[HN Gopher] I am (not) a failure: Lessons learned from six faile...
___________________________________________________________________
I am (not) a failure: Lessons learned from six failed startup
attempts
Author : lisper
Score : 247 points
Date : 2025-01-20 18:40 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.rongarret.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.rongarret.info)
| superkuh wrote:
| The difference between a failure and a success when starting a
| business is if you can afford (monetarily) to fail. if you can
| afford it just keep failing till something sticks. If you're not
| well off, well, too bad.
| gottorf wrote:
| > if you can afford it just keep failing till something sticks.
|
| In the sense that infinite monkeys will eventually put out
| Shakespeare. In reality, money and time are both limited ;-)
| Salgat wrote:
| They may be limited, but most folks can't even afford to
| enter the startup founder game to begin with.
| huijzer wrote:
| Isn't that the whole idea of a business? To make money.
|
| (Sounds like I'm kidding but I'm not really. Many of the
| richest people were very poor at some point. For example,
| Andrew Carnegie or Levi Strauss. Also Arnold Schwarzenegger
| started from nothing in the US.)
| recursive wrote:
| There are a lot more people with the idea of making money
| than there are people making money.
|
| Also, there are a lot more poor people than startup
| founders.
|
| Hm, there must be more to it.
| Salgat wrote:
| The point being made though is that business success is
| greatly influenced by existing wealth, since it gives you
| the luxury of being able to absorb the costs and risks
| involved. People like to give a few rare exceptions to
| the rule as somehow evidence that this isn't true.
|
| The best analogy I've seen is that starting a business is
| like playing a game at a carnival. The more tickets you
| buy, the more attempts you have to win the prize.
| Meanwhile most folks are the carnival workers, never
| being able to get a chance to play the game in the first
| place.
| huijzer wrote:
| I can also make the counterargument that people who grew
| up in hardship are more likely to become relentless
| businessmen. Most of the top richest people in America
| are immigrants.
|
| Most people don't start a business because they tell
| themselves that it won't work. It's the hard truth that
| most people don't want to hear.
|
| If you read about most founders they don't become rich
| due to luck or background or whatever. No most of the
| time they set themselves a goal and then do EVERYTHING to
| get there. They don't care whether their parents had
| money or not. Or whether the market timing is right. They
| just do whatever they need to do.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Damn it was that easy to obviate financial obligations?
| Guess the bank also won't care if we stop paying our
| mortgages?
|
| To give credit to your position, over in Europe they've a
| generous welfare state yet very few successful startups
| so there's definitely a huge grindset factor but you're
| still cashing in on incredible luck or a comfortable
| economic position to be able to try enough times to
| score.
|
| This is why the standard issue techbro advice from semi-
| wealthy "hustlers" who failed upwards on the backs of a
| few H1B 'founding' engineers is not actionable, I can at
| least respect the ones who don't bother with the facade.
| t43562 wrote:
| > Most of the top richest people in America are
| immigrants.
|
| ....because there isn't enough wealth where they're from
| to absorb a lot of failures.
|
| Hence they come to the land of opportunity where there
| are gamblers with money to gamble.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Many of the richest people also come from places where
| they COULD afford to fail. Let's be honest, looking at
| patterns to become wildly wealthy is all survivorship
| bias, although, if you're well off to begin with, you're
| more likely to actually survive, and that makes you more
| willing to give it a shot.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| why go all in at first?
| kevmo314 wrote:
| This line in the article resonated with me:
|
| > First, it sets the stage for what was to come, and second,
| while it was unquestionably a success, it was not my success.
|
| I used to think that success was being successful the way I
| wanted and I was often frustrated because things were working but
| not because of the way I wanted them to. Turns out, it's doubly
| difficult to make things not only work but also work the way I
| want.
|
| I've since tried to be more open-minded and see wins that perhaps
| I didn't expect or want still as wins and it's made me feel a lot
| more successful. One might scoff and say I should hold myself to
| a higher standard, but at the end of the day, success is only an
| intrinsic feeling anyways. It's not a measurable metric so I
| might as well feel better about the progress I'm making.
|
| In the context of the article, the author could see these all as
| failures, but it sounds like some of these were pretty
| successful. In fact, the author concludes as much, finding
| happiness in the "failures". It's all an arbitrary label anyways.
| hinkley wrote:
| I've had a lot of coffee breaks with highly placed peers who
| expressed concern because our boss was sure our success came
| down to one or two attributes and seemed completely blind to
| all the ways we saved him from himself. If apathy ever took
| over the team, we would burst into flames because of all of
| these details.
|
| There's a great old aphorism that sounds like sarcasm if you
| don't understand this: "Take care of the little things and the
| big things will take care of themselves." Any halfway sane team
| is dominated by people who are all too happy to jump on the Big
| Things. But for want of a nail, the kingdom can be lost. And if
| you cannot see his importance, and fire the farrier to hire
| more knights, then everybody loses.
| numpy-thagoras wrote:
| When you see a successful boss, look around for his
| successful reports. They're always the ones cleaning up the
| boss' messes. The truth is that we all need to be saved from
| ourselves at some point (sometimes as education, other times
| as hard lessons), but tech culture certainly pushes that far
| with the "gifted visionary" mythos. A gifted visionary's much
| vaunted "Ideas > Details" only works when the detail people
| are there to make it work.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Yeah, the "success definition" trap is real. For me I was
| having coffee with a former co-worker who was now a VC because
| they had been at one of the same companies I had been but had
| joined "pre-IPO" and so probably had a net worth of 20 - 30
| million. They asked what I was looking for and I said "To be
| successful like you!" and they said, quite seriously, they
| would prefer to be successful like me. And at that point we
| talked about the parent's point of how do you define success?
| This person had money but had lost their their spouse to
| divorce over 'working too hard' and were now alone. Meanwhile
| my third kid was on the way and I was doing okay but certainly
| not "FU money" okay. And yet from their perspective, that was
| more successful than they felt. That really threw me for a
| loop.
| mostertoaster wrote:
| Totally feel this. I think all people should desire to be
| wealthy and to keep from being impoverished, but we should
| not define wealth and poverty simply in terms of our monetary
| wealth, or lack thereof. People who have the love of family
| and friends, a clear conscience, health, their physical needs
| met, and thankful hearts, are far wealthier than a majority
| of people in this world who have a large number in their bank
| account.
