The cult of conformity in Silicon Valley [video]
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It's where the money isn't.
There's a lot of cool stuff that isn't obviously a path to money. The blender community is full of it, for instance.
YC isn't a part of that because YC is primarily concerned with making money.
This isn't a very satisfying answer because it does not lead to investment and money but that's kinda the point.
There are many weirdos (I mean that as a positive thing) building things like popcorn time and its successors, creating models for vrChat, modding games, building rockets, automating their homes with ESP Home/Tasmota, using esoteric languages to solve solved problems, playing with ML models, etc.
They don't need to come to YC.
Like it or not, status follows money, and YC has proven itself to be an effective step to a successful exit. Seekers of money and status (what the discussion refers to as conformists) will find you if you're at YC. Weirdos are weirded out by you.
It really isn’t. There’s lots of other reasons to make a company, and making money is the means, not the ends.
Money isn’t even the point of money. You have a whole life of misery ahead of you if you don’t figure that out and figure it out soon.
If you didn't want money at some level, you wouldn't make a company, you'd make a social club or other hobbyist group.
> Money isn’t even the point of money.
Eh, for some people it is, and for some people bragging rights are the point, which means they want more money so they can brag about having more money than anyone else. Which leads to precisely the same observed behavior, so it doesn't really matter to anyone else.
That's one of those "I'm not your lawyer" sort of things. The exact structure for a group depends a great deal on the fine print of both the group and the local legal system.
I've worked with everything from a joint bank account (legally not even an organisation) right through to a holding company operated by a trust to administer a variety of different entities that got together to buy some land. The latter was a PITA but it was necessary to get the various people to actually put their money in.
When your hobby is, say, running a steam railway, you need a bunch of weighty assets starting with a railway line (probably located on some land) and likely also some kind of shed to keep your steam engine in... it's very easy to end up with millions of dollars in assets even if all you really want to do is pull the cord that makes the "whoo whoo" noise.
This is definitely not true. Sometimes companies are the best vehicle for what you're interested in. That's especially true in a society so oriented around business.
As an example, I new a guy who was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He retired, but was bored. He had an idea for a product, so he put together a small team to build it. In his phrasing, "Profit is permission to continue." He wanted it to be self-sustaining, but he never cared about making money out of it.
Or I used to be part of a bandwidth cooperative; we were a bunch of sysadmins who clubbed together to rent a cabinet for our personal servers. I just did it all on my personal credit card, but in retrospect it would have been much easier just to register a company and mostly treat it that way.
So... money was a requirement to continue. His goal may not have been to acquire personal wealth, but you clearly stated here that money was definitely a company goal. Otherwise, profit would not part of the conversation.
A bit like how everyone needs an income in order to have a roof over their heads and food in their bellies, but for most people, the purpose of their life is not to make money.
If we're going to filter out all of the companies that have failed, are failing, or will be failing, you've only got a sample size of about 5% of all companies. At that point you're basically cherry-picking if you discount all of the duds.
In almost every case, there is a better way to make money than whatever any individual is doing. If money were the point, they’d go do something else.
I had this argument with the executive and sales teams at a company 20 years ago. I knew from direct personal experience that there was more money to be made via plumbing contracts for the US Army than our entire software development company was making. Did they want to do plumbing? I assure you they did not.
Money, it turns out, wasn’t the point after all.
Not the only point. Asking them if they wanted to do the sales team job without compensation would get you the obvious answer. They wouldn't. Money is the point, it's just not the sole point and it cannot be stretched arbitrarily. "Money for rent", "money for retirement", "money for vacation" and "money for a second home" are not the same.
As an example of this, consider Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, Nobel Prize winners in 2020 for Crispr/CAS9, and realize they're entirely financially secure, yet they've taken their science and created multiple startups to bring consequences of their science through regulatory processes to deliver results.
Money doesn't guarantee your safety, your self-esteem, or happiness. Lots of rich suicides out there, some just more slow than other (self-destructive tendencies).
It's a means to getting most, but not all of these things. It's not the only means, and it doesn't always work. It's the things money can buy that are important, not the money.
If you just made a hobbyist group you'd still need to get a job unrelated to your hobby, which takes up a bunch of time that could be spent doing stuff you're actually interested in instead.
