How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub | Hacker News Reader

How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub

tom.preston-werner.com

295 pointsjseliger53 comments

Loved Tom's social hack for finding cofounders, from Startups Open Sourced. He also has a really good outlook on the role of design in startups.

Q: So, the best way to get to know somebody is to go drink with them?

A: That is absolutely the best way to really get to know a person and what they really like and are interested in because if they are interested in technology, then they will have no problem geeking out with you about Ruby or Node or something for three hours, over drinks; that’s when you know that you found someone that could be a really successful cofounder. I think there really is something to doing business in bars. In the early days when there were four of us—we had hired Scott Chacon—we would go to this bar called O’Reilly’s, up in North beach. We went there almost every week and that’s where we would talk about what we had done. This is after we had started full time and it was where all the decisions were made. A couple of drinks in, you start to just say what you mean instead of thinking so much about whose feelings you are going to hurt or whatever, you say things very bluntly, like, “I think we should do this, and I think you are wrong for saying we should do it a different way,” and now you can have an honest argument about what needs to get done and what the concerns are about the company or how it’s structured or how the stock is going to be split. All this stuff will come up over drinks and as long as you are not too drunk, it can be helpful.

I've been travelling all over the world for the last year and a couple of beers is the key to socializing everywhere. I'm not really a big fan of alcohol but getting people's defenses down at least a little bit makes all the difference.

I found myself recommending it to a business student recently. He was saying he's having conflicts with his technical cofounder, so I told him to just stop working and go grab drinks, talk about anything except work. Put your keyboards down and go be normal for a few hours.

The sad thing is that I think you're right--alcohol consumption is normal. I'm glad I'm not normal. Let us know if he took your suggestion and if it actually resolved anything.

It's not actually the alcohol thats important. It's the glasses that matter, the liquid inside could be anything.

Having something to do with your hands prevents/reduces nervousness, and the fact that you can't drink and talk at the same time enforces conversational turn-taking. All these things apply to cigarettes too, which goes some way to explaining their tenacious grip on some social groups despite their lack of tangible benefits, (ie. they dont get you high)

These are the most important things, but also there's the halfhourly rhythm of having to get new drinks, which gives everyone a chance to switch conversations, and the practice of buying strangers drinks in rounds, which builds and reinforces trust.

So yeah, don't sweat about the intoxicants if thats not your thing. Just go and order your juice of choice.

Hooray for juice! Though I'm still skeptical that the drinks actually matter; if you enclose people in a limited-senses environment (like a bar where the t.v. is muted and doesn't have anything interesting on anyway) for long enough they're going to start talking to each other and entertaining themselves that way. Do you know of any studies into this? It's fun to speculate about at least.

> All these things apply to cigarettes too, which goes some way to explaining their tenacious grip on some social groups despite their lack of tangible benefits, (ie. they dont get you high)

I thought that was better explained primarily by the addictiveness of cigarettes and then by the social outcasting of smokers forcing them to band together.

There are tonnes of studies into the effects of physical and social context on alcohol intoxication. As you might expect, a lot of it is all in the mind (or in the bar.)

Here's just one: http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2...

On the smoking thing, yeah definitely the reasons you mentioned are by far the most important. However I still think it's too often overlooked that a lot of people are effectively using them as "comfort blankets."

The above link appears to do some horrible cookie checking whereby you can only read the abstract two or three times before it punts you to a shopping cart page without even an apology. Bloody academic mafia.

Out of spite, here's a link to the whole paper: http://dionysus.psych.wisc.edu/Lit/Articles/WallA2000a.pdf

When I used to live in SF i went to Tosca in north beach and had endless hours of talks about technology, design, philosophy and of course chicks.

We called the sessions Drink & Think and they are still to this day some of the most interesting discussions I have ever had meeting new people and discussing things I didn't know I didn't know.

How did "going to the pub and talk over a beer" become "a social hack"?

London on Friday afternoon is the biggest hacker fest in the world!

going to the pub and talk (about technology) over a beer is what became a social hack.

The term hack on this forum is highly inflationed. Going for lunch or for a drink with colleague or friend or client or possible mate-partner is what people do all over the world.

Is that the reason for the downvote? Honestly surprised by it!

London <b>everyday at lunch</b> is the biggest hacker fest in the world.

I was in London a couple weeks ago and fixed that for you.

It's unfortunate most people need drinks to say what they mean. That doesn't have to be the case. For better or worse, my partners tend to be people who need to try hard to not say what they think.

It's not a matter of needing drinks to say what you mean, it's a matter of lowering someone's inhibitions to see what they really get excited about.

You say what you mean with people that you have some bond with. Drinking together, even just one or two beers, can help build that bond. You could also build that bond by playing soccer, and talking afterwards.

It seems that strategy will get you a co-founder that you like. The risk here is that you typically like people you have a lot in common with. When you are looking for a co-founder a complementary skill set is typically more useful than someone that you have a lot in common with.

Warning: this restricts you to finding cofounders that are 21 and over. :)

Not if you live in a country where you can vote and drink at the same age :)

I'll be honest. When I first read this post nearly three years ago, I barely knew what Git was, the stock market was crashing hard every day, hundreds of thousands were being laid off, and turning down that offer seemed pretty foolish. Now I can't live without GitHub.