|
| Yet in our consumer world, people are continually thinking of
| their worth simply in terms of the money they have or the
| money they make. I've known many married working moms, who
| decided to leave the workforce and be homemakers, who
| constantly felt like their worth diminished because of the
| decrease in their wealth, not recognizing that the bond they
| had with their children, was growing stronger and greater,
| and didn't recognize how incredibly valuable that truly was.
|
| Note: I'm not saying working moms can't have strong bonds
| with their children, I'm talking about specific situations
| where for them it was hindering their relationships, and
| their relationships improved but was at the cost of less
| money.
| morgante wrote:
| Also interesting that it seems like his relatively minor 1 year
| stint at pre-IPO Google was successful enough to pay for many
| other endeavors.
|
| It's a great example of the power laws in startups: it's much
| more lucrative to have a minor role in a major success than a
| major role in anything minor.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I would go even further, it would have been much better
| statistically to work at any of the BigTech companies even in
| the past 10 years than take a chance at a startup.
|
| Seeing the outcome of the startups he listed, it would have
| been much better to work as an enterprise CRUD developer at a
| bank, insurance company, etc
| morgante wrote:
| > Seeing tts outcome of the startups he listed, it would
| have been much better to work as an enterprise CRUD
| developer at a bank, insurance company, etc
|
| Enterprise CRUD developers don't make that much. I'm
| confident OP made more over his career than them.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| How much do you think he made at his failed startups that
| didn't exit and didn't make enough to draw a significant
| salary?
|
| The average CRUD developer working in the US in most
| major cities can make $130K to $165K within 5 years with
| aggressive job hopping.
| morgante wrote:
| OP would have to speak to his experience, but between a
| Google IPO and the $10M Virgin acquisition I would be
| surprised if he didn't average >$200k lifetime.
|
| Throughout this thread, it's clear you have an ax to
| grind. Startups are obviously not for you, but many enjoy
| them and benefit.
| drewr wrote:
| > the $10M Virgin acquisition
|
| I think he wrote that he didn't make anything from that.
| He held onto the equity because he (unfortunately)
| thought Virgin would turn it into a success.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| He wasn't a "founder" at Google. Google IPO'd in 2004.
| How many of the $n number of startups founded around the
| time that Google was founded and it IPO'd were successful
| and how many disappeared into obscurity?
|
| There are so many people especially on HN who succumb to
| survivorship bias. Most failed startup founders never
| admit it. The original author is not one of them one and
| he was willing to be open about it - that's a compliment
| by the way.
|
| "Many" may benefit from them. But statistically, most
| don't
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| I think this is actually not as obvious as it seems as equity
| is also power-law distributed. An executive founder may have
| 10-50x the equity of a founding junior employee, who
| themselves might have 10-20x the equity of a key early
| employee.
|
| The power laws actually cut both ways. I think the optimal
| path is not entirely obvious without some particular
| understanding of whether or not you are a stronger player as
| a leader or a follower.
| jebarker wrote:
| Ugh, I know this feeling too well. I've been pretty successful
| in life so far by societal standards but have always felt
| inferior and like I'm failing. Always. I think partly that's
| responsible for the drive that enabled earlier success, but it
| gets old. My first defense when those feelings bubble up is to
| remember we're all playing a game we can't win!
| robomartin wrote:
| Sometimes wins are not necessarily measured with financial
| success. A company can utterly fail and still represent a win.
| I had one of those.
|
| I started a self-funded tech company around 1998. This was hard
| tech, hardware and software. And I was the sole engineer doing
| all the work. This meant 18 hour days, 7 days per week to get
| the plane off the runway. Two years later, after booking lots
| of sales, we finally moved out of the garage and I started to
| hire people. Yes, I ran this beast entirely on my own for two
| years. A few years later a large well-known company expressed
| interest in acquiring the technology. The number being floated
| was in excess of $30MM.
|
| What happened?
|
| Well, 2008 happened. The economic implosion caused this company
| to second-guess entry into the market we had pursued --which
| they intended to do by acquiring us. The deal went from being a
| couple of meetings away from an acquisition to evaporating in
| front of my very eyes.
|
| The bad news was that the economic downturn truly hurt us over
| the next couple of years. I had to shut it down in 2010 and
| lick my wounds.
|
| This thing went from pouring all of our savings and an
| incredible amount of very hard work into a crazy idea,
| executing well enough to get a $30MM+ offer to closing the
| doors and nearly losing it all in the process.
|
| At the time this felt like an abject failure and a waste of ten
| years of my life. It took me months to get my head back on
| straight. Today, looking back, I see it as a success. I took an
| idea from nothing to close to a massive life-changing exit and
| did so mostly on my own through hard work, grit and
| determination. That's a success story nobody can take away from
| me. I learned a lot along the way and most of those lessons
| were part of success in future endeavors.
|
| Life can be funny and cruel sometimes. You might think you are
| going through your darkest hours when, in reality, you are
| growing a solid backbone that will support the rest of your
| life.
|
| Entrepreneurship is hard. Very hard.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Honestly, that feels like copium.
|
| It's like anecdotes you hear from religious people during a
| disaster. "I lost five of my kids. But I'm so thankful that
| God looked out for me and saved one"
| liontwist wrote:
| Interpreting a difficult event in terms that allow you to
| move on is not "copium". we all do it all the time to
| explain our mistakes and weakness regardless of religion.
|
| I don't think any of these people are saying "I'm so glad
| my kids are dead" they are saying they are able to see
| these unfortunate events in a bigger picture.
|
| What you may be looking for is "sour grapes" - something
| that was previously desired is now not viewed as highly
| after failing to obtain it.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| How are any of these not failures?
| mock-possum wrote:
| The author is saying that _he_ is not a failure, despite his
| business ventures failing.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Consider the only thing he mentioned as part of his priority
| stack is wanting to have a successful startup, how is he not
| a failure?
| liontwist wrote:
| Every negative and uninsightful comment in this thread is
| coming from the same person
| scarface_74 wrote:
| It's not "insightful" because I don't drink the "startup"
| think happy thoughts kool aid?
|
| I assume the purpose of the startup is to make money and
| hopefully make more than the alternative of just getting
| a job.
|
| If my priority stack is "be a successful founder" over
| all else and I fail at doing so, how am I not a failure
| based on my own criteria?
