I read the Kindle version (not sure what's cut in this one) and quite liked it.<p>This is the crux of the piece<p>> All the while, Martino’s ultimate warning—that they might someday regret actually getting the money they wanted—would still hang over these two young men, inherent to a system designed to turn strivers into subcontractors. Instead of what you want to build—the consumer-facing, world-remaking thing—almost invariably you are pushed to build a small piece of technology that somebody with a lot of money wants built cheaply. As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent “the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions,” doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants. In such a system, the real disillusionment isn’t the discovery that you’re unlikely to become a billionaire; it’s the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design.<p>The rest is the story of Nick and Chris intertwined with the writers impressions of the people he met at a $1250/mo for a mattress Hacker Pad he moved into.<p>The author is only slightly contemptuous of the young tech guys who made his beloved San Francisco shitty<p>> “When you have an early-stage company,” he said, “there’s no time to hang out at a cool, trendy bar.” He was 23. The bar might have been cool and trendy in Miami in 2004.
This entire story underlies to me the need to bootstrap into something that is already working and has numbers before talking to anyone about taking money.<p>I enjoyed the piece - the writing, the story. It's meant to have a melancholy, no-end-to-the-story tone. That's the entire point of it.<p>What people have to realise is that most of the rest of the world sees silicon valley entrepreneurs based on what they saw in The Social Network. Ziplines into the pool and young girls hitting bongs while nerds with headphones bashed out code nearby, oblivious. So something like this would serve as a strong counter-current to the prevailing narrative, that it's just a case of hopping the bus and pitching your ideas and becoming rich and famous while still young.<p>Realistically many career paths have low probability, high reward exit points, and that continues to attract youth. The movie or music businesses are really no different. It could easily have been a story about LA and a bunch of wannabe actors waiting tables and going to auditions - some will luck into roles, others will burn out and take normal jobs, a lucky few will walk into top roles because of connections, family or supreme talent.
Living in a re-purposed warehouse, subsisting on ramen and not knowing whether you'll be able to pay for food tomorrow seems like a very high price to pay just to be physically close to something that mostly lives just as an idea in these young people's minds. If anything, it strikes me as a terribly dismal existence for not a whole lot of reward and enjoyment. The most ironic thing is that the people who reap the most benefits of living in the Valley are the ones working for big established companies.<p>I think it is more probable that many people who decide to do this do it for the lifestyle and for the image they associate with the "startup" life, the same way some people decide to live in hippie communes. It's just a lifestyle choice.
I live in SF and pay myself about $25K a year. I'm self funded on about $150K cash (since 2010) and live very comfortably. I haven't taken VC money and I have no plans to.<p>My question is: why do people insist on playing this game the same broken way? Raise money, try to grow as quickly as possible to raise more money, getting massively diluted along the way, and hope that you sell or IPO at $1B+ or $19B or whatever valuation? It's a mug's game given that only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of people get there.<p>What's wrong with growing organically, crafting your product as you grow more slowly and taking less VC money and keeping more equity for yourself? You might make less money overall but you have more chance of actually making it if you have a real idea.<p>And why do you need that money again? Wouldn't you rather make a great product? Lots of morons have heaps of money, but how many have made great products? If you want big money and don't care about your product and are smart and hardworking, go work in finance, it's much a more reliable way to get rich.<p>It seems to me most people are taking long, long shot ideas and hoping for the very unlikely best and being some sort of hero.
<i>Nick and Chris would never explicitly admit it, but in unguarded moments it seemed clear that they missed their old idea, the one they’d come up with on the boat, the one that had served a broad and stately social purpose. Their moments of greatest animation were when they showed off their first demos and decks, when they seemed decades younger.</i><p>That strikes a chord.
Silicon Valley today is like 1849 all over again. A gold rush. Everybody and their cousin flock to San Francisco expecting to find gold and strike it rich. They don't realize that it takes an insane amount of hard work and an ever insaner amount of sheer luck to make it. Sure, some of them succeed. But most of them don't, and several leave SF far worse off than when they arrived.<p>I thoroughly enjoyed this read. It's a nice counterbalance to all the success stories. Not that I mind reading success stories, but sometimes we forget that not everybody makes it big. Mandatory reading for anyone raising money!