So sure, technically it is about money at some level, but only because we live in a capitalist society and don't have a choice.
With some savings or some other source of income one can have a acceptable lifestyle and time for something which one enjoys.
So you can "make money" as in revenue, but as an owner, never take much more than an $80k salary providing for your basics, even over the course of decades. Right now, that's probably the best model to get things done. Even Google and Facebook have only skimmed off a tiny amount of their total profit to some founder real estate and yachts, due to their zero dividend and repeated truckloads of $ dumped back into company reinvestment consisting of employees.
Google and Facebook made their founders insanely wealthy. Literally some of the most wealthy individuals on the planet.
Taking on such a large amount of risk and doing such a huge amount of work, with the goal of (legitimately) only paying oneself $80k if successful - which is not a livable wage for most people doing founder work in the Bay Area - doesn’t make sense.
It’s literally stupid if that’s the goal, because it’s self destructive.
It’s literally all risk, no reward.
At a minimum, rewards enough to rebuild reserves and set someone up to not have to worry about daily expenses and be able to take several large future bets without risking bankruptcy seems saner.
If that's what you end up with, hey that's cool. There are far worse outcomes possible in the world, and that one is pretty decent.
But why not be open to more? Especially when starting and planning.
After all, if things go well enough, you could do the same with $1 of salary.
None of that necessarily requires VC either, just an open mind.
Intentionally saying 'I don't want to make enough money to be wealthy' at a job which is based on building a machine to make money, is intentionally handicapping oneself.
Think of it like setting a required minimum latency for a UI or API that you would intentionally never serve a response faster.
Folks are welcome to do whatever they want of course, and if my competitors prefer to do this, that's cool by me!
If someone doesn't trust themselves with the potential success, I could also understand that. But maybe it would be worth working on that part first. Because that will be a huge problem regardless.
2) who knows if that long term vision ever would come to fruition! It could easily be wild daydreaming, and once you actually start doing real business you’ll realize it was fantasy. Or the market will shift, and what was a good idea is now a bad one. Then you’d need to look around and figure out a real goal.
3) iterative is important. Meeting the market where it is, is important.
And that is what customers generally care about now.
Not some long term ‘will take over the world’ story, but what utility can you provide them now. And that is what your marketing, sales, etc. needs to be about.
Where it goes long term and what you want it to be eventually is usually tangential to that, day to day, and what it may morph into as you have success, day to day.
But putting that out up front before you have a credible path to it just distracts customers, makes sales harder, and is the cart before the horse.
“How much do you want X?” means the exact same thing as “How much is X worth to you?”
The distribution of money is flawed, but the concept is merely the definition of math.
It's not the money, it's the effort in all of these cases that gets in the way. People sometimes substitute money for that effort, and the rich do it more than most, but it's not universal.
Lack of money means a lot, but only because of the things you can't acquire without it. If you know the right people you can get it anyway.
But a very flawed and inaccurate one.
The tech nerds were a great investment recently and so people are trying to spot the real ones in a sea of fakes now. The investors think that spotting the real ones will lead to more of the same.
Maybe that was a moment in time.
Another way to to look at it is through value capture. The things you listed often create a lot of value for the community they're a part of or for humanity as a whole. But these things do not generate as much value to the creators. The creators are unable to capture the value they created but do it anyway.
The last decade can be seen through the lens of tech companies (mostly big ones) capturing the overall value of the tech created at the expense of the communities it once subsidized.
Value capture isn't bad in itself but the immense focus on it kills a lot of the utility of the thing created. More loose forms of value capture created the tech revolution that were then monetized often by a separate group.
The cynically monetized tech will hopefully be outcompeted by the looser forms due to increased utility inherent in its looseness as happened previously.
The good news is that there are real tech nerds out there. The bad news is that any attempt at a general solution to spotting them is probably equivalent to finding a general solution to the halting problem. The worse news is that most investors have no idea what the hell I mean when I say that and so are doomed to piss their money away. Oh well.
There is a whole spectrum between (a) having profit maximization as the main or only goal, and (b) first and foremost wanting to create a specific product or service while being able to make a living from that. It would be strange (or sad?) to categorize the latter as non-conformist.
When money becomes the main goal, companies eventually turn on evil side.