| liontwist wrote:
| Nobody is asking you to drink kool aid.
|
| In this thread are numerous nuanced disagreements with
| people sharing pros and cons of difficult life choices
| they made. I would suggest reading and reconciling these
| comments with your own life experience and values, in the
| best possible faith.
|
| If you have zero interest in startups. These threads and
| this forum might not be of interest to you.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| So few.....
| random3 wrote:
| lol - are we going to see a larger echo post? :)
| andrewstuart wrote:
| That would take some courage.
| Fokamul wrote:
| -I failed six startups attempts, (btw I'm multi-millionaire)
|
| Americans are weird :)
| julianeon wrote:
| If he didn't say or imply that, his advice would be discounted
| as that of a (probable) loser.
| lisper wrote:
| I suppose a truer test of character would have been if I had
| not had one big win fall into my lap that offset all the non-
| wins. But one of the messages I was hoping to convey is that
| one's life trajectory includes a lot of randomness. The best
| you can hope to do through volitional action is slightly tilt
| the odds in your favor. But that might be enough.
| jebarker wrote:
| One point in your story that I think is worthy of kudos is
| that you left Google. I'm not sure how certain the riches
| were at that point, but presumably you could have chosen to
| just ride that wave longer. That's a really hard thing to
| do.
| lisper wrote:
| Thanks, but my motives for leaving were a lot less kudo-
| worthy than you might think. When I left in October 2001,
| success was far from certain. If I knew then what I know
| now I probably would have stayed, and I probably would
| have put a lot more effort into climbing the (very
| steep!) learning curve.
| myheartisinohio wrote:
| Gotta build stuff bro
| random3 wrote:
| When going through crazy stuff as a founder, I always thing "this
| is going to make for a very intersting story some day". Looking
| back I doubt I'll remember them all and, while keeping things in
| full throttle, I wonder if I'll ever get to write about
| anything...
|
| My conclusion is that most interesting stories remain burried and
| we're lucky to see anythign real (as in true stories) surfacing,
| because people that are crazy enough to enjoy these pains, hardly
| have any time to write about them.
|
| Meanwhile we're presented with a somewhat skewed reality that's
| both less interesting, less real and overly biased towards
| glamor. The title of a somewhat :) unrelated book keeps popping
| in my head "Reality is not what it seems".
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| The right moment to start writing down things you have
| regretted not to having written down in the past is now.
| Retric wrote:
| You'll recall a surprising number of details if you start
| trying to write even an outline of stuff down.
|
| Many may not have actually happened, but it's still worth
| considering even decades later.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Heh "it could be the purpose of your life is to serve as a
| warning to others" - despair.com
| neilv wrote:
| Related to many interesting/crazy things being lost to history
| because the observer/actor is too busy to record them, and the
| things that do get reported consequently not representing
| reality... (And maybe a little relevant to the somber news
| events on this Monday.)
|
| Many major religions prohibit making a show of good deeds.
| You're supposed to do it secretly, so that your intentions are
| pure.
|
| But other people only see when a good deed is reported, so
| we're getting a distorted version of reality.
|
| Some of these are reported for good reasons. But the worst form
| would be what social media kids are bombarded with: things like
| the clinically oblivious "influencers" who make videos of
| themselves exploiting a homeless person with a "charity" stunt.
|
| One way to do good, while also letting people be inspired, is
| to do it anonymously. For example, the donation in a large
| crowd of them, or the anonymous rich-person's donation to a
| good cause (not a vanity university department named after
| yourself!), or any of the countless ways that one person
| quietly helps someone else.
|
| You'll never know most of the times someone else helped you
| out, and most of the times you helped out someone else will
| also never be known. That's OK.
|
| If you ever have the occasion to jump into an icy lake, to save
| a busload of photogenic schoolchildren and puppies, then you
| must try to get out of there right after, before anyone's phone
| dries out. Then the story will be about people simply doing the
| right thing, even an amazing thing, and fading back into the
| crowd. It'll be one of the best stories ever.
| hinkley wrote:
| There's an old xkcd joke about how some grand problem in
| information theory has probably been solved on some mundane
| business task without the author even knowing what they've
| done.
| hinkley wrote:
| I wonder if someone like YC or a16z could manage to hire a
| journalist or anthropologist to make an honest chronicle of
| what happens at startups and not turn it into a propaganda
| piece.
|
| Having to explain yourself helps clarify what you're doing. The
| time "lost" keeping said person updated might even pay for
| itself.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I found the "Startup" podcast to be interesting when they
| documented real time the founding of Gimlet media, pivoted to
| other companies and then went back to document their
| acquisition by Spotify
| p3rls wrote:
| I was thinking just today that Squarespace should contact me
| and I'll do a commercial for them based on my experiences of
| creating a webapp and turning it into a business because I was
| too picky to use a prebuilt CMS etc. I have eight years of
| nonstop pain and stories to tell.
| pockmarked19 wrote:
| It's important to think not in terms of success or failure, but
| in terms of philosophy and mistakes. If you're focused on the
| outcome there isn't much you can improve on, the reasons for
| failure are many. Mistakes on the other hand stem from flaws in
| your philosophy, which you can readily revise. In a lot of the
| cases presented here, the mistake that stands out is working with
| the wrong people.
| ktallett wrote:
| Those with no failures never tried. Now I'm the complete opposite
| of someone who would usually say that but I believe it to be
| true. Failure at things is ok, it's just part of doing stuff.
| Just like death is an outcome of life. Anyone who tells you they
| have never failed either hasn't ever tried anything or is a liar
| and protecting their ego. It's ok to admit you made mistakes or
| failed or that you don't know something.
| gruntledfangler wrote:
| > Why don't the banks care? Because they treat the cost of fraud
| as just another cost of doing business, and they pass it along to
| you, the consumer. And they do it in a diabolical, stealthy way
| that you don't notice. But that's another story.
|
| Desire to know more intensifies
| jackthetab wrote:
| In the past, my knee-jerk reaction would have been "Yes,
| exactly!" Then I heard patio11's podcast on debanking[1]. It
| gave me some interesting views into fraud and compliance and
| $STUFF. Highly recommended.
|
| [1] https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/debanking-
| pat...
| lisper wrote:
| See https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-
| cre...
|
| That's actually the start of a multi-part series:
|
| https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-cre...
