The Paul Dacus collection

@PaulDacus99 is in the same hacking community I am. I have never met the guy IRL. I watched his hilarious tweets scroll across my screen for two solid days. You could tell he felt like he had been put through the wringer.

After I got done laughing, I realized that a lot of what was said resonated with me. There was value underneath the hilarity. And it made me wish I had a book of small sagely pieces of advice, that I could call upon when making tough choices.

So when @PaulDacus99 meme appeared, that really started to take on the look of what I was after. Internally, I started to compile his thoughts into a "How to: Not Get F*cked [Startup Edition]" type of book. And I really like that idea. Better yet, I wished I owned the book 10 years ago.

What can offer?

If you have anecdotes of value, whether a coder, business dev, or VC, feel free to share. Please obfuscate and anonymize them. Names really aren't important, just the lessons learned. Ideally these are rooted in the view point of how you personally failed or failed to know, this adds weight to the lesson.

If you have mentor's or blogs that you read or talk to that help in your education of making sound career and business decisions, feel free to also voice those. I'll try to build a list from which people can start learning from.

If they are concise enough, tweet them to @PaulDacus99, it looks like his meme is taking requests.

Hopefully this all makes sense, thanks for reading.

But when I do, I don't really understand what's going on.

Outstanding :)

I would rephrase it as: "CEO 101: When you say COME TO ME WITH PROBLEMS and no one shows, THE PROBLEMS ARE ALREADY WITH YOU."

Do not ever put yourself in a situation where you are blindly giving and bleeding into projects or the company because the chances are oh-so-incredibly promising and you blindly threw all caution and personal limits overboard. No matter how awesome the chances, you need to know where your limits are, whether they are financial or personal and you need to know what you are getting out of it right this moment. Not all "compensation" is exclusively monetary. There are a lot of other things you could be getting out of it. But think of it as investing your time, energy and resources and ask yourself what really are the things you are getting in return? This is not charity, this is work - no matter how much passion is involved. (And even people working in charity get some very real returns; they are by no means all altruistic.)

Yes, people WILL lie to you (for their own advantage) and they'll give you lots of brave talk to get you to hold on, so see it for what it is and do not let it affect or cloud your judgement. Whatever it is, you need to make the situation work FOR YOU in whatever situation you are currently in. Don't make it work for that one glorious point in the future and then keep holding and clinging on and totally forget about the path leading there and the very real possibility of failure. It has to be viable and sustainable (for YOU) now and each turn where it is not, each turn where you are giving more or too much: take that turn consciously and know exactly why you are still giving and bleeding into it, understand your motivations and accept them or otherwise do NOT do it.

These decisions won't be easy but be honest with yourself and realistic and understand all your time and energy as a very valuable resource you are giving away, so it is just fair you are getting something in return - whatever that something might be. And on the upside: there are a lot of other chances out there. There hardly are that many romantic "only one shot" situations in real life.

Do not ever put yourself blindly into those situations where later on you will end up being the one who got completely screwed over and all you have left is your rage.