My luck of course is that my parents were brilliant observers and educators (just lacked any financial background.) Just unplugged from material humanity due to their respective upbringing. Which was lovely, and in many ways very wholesome, but killed them and devastated my family in the end, I still miss them dearly.
Can confirm the Michael O'Church quote.
Long before I had financial security I learned to code switch, to present that demurring, almost embarrassed and indifferent attitude towards money, if you met me in person I can come across as a pretty standard tech bro from a wealthy background. It helps immensely with the leverage imbalance, to appear as an almost gadfly, but it's all very complicated and there are trade offs and unlearned implicit things that I don't have an intuitive grasp on.
I don't really talk about poverty and climbing out of it except on HN, it's usually not personally fruitful and not part of my daily headspace. Everything is smoother when you focus on the similarities of your conversation partners and commonalities. We are all one humanity after all, even if not everyone grasps the depth of that truth.
Instead, he was gunned down for pointing out the nonexistence of meritocracy in the startup world. He certainly wasn't the first to figure it out, and he wasn't the first to say it, but he was for whatever reason the one who turned it into common knowledge.
I wonder where he is now and I hope his book (Farisa's Crossing, is it called?) lives up to the hype.
>I think the fact that "who you are" in these cases implicitly includes a persons network [...]
Yes, you're right, in some sense a person with a good pedigree is bringing these implicit connections to the table, and that has value, for sure. But then that leaves outside the other 90% of people who do not pass that litmus test.
And then, some bad patterns emerge, like this one pointed out by our beloved Michael O. Church: https://twitter.com/MichaelOChurch/status/149157622891411456...