|
| https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-cre...
|
| https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-cre...
|
| https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/cutting-to-chase-repeal-...
|
| https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/a-simple-solution-to-cre...
|
| Keep in mind all that was written twelve years ago and the
| world has changed a lot since then.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| > So why hasn't it been done?
|
| The answer is simpler: it's not that big of a problem to the
| people that would need to solve it (visa, banks)
|
| Yes, it' billions of dollars per year, but that's on a
| denominator of trillions.
|
| > In 2022, global payment card transaction volume surpassed
| $40 trillion, with the U.S. accounting for over $9.5 trillion
| 1 . If we consider the $5 billion in unauthorized purchases
| reported by Security.org 2 , the percentage of fraudulent
| transactions in the U.S. would be approximately 0.05%.
|
| 1 - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tudQcmL8lNH49iZZ8wRB8
| 8KW...
| lisper wrote:
| > it's not that big of a problem to the people that would
| need to solve it
|
| That's not wrong, but it misses the point. It's not worth
| the bank's time to solve it, but for _me_ it would produce
| a pretty damn good ROI. All I needed was one entry point
| into the system, but I couldn 't find it.
| jocaal wrote:
| It's been a while since I read this article, but I remembered
| the title and it seems to imply that it is relevant
|
| https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
| mritchie712 wrote:
| why is this surprising? If they didn't pass the cost of fraud
| along, they'd all go out of business.
|
| The interchange rate on credit cards is high, but "diabolical"
| is a stretch.
|
| Also, fraud is a very small line item in a credit card P&L.
| Generally 25bps to 50bps vs credit charge offs which are closer
| to 3% to 6%.
|
| Source: Ran risk for Bank of America and a credit card fintech.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > Growing up, I had two major life ambitions: to become a tenured
| university professor, and to found a successful startup company.
|
| why the hell those two?
|
| I eventually - into my thirties- worked out that i wanted to be a
| good computer programmer, and a good photographer. managed the
| first, but not the tatter - two bored.
|
| What I mean, is why did you have those ambitions growing up. I
| don't think most normal young people really can't think what they
| want to do until later in their lives.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| > why the hell those two?
|
| I would guess to be free to pursue interesting ideas, and then
| make money off them.
| zabzonk wrote:
| why tenured? (I can't be sacked?). why startup? (well, why at
| all, but also cannot easily be sacked, should the startup
| actually work).
|
| just my opinion, and not to badmouth, but this sounds like a
| somewhat insecure person.
| dasil003 wrote:
| That's a weird take, he's talking about youthful ambitions.
| Tenured professor is a pretty standard bar for academic
| success, and startup us shorthand for building a scalable
| tech company from scratch. These seem like perfectly
| cromulent ambitions to me, not sure how insecurity enters
| into it or why I would care if it did.
| motoxpro wrote:
| It's just a success metric + an activity
|
| Tenured (metric) + professor (activity).
|
| He defined his, same as you did:
|
| Good (metric) + programmer (activity)
|
| The activity is just what people find interesting and the
| metric is what you strive toward. Imposing the idea that
| the only reason you pursue originality is so that they
| can't get sacked is a very wild take.
| lisper wrote:
| > why the hell those two?
|
| Good question. I could probably write an entire essay about
| that but the TL;DR is that I thought that tenure and financial
| independence were the roads to freedom, which is what I really
| wanted. I also really liked (and still do) the college vibe,
| being surrounded by interesting people thinking and talking
| about interesting and weird stuff.
| nolamark wrote:
| I do hope you write the entire entire essay.
|
| Guess my question is did you have any plans what to do with
| that freedom? Or did the vision just stop with freedom?
|
| Must be I was less ambitious than you. I too started out with
| goal of tenure and financial independence. 3 years in on
| tenure track I figured it was easier just to get financial
| independence and give myself tenure than to play someone's
| game.
|
| One I reached financial independence (probably a much lower
| threshold than your), I didn't have any trouble find trouble
| finding things to fill my days with fulfilling activities
| that I had long put off. Always fun stuff to learn.
|
| So interested to learn if it was that you still had something
| you felt you had to prove? Just plan inertia?
|
| Can really put my finger on it, but what if in "I am (not) a
| failure" essay in addition "Lesson Learned" for each attempt,
| you had a "Joy Experienced" (perhaps too corny) section as
| well.
| lisper wrote:
| > did you have any plans what to do with that freedom?
|
| Yes. I was going to solve really hard problems without any
| pointy-haired bosses standing in my way. I was specifically
| going to solve AI.
|
| > So interested to learn if it was that you still had
| something you felt you had to prove?
|
| It started out that way, but now I've ended up feeling like
| I gave it my best shot, and so I failed because I
| discovered my own limitations rather than any external
| circumstances (with the notable exception of Smart
| Charter). And I'm OK with that.
|
| > what if ... you had a "Joy Experienced" (perhaps too
| corny) section as well.
|
| What I find has given me the biggest dopamine rush over the
| years is _getting something to work_ , especially after
| beating on it for a long time. And that includes small wins
| like fixing a bug in personal code that no one is ever
| going to see, or fixing something around the house, or
| getting something I've written on the front page of HN and
| seeing it well-received. The best way I can think of to
| characterize it is that I like to feel useful. I don't
| think I'm alone in that.
| r_thambapillai wrote:
| I thought this was a very powerful meta learning, something that
| abstracts across all the experiences.
|
| > And I think my current happiness stems mainly from the fact
| that I like the person I've become, someone who can fail again
| and again and again and again and still find a way, for the most
| part, to be happy.
|
| Curious if you have any other learnings that are less specific to
| a particular endeavour but hold tru/derive from your experiences
| across all of them
| lisper wrote:
| Author here. AMA.
| var_cw wrote:
| there seems to be a common theme around not believing in the
| idea/product/people too deeply, thus leading to faulty or mis-
| step execution. would it be right to say that? a contrast to
| others who are not a "failure"?
|
| mad respect to you for being open. thanks for sharing.
| pyb wrote:
| I had the same question reading this. Ron, which was the idea
| you had highest conviction in?
| naijaboiler wrote:
| solve problem people care about, and charge from day 1
| lisper wrote:
| Smart Charter. I think that might still be a viable
| business even today, though I have not really kept up with
| the industry so I don't know.