Just no. As somebody else said, the point of the money is not the money itself, even.
Life is too short for just earning money.
I work for free, on software for people that can't afford people like me. I think I do a really good job on it. It doesn't seem to get me much respect (at least with the standard tech crowd), but I'm enjoying it.
In fact I think the software community benefits very much from battle hardened programmers who’ve been around long enough to put things into perspective.
It's weird. A couple of folks, hereabouts seem to have an almost pathological hatred of me. Not exactly sure how I pissed in their beer.
Eh. Whatevs. It's payback. I used to be a bit of a troll.
just watched the video fully and they actually talk about this, how people now prepare for tech interviews like banking and all talk about promotions and bonus stuff
We're at the part of the cycle where VCs complain about why it's not as easy for them to leach onto the people doing interesting stuff. As soon as they can find that thing, guess what they'll try to do? Unify, platform-ize, and mass market... then they'll complain again.
but clearly his investment action is more nuanced: Zuck was not clearly contrarian, for example, nor was Peter into bombmaking.
A more accurate take is VCs are looking for founders that seek to hire exceptional engineers. As usual, second order effects can be more illuminating, but at the expense of clickbaitiness
The sad answer is often only for a little while, at the expense of other parts of their lives and families.
OSS development is either a funded day job or a burning baton to be passed on to the next person real soon.
Many have already made their money so they can spend the rest of their lives tinkering.
Ex: exiting at 9 figures and starting a pinball machine company for funsies.
I'd also argue Openai follows the same.
I don't know if Conformity is the right word, unless you're viewing the world through a lens where everyone is working a job they hate just to survive.
I've absolutely noticed the culture shift over the years though. In the 90s it was a bunch of us creating things because we saw a way to do it, and we were making enough money that we didn't have to worry too much about how to pursue our visions. But money corrupts everything eventually. Geek fashion was definitely nonconformist for a while, but then became trendy - because it was associated with affluence.
I love being part of the Just For Fun crowd. It makes me versatile - I can pick up new technologies quickly because I love reading about them. Throw a problem at me and it's a puzzle I want to solve, not a chore.
That doesn't translate well to a resume or job listing, and over time it has certainly gotten harder to link up with other people who think this way and want to create things in this uninhibited, creative kind of way. It's one of the reasons I've jumped into HN. There are a lot of them here, and I want to make that be more of my world again.
https://reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/10rko7k/most_h...
Somehow in doing so (and partly due to their attitude I suspect) they’ve created a self fulfilling prophecy where… they work for those crappy employers.
It’s all about the money and they’re surprised to find they’re not happy.
It was definitely true that the nerd crowd was looked down on back then. And if you wanted to go into a startup instead of Cisco / IBM / whatever, no girl would look at you. At least down in the valley, of all places. Back in NYC, where I was from, it was little better. People in general just looked at you funny for actually wanting to build something good, useful and/or interesting — in particular if it hasn’t been done. And yes, most of those folks would be in soul-grinding jobs that they hated.
Engineers are a LOT more respected today, and down inside I think it’s for the wrong reasons. People want the fruits of creativity but few want to actually be in the process, or even really understand it.
Deep down it's what most people want because real power comes with real baggage, and most people would rather not deal with it. They just want cool business cards, people to be impressed by them, and we won't get into the last thing. It's not necessarily power we're talking about here, but the principle is the same.
Most people would rather not grind hours of stressful work and/or getting into countless frustrating arguments with other creatives. It's nicer to politic and cultivate the illusion of being important and at the helm of a massive machine.
IMHO, what you say is largely true, when applied to the world of tech in general. And when applied to the world of crypto, is way worse.
I think that if crypto ever had a chance to become an amazing new tech and make the world better, the 99% of people in it just to make money in legit or less legit ways are simply making it impossible.
I get the impression that this site is more just for fun, somewhere like teamblind is a polar opposite
Tbh I'm not that upset about there being a recession because it will flush out the people who're turning this into a money field
For many Just For Fun would be Phase 2 after Phase 1: accumulate enough affluence that Phase 2 can be done in a typical high cost of living city and doesn't involve moving to a cabin or in with roommates.
