After First Succeeding, Young Tycoons Try, Try Again
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Aristotle Onassis
If you stay as healthy and have as good relationships when you're starting a startup as not then "you're doing it wrong." Or you're just unhealthy and antisocial to start with.
Tradeoffs...
The idea of balance seems pretty academic to me. Maybe it makes sense in the long-term, but if you mean splitting your time equally at all times I think that's the path towards doing an equally bad job at everything.
If you follow a routine in what you eat, and eat the same set of foods all the time, you risk exaggerating small imbalances over time, with implications for your health. To avoid this you can either spend a lot of time thinking about what you eat (with implications for balance in other areas), or you just change it up and chase some variety every now and then. Try new things. Listen to your body when it tells you it's had too much of this or that.
With 'listen to your body' this thread connects up with this one where DanielBMarkham talks about introspection:
http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/17541151
(Context: http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/?http://news.ycombinator.com...)
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/series/age_of_ri...
He did the interview on no sleep, so he's kind of loopy.
But that makes it even better. Nothing inspires entrepreneurial solidarity like a cracked-out hacker slurring his speech after an all-nighter.
Flickr -- that other photo-sharing site -- sold for, what, around $30 million? Paypal sold for $1.54 billion.
Though humans are more complex and different, it may not be too far-fetched to say that everything we do is work, in some form or another. If Max Levchin might not be happy doing anything else, that makes a lot of sense.
1) at 22 - he was not trying to be the CEO - he was hacking away at someone else's startup.
2) He was lucky enough to hit it huge with PayPal - but the result they achieved was a direct result of that 18 hours a day mentality and tenacity.
3) Age 29 or 30 is no time to be retired, lecturing, or enjoying long winey lunches at Boulevard - this is the classic "go out and get it phase of your life"
4) Starting a startup with 100 million in your bank account makes it much easier but is no guarantee of market success.
5) And for all of those winter 2008 YC applicants that didn't get the call (myself included) - the greatest startups in the valley did it without YC - so can you
If I were him, I'd see if I could train a dozen startups at once, like YC. If that sounds too easy, try 20, or 40. I guess as a software architect I'm always looking for that next higher level of generalization. Once you do it a few times -- time to move on.
If startups are mostly luck, then this guy sounds like a habitual gambler. If they are mostly skill, then he's stuck in a rut. Either way, I hope he's not doing the same thing ten years from now. That'd be sad.
> once you do that 2 or 3 times very well, either you graduate into something tougher and better or you're just like a stupid little dog chasing a fake rabbit around a racetrack
Does this apply just to the tech industry? Or would you say that artists, architects, and novelists should move on to a new profession once they produce a few good works?
Maybe J.K. Rowling should have stopped after the 3rd Harry Potter book. She was already a popular and financial success by then.
Any field of human endeavor has various facets to explore. Usually there is an entry position, where one becomes familiar with the terms and issues of the field an achieves some initial success. Then one moves on. The other poster pointed this out, and for some reason you guys down-modded him.
I could get into a long list of people who did great in a field when they started and then matured and took the field with them. Beethoven: great pianist. Went on to become great composer. Started composing symphonies. Went deaf but still composed symphonies. Went from there to completely change music as we know it.
I could add another dozen examples. Your example of J. K. Rowling doesn't fly since she considers all of the books one unit. This would be her initial success phase. Now she could continue in the field of book writing, pushing the genre (as Beethoven did with music) or she could move into a more generalized form of literature, say training, editing, or something else. She has an opportunity to redefine writing -- whether or not she could pull it off is up for grabs. I kind of doubt it. Or she could just cranking out that schlock that all of us read. It's up to her, and to say that she's somehow giving up her dream is BS: her dream should be about something big enough to keep pushing for. Being an artist and just making yourself and other people happy is a great dream! There are a lot of artists who find a comfortable niche and stay with that their whole life. But they aren't Beethovens. And they aren't innovators.
Like I said, none of my business.
You're rewriting history. Beethoven started by playing organ, viola, and piano while composing keyboard works. His collection of piano works alone outweighs his symphonic works. That's disregarding his enormous collection string works.
