Poor Ted. He spent all that time trashing other people's startups, and now he has to cope with his own startup problems. It must be Paul Graham's fault.<p>Perhaps PG's advice isn't all perfect, and maybe it's not for everyone, but the fact is that he has helped a lot of people, including hundreds of YC founders, and they generally seem pretty grateful. Who has this guy helped? What has he done to make the world a better place?
"Anger is a cowardly way to express Sadness"<p>The article was funny, but he should not have insulted anyone. I think he is angry at the world.<p>EDIT: Mostly mad at bloggers because his application did not get the best reviews which is ironic because his blog uncov trashed most web application development teams.
FTA <i>Money can be made elsewhere, without nearly as much bullshit: Wall Street, the court room and the operating room, to name a few.</i><p>He just named the places where bullshit <i>lives</i>. I'm speechless. And I liked Starcraft dammit!
"As an entrepreneur, probably 2 days out of 3 are better than they would be if I had a real job. That's probably the best reason I can come up with." [ for why he became one ]<p>That about sums up the content of the article.
Imagine Zed Shaw, only angrier and a less effective writer (I know, it's hard to imagine either...), and you won't have to actually read any Ted Dziuba posts. You can just imagine what he would say based on the title alone.
"Being an entrepreneur doesn't mean you're smart. A smart guy will figure out how to make a bunch of money while taking on much less risk. Corollary to this, there are a lot of dumb entrepreneurs out there."<p>I'd argue that doing a startup with someone else's money (thanks PG and Co), at a young age, and in a struggling economy is much less risky than my former spot.<p>I used to work in finance and many of my friends are out of jobs with nothing to fall back on. I could have easily been one of them. At least if this fails, I'll come out with a ton of experience in numerous areas and good friends.
I have nothing whatsoever against Paul Graham, I really don't know too much about him and aren't one of the many on here who paste all of his articles onto the cube walls surrounding their toilet, and have read them dozens of times, etc.... blah blah.<p>However... I do think that a lot of you are shutting Ted down simply because he said shit about PG.<p>Ted is funny as hell, and pretty much everything he said in his "rant" is spot on.<p>Personal note: I submitted this at +152 points here on news.yc, let's see how far it drops! Like Google after their earnings report? We'll see :)
It's pretty amazing. A few years ago, entrepreneurs wouldn't have even tipped into this guy's radar.<p>We've hit the big time. People are dripping with hate, envy, and disparagement. It seems as if entrepreneur hackers -- people who try to make something new, are now officially a subculture. Hurrah?
I don't know...I think that people who are wildly successful have a right to have a bit of an ego. If you do something ridiculously difficult and succeed, you should feel proud and let people know that you're proud.<p>Can you imagine the New England Patriots without a Super Bowl swagger? A rock star who is genuinely humble? The president of the US acting like he's just an ordinary person?<p>I think if you sell your company to google (or better, start the next google) you almost have a responsibility to act accordingly. Walk around with your chest out and your head held high! Talk like you know something! Or else what's the freaking point? If you don't act like you're at least supremely confident, you're almost doing a disservice to everyone else who is trying to get to be where you are.
Just another rant. Once i liked rants very much, because they are often funny and somehow cool, but after reading too much of them in blogs i have become a little bit bored and suspicious:<p>If i read a rant what makes me say "yes!" to the article?: Is it the content? Or is it more the writing style which makes even the most stupid points and argumentations sound logical and cool?<p>Take this rant as an example: it is somehow succesful on hacker news despite having absolutely no content other than that its author feels fine two days out of three. If he would have written that in a normal style not even his mum would have read his blog entry. But by insulting other people and writing somehow aggressive he creates attention that isnt supported by the content.
In short, and quoting from the article itself, - <i>some dick writes about startups or entrepreneurship on his "Random Musings of an X Programmer" blog</i><p>:)
I have no idea where the lottery analogy is going. Winning the lottery is entirely luck, so it seems to imply that building a successful startup is luck too, but since he doesn't actually argue that point anywhere I'm inclined to think he's just spouting analogies at random hoping nobody will notice they're baseless
Add <a href="http://teddziuba.com/atom.xml" rel="nofollow">http://teddziuba.com/atom.xml</a> to google reader and you'll find it there if you're curious.
<i>Not Found<p>The requested URL /2008/08/an-article-about-startups-that.html was not found on this server.<p>Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.</i><p>If you're gonna vote-bomb something to the top of YCNews, you might want to check the URL works first!.....
"Entrepreneurs start businesses because...they have no choice. Passion and energy drive them on good days and sustain them on bad days." Barry Moltz in "You Have to Be a Little Crazy"