"Silicon valley is where the astounding success of the very few is held out to the youth in exchange for their time, their energy, and—well, their youth."<p>I guess everybody should have figured this out by now. This, of course, is exactly how LA and Nashville operate, too, for different areas. The <i>Pretty Woman</i>ization of entrepreneurship, if you will.
I got to "<i>An MIT AI PhD can generally walk alone into an investor meeting wearing a coconut-shell bra, perform a series of improvised birdcalls, and walk out with $1 million.</i>" and stopped reading; does it get better, or more credible? Also: the rug store? Really? This is the one on University, right?
> He’d be taking a 40 percent pay cut to join them, but he would have his hard problem and would get to run his own data-science team. Nick and Chris had allotted an equity pool that was larger than average, and they were making Tevye a generous offer—in a highly theoretical sense. San Francisco was full of people walking around with their pockets stuffed with 1.2 percent of nothing...Tevye signed up. He asked to begin on January 27, roughly two weeks before Nick and Chris’ money was set to run out.<p>This is precisely why "What's your runway?" is such an important question to ask before you accept a job offer from a startup.
Brutal reality.<p>I remember a moment many years ago when I looked over at the bookshelf behind my desk and my eyes landed on a book titled "Doing Hard Time" (it's about real time embedded systems).<p>It was somewhere around 3:00AM. I had been in that room, coding, since 8 or 9 in the morning of the prior day. I had been doing 18 hour days, seven days a week, for the last year and a half. If I was awake I was in this little 10 x 20 ft room coding away.<p>For some reason I saw that book and my first thought was that I now knew what being imprisoned might feel like. Sad realization.<p>The story got much better after that low point as the product was completed and schedules became sane (but never 9 to 5).<p>I have to say I would not change any part of that experience. The highs and the lows were amazing. Learning, pushing yourself to the limit and back. Finding out what you are made of. Remarkable.<p>That said, had it not ended well the story might have been very different.
I like this piece because it doesn't glamorize the startup life as much as other articles tend to. It's a lot more blood, sweat, and tears than anything else. And I rather miss long-form essays too. I didn't mind the length at all.
> "New York didn’t care about Chicago, but Chicago was where the hogs were being slaughtered. Now New York doesn’t care about San Francisco, but today the hogs are being slaughtered in San Francisco.” What Turner meant is that these are the charnel grounds of the new economy, and that there isn’t anything all that new about the new economy.<p>Who writes this kind of over-dramatizing bullshit? Nobody forces these people to follow their grandiose visions. They could just do useful work like the rest of us, which isn't quite as romantic, but is doing the world as a whole better than another failing "product" (which is the moniker for a useless website that people in 1999 would have put together in 2 weekends without extorting $20000 of VC money).
I wonder if the "?hn" at the end of the URL was added to get around repost prevention† or a favor for the people watching analytics at Wired?<p>† Original submission: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7628952" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7628952</a>
"Martino and I had made plans to meet at a coffee shop on the main drag in Mountain View, but when he got there he found it too full of nerds on laptops, so he called an audible in favor of the bar across the street, where he could watch the game."<p>Lemme guess, Red Rock?
> The partner didn’t want me in the meeting, so I told Nick and Chris I was going to drink my body weight in Odwalla.<p>I wonder what impact (if any) having a journalist tailing them had on their meetings. Interesting read either way.
