The Silicon Valley Founder Meat Grinder
zaksa.zip
zaksa.zip
Persistence > Intelligence , and being able to code isn't some sort of superiority thing, it's just one skill of many
Edit: being able to take risks, and doing so, does lead to higher variance outcomes, so that is something I have also come to appreciate and look for in people. It may look reckless, and attracts weirder people almost by definition, but that is what startups are ultimately about, betting you can do better than the regular path!
Nah, bro. You’re elite level intelligence if you can /s
Some classmates of mine were (like everyone gets) frustrated at one point and actually complained that they were paired up "with those two". Those classmates thought that the other guy and I knew what we were doing and "just got it". Truth was we just kept our hands on the keyboard, had really not made anymore progress than anyone else in class had ... we just kept typing / trying things.
Years later I would say I'm still not a talented programmer, I just stay positive, help my coworkers, and keep gong until I make it happen, and as far as my employer is concerned that's pretty great.
But I love the anecdote and agree with your point completely. Thanks for sharing.
The Bay Area is a weird place. There are countless companies staffed by smart people doing amazing things. There are also countless people cosplaying as smart people and founders who are going through all of the motions, but producing little value.
In my experience (which is as limited as any other one person's experience) the environments at the companies doing the amazing things are on the boring side. Nobody wants to hear about those because it's uninteresting. So instead all of the public stories are about crazy parties, quick wins, huge exits, and the glamorous stuff.
People go there seeking it out. Some get lucky with some early wins, like Jim from this story. But when the time comes to do work, they flounder and get pushed out, also like Jim. It's a big place, though, and there's always some connection willing to hook you up with another referral if you press hard enough. That's the step where the performative, partying people start getting grouped up with other performative, partying people, and it snowballs from there.
Meanwhile the real companies are off quietly doing boring work and getting things done, pushing the Jims out if they accidentally get hired or acquired into the fold. It's a weird place.
I can't say I see a lot of green Range Rovers in other cities, but I assure you this one is universal across places and industries.
I have friends who go to Burning Man and don't post anything on their social media or bring it up in conversation because they don't want to be one of those people. Others go once and it becomes 50% of their personality for the next year.
What part is unfathomable, the Range Rover part or the green part?
I ask because Range Rovers are strongly associated being quite well-off everywhere, but maybe there's something with SF and the green paint choice.
> They also, for reasons I simply cannot fathom, go out and buy a green Range Rover.
In my opinion, there are two types of people that buy Range Rovers.
1. Morons that don’t realize they are unreliable and expensive to maintain
2. Morons that attempt to signal their status by flaunting that they can afford to drive something unreliable and expensive to maintain
Except what she didn't have was an actual functional product (oh, and nevermind that teensy detail that the product as envisioned is actually physically impossible).
If I had one but of advice for my younger self, it would be to get very good at sniffing out who is the real deal vs. who is cosplaying. And to be fair to myself, all I really had to do was trust my instincts - in the few instances where I got taken in by bullshit I definitely sensed some red flags in the beginning, but I ignored them because I thought "well, hey, look at all these bigwigs who think this is such a great idea". Bullshit is actually really easy to spot (usually), it's just that for social reasons we're often conditioned to nod and smile in the face of obvious bullshit.
It’s easy to be consumed by “I’m the wealthy San Francisco founder guy” and doing everything that lifestyle requires, including things that may not be good for you.
I've been to some weird SF events where you immediately recognize that most people there are in their fake it till you make it stage. Then you realize that many of them aren't interested in the part where you have to do a lot of hard work, they just want to be impressive and charming to a broad network so they can insert themselves into the best opportunities that come up.
Every startup collects a couple of these hires during their growth phase. Some times it can be really hard to separate the charm, charisma, and credentials from ability to get things done. The smart founders will push these people back out, much like this Jim guy got fired from the startup he managed to get into at the right place at the right time. It doesn't happen immediately, though.
There’s the doers that actually enjoy the craft, want to share what they’ve done, and contribute to things they genuinely find intellectually stimulating.
And for each of those true believers there’s many more fly by night wannabes that think it’s some kind of shortcut to social validation.
Same thing happens to school extracurriculars.
Home brewing is one of the cheaper hobbies available (though like all hobbies you can spend as much as you want). The only real requirements are a bucket and a pot.
While it is a crazy world and I don’t want to say no one has ever done what you described, it would be an outlier to say the least.