I moved from Seattle to Kansas City to be closer to friends and family, and I'm building a strange thing: https://www.adama-platform.com/
I'm working on how to explain it, but I love doing it just for fun. I love optimizing and just making things. Even if Adama fails as a business, the key is that I am building the platform I want to use.
In Europe, if you're anywhere in the "self-employed" spectrum, people basically think of you as an insolvency waiting to happen. This is particularly true for banks. So, as a startup founder in Europe, you'll watch all your highschool friends build houses while you yourself can certainly kiss that particular piece of status-seeking goodbye until the day of your IPO (which probably will never come).
And it doesn't really matter what words you use to describe yourself, whether you say you're self-employed or a startup founder or an entrepreneur or a small business owner or whatever. Because people, in their own minds and in conversations with others, will always project that image that they're basically like Steve Jobs even when they're self-employed as in UPS driver or a small business owner as in dogwalker.
So people seek out some kind of badge that says: No, no, I'm not one of those people. I'm the sort of calibre of person who could have easily gotten an offer from Facebook or from Goldman Sachs, but I just chose to sit around in my garage and work on a crazy-sounding idea I have, that has yet to make a single dime.
YC serves as a badge like that. ...or even just sitting in a garage in Silicon Valley rather than your parents' garage does that.
So, I think that's at least a big part of what they're seeing there.
In the US, if you are building a house in any popular area, I assume you have access to generational wealth or earned equity by starting and possibly selling a business. Obviously, some employed people earn enough money to buy land, possibly demolish an existing structure, and build a new one, but very, very, very few percentage wise.
I am mid 30s, and I doubt most of my high school acquaintances have ever been able to afford to buy a house, much less build one, without moving far away.
My own personal experience: Most of my highschool friends were able to build houses. As you say, usually the thing that does it is support from parents. For example, the parents might move into smaller/rented accommodation for their retirement and sign over the family home to the children who then take out a loan to fix up the place and live there. That kind of thing.
But the way my parents look at it: Giving money to a child who is trying to do a startup is like giving money to a child who is a drug addict. They see it as a surefire way of destroying wealth, so they hold on to it until I "come to my senses" and get a safe job in a bigcorp.
So, it doesn't matter how cool I and my college friends think it is to start a startup. If I was a conformist, the math just wouldn't add up, as my path to a nice big house is blocked, at least until very late in my life when I've had a successful exit or come into the generational side of the wealth aspect as part of an inheritance.
In the US, there is a world of difference in cost between building a house and renovating a house. Easily in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Lots of people can refinance an existing structure and renovate it, very few can afford to demolish and build new.
Couldn’t your startup make something that generates income so you can do things like own a house?
Making something that people actually want to pay for isn’t a bad way to earn a living as opposed to waiting on a big payday which may never come.
Living in Europe, I have seen my college peers starting startups or small companies and buy the same housing as employed programmers. It is a bit of distraction from your larger point, but getting mortgage for housing is not actually an issue for founder of a software startup.
When I moved from the U.K. to Austria to start my "startup", I had to wait several years before I could apply for a credit card from my Austrian bank because I couldn't show them a paycheck from a current employer. (I'm an Austrian national).
When I later moved from Austria to Germany, one bank even rejected me for a basic bank account with no credit facility at all, when the only piece of information that the German consumer credit rating agency (Schufa) had about me was the date when I first appeared on their radar, implying I was a recent "immigrant", and the fact that I ticked the "self-employed" box on my application form. I managed to convince another bank to give me a bank account, though.
In Munich, being an overheated housing market like most of Germany, prospective landlords wanted to see a recent paycheck, and I'd be in a world of pain trying to explain to them that I couldn't show them one but still wasn't really a financial risk for them. Luckily I came across a landlord who, himself, was a small business owner, who rented to me.
Admittedly: Moving around a lot also played a role in my personal experience with consumer credit rating.
I think it illustrates my main point rather well: To a status seeker it is extremely off-putting to think that, when they open a bank account or apply for a mobile phone plan, they might suddenly find themselves in a difficult conversation, even when they're not objectively in financial trouble.
And, I think it even goes so far that people sometimes seek out pre-seed investments and incubator memberships and things like that, even when they don't need the money, because it serves a psychological need for status and validation.
Former Soviet Bloc countries are more positive towards small business owners.
