tastybites

So, what? All that matters is how much time a user spends on their site.

... this entire blog post was about how people were doing the wrong things.

I think at this point you're just trolling me now, so I'll end it with one more point:

If you know anything about Warren Buffett, you'd know his main thesis is to invest in only the things you understand. That's the advice I ultimately followed to end up in a better place.

Holding onto investments that you don't understand is not his advice at all - that's just a shitty platitude.

But remove that cashflow and the options start to dwindle.

You must have missed the part where I didn't sell at the bottom, started a profitable company, liquidated the equities to invest into myself at +60% off lows, and then came out ahead 2.5 years later.

'Oh you should have held' is hindsight advice, it's not real advice. It isn't even really saying anything at all. It's just something you say after you hear someone's story about how they lost money.

I put a small amount into my retirement accounts while spending or investing mostly on my startup business, real estate, sports cars, and keeping cash.

Which post was more interesting to read?

That's not really the point, I think the point is that I shouldn't have been investing in something that could evaporate on paper in 3 months.

Either way, yes, the point is I'm a terrible equities/retirement investor and a better small business person. Everyone here has excellent reading comprehension, as I would expect on HN.

> That's not to say that your startup isn't a better investment, though.

I didn't sell at the first sign of danger (first of all - selling at the first sign of danger would have been a GOOD idea, but my father, the successful older investor, told me to hold on as it crashed.). I sold after the market had come back by around 60-70% from the lows. That was good enough for me, especially since another 'double dip' was a very real possibility in the beginning of 2010.

If I had sold at the bottom I would have lost nearly everything. But I finally liquidated after my startup was consistently making money and I actually wanted the cash to put back into the business / spend.

Keep in mind I was never broke - I just had a large proportion disappear for a while. That drove me to do 'smarter' things with it after some of it came back.

Having said all that, "You should have held on to it" is standard 20/20 hindsight that makes a market crash sound so predictable. I think I had pretty good forward-sight given the situation.

The financial crash of 08/09 left such a bad taste in my mouth (as in I lost many tens of thousands of dollars) that I have completely lost faith in the stock market and anything associated with it such as ETFs, mutual funds, 401k, etc.

Getting a 'real' job and putting money into my retirement accounts lost me tens of thousands of dollars in savings (so think about how much lost time that is) and the job that paid for it all. Yes, it absolutely sucked. I was furious, with myself, with others, with my parents (who advised me), etc. It was a terrible time. I drank.

I was forced into doing a startup in Dec. of 08. It's been profitable since the first month. You would be surprised at how well you can focus when you lose your job and half of the money in your bank accounts in the course of one business quarter.

I now keep large cash savings, put a small amount into my retirement funds, invest the majority of my 'extra' money back into my startup.

I bought myself an expensive Porsche, an expensive condo, and started spending WAY more on luxury goods / eating out because losing $XX,000 after being 'responsible' makes you realize how TOTALLY unpredictable this life is, especially when it comes to financial matters.

After working about 3x as hard on a day-to-day basis and changing my spending habits to purchasing much more expensive things, I now have way more money than I ever did (in cash and cash equivalents as well as equity in a business). Go figure.

This post isn't advice, it's just an honest recollection of the financial transformation I went through in the past 2.5 years.

I've been working in industry for over 10 years and the only time I've ever had to write a fibonacci sequence generator was during a code challenge (that lead to an interview).

"Do x, y, z or else you're going to be fired."

It's effective because - as it just happens to turn out - nobody ever wants to be fired.

LOL.

Are these people (who own the above mentioned firms) any less "smart" than the "genius" engineer who sits in a cubicle and makes 100k and is at the mercy of his mortgage banker?

The world is filled with quacks and assholes - as soon as your radar is tuned, you'll be able to filter the people worth keeping good relations with.

Either way though, I just think (could be wrong) it's much more rare to find high school kids doing "real" work these days, like admining production servers or writing software that ships to customers.

Reading stuff like this is so surreal because it nearly mirrors my own experience starting out. I got my first job through a local linux users group mailing list (CEO took a chance on me to do sysadmin and scripting work) - my mom had to drive me to work after school and pick me up in the middle of the night after I was done.

Now I run a business and when I look back, it's astonishing how large a chance it really is to hire a kid who can't even drive to write software for your business. The 1990s truly were crazy.

Also, just knowing enough to fix problems in an emergency will make you look like a super hero to customers.

Apparently not, as anyone in the enterprise software world can tell you. There's plenty of room for lots of shitty choices, almost all of which generate millions of dollars of "value".

I do agree with your final conclusion though, that it takes a higher level of competence and business acumen to start, say, an ISP than another run of the mill social network.

the most important consideration should be working on a product you love

This makes for great blog content, but I fundamentally disagree with this. What's equally important is love just plain doing business. Do you think people with successful urinal cake distribution or timesheet tracking ERP companies love their product? The world is filled with unlovable, unglamorous businesses. The love of doing business (which is the politically correct way of saying making money) is equally as viable a path to success than loving your actual product.

Most ML frameworks out there are stuck in academic-land and assume the users are experts - when the exact opposite is usually true - they actually attempt to use the most opaque language possible when describing usage.

ML is still a consulting gold mine because it's so difficult to wade past the jargon and bullshit to actually do something useful/profitable with these frameworks.

I'm not really sure what you mean by 'independent', though, because all companies depend on their customers.... (QED?)

Here are some large, independent companies in our space:

RAX, TMRK (well, not anymore I guess), peer1.com, he.net, IBM

From what I can tell your competitors are the large mutual funds, ETFs, and retail wealth management, so I'm sure you will achieve success, as it's a large and proven market.

And as far as not recruiting this year - web content doesn't disappear after a year.

As a startup founder that wasn't funded by top tier venture capitalists (just customers) I have an extremely difficult time swallowing this narrative that anything I do has any direct mapping to Zappo's, Netflix, Netscape, Google, or (lol) Disney.

My day to day is concerned about finding customers, getting paid, managing expenditures, creating value (also known as doing real work), not worrying about how to define some sort of 'culture'. My culture is finding customers and getting paid. It's a culture of hustling for sales and doing professionally acceptable levels of work under enormous time and resource constraints with clients that don't really care that I'm trying to develop product.

Wealthfront raised $10.5M from investors including Marc Andreessen.

That's just retail markup. If you peer with tier 1 transit providers you can still get IPv4 space for practically nothing.