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Comment by jen729w | Hacker News Reader

Inspirational - truly, and I mean literally, for me - that they started that with two guys who were not experienced coders.

There really is no excuse. I should get off my ass and make something.

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>were not experienced coders.

I think they may have exaggerated that. It another article Krieger say "in high school, one of the things I loved doing was this after-school program where you would teach computer skills to some of the maintenance folks at school." Which he taught, so presumably he was coding at school. Then "studied human-computer interaction" at Stanford. Then he was a "user experience designer and engineer at Meebo." Then Instagram. So probably some years of coding experience if partly on a hobby basis.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/13/4296760/sketching-instagra...

To clarify, I was teaching things like how to use Windows and how to use an email account, so not coding-related. But yes--by the time I was at Meebo I was already picking up some industry coding experience, though not anywhere near what I'd have had on a more traditional CS degree + pure coding job out of school track.

That's what I like about Hacker News, clarification from the co-founder himself.

I was very inspired by the original post on Instagram infrastructure:

http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/13649370142/wha...

mainly because the stack mirrored my tools of choice and how plain vanilla the stack was: AWS, Ubuntu, Django, Postgres, Redis.

Ha, agreed. I always tell folks don't worry about problems down the road. Your company has to get there first. (This is usually to bootstrappers and startups.)

We often worry about things before we REALLY know what the product is. Or even sillier before you have customers.

Honestly the coding was never the hard part, and it becomes less so every year as the tooling gets better. Making a product that people want is the hard part.

Not to diminish their obviously amazing accomplishments, but Stanford's Symbolic Systems major does give a bit of a CS background.

Agreed. I majored in Symbolic Systems, with a concentration in AI, and it was fairly CS-heavy. We skipped some topics I would have later found useful (compilers, database, operating systems) but in exchange I did a lot of AI CS work that I would not have taken were I a standard CS major.

That said, if you choose a different concentration within the major, you would end up taking only a handful of CS courses.

> There really is no excuse. I should get off my ass and make something.

please don't make a Bitcoin exchange/bank. or anything that will take enduser's private PII or money.

the mindset to "just go make something" is admirable in some cases. on others it's not. scratching your own itch and then monetizing it is admirable. picking up a knife and thinking therefore that one can be a neurosurgeon now, is not.

too many people do the latter. the former is fine. ;-)

Couldn't agree more. I've thought about this a lot, how the current mindset is creating a bunch of people who see the end state as "a unicorn" and nothing else is good enough. Anything else is "failure".

Me, I'd be happy if I could find a little niche to fill, and if it could pay me a very comfortable wage that allowed me to retire in 5 or so years. I'm 38 now - half a million a year for a couple of years, then sell whatever it is for another couple of million, that'll do me very nicely thank you very much.

Does that sound like a lifestyle business? Damn right. That's exactly what I want. (I'm in Australia, BTW - the whole Silicon Valley, work 23 hours a day, all that crap - no thanks. I value my life and my friends at way more than a billion dollars.)

A couple million in a couple of years sounds like a unicorn, actually.

>Does that sound like a lifestyle business?

No, it doesn't. It sounds like a 3 SD event.

Half a million a year in profits / wages is definitely a bit beyond lifestyle business. In wages it's possible top of field in something that really matters to a large enterprise. In profit, it's a whole lot of work in a very specific and high value area.

Yep, I saw it take about 15 years trying and succeeding to build a web hosting business before the owner / founder was getting near that for themself. Software can be faster, but that's still extremely lucky and/or lots of hard work.

two words: survivorship bias

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