Comment by thwarted | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thwarted | Hacker News Reader

That was over ten years ago. For context, Mark Zuckerberg was all of sixteen when the original web bubble popped.

Yes, you will have incredibly lucrative job offers in this bubble. That's the easy part. As Startup.com and Code Rush illustrate, the hard part is figuring out why you are working all those long hours.

If this is supposed to some kind of reminder as to what we're doing with our lives, it's not going to work to stop a bubble. Those who will work those long hours this time aren't old enough to have lived through it the first time. The people who were the foot soldiers of the bubble ten years ago are not the ones who are going to be the foot soldiers in the next bubble: I seriously doubt anyone who worked the long hours ten years ago is going to consciously make a choice to do so again. It's not just that our collective memory is short, it's that there are so many new, young, impressionable, minds with no memory to influence their decisions.

This is just how I read it and I might be reading a lot of my own experience into things but I was a very young foot soldier the last time (still in my teens) and I think there's an important point here. The thing about the last bubble is most of the foot soldiers that I knew weren't working to cash out. They were working to change the world.

Don't get me wrong. Money was a nice consolation prize but still.

The problem today is most of the people I meet in startups seem to have the same goals. For all the talk I can't recall meeting a founder who openly admitted to building a company just to flip it. Yet they're repeating the mistakes of the late 90s because our industry has very little institutional memory

(perhaps all that looking forward makes us forget to look back)

I think his point here is that those of us who were there need to remember what happened and make a point of imparting those lessons to those who weren't there. Because they were too young to really see what was going on.

I started my post-collegiate career in 1997, joining a startup. You know why? I love technology and it was a great job. In 2000, I joined another startup. You know why? I love technology and it was a great job too. In 2009, I joined yet another startup. You know why? I love technology and it's still a great job.

Will this startup crash and burn? Maybe. If it does, I'll roll the dice and try again.

Over fifteen years, I've worked with lots of great people, on mostly exciting work, solving new problems, often with technology that didn't exist last year. Sometimes it takes long hours, and sometimes I can scale back a bit.

Some of us do what we do because we have fun doing it.

In the mean time, my work has enabled me to support a family and contribute meaningfully to society, even if I'm not changing the world 100% of the time.

$0.02.

So what you're saying, is that it's good to be king? If you lived through the first dotcom as a foot-solder you now have some experience and wisdom behind you and access to lots of cheap, unsophisticated labour willing to work long hours.

Sort of like Mark Zuckerburg now.... Maybe he is smart after all.

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