Hacker News Reader

As college student who grew up watching Zuck "get rich easy", I was easily taken in by the Hipster startup culture. Very unfortunately for me, I only found out about this fantastic site (Hacker News) about 5 months ago. By this time, the hipster ethos was rampant and I was swept up by it. My ego deeply resonated with their fancy promises and extravagant buzz words.

However, there is a thread of hope. An undercurrent of truth which I have recently started to uncover within the layers of crud. I just read Paul Graham's essay Beating the Averages last night and realized that I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about.

Lately there has been a growing thread of dissatisfaction with Hacker News. It feels as though the original community has become diluted by an influx of folks like myself, eager to make their mark but too naïve to really do anything constructive (and too naïve to realize we’re naïve). But we are learning.

So, Hacker News, thanks for putting up with us noobs! I realize now that I won’t be the next Zuck, but if I keep listening and learning from HN, I just might make a dent in the universe.

You're absolutely right on all counts. But also realize that while, 4 years ago HN was more diverse in many ways, it still was overrun with "startup hipsters", though they weren't called that.

You saw people denigrating others startups as "lifestyle businesses" and me suggesting that one might pursue product market fit before VC money was laughed at.

Back then the Word of PG was the Word of God, and you could be shot down with a misrepresentaiton of a PG quote. (Did you know PG opposed customer development? I bet he didn't!)

For awhile I though HN was going to become a cult of personality for PG.

I work for a 4 yr old startup. I'm an ideas guy but I didn't have the idea for the startup I work for, I merely do administrative projects for it. Nonetheless, I have to be careful how I word things.

About a month ago, I was at a meetup which had nothing to do with technology or the internet but I ran into a guy who was throwing out some buzzwords. The point came early on when he asked me what I do, and I really didn't want to say I worked for a startup (because I sensed what was coming) but I did because I do. Then came the 20 minute monologue throwing out many more buzzwords and how he'd just moved to SV. He was going over how he was just pre-launch and outsourcing the coding, blah blah blah. He was very, very excited about his project (at least there's that). But then he told me what it was (I forget but it had to do with health, it might have been a lifestyle app) and I thought to myself, "but specifically what you're describing is not a startup, that's a small business that happens to be online."

He wanted to keep in touch, almost as if we were two kindred souls braving the unknown and at that point I gave him the (true) line that works really well in certain circumstances such as these. "I'm not searchable on Facebook, sorry, but you can send me an email." In casual settings, no one ever sends the email, by the way. It's FB or nothing.

Being that I have another regular job (that happens to be online), I now say I do that instead of "I work for a startup." Though, believe me, if I had one, I'd have zero shame in saying it.

This will come across as rude, but I don't think there's such a thing as an "ideas guy". Every person I know who says that is covering for a lack of attention to detail and a general inability to get shit done.

Maybe there's a rarefied world of amazing CEOs who spin off amazing ideas every 10 minutes, and then legions of people go do them ... but I doubt it. And you're probably not going to get to that job without a lot of plain old execution first.

Not rude at all.

I'd say I mean that in the sense that my mind always has put seemingly unrelated concepts together to form a new idea and that I have a daily habit (of at least 7 years) of reading tech news. Put the two together and it's not too difficult to imagine that a lot of my ideas would relate to the subject matter I consume regularly.

But as far as an "ideas guy" in a company whose purpose is just to have ideas, I agree with you.

Or, put another way, I'm an ideas guy. So is my co-founder. Both of us have really good ideas, pretty regularly.

But that's not my job in our startup-- I'm in charge of engineering. My cofounder does design & marketing, and we split a lot of the CEO stuff.

People say ideas are worthless, but that's not always true- I've seen worthless ideas and really valuable ones both.

I think what you're reacting to, and what the parent is acknowledging in a humble way, is that some people have a lot of ideas but aren't yet ready to be "in charge of engineering" or whatever.

When I went to college, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I think ther are a lot of kids[1] today who have the idea they "want to work for a startup" or "found a startup"... but they still don't yet know what they really want to do with their life.

Some are foolish and think that being the "ideas guy" is valuable, some are not (and I think the parent is not.)

[1] in the sense of "younger person, cause I'm old", not in the pejorative sense.

"but they still don't yet know what they really want to do with their life" | -> exactly this. So until I do figure that bit out, I'm gonna keep my eyes open and make like a sponge.

Additionally, I used to think that being the "ideas guy" was valuable... I think there is a general understanding among average people that being first-to-market is THE driving force behind successful brands. After numerous business and entrepreneurship classes at university and reading many case studies of businesses; I have come to the realization that (of course) anybody can have an idea: it's the execution that matters.

I guess what I'm trying to acknowledge or convey is that we know not what we do. Us noobs, who are invading and "hipster"-izing this community.

So please, guide us! Love us, that we may love you back...

