges you had to your users.

You don't even need to give me your contributions, just your users.

There are pockets. At MIT, as a student, it was definitely very pay-it-forward. But try starting a company in Boston and getting investment, or introductions, or do any sort of networking. It's literally impossible unless you have some way of scratching their back. I have heard this time and time again from founders that moved from Boston to the valley, and I have experienced it firsthand with my company.

Again I think you're overplaying this. Most of my network has never worked with me and likely would never work for me. But I don't have a particularly hard time getting in touch with anybody I'd like to.

(And if anyone who's reading this would like to chat--well, email's in my profile. Don't be shy.)

> nearly everyone I meet has a “pay it forward” attitude

basically the opposite of what I've experienced in 15 years in tech in the UK, sadly.

As a UK company founder, that spent a year in SF I wholeheartedly agree. London is getting a little better though but it's more of a cultural shift and will take time.

I have found a similar ethic in Boulder, wonder if it arose separately or came from the valley?

I have heard great things about Boulder, but I've never been. This may very well be true.

Maybe the sunny weather encourages optimism? And orange trees fruiting in the streets.

Always thought Douglas Adams' "horrifyingly sunny" Ursa Minor Beta was based on California.

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