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aerosmileon The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

https://hotline.faa.gov/

It's a thing, trust me, and works a lot better than you assumed above. You absolutely don't need an article in the NY Times to initiate an FAA audit.

aerosmileon The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

> Not only did he quit his VP job when he saw these safety problems

Agree, great guy, putting his ethics ahead of his career

> but he went around giving interviews about them

Hmmm, gets a bit murky here. If he wanted to save lives, there's a very clear path to alerting the FAA. But he didn't do that. This sounds a bit more like he was trying to save his career. Which brings in question why he quit in the first place, and how voluntary that was to begin with.

aerosmileon My co-founder was a worthless chump but I survived

The author claims to be the victim but his writing reeks of someone you wouldn't want to share an office with (to put it mildly).

aerosmileon The Chief People Officer as PM

I should set the record straight. In my experience, later-stage senior leaders can be tremendously helpful, and I currently work with a few that make my life much easier. But if they wrote an article where they took credit at someone else's expense (either their manager, or even their predecessor, like: "it was really bad until I arrived"), I would be disappointed in their lack of understanding of the big picture.

The first wave of people you hire are very strong in certain areas (eg: pain tolerance, imagination), and very weak in others (organization, social skills). It turns out that in the first year, the pain tolerance is a lot more important than organizational skills, and that first wave of people didn't care about certain things, like an employee handbook, performance reviews, etc - all they wanted to do is get shit done. Eventually, things flip, and suddenly we find ourselves spending an entire week doing 360 reviews and similar work. The new people who join the company notice that the 360 reviews are not sufficiently streamlined, and they bring this to the attention of the newly hired chief people officer. That person takes a look at the problem and fixes it. At that point, the story should be delivered as follows: "the company decided that it was the right time to invest in this process, and this is how we did it." That sounds a lot different than "it was a mess and I fixed it."

aerosmileon The Chief People Officer as PM

Here's something that rubs me the wrong way whenever I see it: a senior leader tells their story in a way that makes her current or former employer look like total idiots. If they meant to do that, fine - everyone has an axe to grind. But I am actually not sure they even realize they are doing it.

How many times have we read an article that goes like this: "when I started at X, everything was a mess. I quickly turned things around by doing Y." Well the CEO who hired you at that company now looks like an idiot, and their board of directors is quickly taking notes. You took credit by making someone else look bad. Was that really necessary to get to the point you're trying to convey?

The reality is that the CEO built something out of nothing, and prioritized certain tasks (eg: PMF) while deprioritizing others (eg: the company's expense policy). Eventually there was enough money in the bank for the company to afford a $300k/year hire, who then paid back the administrative debt. How you paid back that debt is orders of magnitude less heroic than how the CEO got to the position of being able to afford your salary in the first place.

I really wonder if all those later-stage senior leaders could be that tone-deaf, or if they are throwing their CEOs under the bus on purpose.

aerosmileon OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

It's actually a more complex topic that it appears at first. Some things are much more expensive, but some are identical to everywhere else - eg:

- vacations

- cars

- all online purchases

- most hobbies

- etc...

When I moved to NY, I expected that my (much higher than before) salary would barely allow me to buy a car. Instead, I ended up with the best car I had ever owned up to that point, and went on craziest vacations. I also lived in the shittiest place ever before and after.

aerosmileon Hire for the Ability to Get Shit Done (2011)

You're absolutely right that there are many types of people and stages of careers where an early-stage startup is not a good fit.

aerosmileon Workers don’t want their old jobs on the old terms

And I wasn't saying that the dip is because those people are no longer alive, but because they are just trying to be more careful and therefore avoiding exposure since they can afford to do so financially.

aerosmileon Workers don’t want their old jobs on the old terms

I honestly have a hard time following your math and don't have the time to find where the bug lies - but if you're going to deny that Covid has a more severe impact on older people, then we should just save each other time and agree to disagree.

aerosmileon Hire for the Ability to Get Shit Done (2011)

I am embarrassed to admit that many years ago, I wasted one of my few moments with PG to make the dumbest suggestion ever - in my mind, HN could make some minor SEO tweaks and easily acquire a ton of new traffic, which would help YC get more exposure. He just smiled and didn't say anything. I knew right then and there why I was wrong, but the true extent of my stupidity has only been recently dawning on me.

aerosmileon Hire for the Ability to Get Shit Done (2011)