But posting articles detesting hipsters won't help, since a hipster never considers themselves a hipster. (and they will just agree with your article "Damn those hipsters!")

Well said. I think that I would be shy of describing myself as an "ideas guy" simply because of the experience I've had with people who describe themselves that way.

But I appreciate your more nuanced interpretation of both the phrase and the parent's intention.

Looking back at the vantage point of my own 10 year old "startup" - oops, I mean "small SaaS software business" - I can certainly point to a couple good ideas that took about 5 years' execution apiece =)

To put it all another way:

If some young person said to me "I'm an ideas guy", that would probably be the end of my taking them seriously

If that same young person said to me "I've got a lot of good ideas - I think - but I'm not sure of my ability to make them happen", then I would respond very differently.

I think real ideas guys get stuff done too. You can;t get good, practicable ideas without doing stuff. That;s the nature of the beast.

I get lots of good ideas because I do stuff. Many of those ideas I will never be able to follow up on and so I share them. After all, if my ideas help someone become successful, that is better than letting them die because I can;t get it done myself. Moreover maybe it helps build relationships with other businesses.

Ideas without hands-on experience invariably suck.

We do exist. I'm an ideas guy, I specifically build my portfolio to showcase my diverse creative thinking. http://www.chrisnorstrom.com Unfortunately my best ideas, the projects (NOT startups) I'm working on, I can't share, because then I give myself a deadline of 1 year until they become unpatentable by law. So it sucks I can't share 87% of the ideas I come up with. I love prototyping my inventions and products and as they fail, post them online. Which I'm gearing up to do in the following days actually. I've got 5 failed products that didn't pass the prototyping stage. Since I'm not interested in patenting & building a business around things that don't work I'll throw them up on my blog.

My advice to "ideas people" is that you need to prove you're creative and useful. Otherwise people think you're bull-shiting them.

That is what a 'bubble' looks like. People with more money than sense giving it to people because those people are offering up what ever is the bubble today. In this case "startup". The dumb money will be lost, the "startup founders" will slink away (for the most part) into nondescript corporate jobs, and saying you are doing a "startup" will become a bad thing. Well at least that was what happened here in the Bay Area during the 90's.

"Let's get realistic here - building a web app or an Iphone app these days is no more high-tech than a mechanic fixing your broken car."

I think high-tech folks tend to underestimate what it takes to be a mechanic.

Perhaps, but the analogy is not all bad. After all, there's a lot to know about making web or iPhone apps. You might pick up the basics fast enough, but if you don't know what you're doing it's liable to blow up down the road.

Are you saying there is not a big difference between a great mechanic (who fixes stuff that stays fixed) and the one to whom you are always bringing your car back to?

I think the HN crowd (as a whole) tends to underestimate what it takes to do just about any job aside from programming.

Nothing against the skill of mechanics here. Striped of hyperbole my point was that 'high tech' is another phrase that needs to be rescued. Recently the term has come to mean 'anything that uses custom code', and the distinction between technology and high technology has decayed. Of course mechanics are skilled; my point was that the bar for considering oneself to be on the cutting edge of technology has moved upwards and that the companies and programmers building routine Ruby on Rails web-applications and iPhone apps need to re-assess their place and adjust their egos accordingly.

"Viacom was founded by PHD students at MIT..."

Wasn't it Viaweb? Big difference between Viacom (the media conglomerate) and Viaweb, the online shop software.

Fixed. I had Viacom on my brain for other reasons resulting in a nasty typo.

I can back Jack in saying the Berlin startup culture is vommit-inducing.

Most startup founders use tutorials to build technically trivial web/iphone apps, and yet they hire programmers and can't build products themselves?

I've seen a lot of this as well. And the term "dumb money" is right-- there are two causes of startup death in my experience. The first being fights between the founders paralyzing progress. The second being VCs forcing the company to ignore profitalble lines of business or customer traction and chase the VC's favorite fad of the day.

But, this is also a perversion of the meaning of the word "startup". A lot of the BS aquihires-in-waiting in the Bay Area are not startps either.

Somehow getting dumb money and being faux "scalable" has become what "a startup" is, with everything else (That is real busiensses, often scalable themselves) termed a "lifestyle business."

A one man SaaS business is scalable if the target market is large enough, and even if it is a nich, PG has advised people to conquer a niche and then move to adjacent markets.

So, if patio11 keeps his business at the size that he can run it by himself, that's fine, that's a choice, but I disagree with the idea that there's some magical "scalability" that those who live in the Bay Area and get funded by VCs have, compared to living in Japan and not taking investment.

When you have no engineering background and your primary skill is BS, then its really easy to morph your "business" into whatever investors want and get that dumb money.

But if you really want to build a business- then follow Running Lean, Steve Blank, and build that business.

Chasing investor money seems to be a waste of time-- Investors would rather fund these hipsters than Viaweb.