Home brewed beer is generally bottled or put into a keg and tapped.
(Almost) no one is just drinking warm uncarbonated beer from the fermenter.
The median Drinker / non teetotaler consumes about 0.5 drinks per day.
People with severe alcohol use disorder often consume 10 to 20 drink equivalents a day, most commonly cheap hard liquor.
Basically no alcoholic is going to be brewing a keg every couple days for self consumption.
I absolutely have friends who stopped home brewing because they realized that having a tap of readily available beer in their house wasn't a good idea.
If you want to find people doing that you look for the illegal drugs that haven't had wide spread industries drive down the price, like meth.
My point isn't that home brewing makes alcohol easier to obtain; clearly it doesn't, as you pointed out.
Rather, it provides a respectable rationale for having a beer (e.g. testing a batch, checking the bottle fermentation, seeing how it pairs with a meal).
Drinking is now part of a productive, interesting hobby. For most people that's harmless, but for a vulnerable individual, the hobby supplies frequent opportunities, a steady supply, and an intellectually respectable reason to consume. That's all.
The hobby itself can get costly though. So much equipment to buy. And space.
Well, he also mentions getting a dog and a cat in that context. Recklessness is relative I guess.
The cat would certainly agree though I suppose, when it sees that dog walking in the door...
Before he was willing to make big sacrifices to “make it”.
And on the first step of the ladder to success he started taking on other responsibilities for fun.
In other words, there are a lot of people "playing startup" in the valley - some of the VC money flows too easily and there is always going to be an ecosystem of people to try to put it to work.
People dumping discounted equity to hyper-scale on debt is not a business, but just another IPO over-valuation scheme. =3
Nothing else even comes to close to these attributes in having a comfortable sucessful life. introverts and cynics get crushed.
The goal isn't abstract - read it as - goal of "not being a wage-slave" and have a shot at being more. It's an ambition type of thing.
Of course some people win the lottery, but playing the lottery isn’t a sound strategy for a good life.
If you do that, you're almost guaranteed to stay in the top 2% globally for the rest of your life. You've made it in life, at least financially.
The approach of not taking advantage of the lucky and privileged situation exposes you to a huge risk that your NW will go down to zero and you never get a second chance.
As a human, your needs are simple[1]. With a $1M net worth, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply. And your dependents can live in that same place, also cheaply.
All you need to do is show the Joneses the door out of your mind and never let them back in, nor look toward their lives in envy.
[1]: Healthcare being a notable potential exception, depending on the individual.
To me this is the most critical problem with the "move somewhere crazy cheap" plan. I feel a parent owes their children at least somewhat similar opportunities as they themselves had. If you got to work as "high flying white collar tech worker", but the only option your children have is "subsistence fisherman", you have wronged them.
Even if your goal is financial independence, it's reasonable to not drastically decrease your existing standard of living just so you can retire _now_.
Whatever happens, perhaps AI replacing all cognitive work, you know you'll be fine. Maybe not able to live lavishly, but much better than needing to have a job you hate in order to survive.
You've hit the escape velocity. Worst case scenario (I'm simplifying) is that your NW stagnates, best case scenario is that your NW will continue to grow quickly. That's much better than the worst case scenario being that your unemployed with a zero NW.
A toy model game is poker. If opponents know you'll never call an all-in/go all-in, they will always outplay you on the river.
And so, let the market pump funny numbers, and matriculate the lucky survivors.
What means do you see? Buy some S&P500 ETF and live off the interest rate? That seams easy but without investing in AI, you’re at risk of AI making the existing economy irrelevant, it’s the same as having all investments in local craftsmanship in 1700 and the steam machine happens, except much faster.
And move to [insert home country]? (What if I want to keep my friends)
What’s your idea of investing in AI?
Startups are taking longer and longer to reach public markets, so more and more value creation requires you to be a family office, angel, or hedge fund.
Is having a couple of pets and a ridiculous table lifestyle creep. Maybe. I think of lifestyle creep more in terms of you are not saving any money at all.
I think that comment is more telling of what is expected of founders and engineers. At least from authors point of view.
No life allowed. Definitely don't reproduce. You work, and work so you can work more.