People have definitely found ways to turn PG into a monster, so I am prepared for anything... but Elad Gil? That would be a first, so super excited to hear which parts rubbed you the wrong way. If possible, try to keep the context in mind (early stage startup: 5 people with less than 12 months worth of runway).

aerosmileon Hire for the Ability to Get Shit Done (2011)

Thank you.

aerosmileon Workers don’t want their old jobs on the old terms

For visibility, this is the graph we're discussing: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=Gh7k

I think we all know why the 55+ year olds are seeing a dip - they have an exponentially higher chance of dying of Covid. A bit weird for such an obvious fact to not have been verbalized in the article. If anything, the graph above actually contradicts the title of the article - from what I can tell, all other age groups seem way more employed than I would have expected given the logistical and health concerns that the pandemic threw at us.

aerosmileon Workers don’t want their old jobs on the old terms

It would have been helpful to understand if the labor shortage is happening at the top or the bottom end of the career ladder. I always heard about it in the latter context - eg: restaurants struggling to find waiters, as opposed to unicorn startups struggling to hire their next head of marketing.

The author rushes to conclusion that the labor shortage is in the worker cohort that has the financial freedom to take a pay cut. It would have been nice to back that up with some data, especially since he did back up other parts of his essay - it's just that the conclusion comes out of the blue and with no supporting evidence.

aerosmileon A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

Very insightful comment. When you run a gazillion dollar company, you don't care about a billion here or there from porn sites, you care about not losing your gazillion dollar business. There are plenty of examples where CEOs were not conservative enough and it cost them big time - just look at Facebook's loosey goosey approach to political advertising, which in the end turned the entire country against them. From a business perspective, it's better to take a small financial hit but continue to run your business without any additional regulatory oversight.

aerosmileon Use Pixar's story formula to win over investors

Think of entrepreneurs as athletes. Working hard is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

aerosmileon Use Pixar's story formula to win over investors

I am sorry that you seem to be in the Trough of Sorrow at the moment [0]. Sending you good vibes so you can prove to yourself that you have more power over your destiny than you currently realize.

[0] https://medium.com/@BoundeHQ/what-is-the-trough-of-sorrow-an...

aerosmileon Berlin, a divided city. The events of 60 years ago

My bad, I meant to say far-left instead of leftist. Hopefully that sentiment is evident throughout the rest of my comment.

aerosmileon Berlin, a divided city. The events of 60 years ago

Far-left and far-right ideologies have more in common than many people realize (including the people within those factions). They are both based on the principle on low tolerance, and as such they are well-aligned on the idea of strict enforcement of their ideologies.

There are some hilarious misconceptions that members of those factions have about their own ideologies. Far-left is against the police brutality, but there is a 100 year history of perfect correlation between leftist regimes and policy brutality.

Far-right is against government interventions in all economic matters, but that also has never materialized anywhere else.

The bottom line is that anything that's far-something requires suppression of the society's natural tendency to return to the center.

aerosmileon Berlin, a divided city. The events of 60 years ago

I said specifically "the Russians' usage of the term..."

aerosmileon Berlin, a divided city. The events of 60 years ago

The Russians' usage of the term antifascist certainly didn't age well, but it's worth noting that "fascists" is how all people in the world referred to certain Germans and Italians for a period of 25 years all up until 1945 (and the affected folks didn't mind that - in fact, the term was invented in Italy in 1915 and then adopted by Mussolini in 1918 and by Hitler in 1923 [0]). So for Russians to refer to Germans who didn't join them as fascists is just a continuation of how the term had been used for a long time.

By 1961, it was definitely unfair to continue using the term in its original meaning, and at this point it was certainly the Russian government pushing their agenda a lot more strongly than the general population would have on its own. But it's not like everyone was strictly opposed to it either - the horrors of the war had created in Eastern Europe such deep resentment towards Germany that it would take a lot more than 16 years to get over that. In fact, my grandpa lived until the 90s and still called every German a fascist.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

aerosmileon TikTok overtakes Facebook as most downloaded app

The same that's happening with Facebook and Tik Tok - the new guys built a better product and that was it. In a sense, it's how life works - the winner takes it all. But that's only true in a 100% free-for-all society, whereas most countries have found that some level of regulation is better than none. To take this a level further, consider the fact that many European countries impose tariffs on US-made cars, making them substantially more expensive to buy in Europe than in the US. A way around that, obviously, is to manufacture them in Europe. Is there something to be said about asking a company that's about to kick Facebook's ass, to use a US-based hosting infrastructure for their US traffic?

aerosmileon How Sweden became the Silicon Valley of Europe

I only shared my parent comment with the hope that some people might benefit from the lessons I've acquired quite painfully and over many years. It's not a diss at anyone's country or sense of pride.

