As someone who has always built and shipped, I've been troubled by a subtle shift in thinking in our industry the last few years. Why so much hostility and failure to learn from others? Why so much attitude?
This brilliant post finally explains it: because so many of us who at one time would have been building products, services, and value are now building anything but: resumes, reputations, portfolios, and (Heaven forbid) "personal brands".
Thank you, Glenn Kelman, for one of the best arguments I've seen in a long time for builders to just shut up, find a customer, and satisfy them.
Just a few gems that really resonated with me:
But one crucial difference between this boom and the last is that the folks in the last boom had to ship or starve.
Amazing what you can do when you have to.
But how many engineers hired from Stanford or Berkeley in the past year will ever feel the savage need to make something happen, to bust out of the matrix, to push the limits of their abilities?
Is "bust out of the matrix" the new "think outside the box"?
The problem is that the young engineers earning that much become well-fed farm animals at the very moment in their lives when they should be running like wild horses.
What a great metaphor!
The result for many engineers and product managers is often a case of arrested development, as they drift from one startup to the next, dabbling in several side-projects, without the ballast of having solved some really hard problems or contributed to a lasting business.
Sometimes, not having an alternative is the best motivator to finish something.
After all, the only way to get much better at your craft is to be challenged in ways that make you uncomfortable. Yet not many people in high technology are uncomfortable these days.
I had no idea.
Startups, like professional football, are best done by the most desperate people on the planet.
Great observation!