|
| Ironically, today I have a part-time consulting gig at a
| company designing network switches, and I see them
| wrestling with the exact same problems we were tackling 30
| years ago. So FlowNet would be a very close second.
| lisper wrote:
| > there seems to be a common theme around not believing in
| the idea/product/people too deeply, thus leading to faulty or
| mis-step execution. would it be right to say that?
|
| Not sure whether you're asking whether that sentiment exists
| or if it's correct. But either way, there's no easy answer to
| that. If you don't believe that's not helpful, but on the
| other hand, if your beliefs don't align with reality that's
| not helpful either. It's possible to succeed without strong
| convictions, and it's possible to succeed with convictions
| that don't align with reality, but if you have to choose one
| or the other, believing in yourself is a better than
| believing in reality if your goal is material success. (Look
| at Donald Trump.)
| mfld wrote:
| The last startup was based on a great idea, with obviously high
| potential (see airtable). So why did you stop following that
| idea so early?
| lisper wrote:
| Because I'm not a bizdev guy, so when my partner, who was the
| bizdev guy, had to quit, and we had no customers, the odds of
| success seemed too low for me to deem it worth the effort to
| continue.
| LAMike wrote:
| Did you buy any Bitcoin for long term investment?
| lisper wrote:
| No. That's another long story. I think bitcoin is basically a
| scam. (That's another essay I should probably write.)
|
| This is not to say you can't make money at it. People make
| money on scams all the time. One might argue that it's a
| foundational element of the American economy. But when it
| comes to bitcoin, I understand the technology and its
| attendant risks too well for me to want to play that game.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| I encourage you to expand on "In the real world, research is
| not a Platonic quest for objective truth" maybe by writing
| another article or linking what others wrote on a similar
| subject.
|
| This is an incredibly common pitfall that people fall into time
| and again. Hell, even I am getting these vibes with all that
| recent hype about deep learning - despite I am no stranger to
| academia (in another area and some years back).
| lisper wrote:
| I don't know that I have all that much to say about it.
| Research is (at least to date) a human activity and so it is
| necessarily beset with human foibles. It requires resources,
| so it necessarily involves economics, which necessarily
| involves politics. It's not rocket science. Anyone who thinks
| about it for even a moment can figure this out without my
| help.
|
| > recent hype about deep learning
|
| Does anyone really look at contemporary AI as a Platonic
| quest for objective truth? It seems to me that there is
| pretty widespread clarity about the fact that this is mostly
| a commercial endeavor. If you want to talk about Platonic
| quests for objective truth we should talk about, say,
| mathematics or fundamental physics.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| > Does anyone really look at contemporary AI as a Platonic
| quest for objective truth?
|
| I realize I have a tendency to romanticize some of the
| papers I read even if I fully understand intellectually it
| is a wrong thing to do. Probably I should try concsiously
| train myself not to do it or something along these lines.
|
| My experience tells me if I have a question or an issue
| it's very unlikely to be unique to myself. And (re-)reading
| an honest or even cynical account about something typically
| helps e.g. ribbonfarm on corporate hierarchies/politics.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| BTW I really enjoyed your recent open letter
|
| https://blog.rongarret.info/2025/01/an-open-letter-to-
| democr...
| paul7986 wrote:
| Failure here too I guess but my downfall per my experiences in
| dealing with many who made it to the biggest names in tech is my
| morality. I can't lie/cheat/steamroll over ppl to get to the top.
| sinoue wrote:
| What a fun read. I hope you'll try again!
|
| "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use
| being a damn fool about it." -- W.C. Fields
| hinkley wrote:
| Despair.com poster:
|
| Quitters never win. Winners never quit. People who never win
| and never quit are stupid.
| lisper wrote:
| > What a fun read.
|
| Thanks!
|
| > I hope you'll try again!
|
| Thanks for the encouragement, but I just turned 60. Running a
| company is too demanding for me to try it again. My ambition
| now is to be a writer and find an audience that wants learn the
| easy way things that I had to learn the hard way.
| xn wrote:
| Hey Ron. I've enjoyed following your blogging since we
| crossed paths 20 years ago at Indiebuyer/Zerolag. I'm happy
| to hear you're doing well, and wish you the best for the next
| 20 years.
| lisper wrote:
| Thanks! I miss ZeroLag. You guys were the best.
| latchkey wrote:
| > But we couldn't figure out a way to procure drivers.
|
| I briefly worked for Grab the company, which was another SE Asia
| "Uber". Among other things, at one point they procured drivers in
| Saigon by giving the wives/families free chicken meat. This way,
| they could prepare the drivers meals to take while they were out
| on the road all day long.
|
| Kind of a local spin on tech workers free meals.
| not2b wrote:
| Multiple "diabolical" (his word, not mine) plans to fool people
| about what the business really is (an attempt to get in the door
| with one pitch, then pivot to the real plan and steal their
| lunch) did not work out. Sorry about that, but putting out this
| post won't help this guy execute on similar plans in the future.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| That's just business. I can't think of any business that's not
| set out to displace some other business, whether by competition
| or simply elimination.
| redcobra762 wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious as to what gave you the impression that
| he intends to try again. I read this as a brief little memoir
| of a man who has since moved on to bigger and better things.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| building a business is much more than having a great idea. Its a
| different skill by itself. Skills PhD's don't prepare you for.
| jfengel wrote:
| My main lesson from running a startup: don't. And if you do, quit
| when the going gets tough. Perseverance does not pay off.
|
| Obviously it doesn't always end badly. But we get a massively
| skewed view from survivor bias.
|
| My life turned out pretty damn well once I got a plain ordinary
| job working for someone else. But I don't kid myself: when it
| comes to starting a startup, I did fail. The main lesson I
| learned was that I was always going to.
| seany62 wrote:
| > My main lesson from running a startup: don't.
|
| I hear this a lot and I think it is good advice because the
| only person who should actually start a startup is the one who
| sees this but still does it.
| cheinic63892 wrote:
| > My main lesson from running a startup: don't.
|
| Worse than failing is not trying.
|
| You will live your life always wondering "what if".
|
| When you fail, you will have an answer to the above question
| and can live in peace.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| It depends. Why do you want to start something? Do you really
| believe in it? I mean there's got to be a certain set of
| "hell yes" questions that need to be answered in the
| affirmative.
