Early epiphanies as a late cofounder | Hacker News Reader

Early epiphanies as a late cofounder

blog.jeffzchen.com

28 pointscijdl58412 comments

I fear this is going to be taken poorly, but this really made an impression on me. This is not a criticism of the author, nor really a condemnation of the lifestyle depicted - but only an observation. I find the "Myths of The Valley" both very interesting and very frustrating. This is about the Myth, not about the author.

This reads like a religious testimony, or a classic Campbell myth.

It begins with scripture from one of the prophets, "Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly, but working for a large company is like being waterboarded. - Paul Graham" then moves to the (self-acknowledged) epiphany where the author expresses how his eyes, once closed are now open. In monomyth terms, its a mix of "the ordinary world", "call to adventure", and "the refusal":

"I’ve learned more and done more in the last four days than I have in the rest of my 22 years of existence." "Until last week, I was pretty convinced that I was a lazy, talentless fuckup." "We are so good at it that we can easily convince ourselves that we are happy doing something when in fact we are not. ... Then I woke up."

We then bring in several of the common Valley mythical elements:

The "all-nighter" - "This week I worked 15 hour days and was disappointed when I got too tired and had to sleep."

The "garage" - "On day one, I ... slept in a garage next to my motorcycle.

We then have, in monomyth terms, the "meeting with the mentor": "On day two I met with one of the biggest investors in the valley."

Testimony as to how life prior seems trivial: "There’s not not enough time to argue about what movies to watch or what restaurants to go to."

And the conclusion where the author warns about being led astray on the journey: "Between the time that I left Facebook and the time I joined Pixlee, I received a literal metric fuckton of advice, from respectable, well-meaning, intelligent people. I compiled all of the advice and in the end, went with my gut."

We're now at the beginning of Act II, I'm honestly (really!) excited to read the next part where we have "tests", "allies" and "enemies" and "the ordeal".

I think the whole startup experience fits with the monomyth quite nicely, and we already have a few epics coming out of the Age of the Valley - the Jobs myth and the Zuckerberg myth, among others - both of which fit the classic pattern pretty well.

Anyway, I wish the author well, it really is an amazing experience!

That was incredibly interesting! The blog is mine, by the way. I'm incredibly flattered that you made such an in depth analysis; frankly I wrote it as nothing more than a happy rant and wanted to share with some fellow hackers and entrepreneurs.

I agree with the sentiment that the Myth of the Valley is interesting and frustrating. Mainly though, I think it gives many smart people a strong sense of purpose (not unlike the prophets and religion in general), and I definitely think that's a good thing.

A sense of purpose is generally a good thing. If it is determined by social pressure, conformity, uninformed emotions, etc. then it is risky. If it is determined by deep introspection in light of a well rounded understanding of human nature, then it is much more likely to last. It is difficult to be very introspective, however, without some life experience. Most people, I think, are not prone to figuring that stuff out totally in the abstract.

Yup. But every age has it's storytelling style. Right now, I'm reading Grant's memoirs; It's extremely self-effacing; He speaks of some of his more heroic moments as a young commissioned officer as if he was walking home from the grocery store. The book has interjections marked "PUBLISHER:" where it is explained that he received this or that medal or recognition for this heroic action that he had just described in such a humble manner.

Your storytelling style will effect who your story appeals to. I mean, great storytellers can transcend styles, but for most of us? we're writin' form letters. And really? there's nothing wrong with that.

(I do think there is something wrong with the 'all nighter' myth, especially when told to people too young to know that it's a lie, but it's largely inseparable from the silicon valley mythos.)

Nice analysis. This statement jumped out at me:

> This week I worked 15 hour days and was disappointed when I got too tired and had to sleep.

Examples of this are everywhere. First date with an exciting girl. New video game. Reunions with old friends. I challenge the author's conclusion that this is a sign that he's made the right career move -- more likely, it's a sign that he's gotten out of his rut.

That's not a bad thing, by the way. But remember, switching jobs is almost always exciting for us hackery types. More generally, a novel environment will usually produce excess excitement.

Unrelated to the blog article, I hadn't heard of Pixlee until now. The company appears to scrape Instagram and try to measure brand awareness/usage/trends/______ by analyzing the pictures. Probably advertised as "Twitter-like sentiment analysis for Instagram." Image recognition is a hard problem. Good luck to them.

Scraping Instagram? Wow, that just gives me more pause about putting too much personal info on social networks. Will people create a startup that measures risk profiles for insurance companies based on how many beers or cigarettes appear in pictures? Or pictures that include known felons or people with police mug shots? It will be interesting to watch this space.

"This week I worked 15 hour days... I believe everyone has something that will motivate them to this level"

Working crazy hours is not a synonym of motivation. You can be crazily motivated and still have a life...

What precisely is a "literal metric fuckton of advice"?

Well, we can take as a lower bound for information/energy equivalence as the k.T.ln(2) from Landauer's principle[1], and mass-energy equivalence as e = m.c^2; there would presumably be some inefficiency in converting energy to fuck-energy (call the efficiency epsilon), so that gives us

  information =  epsilon . mass . c^2 / (k . T . ln 2)
              =~ epsilon * 3.13e43 bits

or about 3 billion billion yobibytes assuming peak fucking-efficiency. Bear in mind that this is assuming the advice was delivered at room temperature of 300K, which is unlikely given how hot Instagram startups are at the moment, and of course no-one should work in a vacuum, so this is just an upper bound.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauers_principle

Good read. I especially enjoy the part about smart people having an "idiot mode". I've found that some of my best ideas were derived from silly ones, and the silly ones only came about because I was with friends I could trust.

How is this any different than "epiphanies as a hacker at a multi-person startup"? The post was well worded and concise, but didn't contain any insights that aren't standard HN rhetoric.

I think I can say with fair confidence that I’ve learned more and done more in the last four days than I have in the rest of my 22 years of existence.

-- Isn't this a classic display of cognitive bias?

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