Notes from The Valley: The real social network

If you have a shitty product, it doesn't matter if you hang out with Arrington, Kevin Rose, Paul Graham. your product will still suck. Yet if you build a great product with real users/customers everyone will flock towards you.

"Submitting a resumé to a website is about as useful as throwing a coin into a wishing well."

Not true if you are experienced, (and an engineer). The above is true only if your resume is not interesting. ie. 1. You don't have any position on interesting companies on your resume that are known for good technical talent. 2. You don't have any significant products, or side projects to show. 3. The company is not looking for somebody like you right now.

If you have shown to ship products (and good ones), then you always get a call back. Most startups do actually check and screen inbound resumes.

This is yet another thing I hate about the brogrammer culture of VC-istan: the idea that if you can't get an introduction to that person specifically, you're garbage. Perhaps that applies to upper-middle-class males who were in Silicon Valley since they were in junior high school. But there are a lot of good people-- 40-year-old programmers who spent their career-building years Milwaukee for family reasons, but who studied on their own and became really good-- who end up at front doors because it's all they have. It's not fair to assume that he's an idiot and a loser just because he's at a front door.

You need social proof to get around all the purple squirrel requirements. A company that mandates 5 years of experience in a 3-year-old technology won't be able to hire outside of its immediate social network... which is sometimes fine, and sometimes crippling.

As advanced as we think we are a species, tribalism still reigns over much of our behavior.

Guess I should just go out and buy a ticket hey...