AstroChimpHam

Engineer turned B2B founder here. I've sold to a lot of large $100M+/year businesses at this point, so feel decently qualified to answer this question. The top three things that helped me:

1. Listen to yourself pitch. Ask people you talk to if it's OK to record the pitch and then listen to it repeatedly and take notes. It will be painful, and you'll notice so many things you hate, but you will get better. This is the number one thing that helped me get better.

2. Understand your customer. Really understand them. What are their hopes with buying your product? What are their fears if they make the wrong choice, or no choice at all? The stuff that's really at the core of these questions-- it's deep, personal, often embarrassing stuff people won't just tell you. Getting at this sort of thing is a skill. If you do it well, you'll not only sell better, you'll have a better sales process, and probably a better product.

3. Read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28815.Influence) by Robert Cialdini. If you're a former engineer, you'll especially love this book. It helps you understand how people tick, including yourself, and some of the techniques your competition are probably using.

Finally, don't be an asshole. It's so easy when you get good at sales to view the sale itself as the goal. It shouldn't be. The goal should be solving the customer's problem. Getting the sale is the first step, but make sure you only get it if you can genuinely help the customer-- if the customer will be thrilled they bought from you a month from now. The world has too many assholes willing to sell people the wrong thing for them. Don't be another one.

I don't know why more people don't say this. I agree 1000%. This should absolutely be the case. Why should anyone have a lower probability of winning a lawsuit just because they're poor?

Posting about how they're going to take over delivery while being investigated for antitrust stuff is an interesting choice.

Save money. Get a job that pays as much as possible, even if it has shitty clauses around side projects, and just save as much money as you can. When you have 1-2 years of nest egg saved up (might be eating ramen, etc), then quit and go work on your company.

This already happened on healthcare. He already has a healthcare initiative: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/20/dr-atul-gawande-to-lead-buff....

The thing to bear in mind with this is they're all constantly looking at a bunch of other initiatives before jumping in, so if one of these people had a comment to a reporter on just about anything it's probably not the first time they're thinking about that subject.

Snarky comments aside, Zuckerberg built a massive ads business from scratch, not previously knowing anything about ads. He built a massive social network from scratch, not knowing anything previously about social.

Bezos built the biggest e-commerce business in the world, never having worked in e-commerce or retail before. And seems to be doing some impressive stuff at Blue Origin, not knowing anything about space travel.

That's all not to mention Musk, who goes from new industry to new industry, building successful businesses that fundamentally change those industries, without previously knowing anything about those industries.

These are incredibly impressive accomplishments. They've proven their bonafides for solving general problems in fields they weren't previously familiar with, probably more than just about anyone else in the world.

I've had this thought before, but always come back to what happens after they hit that limit?

> but, he asked, why should they be treated as sagacious experts when they come from a completely different arena

Because they have a history of getting impressive shit done. Not complained about, but actually done. And they have the will to get it done, and a bunch of capital to put behind that will, even if they were taxed at whatever ridiculously high rate Giridharadas wants them taxed at.

Giridharadas is welcome to disagree with successful people, but they've at this point proven their opinions do tend to matter when it comes to shaping the country whether we want to pay attention or not.

This is a really fair question. Amazon doesn't do it well, but just about no one currently does it better. It's like looking at Yahoo or AltaVista before Google came out and saying they're plenty successful without having incredible search.

Of course, it's not the same, and retailers need to do a hundred other things correctly as well, but there is a lot of data to show that people go where the good search is.

Founder here. It's a probabilistic problem from the perspective of solving personalization. If you tend to want something different after trying the same thing a bunch of times, the algorithm should learn that as well-- that's also personalization.

There's also been a ton of research done that most consumers do want personalized experiences, will pay more for them, and will be more likely to churn if they don't have them. There's a pretty good list at https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/18/hyper-personalization-mar....

Some examples from that article:

>>> Forrester uncovered the fact that 77 percent of consumers have chosen, recommended, or even paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience.

Accenture found that 75 percent of consumers are more likely to buy when you show you recognize them as an individual and provide recommendations based on their unique wants and needs.

The author focuses on the generalists who did great things, but ignores the specialists who do important work, and speaks nothing of the many jack-of-all-trades who can’t find a job because their knowledge isn’t deep enough in any valuable area. If anything, most of the people I’ve seen not hired and let go has been due to not enough specialized knowledge, and this preventing them from being effective.

The software engineer unemployment rate in the US is something like 1.6%. Engineers who specialize in self-driving cars get paid absurd amounts because there aren’t enough of them. We need more specialists, not generalists. If they’re specialists in more than one thing, that’s even better, but it’s not the main problem.

What does this do that Percona's pt-online-schema-change tool doesn't do?

sure :)

People downvoted you because you're saying they want Uber to burn due to sensationalism and not because it's a genuinely bad company. It sounds condescending and probably pissed people off.

I have a number of acquaintances in the situation where they tried to go out and raise a proper Bay Area seed of $1-1.5m, got told they needed more traction, and wound up giving up part of the way through, stopping the round at ~$300k and calling it an angel. Then, traction appears and they come back to finish that initial seed round. Every time I've heard of this happening, the issue was investors becoming more careful with their money rather than founders underestimating how much money they'd need.