If you're in the early-early stages where you're just funding the startup yourself, you may not want to pay yourself a salary for various reasons (e.g. offsetting your losses against future earnings for tax reasons).
If you do cut yourself a paycheck, the model will probably assume that's all the money you make and won't understand the fact that you're also the owner of some business. So it might backfire, if you try to game the model by paying yourself a very small amount just so you get to be in the employed-category rather than the self-employed category.
...maybe I'm just being stupid for ticking the "self-employed" box rather than try to make it look on paper like there's basically no difference between my situation and that of an employee in a bigcorp. I just don't know.
Statistically, I probably am a risk.
But I've never had an actual credit event, am not planning on having one in the future, and any time I want money, I can just pick up the phone to a freelancing agency, and by next week, I'll be making more money than most of my highschool friends. So in that sense, I'm not a credit risk. There's just no way to explain that to a risk model.
You know the issue, the risk modeling will never take into account a subjective experience such as "I can pick up the phone and make bank", there's no way to price that in, it's a very edge case that requires some human intervention to understand it.
If you did that consistently over a couple of years and had tax returns to prove you can do it reliably I'm sure some credit models I worked with would use that as a strong signal, right now you are definitely a risk (and you are aware of it), what exactly do you expect risk models to do in your case?
In that, I believe we should leave some room for human intervention in some automated systems; credit models/risk assessment models would be one of those, you should be able to meet a real person, show them how you are not as risky as their modeling says you are and be able to present/defend your case to invalidate their automated assessment.
I'm not complaining, just responding to others on this thread to whom the connection between consumer credit rating and being a startup founder wasn't so obvious.
> [...] we should leave some room for human intervention [...]
I couldn't agree more, and this is not something we can take for granted. I see a dystopia lurking around the corner where only HNW individuals get the privilege of attention from human bankers and automated decisions can effectively block the path towards ever getting there. But that's a topic all of its own.
Probably, the OP sees a distinction between "bootstrapping", and having the startup funded by someone generous or wealthy. In the latter case, it is possible to give "normal" salaries which banks and landlords will accept.
Their salaries were not "normal" for programmers. But banks had setup for this apparently.
In CZ, self-employed people get mortgages regularly. You need to show last, I think, two? tax filings and if your income after taxes was OK, you are good to go. So unless you are heavily "tax optimizing", you should get the mortgage. If you go bankrupt anyway, the bank has a priority claim to sell your house.
Getting a business loan is trickier, though. Nothing similar to the SV VC culture exists here.
I can see tech being uncool for Ivy League/tier-1 university students who, particularly in the aughts, were tracking into consulting and finance. That was "cool"/"conformist".
But these takes aren't relevant to you if you're not part of that elite milieu. In the aughts, after only attending community college for a while, I started my tech career; specifically in early stage startups. And, to be honest, I felt more like a square than a non-conformist. For me it was pretty simple: I liked programming computers. The easiest places to get hired to program computers were early stage startups. Early stage startups give you a bunch of personal latitude towards programming. When I was young, this freedom made up for the downsides (lower pay, inexperienced business operators, employment volatility, etc)
All the talking points in the video are pretty accurate and it's not just an overall industry shift, the same shift happens within startups as they grow.
Small startup = high risk and mostly true believers who are interested in the problems.
Large startup = heavily de-risked and people are now joining for the brand more than for the problems.
The push for instant hypergrowth seems to have exacerbated this transformation over the past few years as startups raised larger and larger rounds earlier and earlier. This premature funding then drove premature headcount growth which diluted the core sooner.
As someone mentioned in the video comments, maybe the non-conformists are now the ones refusing VC money but it's a tough game when your competitors can spend more on marketing in a month than you spend in a year.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS10
Basically, it's the same reason your entire family thinks housing is an investment.
Unless, we figure out a way to back to zero and (figure out a way like digital currencies to go) negative this doesn't really continue. More likely, if there is some form of deglobalization, rates go up for the medium term (5-10yrs).
This feels like a mini Dotcom crash. The big companies will survive but will shed workers. Underfunded companies will go under, and other companies will scape by with minimal staffing, waiting for the industry to turn around to look for funding.
The recovery will be slower with lower valuations and longer time in-between rounds. General and stock comp will probably take big hit.
