sidman

I quit my job just over 1 year ago to work for myself, to do some consulting work and improve on a website that I had knocked up with a mate over 2 weekends and see where it would take us and we are doing OK.

I felt I got the same treatment as the original poster did (quiet pity & the why's) but I didn't care it was/is low risk and if worse come to worse I will get a job again if I feel things really aren't going the way I want. One of my friends even asked, "do you like money and want to get rich so much that you are willing to leave your job that is stable and go out on your own". I think the assumption for everyone who doesn't know about the love of working with tech is that its done just for the money only not because its so fun and challenging to some of us.

I responded by saying that I actually like money less then he did because I was willing to go for 2 years (if needed) without stable income or money to do the things I like (within and outside of tech), the way I figure, this shows less of a desire for money then someone who wakes up everyday hating what they are doing just for the money when they don't have the kids and a wife ?!

One of the advantaged that I didn't realise about quitting was other then being able to do the work that you want to make $$$ (work that replaces your 9-5) you end up with much more time because you are able arrange your time appropriately and the time wasted on ridiculous meetings, coffee breaks, friday drinks the 2hr total train ride everyday and the complete drain at the end of the day that just leaves you wanting to veg-out after work and not do anything was no longer there. At the moment after I get a piece of work done and I am happy with it I move onto the next thing whether it is a "work related" task or "something fun" (like going to the beach for instance).

When I had that additional time the one big issue I had was trying not to feel guilty about not working on the tasks that I was doing to replace my previous day job and force every bit of work in any free time BUT once I was able to get over this I managed to pick up a new sport a new language and learn many things that I feel has enriched my life so much more.

What i kinda learnt is sometimes you quit work because of the usual HN reasons, to do a startup, work for your self but for me specifically because I didn't have to waste so much time I ended up discovering lots of other things that makes life awesome. Unless i really need it and things go south in a big way, living life with much less salary as before but with this additional freedom is so much better. I guess its good to enjoy this whilst you can for those that can because when kids come along being a responsible adult things will obviously have to be different.

Yes I remember the 90's and how scary it was (the idea of contracting HIV). I wonder how children born in the 90's see it and whether they still view it as we did when we learnt about HIV and Aids in the 90's.

I also remember as a kid the news when Magic johnson made his announcement and thinking , dam he is gonna die really soon, not knowing that decades later he is still doing well.

May I ask, i felt the same way but I myself am not much of a facebooker who likes t share his life, post on twitter or post on pinterest.

Maybe its just me but all those ideas are the same arn't they ? They just need enough people to participate and it becomes fun, meaning its enough for people to come back. If people all left facebook there would be no reason to post status updates anymore, same goes for twitter. They dont actually have the kind of value that people are willing to open their wallets for (and people dont, im sure if facebook started to charge for their accounts many people would leave). In the case of listnerd isnt it the same. If the marketing efforts are good enough then why couldn't it follow the same trajectory as the other social sharing apps?

Personally I have always wondered why people want to share their life online and hence why I personally dont have an interest in social sharing apps but many people do. Now people are more open online then with their own families and this is just another different way to share so my question is what makes this different then any of the other social (post what im interested in) sites that have been so successful over the last couple of years ?

Don't like the title, should probably be more like "Be flexible with your consistency"

You can't be inconsistent and learn say a language (programming or otherwise), or even learn how to be a good entrepreneur, you got to be consistent and keep at it, just be flexible with the information that you receive and be willing to change your ways if you need to.

> but if you want the next Facebook, you're not going to get it by investing in, say, Codecademy, which, as laudable as its goals are, only appeals to newbie coders, who are a tiny slice of the population

Well you would just never know. Computer science and software engineering could become part of the basic school curriculum in the next few years. In the news you see that "the 14 year old boy developed an X for the iPhone and is now a millionaire". Enough of these stories could prompt the education system to deem coding as a basic skill like math, english and science. Code academy could end up being the platform that schools use to teach it.

But i guess the chances are slim because as it stands now the population is small though the possibility is there.

If you could pull that off without discrimination that would be an awesome idea. It may cause somewhat of a North/South Korea kind of thing but if it can be done it would be a great data collection exercise that investors, founders can really learn from.

Would be interesting to learn why the black swans have done better then the normal batch, or why the normal batch did better or why it was a 50/50 split.

You might even learn that because a startup is considered as a black swan founders in that group work harder and thus have a higher success rate. This would really put into light debates about how much intelligence vs hard work may effect success rates in the world of startups.

So it seems for investors, the big winners are simply based on luck, there is no logical factor that you can easily pick out that will give you a better chance of winning accept for possibly experience over a number of years that allows you to pick the features of a successful startup that initially doesn't look like they are going to be successful (maybe a glimmer in the founders eyes, something that isn't completely obvious to the general investment population).

But whats the thought process and how does it change given this insight ? It should still be the case that as an investor you still should focus on the best opportunities and try to maximize a decent return from the majority of your investments then focus on picking that facebook, dropbox or AirBnB right, just as you would if you were a trader in the stock market ... otherwise your just gambling ?! Focus on the technicals and data that give you the best odds and just take those trades cause taking trades where you are waiting on information from the fed chairman or draghi without insider info for example (even though they have big pay offs if you swing the right way) will earn you pretty much the same amount of returns as losses in the long term.

If the potential to win big time is counter intuitive what do you trust from data in front of you to make the decision to invest other than the "gut feeling" ?

In any case, i would think with dropbox it never really sounded like a bad idea and the founder/founders (Drew and Arash) sounded very promising even from the start. If this is the case even good bets do pay of big time to :) maybe these are easier to pick then the facebooks where at the time it does look like a bad idea.