> He approached me because he was really into startups and wanted to become a tech entrepreneur, and make the big bucks
It's a shame that so much of tech culture has become about money. Money was always a part of it, but living in the Bay in 2010, there was more of a focus on building things. But once people started getting rich, especially off bitcoin, it brought in a whole host of people whose primary passion seemed to be money. We moved out in 2018. Still bums me out, SF was my favorite city, and I hoped to live there for a long time, but the values weren't my values anymore.
This is funny to read because I remember hearing someone complain about the exact same thing in the Bay Area, but their dates were shifted by about 10 years before yours.
I think it's kind of like Burning Man, where everyone's favorite experience was their early days when they were young. As you get older, you complain it's gone downhill and the new generation is going for all the wrong reasons.
SF and the Bay Area are constantly shuffling through and recombining ideas. What generated money relatively easily in 2010 would've started becoming low value in 2018, rapidly approaching an asymptote of relative uselessness today. 2018 is about the point where you needed to be pivoting to AI if you really wanted to remain part of the city's "upper class", where money feels like it doesn't matter because it's abundant and automatic. 2010 was the era of mobile apps.
Makes me wonder how long we have before, "create your own ChatGPT" becomes the next big thing and people wonder why their "AI Labs" aren't making as much as the big boys.
We're already there. It seems like every intern I see has built a custom chatbot with a RAG pipeline integrated into an internal application.
And every legacy SaaS is paying millions in consulting to add the same to their app.
There are gazillions of candy crush remakes, but Royal Match, launched in 2021, still made it to the top in revenue. It was not thanks to some existing monopolist pushing it, but thanks to a) ginormous marketing budget and b) relentless execution and experience of making mobile games before, i.e. you know what works, what doesn't, how to extract maximum amount of revenue, etc.
https://naavik.co/digest/royal-match-finding-success-through...
https://naavik.co/digest/why-dream-games-success-is-a-challe...
And then they get into mental contortions as to why getting 2x or 3x better in an absolute sense doesn’t budge the needle much.
Er... so you don't need to be a monopolist, just have a massive amount of existing capital and deep understanding of the field?
The issue is that simple and novel can also be copied easily (anyone can just point an LLM at the target and ask it to build a local personal version). The days of making money from this class of app are over.
Novel and very complex ideas will still make money, but outside of gaming are usually niche markets.
Novel and moderately complex apps will have to build their own moats to prevent copying - heavy server side rendering, server logic processing, and an idea that can't be re-implemented on simple CRUD architecture.
In reality, you could probably put any date in there and it would work.
And when it comes to culture as festivals they are very much victims of getting hallowed out and sucked dry.
Another perspective is just that SF's culture has been declining for decades. As someone born in SF, I'd agree.
Let’s keep it in perspective.
It's also a bit of "I like you because you're like me" thing plus some "it's useful to me that you're like that".
I've seen plenty of startups where the CEO/CTO has been trained to fit under one specific stereotype (common ones these days are: the asian twink, the athlete, the nootropics guy, etc.), and then lots of their friends/hires happen to be of the same or adjacent/compatible stereotypes.
> The establishment scions pouring into tech take on the trappings of subversion, while remaining fundamentally conformist. Meanwhile, rampant success inevitably causes the former tech counterculture to morph into posturing “Prada revolutionaries,”
Unfortunately the article ends on praising crypto and surveillance, so this has been going on for a while
Author has discovered that his 'working hard' to be at the bottom of the in-between layer pales in comparison to the invites others receive for simply showing up.
That's how it goes.
The real bitch is when you get to spend some time with the hot folks or the nepo babies and realize there's no substance - all they have is a mastery of surface level pleasantries and an incredibly thin skin.
One example of this is the current AI companies. Irrespective of how much marketing / hype that exists today, the long term question remains the same. Can they build a sustainable business ?
- would this have been possible if Jim was not charismatic like the way the author described including being white, tall and being part of that fraternity.
some opportunities allow people reveal parts of themselves or things they always wanted
There are lots of earnest, sincere, and interesting founders. There are also lots who probably would've been happier on Wall Street.
In so many European countries, unless you happen to have bootstrapped your way into success, you'll be written off as a bozo if you don't have all the correct credentials.
Someone like Jim (read: No formal relevant education, no industry experience, only hopes and dreams) would in the very, very, VERY best case get a €100k funding - and that is only if they had other more attractive looking co-founders with them.
I mean, it is something everyone knows - but the sheer risk averseness you often see here in Europe is really something.