The differences this time are the companies are much bigger, but they actually have revenue.
What I wonder is how many will go under this time because their only customers were other tech companies.
The newest ideas aren’t going to come from computer science or IT, they are going to come from outside those fields and then be adapted and monetized. That’s how it has always worked.
The example I always like to go on and on about is AR. In 2023, augmented reality should have already been a dominant technology adopted by the mainstream. Yet, we don’t see anyone using it.
This is because the people who worked on adoption failed to realize that functional fashion, in other words wearable computing, was the future, not ridiculous looking glasses.
I should be able to grab a baseball cap, put it on my head, and have as much functionality as a mini PC or high end smartphone. Yet it doesn’t exist.
I should be able to wear clothing with screens embedded in the sleeves, or projecting displays available on my wrist. Still don’t have it.
Functional fashion and clothing have enormous tech potential, and we still don’t see much. Everyone needs clothing. All you need to do is make it useful.
AR and smart clothing offer, for most people, only a fairly marginal advantage over connected watches/cars/phones/homes - and aren't without downsides (do I want all my coats to be smart? What if I'm going out in a t-shirt.. how does boring, necessary stuff like charging and laundry work?)
For me personally, I want to see the hardware disappear and fade into the background. When I’m cooking, I want to see the recipes and instructions overlayed, and when I’m examining my car, I want to see diagnostics on top of my vision, and when I’m working out, I want to see my vitals. I don’t want to be looking at a watch, staring into glasses, or holding a device of any kind. I’m arguing that fashion designers can accomplish this task better than technologists alone. Clothing, love it or hate it, when done right, becomes somewhat invisible to those who wear it. It’s the perfect medium to make this happen.
I’m sitting on a chair right now, looking down at my pants. This is empty, available real estate for display, one on each pant leg. I’m sorry if people find this ridiculous, but it just makes so much more sense to me than holding a device. It’s also perfect space for a split keyboard input, one half on each fabric of the pant leg. It would enable writers to compose just about anywhere, and it’s not unprecedented. On location news crews outside of their TV vans would use keyboards like this, strapped around their waist.
True vision overlays and suchlike still have some significant materials-science challenges, it's a lot more than just product design.
Writers can already compose anywhere. Roll-up keyboards exist, as does voice dictation input. The ergonomics of tapping on pant legs don't seem to offer an advantage.
AR is where CRTs were in the 1980s. It wasn't hard to imagine a "futuristic" giant flat panel display. But it was literally impossible to build one, at any price, with the tech of the day.
The kind of non-intrusive AR you're talking about it is maybe 15-20 years away. In the meantime we get dorky visors and - coming very soon - slightly less dorky but still not very elegant glasses.
Still wish it was more of a thing.
This outsider can’t tell the difference between the conforming and non-conforming pablum.
A large number of startups exist for one point - making a nice exit. There's no nonconformism, just an angle. Going to an incubator, getting seed funding, getting several VC series - it's about as conformist as you can get.
You want to see nonconformism, you need to look outside that space. Bootstrapped, co-ops, democratic governance models - those are the models that attract the outliers, because startup land now is what Wall Street was in the late 80s.
Startup land is basically the intersection of hobby coders and sharks. Often those overlap in the same person, but sometimes they're somewhat separated.
And the motivations of both are surprisingly similar. Hobby coders want to tinker and work on cool stuff because it's fun and also because it can provide status and reassurance. And sharks want status and $$$. And sometimes also reassurance.
The common factor is a strange kind of individualised selfishness which is either blind or aggressively hostile to social contexts and consequences.
AirBnB is a classic example. They made a lot of money - go them - but they've also made a huge contribution to making rents and housing unaffordable for local populations in cities all over the world.
Non-conformity would require a "Wait a minute - this is going to cause some significant harm" moment.
Startup culture - YC included - just doesn't have what it takes to do that.
Now... yeah...
At what point were Silicon Valley startup founders non-conformists? They have historically been started by rich white dudes, who went to Stanford etc.