|
| Otherwise you're not missing much. Work for something that
| pays well, solve interesting problems, spend time at home
| with your family and friends. The problem is when you're
| wanting to start something because someone else did it and
| don't have the implementation or execution perseverance (or
| just don't believe in it strongly).
| z33k wrote:
| Worse than not trying is trying and experiencing burnout
| and/or destitution.
|
| When you fail, it can be due to many things. Not everything
| in the world is controllable. This is one of the reasons why
| expecting zero "What ifs" at the end of your post-mortem is
| unreasonable.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Most people don't want to start a business. They might
| fantasize but it's not something they would enjoy doing. It's
| fine to realize you have other goals and to work on them
| instead.
| makerdiety wrote:
| This (very popular) sentiment you have can basically be
| abstracted into the "fear of missing out" meme. It's an
| unnecessary predicate, it's founded on presupposition and
| bias, and it's really detrimental to all serious long term
| analyses.
|
| There's no proof that this personal feeling should be
| listened to or given behavioral authority, especially when it
| suspiciously conforms to the aesthetic that is widely shared
| by many who end up having only achieved a mundane life,
| despite "noble" projects launched because of arrogant egos.
| This social phenomenon which sponsors the freedom and agency
| of people fit only to be busy drones is wasting global
| resources on bourgeois affairs. Elon Musk and his eventual
| epic failure at super-industrialism is a great example of
| this harmful sinful pride.
|
| The "what if" has only served to help overvalue ordinary
| potential, when that capability should have been limited to
| simple tasks, industries, and affairs. It's a mind virus
| riding on the waves of language and the beastly body of
| rationality, a false reality having been successfully
| disguised as a legitimate object to perceive within the
| cognitive sphere of humanity. It is deviation that surely has
| contributed to the collapse of the great liberal humanism
| project, the real goal of democracy and its encompassing
| civilization having been the quiet and stable enslavement of
| a massive surplus of dull brains and basic bodies. A mass of
| uninteresting genetic carriers who would do well to never
| worry about what is outside the scope of their common
| destinies.
|
| The dialectic that there can be morbid peace if you would
| just test out the hypothesis that you can become a great man
| is an incomprehensibly devised thinking trap that can filter
| out men who don't know what the fuck is going on in the grand
| universe.
|
| But God (or simply nature) works in mysterious ways and I'm
| glad that hubris was created to serve as an instrument for
| learning what not to ever do. And to materially benefit from,
| salvaging from the failures of future past technologies being
| a huge possibility to leverage. Your supposed tragedy is my
| informed opportunity, to paraphrase Jeff Bezos.
|
| EDIT: If you ever invent warp drive or faster than light
| travel or functional nuclear fusion, I'll be looking forward
| to the blueprints of such treasures and strategic advantages
| ;)
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Nope. I never lived one minute wanting to either start a
| business or be an early employee at one - I'm 50.
| solumos wrote:
| Assuming that the process of failing doesn't cost you your
| peace -- which is certainly a risk.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm on the ordinary working job track. I like it.
|
| But if you're young, got the time ... I think it's worth a
| shot, or two, or more.
| jrockway wrote:
| I think there are upsides and downsides to starting young. On
| the one hand, you don't have much to lose, so failure is
| softer. On the other hand, you're missing some experience
| that would be useful.
|
| I worked for a startup whose founder was a super young guy
| who had never had a job before being CEO. He was missing
| experiences like "what do I hate when my boss does" and so
| needed to repeat all the same mistakes. This resulted in
| things like... postmortem reviews with action items like "we
| should dock people's pay if installs are done incorrectly"
| instead of "we should ensure that the install crews have the
| tools they need to do the install correctly". (That action
| item was one of the few battles there that I won. We gave
| every installer a toolbox containing the tools to do the job.
| This improved the success of installs greatly. But who needs
| a meeting to come up with an "idea" like this?)
| duxup wrote:
| At least if young you got the energy, time, usually fewer
| family obligations, maybe even naive enough to do something
| others won't (as a good thing) and ... you know if that's
| the lifestyle you want.
|
| But I hear you starting at zero life experience, that is
| bad. I would find it pretty painful to work at a start up
| and have to talk to the founder "bro let's talk about the
| basics of picking your battles" and do it ... well.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| It's still not worth it. If you can get into a well paying
| BigTech company, save aggressively and let the time value of
| money be your friend, it statistically will make much more
| sense to do that.
| liontwist wrote:
| Minor irritation: That's not what time value of money
| means.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| It is. It's better to have made enough to save $300K when
| you're 25 and put it in the stock market and let it grow
| than make $300K when your 50. $300K is worth more when
| you're 25 and retiring at 65, than it is when you're 55.
|
| "The time value of money (TVM) is a financial principle
| that states that money in the present is worth more than
| the same amount in the future."
| liontwist wrote:
| It's a subtle point, but it's backwards.
|
| Money is worth more NOW so you can spend it to acquire
| skills, resources, and goods. If you wait then you are
| living life without those things. And delaying early
| strategic wins.
|
| Passive investing is renting out that optionality to
| other people, like starting a 401k early.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Money is worth more now because it can be invested and
| grow in the future instead of getting more money in the
| future that is worth less because you have to take into
| account either inflation or what the money could have
| made even if you are just looking at the risk free
| returns - ie discounted cash flows
| liontwist wrote:
| > Money is worth more now because it can be invested and
| grow in the future
|
| This is circular. Why would money magically get more
| valuable in the future?
|
| Money is valuable for its uses, not intrinsically.
|
| The reason why you can get interest on money is because
| people and businesses need it NOW to do productive
| things, more badly than in the future.
|
| This is the entire principle behind discounting cash
| flows.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I'm starting to think you really need to be well connected or
| at least come from an upper class background to win here.
|
| Steve Jobs is sort of an exception here, not only was he
| adopted , but he was adopted by a very middle-class family .
|
| I find myself really good at developing small apps, but very
| bad when it comes to the business side. I would love to find
| someone to work with who's good with business. But so far I've
| just been time scammed a few times by morons who come up with
| insanely impractical ideas .
|
| And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want to
| give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're able
| to build the entire thing out from scratch. If you discuss
| modest technical limitations they'll berate you for corrupting
| their vision.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I'm starting to think you really need to be well connected
| or at least come from an upper class background to win here.
