Hacker News Reader

> Sometimes the wiser choice is to take the risk and follow the more exciting path. It is no guarantee of success, but neither is taking the safe choice.

It's really just dumb luck. One thinks one can extract a lesson from this hindsight, but how was the situation that led to your decision any different than the 99 other startups that were just as lame but didn't make it?

> Do what excites you and put your energy into that.

Absolutely.

True true. But if it is all dumb luck, then what the F, do want you want. I guess that was my point.

It's not dumb luck. MS made a fortune from marketing and business politics, not from cool technology.

MS was never primarily a tech company, it was a sales-and-marketing-and-M&A company that happened to sell tech products.

So the 'Does this company have a future based on this product?' question is misleading.

The important question is - how are they marketing the product? What relationships do they have? What relationships are they building? What's the sales and marketing culture like?

MS are poster children for this. Time and again they've marketed the crap out of technically mediocre products with - mostly - great success.

AirBnb weren't exactly light on the marketing either. (Etc.)

If you completely dismiss their product then you would have missed Microsoft because it's highly likely that at that point their marketing etc wasn't great. That's the trap the article is warning against.

The more expert you are at something the more likely you will dismiss things. PG recognises this bias and is trying to keep his mind open. You have fallen straight into your own trap which is narrow mindedness presenting itself to you as expertise.

They did have a product and they did go on to build many products. Many of them are far from crap and solved really difficult problems including running on all kinds of hardware, maintaining backward compatibility, rewriting their main OS from scratch. Microsoft is not Coca Cola. PG is trying to see that in other companies at a very early stage. (not giving him a free pass - I think he still has other blind spots that annoy me - I have many more no doubt)

edit: No doubt, it's probably that combination of being an expert at something but having a somewhat open mind that got PG started on his adventures in the first place.

I have no idea if I would have dismissed the product. In retrospect, MS BASIC had a 4K footprint which also included floating point. That certainly made it stand out from the competition.

But I wonder if an investor might have noted that Gates had an interest in aggressive market-building and income generation, as suggested in the scrappy and public fight with the tape sharers and the eventual battle between MITS and MS over royalties.

I wasn't paying attention at the time, but looking for similar patterns today - in, say, Uber - suggest that there's a clear interest in aggressive and cut-throat behaviour, which probably bodes well for future investment returns. (If that's your main interest in a tech company - it's not mine).

I certainly don't think MS were crap at everything. But there's also no denying that the user experience with many MS products was - and still is - shockingly bad.

Office and XP were good-enough, with a few nice tweaks. But you have to balance that against a long string of horrors (insecure VB macros, IE6, the ribbon, Win 8 tiles, Win 95 series bugs, and on and on.)

So historically, the focus has always been on sales and using legal and corporate lock-in to sell poor-to-good software.

It clearly hasn't been on creating state-of-the-art super-products and assuming that quality will sell itself.

So I think the point stands - look at business culture and management attitude to market building as a primary predictor. Product quality is not a predictor, as long as it's good enough.

Being slightly better than average doesn't hurt, but there's no commercial need to be a technical marvel.

> It's not dumb luck. MS made a fortune from marketing and business politics, not from cool technology. MS was never primarily a tech company, it was a sales-and-marketing-and-M&A company that happened to sell tech products.

The Apple of the eighties.

That's what I understood and wanted to reinforce :)

Did you want the MS job? I mean, I could figure out how to make things overlap without repainting, and I'm a 4-year-old child.

Could you draw overlapping things without repainting using 1985 technology?

That is, an IBM PC running at 4.77 MHz; with 128 KB of ram (or 640 KB if you're lucky). The OS would have been dos at something like version 2.x Some people[1] used Wordstar as their text editor.

You had limited multitasking -- TSRs maybe.

I'm not sure what programming language they used but possibly Microsoft C and assembly.

[1] http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/windows1/

To add a little more color to this, you had to be able to quickly repaint just a region of a window. And you don't have a bitmap of the window's current contents because that takes up RAM and you'd need CPU time to update a copy every time the window updates (slowing down any animations).

I don't know how it's handled these days, but when I was first playing around with Win32, you'd receive events telling you a region of your window was invalidated. You were expected to figure out what controls and images belonged in that region and just repaint those items because of the CPU load.

I'm pretty sure Java's Swing uses a similar approach.

Sure, because that was the obvious standard technique in 1996. But for it to become the standard, someone first had to invent it. (And Swing in 1996 probably ran slower than Mac OS in 1986, despite Moore's Law.)

Yes, and it was trivial to do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager pre-dated windows on the same HW !

>but how was the situation that led to your decision any different than the 99 other startups that were just as lame but didn't make it?

Sometimes I think people look at where a company is, rather than it's direction, it's velocity.

I think this sort of illustrates the flaw in the reasoning of the original post. No one could have looked at Altair BASIC and seen Microsoft, because Microsoft didn't grow out of Altair BASIC. They grew out of canny marketing and business decisions and dumb luck. Their shitty software had nothing to do with it.

If someone can proverbially sell ice to Eskimos, it's not because ice is great stuff.

