I am a former executive of a large famous company in the computer industry. AMA | Hacker News Reader

I am a former executive of a large famous company in the computer industry. AMA

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74 pointskyro19 comments

Some of these Ask Me Anything threads on Reddit are really fascinating, and often times, you'll get people who are/were heavily involved in the cs/startup/business industries. I'm not sure if you guys view these sort of submissions as spammy, so I've tried to not submit every AMA thread that I find relevant and interesting. Anyway, lots of interesting information in this one.

Thanks, the reading was interesting and maybe educational (to some extent).

I Was also an Illegal E-Mail Spammer for 5 Years. I got Caught. AMA

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9ebku/

I think this comment by the exec may be relevant. (He is talking about his thoughts on starting a company, which he is a part of now.)

"A cool technology or product is not a company or a business. A real business is as much about sales & marketing as it is about product. Even if you have invented a flying moon car that runs on urine, if you can't sell it, you don't have a business. Do not start a business without a marketing person and a salesperson."

You may not agree about starting with a marketing guy and a sales guy, but I think that if these are shoes you can't or don't want to fill, you must hire them soon.

This guy was hired right out of college and worked his way up in a massive corporation over 10 years. I would trust his opinions on starting a new company very little.

There's no doubt he can talk to the talk. That's the primary mechanism for promotion in a big company. I would be very careful about mistaking his opinions for actual experience.

I concur....successful one trick ponies should be taken with a grain of salt.

Also keep in mind, he graduated with a CS degree, not a business degree, and he's in a small business now.

"I was hired soon after college (computer science degree) and rose up the ranks from product development"

So this guy started with a CS degree, hired into product development for a major tech company, and was promoted from there.

I'm not saying that necessarily translates to starting a company, but I think his advice holds a little more knowing that he worked both sides of the equation (Product development and management).

I apologize for the double post. I found this reply by Exec regarding his startup history.

"Yes. Here's my startup track record.

I started one that was a success and ran as intended.

I started another that was a failure. Mistake: bad market timing.

I joined another that was poorly run and I left after others refused to change. Later it failed as expected.

I joined another that is on track to do well. I'm still at it.

I'm involved in another that is on track to do well. I'm consulting.

I evaluate other startups for myself and various investment groups routinely."

In case you're unfamiliar with the IAmA series on Reddit (which I see is getting positive feedback from HN readers, needless to say), a 'starred' post such as this one means that the OP has verified his/her identity with a subreddit moderator.

Just wanted to point out since this new process was implemented only few days ago.

The guy is eloquent and honest for a tech exec; I found myself upvoting most of his replies

i haven't been to reddit in years. this is a lot more polite than i remember.

Some of the subreddits aren't so bad--the programming one and the lisp one are two that come to mind[

Seriously? I have to go to the womens fashion subreddit to get away from the arbitrary fad-like groupthink on programming.reddit.

"Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you’re always going to get a pop culture."

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

So true.

Redditors seem to take a certain pride in being uneducated. Better to spend months reinventing a square wheel poorly than to Google a bit and find a paper on how to design round wheels.

I take issue with the "So true" statement. It's either true or false, not a degree of true or false. That would be fuzzy logic or something and that's just bullshit.

English has idioms. "So true" tends to mean "I agree".

Not that it is all that great, but filtering through it i do find things of interest.

Women's fashion subreddit? I had no idea.

The IamA subreddit is developing an interesting culture. There are some issues of people faking, but in general it shows an interesting cross-section of life in a very addicting and supportive way.

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