This is a bigger problem in Silicon Valley right now than anyone seems ready to acknowledge.
Nothing wrong with that per se, I basically did that in grad school. It’s completely different than actually grinding 100 hours a week though. Also tough to be a part of if you have a life or family outside work.
1. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-communications/fda-upd...
Go back to early 2000's post dot com bubble.
The whole of the bay ran on Adderall and Ambien + what ever else one could get their hands on. It was so pervasive that even a decade later you could find Adderall references in Bay Area hip hop.
Almost 30 years on, and this still has not really changed.
This blog misses quite a few red flags that are obvious to the reader from the very beginning. Jim is an aimless party boy and got a rich gal to sustain his mediocre life. Blew his first success on thrills, cheated on his fiance and was a terrible human being. He then became worse because everyone around him enabled him, and that's just the character he is. He's not the Steve Jobs charisma that people like the blogger think he is. No. Instead, he's a sleazeball sales guy who is a master grifter and conman. Think more Elizabeth Holmes.
This isn't at all the typical SV founder meat grinder. There are plenty of boring, hard working, regular family folk who show up 9-5 and pursue their passion projects that got funded. This is how we're all on this site. We like to see these projects succeed and we want to see cool stuff that helps us nerd out. Because that's ultimately what being in this industry is: Making a chunk of metal do some really cool stuff and solve problems that are worth solving.
Along the way, it attracted some really unsavory people like Jim who looked at the tech money and wanted a quick piece of the action. It's the same problem we're having with young CS graduates. They have no drive, no passion for this stuff, no obsessive nerding out over the tech. They were told by everyone around them that it was a guaranteed job market and paid well, buy a house, great life. Even without AI coding, I would bet the vast majority of these graduates would have a very difficult time finding a job.
Ultimately what we have to realize is that this world is full of people like Jim who get away with stuff because of privilege and great grifting skills. Think about how many actually sustainable ideas you or people you know have come up with and even prototyped. But could never find the funding to make it work. That's how nearly everything got started. Somewhere along the way, we stopped caring about joy and nerdery of it and started chasing the $ :(
John W. Spiegel: A prominent business litigation and securities lawyer who graduated from Yale University and worked as a partner at the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson.
Drug fueled founder parties? Orgies? I've clearly been doing silicon valley wrong. Or right, depending on your perspective... but not this? I've seen board game fueled parties where maybe one or two people do drugs, but it remains very nerdy? And no sex parties. Mostly sausage parties?
... so yeah. Do people really know Jims? Because I just read posts about them.
Clearly you weren't cool enough to get into the drug-fuelled OpenAI gay sex orgies.
What?! Source?
More prison gay than anything else. I'd go down on a man for a million dollar OpenAI offer even though I'm into women. I don't think commenters here realize how desperate people can become for money.
The journalist is trying hard to tie it all back to OpenAI, but the original Tweet only mentions OpenAI as an eventual destination for some of the people involved in what she witnessed.
The shared "hacker house" scene in SF is really weird, though. Especially the more you get into EA/rationalist circles. There were groups that were basically cults emerging out of some of them.
The startup incubator in Silicon Valley, the tv series, was good comedy.
Actually the one drugs + stripper party I was invited to was so damn sad and pathetic I left after a few minutes. A bunch of geeks who got rich, using money to do an impersonation of the crazy lifestyle reality TV taught them they were supposed to be having.
I left the party and went back to playing board games in another wing of the hotel.
The startup market rewards first to market and first to scale. This creates a game of "chicken", where the competitors spend like crazy trying to achieve a near monopoly. That's why some of the fake-it-til-you-make-it crowd gets ahead. But most of them crash. The historical success rate for VC-funded startups is only about 1 in 10.
This seems like a pretty dubious conclusion to make from the outside. There are a lot of reasons somebody would get fired after an acquisition. Hell, even if he was coasting, an acquisition followed by a rapid change in environment and culture can cause somebody to lose motivation for a wide range of reasons. Blaming this on "lifetstyle creep" is rather premature and, frankly, pretty judgemental or moralistic.
This is downstream of a pretty frustrating belief I've seen repeatedly in the tech industry: that whether a person is "motivated" or "hard working" is some kind of inherent quasi-moral characteristic of the person, rather than something substantially affected by environment. But hey, it's much easier to blame individuals and lean on the perf review process than it is to change organizational culture or leadership!