Small sample size and all, but if this is the way things are going, it'd be a good thing and force more founders to focus on metrics that matter early.

Cython looks like typed Python. Crystal looks like typed Ruby. Both are compiled, and both are not quite as fast as C, but much faster than the language they're based off of. The point of both is to be able to write something that looks like a clean scripting language while getting close to the speed of C. Was that unclear, or are you just trolling?

So, this is like Ruby's answer to cython?

She's a great writer, but wow is she wrong about everything. In her head, the market decides Candy Crush is $7b because a few VCs decided so. That's not how this works. The market is willing to pay $7b for Candy Crush because millions upon millions of people download it, enjoy it, and look at ads on it, which generate revenue. At the same time, those users' enjoyment is the value it created.

Holly doesn't think that's real value. She thinks she's a better judge of what value is and isn't. And that's where this becomes hilarious. Because Paul Graham respects "the poors" to spend their money and time on what they think is worthwhile. But not Holly Wood. She thinks that millions of people downloading and using and enjoying Candy Crush isn't valuable because she personally thinks Candy Crush is a stupid waste of time. She knows what's really good for people. Those people themselves, they have no idea.

No wonder she hates libertarians. She's a totalitarian. And the funniest part for the rest of us is she doesn't know it.

PG started off talking about the fragmentation in politics, and I wish he would have wrapped that back in at the end. It feels to me like the two party system in the US is dying now as the oligopolistic system of just a few big companies began dying in the 90s.

The two party political system is more unnatural than the few-big-companies system. Libertarians and Evangelicals agree on very little yet they've been voting for the same party for years. Proponents of extreme reform on the other side don't want to vote for a moderate candidate. A Trump vs Clinton election is going to leave too many people without a candidate and force the beginning of the end of the two party system.

I'm a long time Python user and I still tend to go for 2.7 over 3. When writing packages, I'll add support for 3 as an afterthought, but that's it.

The main reason for this and the main reason I prefer Python to other languages is the excellent and complete ecosystem of libraries. I've never seen a single Python library I wanted to use in the last 8 years that didn't have support for Python 2.7. I still run into those that don't support Python 3 well. So, using Python 3 means being terrified that I run into a case later on where I need to use some package that only supports 2.7 and I get stuck. With all of the other potential problems to run into while coding, why would I want to add that extra one, especially for something work-related?

I imagine this will continue being an issue until some major packages stop supporting Python 2.7 entirely and force people to make a choice.

When did I say it's OK to take advantage of anyone? Of course it's not. All I said is I'm willing to take a $10k-$20k pay cut to work at a start-up I find fulfilling instead of going to work at Google. Why do you think this trade is unfair?

Those investors are trusting you with a lot of money. They put in seed money these days at $5m-$10m pre-money valuation. If any of my employees come in asking to trade $50k-$100k of salary for an extra percent of the company during the first year, I'm happy to make them that deal.

After the founder who went a year getting paid negative money, the investor putting $1m in their dream and valuing it at $5m-$10m is taking the next highest amount of risk, and I have no problem with the reward they get in exchange.

No idea where you got that many-most figure. I hang out with a lot of founders. Don't know any except for repeat founders who get founded pre-product. Not saying it doesn't happen, but it's rare, and finding that Angel to fund you that early is not easy.

Agree they deserve a good part of it. My qualm is mostly around what "good" is. Employee #50 making $350k off a success doesn't feel like like a tragedy to me. If employee #5 made that at Box, I'd be upset too.

I disagree strongly about your characterization of risk. Long run losing of $10k for 10 years is nothing like losing salary completely for a year. Unless you've been very good with money, taking a year with no salary in the Bay Area means Ramen. That year is also the start-up's most risky and the one with the least support. Most of the time when I hear these arguments it's from employees who have never tried founding. People who've tried both and know how difficult it is to keep yourself going for a year making nothing and trying to convince someone to pay for what you made don't think the equity split is unfair anymore-- even when they go back to being employees.

I'm a former employee and now a founder. As an employee I always had a paycheck and could easily leave any time I wanted. As a founder, I spent a year with no salary, paying for servers out of pocket, and stuck with the company because we had paying customers who depend on us. As an employee, I risked maybe $10k of salary vs working elsewhere. As a founder I risked ALL OF IT. I'm making a much bigger risk as a founder than as an employee, so yeah, I expect much bigger rewards. I thought my equity and salary were fair as an employee and I think they're fair now as a founder.

There's no problem either way. If you want that big paycheck, enjoy ad tech or high-frequency trading. I'm not judging you. But if you come into a start-up, both the founder and the employee should be clear that more money can be made elsewhere. The start-up is for someone who wants that romantic lifestyle. They still will earn plenty of money, but no, it won't be as much as you'll make at [insert-huge-company-here], and that's OK.

It sounds like Box dude from the story had a very cool experience building a company from 50 people to 1,000. I'm sorry all he thinks he got out of it are his stock options.