Great comment and awesome HN bio. Instantly made me feel good after a tough stretch. Thanks.

> A 58 year old hacker. 5 failed start ups, now work for a really really big company. eh, oh well.

I took the risky choice twice and it didn't work out. I think it's just a gamble especially if you are an employee. As a founder you have more influence.

Whenever I get to berating myself for missed opportunities (probably biggest was turning town a job at FB in 2007) I try to also think of the right gambles I've avoided: turned town early positions at 2 failed search engines, turned down job at Yahoo in 2005, etc...

I find those smart choices don't come to mind as easily as the missed big opportunity choices, so I have to work to keep them in mind too.

Whenever I entertain the "employee #N" daydream, I fantasize that I might have negatively altered the trajectory of the company: butterfly effect and all that. By hiring me, they might have missed out on hiring engineer X, who sneezed one day at lunch and gave designer Y a cold, who became inspired to doodle a graphic while out sick, which subconsciously cheered up a key customer prospect because of something his daughter said that day, which leans him towards signing a big contract, and that made all the difference. Or perhaps it was a more direct action or inaction of mine that changed the course of history.

Is the success of an endeavor highly sensitive to small perturbations in the timeline? I'm guessing most of us don't buy into the mythology of the all-powerful Idea and Founders. Every employee and action matters. The details matter. If I could go back in time and swap in for employee #8 at MS, it would probably no longer be the MS we know. Or perhaps we wouldn't know of it at all.

Perhaps best not to sweat these missed opportunities, and instead keep making whatever we're doing right now the next MS, or whatever you define as outrageous success.

The butterfly effect is good for millions of years--maybe, but giving Hitler a cold in 1925 definitely would not have altered his trajectory in the least (blah blah blah goodwins law blah blah blah) there's just so many other things at work that most small things do very little to decide the success or failure of a company -- despite all the stories people love to tell about fedex's last $25,000, if the founder had gambled the money away instead of quadrupling it he woulda just found an investor or bank willing to back him and fedex would be in the same place it is today.

Perhaps. onejoe's version sure is comforting though.

for those who don't know it, it is a basic human trait that failure is more impactful (e.g. you think of a missed opportunity more than the ones you took) than success, it's called negativity bias[0].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias

Negativity bias is how a negative event is more impactful than a positive one, but turning down a job is not a negative event.

It may later seem like it was a loss, so some form of retrospective loss aversion might be more appropriate to apply to this phenomena: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

On a general note wrt. failure/success then we actually tend to slightly exaggerate our successes when remembering them, and similarly downplay our failures.

Out of curiosity, why would you characterize avoiding Yahoo! as a right gamble? Were they in a really tumultuous period at the time? While not particularly hip, they're still probably the hugest company to survive the dot-com bubble.

Maybe I'm too conservative, but just looking at it from a "cool thing to work on perspective" I would have turned it down as well. I mean, seriously, you tell me a story about how a company offers you a job reinventing a wheel from a previous job, and that company later turns out to be the one in a million that made it on dumb luck and marketing, and you expect the takeaway to be "work for a technologically backwards company for low pay because, hey, they might be successful someday!"? It sounds like you did exactly what excites you: you passed up repeating work from a previous job.

That was an aspect of it, one of the things that I had started at NSI and got cut short when they sold out to Big Blue (and PG would love this) was AI Expert System for Network diagnostics using a Symbolics computer using OPS5. I was convinced at the time that would be the next thing after the GUI. But if I had to be completely honest, a huge part of it (80%) is I just thought they had no chance of making it.

I think what is really interesting in your story is that you directly had a lot of the knowledge and tools to fix the part that you felt was severely lacking in Microsoft's product. Was that the only reason you felt MS was doomed? I would definitely recommend to anyone who feels they can be the missing piece to be that missing piece.

My thoughts on this are: The op's perception could've been that they weren't very capable (since they didn't have solution to a fundamental problem (dirty rectangles?)) and, going in somewhere and being a savior is not something I'd want to do, that's large burden to bear.

>At the time, Windows was very very primitive, they had not yet figured out how to make the windows overlap and re-paint (which we had figured out a long time before that). I actually felt sorry for them at the time because I just could not imagine how they would ever catch up with Apple, the Mac was just so much more advanced. It seemed to me like there was no doubt that they would be out of business in a few years completely replaced by Apple, it was just so obvious at the time to me.

while it feels somewhat paradoxical, reinvention of the wheel has been an extremely efficient way to move the industry forward. Probably because it is an effective way to subterfuge the incumbents, and incumbents are the most significant obstacle on the way forward.

One thing that took me the longest to figure out was the value of half-assed work. It's actually possible to build things of value with enough half-assed work. I think that's one of the ideas behind the "worse is better" philosophy. Sure, it will take orders of magnitude more man-hours, and sure the end-result won't be nearly as elegant and perhaps not as robust as if something else created by a super talented team. But not everything needs to be created by "rockstars", sometimes you just need stuff that works well enough after a sufficient application of development effort.

