Founders Need Rock Hard Abs
jordancooper.wordpress.com
jordancooper.wordpress.com
Being rejected by YC is far from a "real punch to the stomach". The point of the article is absolutely right. You need a quasi-inexhaustible supply of rock-hard abs to run a start-up. Sometimes, things go very wrong. As the comments on http://danieltenner.com/posts/0005-starting-up-with-a-friend... showed, it can oh-so-easily happen that you find yourself losing your best friends over your start-up.
After I launched my first start-up, my father's advice was: "Are you prepared for the possibility that it might all fall apart in complete disaster in 6 months?" I didn't know how right he was, but having that in my mind certainly helped prepare me.
I'll close with a quote from the ever-insightful "If" poem by Kipling:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
...
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!Perhaps "Sisyphean" would be a more evocative adjective, in that particular situation.
Advice from someone who can't be bothered with the most basic details and easiest remedies? I'll pass.
This is actually excellent feedback.
It reminds me of the time I took 4 enterprise vice presidents from New Jersey to visit a software vendor in Silicon Valley. They had great (multi-million dollar) software and it was perfect for this customer.
Our first meeting was at 9 a.m., and there was no coffee! The Vice President of Sales actually found the coffee and filters and brewed the first pot himself in the vendor's conference room. (Probably the first time he made coffee in 20 years.) Then he said, "Why should I trust them to handle my customer orders when they can't even do the basics right?"
A subtle but very important point. When engineering people sell to business people, we have the extra burden of showing that we know how to conduct business at their level. The easiest way to get started is with precise attention to details. And faux pas destroy trust much quicker with web technology.
I didn't even notice OP's quote. Thanks for pointing this out, efsavage.
Said everything I needed to know about the guy.
What does not buying someone coffee tell you about them? Does it matter that this took place in or outside of his office? Does it matter that he invited you?
[Edited to add: Oh, I live in Japan. This might be interesting to some of y'all: here, the boss outranks the job applicant and is almost certainly the host rather than the guest in this context. Thus, it is his social responsibility to arrange for tea or coffee for his guest. The guest should probably decline the offer once before accepting it.
Not offering the coffee is a fairly significant breach of etiquette -- it would cause me to wince hearing the story. Buying your own coffee, on the other hand, is about a step short of slapping him in the face. It says "I noticed your lapse of etiquette" and, more importantly, "I just called you on it." Given that a guest has bought himself coffee, the polite thing to do as the host is to take no notice of the fact.
We have manuals for this sort of thing.]
I'm thinking back trying to remember a time I invited someone over and didn't buy. Nothing comes to mind, but I couldn't 100% promise you that I managed to buy every time.
I'm not doubting JGC learned something about that CEO from the fact that the guy didn't buy him coffee, but in America, sometimes not buying coffee just means forgetting to buy coffee.
I've always liked the waiter test for salespeople, though: tip a waiter $50 to handle the candidate poorly, and see whether the candidate remains respectful. I know I've never snapped at a server before.
Yet culturally, I need to learn this in order to close some deals.
EDIT: With all that said, I'm not vouching for the quality of the post one way or another. I'm just saying, judge the content by the content and nothing else.
If there were more of an explanation, it might endear me to the guy. If he dug into some of the haphazard history of English spelling conventions and refused to adhere to illogical paradigms, I'd give him credit. If he mentioned something from communications theory, I'd give him a pass. But the explicit statement that "my idiosyncrasies are higher priority than your user experience" is not a good statement to make. It's a significantly worse impression than a simple typo, and a stronger one because it's intentional instead of an oversight.
But his situation is even worse than you say: He's aware that he has a problem, and he's also aware of the existence of a virtually effortless, automatic solution to this problem. Even if it only makes his writing 1% clearer, isn't it a free 1%?
If his site were ugly, and he apologized for not being a better designer, then ok, I can understand that. There's a slight barrier to having an aesthetically appealing site. But it's 2009 - what is he composing in that doesn't have automatic spellcheck? The contents of this very text box are being checked for spelling.
(I'll avoid commenting on the phrase "deal with it"; maybe it was funnier in his head.)
For me, the disclaimer is a red flag, but the quality of the text countered it quite well. Should I presume his logic is positively correlated with his strength of sentence structure? Usually I do.
But for me, this was overridden by the attempt to cite fiction as an authority. Good fiction is good because it appeals to our sense of authenticity, not because it actually is authentic. Thus using fiction as an example is usually just arguing that something 'sounds right'.
I just watched a very good documentary on steriod use (Bigger Stronger Faster) that pointed out that the real Stallone's physique as depicted in the movie relied fairly heavily on steroids. Sure, there were lots of crunches, but heavy drugs as well. Is the real message of this article that deception (self or otherwise) is essential to entrepreneurial success?
IMHO it is, especially considering how trivially easy it is to correct these misspellings. What is more bothersome is not the presence of misspellings, but his acknowledgment that he has a problem, but steadfast (and even arrogant) refusal to fix it.
To me this suggests a "good enough" work ethic, which honestly doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.
That being said, I'd probably only apply this sort of judgment if I was thinking of hiring him or buying from him - it does imply a lack of attention to detail, a rejection of things that others consider basic competency, and an arrogant attitude.
Fred Wilson pen's many of his posts on his blackberry and in many ways that adds to the conversational tone he tries to set on his blog.
annnnnd....that's where the analogy broke down. I thought it was a bit disjointed. All that talk of strong abs was unnecessary. But strip out the attempt at clever humor and you have an important message, I think.