Comment by jmtame | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmtame | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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