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.
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.