> So much of the business stuff we read now is bullshit. It is stupid people getting lucky and riding on VC money while making more stupid decisions but ultimately dumping enough investor money into it that it works enough to get sold.
My impression (from way outside, I'm not an entrepreneur at all) is that so much business is VC-funded, which effectively means driven by finance people. Everyone who isn't a VC is still chasing a VC, so VC culture ends up defining business culture.
People, especially left-brained ones like programmers and finance nerds have this really bad tendency to see problems in terms of their preferred solutions. The old "if all you have is a hammer..." thing. So finance people like to turn everything into a money problem that they can solve using spreadsheets and Jupyter notebooks or whatever else it is they use.
Their ideal state is that "business" is just some board game where the money is all on the board already and you're just playing the rules to move it onto your square.
...which is of course completely antithetical to any kind of business that actually matters to real humans. If you want to actually solve a human problem, make peoples' lives better and maybe make a little money in the process, Silicon Valley business culture is increasingly useless to you.
If you want to understand how to make people’s lives better, first you have to go out and actually live.
Scrappy college kids making a startup don’t know how to live, they’ve just barely lived. And a lot of professionals in tech have no lives outside of work and tech: Wake up and go work in tech. Go home and go read about tech. Attend a party and talk about tech.
How can we expect these Silicon Valley people to create anything that makes life better? All they can do is make cheap permutations of the same tired ideas that have passed through the lips of wanna-be gonna-be entrepreneurs for decades. Ask them: This product makes my life better? Better for what exactly?
Here’s a man who understood that life is a bit better when you can bite into a tasty and juicy Vidalia Onion. This is something you can only know if you stop and take some time to live.
I'm reading this from the bus as the sun sets on 280, looking over south San Francisco. You're so right. I just quit my job so I can make furniture full time. Got accepted to a really good, niche school in a beautiful coastal town in the middle of no where I'm moving with my partner. I'm not going to miss this scene at all.
Would that happen to be Charleston? 10 years ago, a friend from South Carolina thought about doing an apprenticeship in custom furniture there but decided instead on his other dream job and became an Indy Car racing mechanic after completing a year-long course in the Jim Russell school up at Sonoma. He still talks about possibly getting into furniture, though.
The food scene in Charleston is amazing. I had a buddy who lived in Florence, and every six months or so I'd make the drive down to see him for an extended weekend. I'd never been to Charleston before and it blew my mind.
let me try to explain this Scrappy college kids VC dynamic to you.
it's popularized on myths like Facebook where the founder
actually retained control and got a good deal but that's not the reality and it's not what VC are trying to create.
the reason it's all Scrappy college kids because you need slaves going to work crazy hours and do what they're told but also be crazy and naive enough to believe in it, and low maintenance and confident enough that they can take some direction on their own. and you just need a lot of these people.
because not all of them are going to work well and not all of the ideas are going to pan out but you don't know that and you can afford to fund some of these. you are basically funding an array of experiments and you don't need people who are grown up, in as in mature people who kind of go well I don't think I'm getting a good deal here you need as many bodies as you can. just like the military in war time. and for VCs in their hunger for money for their partners this is like a kind of wartime for them so they're just trying to throw as many bodies as they can at the problem.
all that talk about changing world and saving the world all mythologizing about Facebook etc is to get all those young slaves motivated.
is YC any different? a lot of early writings of Paul Graham on what founders need to know and what makes good startups can be easily read as just propaganda for this sort of program. the bottom line is it's not about what works for founders it's about what works for VCs. and I guess everyone justifies by saying well if vcs get a good outcome then founders do too, but those two Venn diagrams don't necessarily always intersect.
A man approached the salesman upon seeing various colors of different fishing lures being on display. He asked whether those different colors actually work in attracting and catching fishes. The salesman promptly replied "Mister, I'm not selling these to fishes."
If these people are targeting VC money, they don't care if their products actually help solving problems for end consumers (aka the fishes), they just need to know what triggers the VC to invest. Even Masayoshi Son, the head of SoftBank, has lost $130 million in Bitcoin after listening to pitches from those crypto startup CEOs. This is how most businesses fail but hey at least it keeps the money flowing.
Those VC operate based on the principle in which if you throw enough spaghetti onto a wall, even though most will fall off but a few are always bound to stick.
Believe me, nobody knows anything in advance and everything is purely a game of chance, but once somebody gets lucky they can immediately declare themselves as the expert. They start selling books and everyone else would rush out to buy and follow exactly the same steps only to find out most of it just don't work. This same cycle just keeps repeating itself over and over again. Why? The market is not static, it constantly moves and changes around so you are already way behind by the time you apply those same strategies. Plus your personal life and connections are completely different than the other person's so you can't realistically expect the same results.
It's still necessary to learn what has worked because new levels are always built on top of the old ones. But this demonstrates why mathematics, or the rule of randomness, is a universal language that governs everything in our life.
>Their ideal state is that "business" is just some board game where the money is all on the board already and you're just playing the rules to move it onto your square.
Right. Terms used like "gameplan", "playing to win", etc., confirm it. In fact, although cliches definitely have their place, overuse of terms like that can be considered a "biz smell" (term I just coined - see what I did there? :), analogous to a "code smell" in programming.
> ...which is of course completely antithetical to any kind of business that actually matters to real humans. If you want to actually solve a human problem, make peoples' lives better...
Who are we kidding? Every startup is about making human lives better. /s
My impression (from way outside, I'm not an entrepreneur at all) is that so much business is VC-funded, which effectively means driven by finance people. Everyone who isn't a VC is still chasing a VC, so VC culture ends up defining business culture.
People, especially left-brained ones like programmers and finance nerds have this really bad tendency to see problems in terms of their preferred solutions. The old "if all you have is a hammer..." thing. So finance people like to turn everything into a money problem that they can solve using spreadsheets and Jupyter notebooks or whatever else it is they use.
Their ideal state is that "business" is just some board game where the money is all on the board already and you're just playing the rules to move it onto your square.
...which is of course completely antithetical to any kind of business that actually matters to real humans. If you want to actually solve a human problem, make peoples' lives better and maybe make a little money in the process, Silicon Valley business culture is increasingly useless to you.