Also, it was hardly a unique thing to do. Mozart, Haydn, Sibelius and various other composers followed precisely the same path: start with piano training, produce piano works and expand outward. In fact, this paragraph actually supports what I was sarcastically suggesting: stick with what you do best. In this case, composing. You just got the details wrong.
> She has an opportunity to redefine writing -- whether or not she could pull it off is up for grabs.
That's ambiguous as hell. Explain "redefine writing".
> Or she could just cranking out that schlock that all of us read.
Is its "schlock" factor based on whether or not a writer's works are read and enjoyed by the general populous? In that case, Shakespeare cranked out a fair bit of schlock in his time.
Beethoven started out as a keyboardist, sure. His father made him practice like crazy. At first he was a great performer of other people's works, not a composer. He received some acclaim as a performer and went to Vienna. At Vienna he was supposed to develop his composition skills. Hayden took him under his wing, and let's just say things didn't work out. Ignoring all his other great works (if such a thing is possible!) and concentrating on his symphonies, you can see where he started in the classical form and eventually blew the doors off of it, substituting motif development for the typical lyrical development of the time. His use of rhythm and instrumentation (including a chorus in the ninth) was completely unheard of. Music critics attending his symphonies for the first time were outraged. He was taking a field and innovating. The place he took the symphony, for instance, was somewhere the day-to-day practitioners of the time would never have went.
Glad to continue the historical bantering if you find it productive.
You ask for me to explain redefining writing? Sure as heck it's an ambiguous statement. That's the whole point! We can't see where the field can go because we're not practitioners at the top of our game. That's the purpose of pushing forward. It's not a question that has an answer that I can provide.
Interesting that you would choose Shakespeare as writing schlock. In fact, he did write a lot of stuff that was considered pulp at the time, but not only was his works popular with the masses and sometimes low-brow, he was also cutting-edge. His use of language and meter was, once again, unheard of. I could start listing all the new phrases he came up with that are common today, like "into thin air." Geesh! He coined over 2000 new words! He started a completely new way of constructing sentences in English. Shakespeare was probably more radical than any writer since him, yet he also appealed to the masses. You don't have to choose between popular and innovative. Sorry if I represented it as such.
Of course, Beethoven could have stayed with Hayden and wrote Baroque material his entire life. Shakespeare could have used the common vernacular and still been a very successful writer. There's nothing wrong with just wanting to do one thing the best you can. But doing "the best you can" to me means trying to change the world, not just plodding along in it.
But startups is not a profession. It's a way to get from "zero" to "financially set for life". If your "profession" is business, then after making millions, you should aim for billions, and another web startup isn't a good way to get there. If you are trying to make something people want, then you can make a much bigger difference without trying to make a profit. Wikipedia and Ubuntu (and YC, for that matter) are good examples of that. If you're trying to be on the cutting edge of tech, research is better than startups.
By the way, J.K. Rowling is not a good author, so it's a bad example.
http://padovachronicles.welton.it/articles/2004/11/08/spritz
Actually, the original term came from when the Austrians occupied the area, and imported what is still called a "spritzer" here in Austria, which is just wine and fizzy water. In the Veneto they took it and improved it by adding the bitter.
Ok, wildly off topic, but it's kind of interesting, and if you're ever in Padova or Venice, I highly recommend having a spritz in the piazza.
I think Max deserves praise, not criticism. In his endeavors, he's creating wealth, jobs, and happiness for millions teenagers who get to display animated slideshows on their appalling MySpace profile pages :)
The world also has a lot of people that keep pushing the envelope. Finding the underlying reason they love the thing they do and making the world a better place for it. The reason you love something is greater than the thing itself. And introspection is the key to fulfillment of potential. So you can do one thing and do it well, or you can master a field and move the world.
This article struck me as a guy who made it one time, not being content that it was his skill or that he could do anything else interesting again, so going back to the well to try again. Like I said, 2 or 3 times, sure. After that you're just doing what you are used to doing, instead of the type of thing it was the first time you did it.
I guess it just depends on the person. It was a very subjective comment, and I tried to prefix it as such.