|
| In my local startup community there are a lot of
| entrepreneurs and small startups founded by MBA students and
| recent college grads who clearly come from wealthy
| backgrounds. Nearly all of them either fail quickly or
| continue for years without getting any traction beyond their
| parents' connections' businesses.
|
| The other side of being wealthy and well connected is that
| it's really tempting to fall back on a job with your family
| connections or to play startup for a few years while burning
| through "seed" money from the family without the real
| pressure of needing your startup to succeed.
|
| > And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want
| to give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're
| able to build the entire thing out from scratch.
|
| There are a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs who need a cofounder
| but don't want to give cofounder equity.
|
| The majority of successful founders and founding engineers I
| know had past working experience together. There are
| exceptions, but most of the time when someone goes searching
| for a cofounder or founding engineers because they don't have
| anyone in their network, it doesn't work out. It can work and
| does sometimes, but it's so rare that I'm very surprised to
| hear success stories.
|
| There are just too many people in the startup community
| looking to "hustle" their way into an MVP without giving
| anything up in the process. Also a lot of people who want to
| be "cofounders" and get 50% of your company in exchange for
| doing as little work as they can.
|
| I was in a startup Slack for a while. Every other week
| someone would come in asking for advice about how to evict a
| deadbeat "cofounder" from their company who had secured 1/2
| or 1/3 of the equity but wasn't contributing anywhere near
| the other cofounders.
| octopoc wrote:
| I wonder if there's a market for "work swapping" where
| founders of two separate companies will trade work without
| trading equity.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| At that point just pay me.
|
| If my normal billable rate is 70$ an hour I might offer a
| discount if your project is really neat.
|
| But I've never seen that, I've seen people wanting to me
| to sign contracts would say I will donate time, and these
| are never people who are realistic about what their
| chances are. You get all this hype where they claim
| someone offered them 100K just for the idea, but when you
| ask for $100 a month to host the server they don't have
| it .
| hylaride wrote:
| Steve Jobs was connected: By being raised in Silicon Valley
| at just the right time. He even had a story (who knows how
| true it is) of him as a kid looking up Bill Hewlett in the
| phone book and asking about electronics parts (a frequency
| counter IIRC) and Bill not only got him the part, but gave
| him a summer job.
|
| As for business, many successful tech entrepreneurs "learn"
| it either as they go or by bringing on business experts, but
| not giving them full control. For larger examples of the
| latter, see Eric Schmidt as the "adult in the room" for
| Google, Sheryl Sandberg for Facebook.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| If you had to look up someone in the phone book you by
| definition aren't connected.
|
| Connected is when your Mom knows the chairman of IBM. Like
| with Gates.
| liontwist wrote:
| You have the agency to try to contact powerful people too,
| but you don't.
| jongjong wrote:
| Yes, the social aspect is significant. It's not so much about
| innovating and strategizing as much as it is about playing
| politics with rich people and hope that they let you build a
| successful product. Let's face it, rich people make all the
| decisions. If you're not rich, it's all about socializing and
| luck for you. It's hard to find a rich person who will let
| you implement your vision and actually control your destiny.
| It's demoralizing TBH.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Jobs got his start in a tiny industry (tech was decently big
| already, but PCs were not) poised on the edge of massive
| growth as technology got to the point where you could build
| machines people would actually buy. And there was a huge
| moat, as the necessary talent was rare. And even within that
| rare talent, Jobs had the unique advantage of being able to
| partner with Woz.
|
| Nothing you can do today with a typical HN skill set will
| come even close to that. There are thousands (at least) of
| people with those skills. They can build it too, whatever it
| is. You're not Woz and you don't know a Woz. Likely there is
| no Woz today; everything computing is so much more
| specialized and complicated and layered and just plain big.
| You may be able to find success in this world, but it won't
| be replicating the Jobs story.
| financltravsty wrote:
| Always baffled me how little commercial sense HNers had when I
| was growing up and reading this forum.
|
| It's as if no one taught them -- or they just don't have the
| sense for it? -- that a startup is just a vehicle to make
| money. There's nothing special about it. You can make lots of
| money without a "startup." You can make lots of money doing
| many different things even without a business entity. It's just
| an abstraction for linguistic convenience.
|
| My biggest wakeup was finding people much less educated and
| much less intellectually gifted and much less socioeconmically
| privileged making a lot more money than what could be
| considered their betters in more prestigious and, on the
| surface, well remunerated professions.
|
| If you don't want to make money, don't go into business. Stay
| at your job and grind a career out. If you have the desire to
| make money, your senses will naturally sharpen as you use them
| more to achieve that end. Otherwise, if you go and "build a
| startup" for any other reason than making money you will fail
| barring extraneous circumstances.
|
| Baffling that this isn't common sense, really. But my fault. I
| keep forgetting a professional forum is just a proverbial water
| cooler, where you get to see a wide mix of people in your
| profession -- and all the different backgrounds, values, ideas,
| and ways of seeing the world -- most of which are continuous
| works in progress that culminate only at death.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Would you feel the same way if you had effectively infinite
| money? (e.g. you were Bill Gates' secret daughter he sends a
| million to each month).
| makerdiety wrote:
| You don't ever have to worry about survivor bias from me.
| Because I know not to esteem highly those men who believe that
| family formation and a business enterprise building commitment
| can both exist at the same time.
|
| Either you devote your entire being to the invasive alien job
| that is learning how to extract value from civilization's
| economically receptive citizens or you pack up your bags and
| head back home on the plane that can depart from the place
| where great men are selected and trained. Being a startup
| founder is much, much more intense than some special forces
| soldier life. You learn better values and habits than some punk
| that will have peaked at the earning of the title of U.S.
| Marine, to use a stark contrasting example. Or a black ops
| Delta Force guy who just has to navigate a huge forest in the
| dark on the dangerous way back to friendly territory, while the
| compared startup founder needs to develop an entire science for
| the navigation of profitable markets that no human has ever
| seen before, let alone taken advantage of before. A nerd like
| Richard Feynman can be much more tougher than someone that can
| do a thousand pushups without stopping and shoot an M4 carbine
| at a target 900 meters away.
|
| Is Elon Musk even a good example of a successful startup
| founder or businessman, despite his billionaire status? Logical
| skepticism says no. And the brainwashing that popular ideology
| does says yes.