This strikes a chord that's been humming for awhile. People flock to start-ups expecting wonderful lifestyle, changing the world, yada yada yada. But then they fall prey to the same societal pressures that they sought to escape from in the first place.In the end they're still climbing the ladder, just instead of the end point being CEO, their end point is IPO. There's not a huge difference.<p>I wonder if it's possible to bring "slow" principles (as in slow food) to the world of start-ups? There's nothing wrong with fast and lean, but the interpretation of it has been perverted to a great extent I think.<p>Personally as a founder I aspire to stay bootstrapped and migrate to financially sustainable to scale. Even if that means $20K for 10 years, that's still enough money to live in SF if you know how, and I don't want to subject myself to pressures from any number of investors demanding returns. I want to focus on the social vision that I want to achieve, not monetization. Yes I'm starting from a more idealist perspective, but hey, I expect some of that to be worn away with time, hopefully by starting from a greater base, I'll still keep some of it by the end!
Well written and pretty funny in places. Reminded me a bit of David Foster-Wallace; I guess that was the intention. The bit about the Indian ex-doctor and his girlfriend was funny.
Having given some parts a good read and skipped over others, I am not confident the story was worth telling. Every drop in the ocean has its own story, sure, but why do I want to hear about these guys? It's not really aspirational, it's not really original, it's not really thrilling. I feel like it adds false dramatic weight to a bunch of dudes in one of the richest places in the world, trying to strike it richer. Their worst case scenario is many people's best case. I know that's a fallacy along the lines of "someone always has it worse than you" but I don't really understand why this particular story was told. Maybe I'm just not the target audience. But who is?
"Just as we got back to the city, a report came over the wire that Nest had been acquired by Google for $3.2 billion in cash. Nest had been backed by Google Ventures, their biggest win so far."<p>What does this mean? Isn't Google Ventures a part of Google?
I read the article. After letting it marinate, I concluded that I completely disagree with the author. Here's the crux of the argument.<p><i>One night I escaped the hacker house to go out with a group of founders from various startups ... At 10:30 the waitress came over to take our orders for a second round. I ordered another whiskey, but everybody else looked at their phones with muted anxiety. At 11 pm the founders rose in pairs to leave, as if they had an exam in the morning. One founder (his company was literally an app that optimized app stores for other apps), who’d ordered a water and had taken off neither his backpack nor his jacket, apologized on behalf of everybody for leaving so early.</i><p>vs.<p><i>By contrast, on a weekend afternoon I went over to find my young cousin—a talented and good-humored UX designer for Google—with his friends in Alamo Square, where they were winding down a barbecue in the January sun.</i><p>IMO, the author has outsmarted himself trying to find a way to 'upend' conventional wisdom.<p>I just don't think its bad for smart, motivated people to sacrifice bar crawls and bbqs in the hope of accomplishing something important. That doesn't sound like a problem to me ... that sounds like maturity.
Felix Salmon's review and analysis based on the book is more informative than the book itself, read it:<p><a href="http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/21/the-most-expensive-lottery-ticket-in-the-world/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/21/the-most-ex...</a>
Throughout the article, the founders mention "making room" or hoping to "have room" for some investor. I mean, wouldn't you have infinite room for investors? What's limiting how much they can take? As it's obvious, I've never done at fund raising, so can someone explain (or point to a reference) what's the deal?
It seems Tevye Krynski, their MIT engineer, while still working there is also doing his own thing:
<a href="https://angel.co/tevye-krynski" rel="nofollow">https://angel.co/tevye-krynski</a><p>Talent hard to get and hard to keep maybe.
Adding to tptacek, some other things I dislike about the article:<p>1. Trying to use ZenPayroll as an example of a vapid startup company. That's one of the worst examples to use to try and back up the general sneering undertone of condescension towards startups.<p>2. All the random, vapid innuendo that's used in an attempt to frame certain aspects of Silicon Valley as essentially stupid. Like mentioning that the GV partner "apparently" went to a Miley Cyrus party. The weird descriptions of an unrepresentative part of SV: the people at the hacker house (I am willing to bet that there is a disproportionate concentration of "wantrapreneurs"). The picking apart of random quotes (the haughty picking apart of SF locales as if the author was a <i>true</i> SF native). Millions of other random observations that are in reality completely inconsequential.
"<i>You can read an extended version of this piece by downloading it from the WIRED app or as a Kindle ebook.</i>"<p>Holy crap, there's more?