Maybe, but that is not what makes a good engineer happy. And if happiness is the goal of live instead of richness in money "worse is better" is the wrong philosophy.

That aspect of "worse is better", certainly. But work isn't about just being happy all the time, it's about doing work to acquire skills and experience as well as income. There is a range of acceptable levels of enjoyment at work and there's often a tradeoff with other factors. Grueling work might still be enjoyable if you have a great boss, great coworkers, and the work forces you to better yourself and provides useful experience or great, positive value to end users. Looking at a company in the early stages while they are flailing around a lot and half-assing things a lot and forming a distinctly negative opinion can sometimes be erroneous. Sometimes it's worthwhile to join an endeavor like that precisely because you'll have the opportunity to improve things so much. And perhaps there might be a lot of money to be made along the way as well. There is a degree of unpleasantness in some jobs which is so poisonous that one should escape as rapidly as possible no matter the financial opportunity cost (personally I walked away from a 6 figure income plus nearly 6 figures in bonuses and stock just to get out of such a job) but there are also many jobs that, while challenging and at times excruciatingly stressful, are still worth it for the RoI. There are tons and tons of folks who put in 5 or 10 years at Microsoft during the chaotic early years and then got rich enough to be able to go off and not only retire but indulge their interests, start new companies, etc.

Let us remember that we are here chatting on HN because PG sold his company to the quintessential collection of half-assers in tech history: Yahoo.

This depends on what is being made is a means to an end vs a end in itself.

This reminds of me of an image I used to have as my desktop computer background. Lost it later and the closest I found was this, so I added the same motto (that the image had) at the bottom of my post:

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/11/alley-in-park-bucharest-ro...

This is a variant of the Robert Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken" if you didn't know! :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Taking_the_road_less_...

Apparently this poem is not meant to encourage taking that less traveled road.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken#Analysis

Also, reminds me of my favourite variant of this quote:

"Two roads diverged in the woods. I took the one less traveled, and had to eat bugs until Park rangers rescued me."

( from http://lesswrong.com/lw/xm/building_weirdtopia/ )

This. I wish I were not someone who had pet peeves, but this is one of them. People quoting maxims from great literature that are meant ironically. Robert Frost seems particularly prone to it. See also "good fences make good neighbors." And Shakespeare of course - this applies to everything Polonius said, for instance: "neither a barrower not a lender be," and that old favorite, "to thine own self be true."

In what way is "neither a borrower nor a lender be" ironic?

Well, first you have to consider the source. Polonius is a boor and a blowhard. Then consider what he says. Both borrowing and lending can be solid financial decisions. Finance was in its infancy in Elizabethan England, but the British were early adopters in the field and would have known better. Shakespeare also would have been familiar with classical ideas about liberality as a virtue.

But the main takeaway is that Polonius is an idiot and his advice to Laertes should be considered platitudes at best and terrible counsel at worst.

I think that the context makes it pretty clear that he's talking about borrowing and lending between friends. Shakespeare would indeed have been aware of it, as it was commonplace for young noblemen to run up ruinous debts from gambling and borrowing from each other and moneylenders (who were only too happy to lend to the heir to an estate). Families lost their wealth and estates because of it. "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" is extremely good advice in this context. And, frankly, remains so.

Also, I reckon people are generally too harsh on Polonius. Sure, he's not the sharpest tool in the shed, but in this scene he just seems like an old man who's worried about his son leaving home and trying to give him good advice. That he can't come up with anything genuine to himself is, I think, a little sad.

But I suspect most of us have endured our parents sending us off with good advice on our first time leaving home. And generally that advice seems to be similarly cliched ("Remember to eat properly...and make sure when you're going out, you know how to get home...and wrap up warm when it's cold out..."). I doubt I'll do much better when my time comes!

Yes, had seen that, much later (just a few weeks ago), via another chain of links. Thanks, though. Interestingly, as Temporal says in a sibling comment, analysts of Frost's poem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken

(linked to from your link) take it to mean something else, somewhat the reverse. I prefer my own (or rather, that background image's) more positive (IMO) interpretation, though :) And that's why I had it on my PC for long. Friends liked it too.

In retrospect, the only difference between the fork in my road and the fork for others is that mine was so obvious in hind sight. Other people probably unwittingly passed over great opportunities but just did not ever find out what they missed.

> the wiser choice is to take the risk and follow the more exciting path...

@AceJohnny2 started to touch on this, but them seemed to retreat(?), but:

I can't find "wisdom" anywhere in that scenario -- some seem to think that making a mistake is -- making a mistake -- which is hilarious because people cheer for articles or philosophies of plowing through the business landscape making mistakes and pivoting until something "sticks".

With the information you had, you made the best decision you could. The lesson is "sometimes people are wrong", or "I had a near-miss w/ success/failure", or "there's no way anybody could have predicted X, and I witnessed part of it." Your experience (I don't mean to diminish anything) is an anecdote.

I agree completely. I do not view it as a mistake (although it seems like everyone else does). It was just the path I took. And I went on and got to work on a lot of other very cool projects and did very well for myself as a result, just not "early MS money" well.