|
| After all, didn't Elon Musk fuck and impregnate some bitches
| during his rise to a big bank account? He could have been using
| that time and energy to colonize Mars before this twenty-first
| century ends. He's not serious about what he says he wants. A
| terrible role model to look up to.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| I've heard from top investors that the best companies usually get
| immediate and rapid traction. Sometimes theres a figma story
| where it takes a while, but thats usually BS. Generally either
| the product is right, or its not, and you know very quickly.
|
| They usually dont want to tell founders this, they want them to
| struggle through in the off chance it works
| Ecoste wrote:
| Thanks for the interesting read! How did you support yourself
| through all of the failed startups?
| anonnon wrote:
| > To this day I'm pretty sure that plan would have worked if we
| had actually executed it. It was a brilliant plan if I do say so
| myself. In fact, it was so brilliant that it convinced Richard
| Branson to acquire the company before we launched for $10M. We
| started the company as Smart Charter, but we launched as Virgin
| Charter.
|
| It's noteworthy that he's portraying selling before launch as a
| failure, and while ultimately the acquirer didn't follow his
| vision and the business didn't pan out (and perhaps the author
| never even got to liquidate his shares), it's still arguably more
| of a success than Loopt (raised $39M, sold for $43.4M), which Sam
| Altman and his backers had no reservations about portraying as a
| huge success that springboarded him to YC president and later to
| AI kingmaker.
| morgante wrote:
| It's interesting how at least several of the failures were good
| ideas with bad timing/execution that others have replicated
| successfully.
|
| iCab: Uber obviously was very successful with this ~same premise
|
| Smart Charter: I assume you can easily book a private jet online
| now?
|
| Founder's Forge: linking record-keeping and payment is what makes
| Ramp great; 10 years of fintech innovations made executing this
| much easier
|
| Spark Innovations: this is basically the premise of Airtable
| rsanek wrote:
| As they say: ideas are easy, execution is everything.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| ideas are cheap. everyone has them. building a succesful
| business out of ideas is hard. really hard.
| s__s wrote:
| It's honestly both. A good idea that's actually feasible and
| has some kind of moat is extremely hard to come by.
| antidamage wrote:
| Most things that are new but not working can be solved by "I
| should try this again later" after the landscape has changed a
| little, whether that's supporting technologies, how receptive
| your market is, if your market even exists yet.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > Spark Innovations
|
| As I understand it, the competitor in this space is Anaplan.
| NickC25 wrote:
| Of course you're not a failure. You still put food on the table,
| provide for your loved ones, and have a roof over your head.
|
| You've got battle scars, and stories that are worth their weight
| in gold. Your experience is probably extremely useful for the
| right startup.
| justmarc wrote:
| Winston Churchill's words, "Success consists of going from
| failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| There are many reasons to do a startup, but people should only
| call it a business when the goal is either a tax deduction
| mitigation and or rapid entry into profit traction.
|
| 1. Don't use some clever or hard to remember name with a weird
| spelling. While easier to Trademark, the users and customers
| won't differentiate your site from the sea of attention grabbing
| garbage.
|
| 2. If people have zero paying customers, and zero revenue... than
| the hard fact is they were never in business, and should have
| founded a nonprofit instead (common for opensource support
| service entities.)
|
| 3. Often copyright and patents are infeasible for small business,
| and people simply can't build or defend things like a large firm.
| Thus, initially design products/services to last maybe a year or
| simply be disposable... When 270 desperate cloners show up to
| dilute the market sector... people quickly understand why they
| can't rely on Android, Steam, or Apple ecosystems to protect
| their bottom line.
|
| 4. There is zero loyalty without treasure. The only people that
| care if your firm goes into the red is you, and maybe the small-
| time shareholders. Most people can't take the constant
| adversarial posture with problematic staff, opinionated
| shareholders, and high-demand customers. Everyone thinks a CEO is
| lame till you become a CEO for a year or two... Every
| conversation from that point on is about money or marketing, and
| most people keen on building things tend to burn out of the role
| eventually due to social isolation.
|
| 5. No company lasts forever, if the operation is a projected
| liability it is your job to respond accordingly. Even if that
| means executing an exit strategy, and firing the entire
| problematic division.
|
| 6. Ask business people about their memorable experiences, and not
| about their money source. The superficial apparent function of a
| business is usually very different from the actual revenue model.
|
| Best of luck, =3
| antics wrote:
| There is one other way in which you are not a failure, and I am
| sure that I am not alone in thinking about it: I have been
| reading your words for 15 years, from the time I was a baby CS
| major. That's really true, _e.g._ , here[1] is a comment from 11
| years ago where I mentioned that a lisp you wrote for the Apple
| //e informed a lisp for the Apple //e that I wrote.
|
| Especially in my college years (2009-2013, ish), the world seemed
| smaller, and to me, a lot of what you wrote was like looking
| through a keyhole into the real world. Grown-ups can apparently
| write lisp at JPL[2]! Google was chaotic[3][4][5][6] to work in
| 2000, especially if you commuted from Burbank. A name change[7].
| And, variously, surveillance, more lisp stuff, _etc_. Now I 'm an
| adult and I still haven't professionally written lisp, but I'm
| glad to have read about it anyway.
|
| Anyway, it might surprise you to learn that when I think of your
| writing, though, I think of your HN comments first. There is a
| kind of influence that you can only get with a steady, unthanked
| build-up of seemingly-small contributions over a long period of
| time. In the right place they compound. I probably cite you to
| other engineers once a month or so.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6199857#6200414 [2]:
| https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html [3]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20080212170839/https://xooglers....
| [4]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20090408003924/http://xooglers.b...
| [5]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20090408013612/http://xooglers.b...
| [6]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20090408003913/http://xooglers.b...
| [7]: https://flownet.com/ron/eg-rg-faq.html
| chasing wrote:
| Also remember that your fail state might be someone else's
| success state. Like being part of an IPO that lets you spend the
| majority of the rest of your career working in your own ideas.
| yapyap wrote:
| (n+1)th time's the charm
| mindwok wrote:
| Thanks for writing this, I enjoyed every one of these. Something
| that jumped out at me from these attempts is the lesson that when
| you want to take on an entrenched business model, you need to do
| it in a way that isn't directly at odds with the existing model.
| Secondly, you seemed to learn that and apply it brilliantly. I
| would love to know what went on behind the scenes of those banks
| deciding to pull the pin on your idea for startup forge.
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