In the 60s and 70s there’s lots of talk about drug use at berkeley etc, but that wasn’t where startups were. In fact then being a startup was even more likely to require you to be from an already affluent family, definitely white (because banks could and did deny loans to people who weren’t white, red zoning meant PoC couldn’t buy property in many areas of the bay - hell it was so bad that Digital had to create its own credit union because it employed women and PoC who could not then get mortgages, etc)
In the 90s people realized that they could use marketing to create an image of what a tech rockstar should look like, and then was “affluent white guy”, and that’s where the funding went.
The ability to be anything beyond white guy in a suit is recent, and being “counter culture” has always been a negative. Hell Steve Jobs is the closest you get to “counter culture”, and all his marketing images have in a suit through out early Apple. It was until much later that any other image was acceptable, and that image was rich “grad student”.
Michael Seibel - managing director at Y Combinator and co-founder of two startups – Justin.tv (eventually Twitch) and Socialcam.
Dalton Caldwell - partner at Y Combinator and founder and chief executive officer of Mixed Media Labs (picplz & App.net) and founder of imeem.
I don't think you need to introduce yourself on your own channel in every video. It would quickly become annoying for returning viewers.
So are they making it harder to find what they're looking for, by coaching fakers?
One way this could be interesting is if they figured out how to plant a trap in what they say -- some suggestion that less-genuine people would dutifully follow, but more-genuine would decline that part while still otherwise engaging.
Or maybe they just say what they're looking for, but never say some less-obvious telltale signs of it that they look for. Something people with a certain quality would say/do without even thinking about it, but probably wouldn't occur to someone who was trying to fake that quality. (Or, if the person can understand people well enough to fake even that non-obvious sign, maybe you want stock in any company where they're CEO/salesperson anyway.)
The gold rush has certainly brought in a different crowd. Many of them can excel past nerds like me just from sheer intelligence and quickness. It's still great having opportunities to work with fellow hackers colleagues though.
Really? Usually breadth and depth of knowledge makes people who really like the stuff stand out.
It’s like playing ranked vs people who never play ranked and do whatever meme custom game.
* sure a degree alone isn’t instantly valuable, you can skip it in CS, but it requires substantial time commitment regardless. The goal is to have the knowledge and skills to be valuable (in a purely utilitarian sense). A CS degree can do that, but so can for example working on large OSS projects - the difference is largely how focused the approach is on bringing up core knowledge. On the one hand I know a lot of “self taught”/non degree devs who have annoying gaps, on the other hand you get people who know O(N) but not how a computer works. You really need both.
> many of them can excel …
No, the super successful “young founder” startups are largely luck plus connections, not any magical ability others lack. There’s often after the fact assignment of brilliance, but that happens in many fields and is often kind of questionable. Strategic/tactical brilliance is also super susceptible to survivor bias.
Just focus on doing the best you can, and worry less about what others are doing. There will always be someone who might be smarter, or richer, or luckier, etc and there’s nothing you can do to change that, so don’t bother.
The startup I was in which made it and IPO'ed was "non-conformist" in a different way: it took a technology which the networking graybeards claimed would never work, and said, "yes, it will."
YC and these two are in no way, shape, or form "non-conformist" to that degree. They are the Cool Kids Table in the high school cafeteria.
Parents at a college graduation party will now say "oh wow, that's great" when a graduate says they are joining a tech company instead of thinking it's a wild choice.
I really don’t think they’re the same thing, even for a type-A MBA grad. They know that living in a warehouse and making art is cool, they’d just rather make money and have a socially-acceptable profession.
"Yes, sir. Yes I am."
"Plastics."
Bill Gates was very famously the richest guy in the world in the 90s from tech, no?
Tech is now called “Deep Tech” (because of word dilution/arrogation) and while it has never been cool it has always been IMHO fun.
There is more awareness of tech companies today because of their penetration and contributions to media and culture. I guess that kind of awareness makes them “cool”.
Fighter jets and super cars are cool, but they aren’t considered “tech” for some reason.
The former pays way more than the latter. But yeah, it’s not “cool” or even really respected outside of software engineering circles (who know the salary range). Doctors and lawyers command more cool factor and respect, even if they’re earning less than FAANG employees.
Non-conformists create new places. Yes, it's a tough life.
Some have drawn the attention of the SV crowd - they sold, to YC grads or bigger corpos, and immediately bootstrapped again. The money is a Means only; We just want to solve puzzles and learn things.