From the governments' perspective, it makes perfect sense to do everything they can to turn their countries into the next Silicon Valley. Same with the VCs - there's a lot of money to be made with the local talent that for whatever reason chooses to work in a geo with less attractive valuations and less favorable terms for the same quality of work.

But from the entrepreneurs' perspective, it really does matter if your local VC can get away with shenanigans because they are a big fish in a small pond [0].

[0] In this context, small pond is not a measure of the size of the city or its population, but instead a measure of the opportunity cost. If a NY VC screws over a NY entrepreneur and that entrepreneur somehow gets a big enough megaphone to ruin that VC's reputation, the VC in question would simply just focus on one of the many other sectors of finance that exist in NY (eg: private equity, investment banking, etc). If the same thing happened in the SF Bay Area, that VC would have to relocate their family to a different city in order to have a hope of a career in something related to finance. I am exaggerating a little bit, but not much. That power dynamic is very evident in interactions with VCs in the SF Bay Area.

aerosmileon How Sweden became the Silicon Valley of Europe

This 100 times. It seems that people confuse the term "Silicon Valley of X" with "overindexing in tech relative to expectations."

I have worked in tech in NY, SF Bay Area, and LA. While all three geos were perfectly suitable for launching and running a startup, nothing comes even close to the experience of working in the SF Bay Area. There are many facets to this, but here's a very simple litmus test: take a meeting with a local VC and benchmark their behavior and expectations.

aerosmileon TikTok overtakes Facebook as most downloaded app

If you had an issue with Zuck calling early Facebook users "dumb f**ks," wait until you find out what's going on behind the closed Tik Tok doors. You have to remember - we're still in the honeymoon phase with Tik Tok and haven't learned to hate them yet. Once the media and all your friends start sharing hatred about Tik Tok, leaks are going to start coming out, and there will be all the other fun ways through which we discover the true nature of the beast. My money is on Tik Tok setting new standards for how evil a corporation can be.

> The China thing is touchy but I want the west to beat them by being better, not by being dismissive and protectionist.

You got used to the idea that the US has the ability to be better at anything we set our mind to. For our sake, I really hope that truism to continue to be true for a long time. But unless you believe in American Exceptionalism, there are no reasons why that should be guaranteed - or even likely. China is more supportive of growth-at-all-costs, their population is willing to work harder, and the idea that Americans are more innovative hasn't been true for quite a while - look at Nio, Xiaomi, Huawei, ByteDance, and countless other examples. A lot of cutting edge stuff is coming out of China these days, with the trend only accelerating.

We might even start longing for days when we used to have a strong domestic competitor in the social media space. The same thing happened in Germany - back in 2008 when Facebook was tiny on a global scale, there was a German €100m company called StudiVZ that dominated the social networking in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with about 10m active users. I don't have to tell you how that story ended - the company is no more and all those users are on FB/IG now. Germany and Austria also happen to now be the ground zero of the global Facebook hatred [1], and I bet you they wish they had shown their domestic company a bit more love back when this would have made a difference.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/86d1ce50-3799-11e8-8eee-e06bde01c...

aerosmileon “My scooter was stolen. Unknown to the thief, I hid two AirTags inside it.”

Occam's razor:

1. The police don't know and don't care. No surprise there.

2. The police do know (holy shit!) and also are directly involved in a criminal operation (holy double shit!).

aerosmileon “My scooter was stolen. Unknown to the thief, I hid two AirTags inside it.”

Throwing the term privilege at every occasion you can will ruin any chance we have at removing real privilege from our society.

aerosmileon Amazon postpones return to office until January 2022

The real amateur move here was to have the CTO decline and then change position. Of course you already lined up a new job, have no loyalty to your current employer, and will tell anyone who is willing to listen. They are now going to have others shopping for remote offers and giving their 2 weeks notice just to get the exception.

aerosmileon Facebook’s claims about the Ad Observer are wrong

I would agree with that - the US population that has the means to leave doesn't have the incentive to do so, and those who have the incentive don't have the means. Conversely, the Danes who are too ambitious for the way that Denmark is set up likely have the means to leave.

aerosmileon Facebook’s claims about the Ad Observer are wrong

I find the argument about the familiarity of cultures very strong, and you're likely onto something there.