Honestly, I don't think turning down an offer is ever a real problem. You can always ask for the offer again; does a company as big as Microsoft ever have enough smart programmers? People come and go every day. There is probably room for you somewhere.

This is very true, just want to add the caveat that the notion of low cost of foregone opportunity you are talking about could apply to mature-stage companies, not necessarily fast-growing ones.

Also there is tremendous selection bias in which of these "I turned down X to do Y" stories get told, of course.

I would definitely read the "How I turned down a $300,000 job at bigcorp to found a startup that crashed and burned 18 months later" story.

Such a story may or may not make it to HN front page, but it sure is a risk that one has to take. And as pointed out, the offers from Microsoft et al are not going away for smart people. Of course, tonnes of smart folks would have taken the offer and lived happily ever after, so I do admire Tom's guts.

I turned down a job at Google (not 300k but hey, it's Google!) to join a startup. The startup started to sink about 2 years later.

I learned a ton and didn't regret it for an instant. Moved on to a new startup 2 years ago when it became clear the first was a dead end. Google recruiters continued to ping me religiously every 6 months regardless.

Moral of the story: Google, MSFT, Facebook, etc will all still be there in 2 years. Especially if you're early in your career and don't need the cash today, go wherever you will learn the most.

it was 300k over 3 years... so your offer probably wasn't that far off!

> When I’m old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say "wow, that was an adventure," not "wow, I sure felt safe."

A great conclusion to a great article. Definitely a motto to live by.

A cynical mind might say that a really adventurous life might also expose one to more risk of being young and dying, rather than old. Or other less than pleasant outcomes.

That's why our brains afford us both desires: the need for adventure, and the need for security. The two keep each other in check. Adventurous people, who aren't reckless, simply choose to be more adventurous than fearful when there aren't too many real safety risks, but mostly perceived ones.

Perhaps a pithier wording of this is "Regret the things you did do, not the things you didn't do."

Or "I don't regret the things I've done, but those I did not do." - Lucas, Empire Records

It's worth noting that none of the Ruby guys Tom worked with at Powerset are still working for Microsoft 3 years later. The guys I've spoken with had a miserable time working there and left to work for other startups like Greplin, Bank Simple, and Square.

How did github get early users?

We invited everyone we knew in the Ruby community. We all attended local Ruby meetups and talked to anyone that would listen. We used it for our own open source projects and invited would-be contributors to join the fun. We used an invite-only model during the private beta to create artificial scarcity and encourage people to invite their friends.

Am sending this to every person I know building a community-driven site. You've perhaps unwittingly boiled the general solution down to its base components.

Great post, but dammit, now I'm going to have "You’re The Best" by Joe Esposito stuck in my head all day.

This story is encouraging! I'm soon to graduate college and am figuring out what exactly I want to do next. One of the options is to work part time on my startup, next to another part time job or freelancing. It's a lot easier when you have savings to make such a leap, then again, I live lean and live cheap.

Turned out to be the best move.

No kidding. Coming from a guy who has never raised a single round of funding and has operated profitably every single month since launching (except for one month where he hired two people), they're doing really, really well.

Very nice read. That also leads me to mention that Github, as good as it is in 'social' coding or whatever that means, does not fill a gap for a proper resource on how to use Git. Not that it should and it clearly doesn't carry that mandate, but there is hefty amount of respect to be made for any group that de-mystifies git in all it's glory.

Hell, there are plenty of comments here, on groups and proggit from users that lose their hair over advanced use of git.

In my opinion advanced consulting services and migration planning for currently SVN,CVS engaged companies would be nice.

One of the guys on the early team wrote pro git which he then open sourced and gave away free. That book is pretty good at demystifying git.

We have training available in person (https://github.com/training) and online (https://github.com/training/online) during which we can do all of those things.

> proggit

One too many Gs: progit.org

I'm having trouble determining whether you are serious, but I suspect the original poster was referring to reddit's programming community.

I'm suggesting that's a better place to learn about git not to mention being created by one of the Github guys.

Okay since I'm just getting driveby downvotes, let me explain the source of my comment. The original comment said:

> That also leads me to mention that Github, as good as it is in 'social' coding or whatever that means, does not fill a gap for a proper resource on how to use Git.

Well, Scott Chacon (#4 githubber I believe?) wrote the book to demystify Git. Of course, there is a certain irreducible complexity there, but I think Github has made a significant contribution there, so I don't think it's fair to level this criticism at them out of passing unfamiliarity.

"You're the best around, Nothing's gonna ever keep ya down!"

When I’m old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say “wow, that was an adventure,” not “wow, I sure felt safe.”

Great quote and I try to live my life by the same philosophy

I pay for github, great decision :)

GitHub makes using version control fun.

"The next night, Friday, October 19, 2007 at 10:24pm" Was there a time-machine involved overnight or is it supposed to be 2008?

I think the post was published in 2008 but it was talking about events from a year earlier:

"2008 is a leap year. That means that three hundred and sixty six days ago, almost to the minute, I was sitting alone in a booth at Zeke’s Sports Bar..."

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