Basically, Im curious as how this insight in PG's essay would change how an investor should invest or is it just an FYI and something to keep in the back of your mind as an investor ?

Im not sure if you can find many places where they have both in great detal as most machine learning material assume some knowledge in the specific math but you could always write down the terms that you dont understand from any ML material and look it up on khan academy. For all the material you need for Andrew Ng's classes (on coursera) for example you can pretty much find all the required terms (matricies, probability etc) on khan academy

Aus not doing so well either

As mentioned probabilities is something you want to get into very early. Its easy to understand at the start and its practical uses in many different computing areas along with many other things in life is priceless.

Good place to start would be to go through khan academy's probability videos.

i somewhat feel this is facebook trying to justify the massive IPO money and hence expanding into other areas that will make use of this money. Its the typical scenario were a company gets more funding then they probably need and in turn leads to that company addressing areas they might not have, given they had less money.

Facebook should get into mobile hardware but not in such a short time. Im sure there is lower hanging fruit they should be aiming for that could help boost their revenue many times over and get them back in the good graces of their shareholders again (if they care about that :) ).

If they get into the mobile space by having their own device it seems like such a high barrier simply to add to their advertising revenue, it almost seems like they are leaving their web and mobile apps business cause in terms of revenue, what they have (in web and mobile apps) is all they can figure out and NOW they need a new platform to expand on ?!

In the same boat as you, quit my job around the same time you did (august of 2011), built an iPhone app and have some affiliate marketing. Turned over a bit more then 10 bucks a day (average about $70) but still in the ball park of can do much better :)

And yes it is fun ! i guess we just gotta keep going

I have always seen education as the most important gift that one can give because once its given excluding fatal accidents its something that can never be taken away or lost and is useful throughout you whole life, whether at a job or simply to allow you to see the world through different perspectives.

It is great the the university was able to provide a discounted education to Filipaj and allow a man that wanted to keep studying to do just that.

Just as a side note, i feel that the coursera subjects to be just fantastic, free education from some really great lecturers on some really interesting topics just can't be beat

> Ouch. It's one thing to have your idea panned, but to say "nobody gives a shit about your team"? That's harsh.

Thats the sentence that got me too. It shouldn't be personal and that was very personal. Harsh comments about the idea, the technology used, the implementation, the design or even the presentation is acceptable but to say no one gives a shit about your team is almost like being racist (in the startup world).

I say this because it seems that the judge was making a judgement on someone simply because they might not have had any rockstar engineers or might not (up to this date) done anything of note, which really doesn't mean anything, simply judging the book by its cover without even willing to read the summary at the back.

I searched a few things, one being the project im working on now and i discovered very interesting things that lead me to book mark the results. One of the results even made me laugh and one lead me to some information i had no idea about ! Its an interesting project and i book marked your URL to discover things i normally might not so great job. I guess just like the physical world the deeper and deeper you go the more interesting and weird are the results.

BTW have you written your own crawlers and indexers ?

Yeh, i was looking/playing the puts and it was traded very thinly as well, took ages to get bites so didn't try again after i did it once.

Is it possible that the dodgy side of groupon was seen earlier and predicted earlier by the google MnA team and it wasn't Andrew Mason that said "No" ?

Im sure if nothing has changed since the early days of groupon till now, the skeletons now are still the same as before, google was just smart about it, did the math and said no way and allowed Andrew to walk away and speak about the deal however he wished.

On another note, if groupon collapses is it a good thing for the daily deals market ie, more smaller ones take their place, better competition better monetization strategy or does it spell the end for this market ?

What do people think ?

Yeh thats true, but i think the key is (as you suggested) he had many differences/oddities from the beginning (a very young age), you being a good father didnt tell him to change or fit the normal mold but encouraged that differences in thought. If that different way of thinking for your son are signs of genius then you cultivated it but its origins can not be explained or learnt by trying to think in the same way .... which frankly sucks.

I guess we can try and get so far, but for most normal people, we can do it to an extent in our field of expertise but still somewhat bound by previously learnt data that needs to be accumulated over a substantial period of time to get that A->C thinking .. without it problems in a differing field are still just solved step by step.

In the text it states that "Genius often comes from finding a new perspective that no one else has taken".

I think this is clear and people not even considered geniuses can also perform this feat. The defining part is that geniuses seem to come by those alternatives so easily, its just always there. So for example if we devote years to programming we can tell ourselves OK, if i have a problem invoke all my years of experience and look at this problem from many different angles, we can formulate and combine our thinking into something unique that even surprises ourselves because the combination of all the data we we know to get this new idea is far greater then adding the single idea's and pieces of data that we have. Over time we can build on that to get better ideas.

But if i say ok, i know the method of thinking like X helps me do great things when im programming and i try to do the same for say math problems, if i havnt had the experience no matter what I tell myself, i just can not look at the problem from different perspectives or if i do, its not such a great leap, its incremental. Its still step by step, A->B not to A->C, it still follows a logical thought process and we do not surprise ourselves by our solution

For the genius it seems after reading something once or by some method unknown (and having no experience) they can still have all those different perspectives. Then it leaves us normal people thinking, how did they get from A->C without going through the normal steps A->B->C ... this is specially the case when the individual is very young and has managed to soak that information without college or any formal learning ...

Great post dude and i think i can relate to many of the situations you found yourself in. Hell every time i finish a module or feature on my current project i am always like ... What the hell ... It actually works. I do this because i remember not 5hrs or a day ago, i had no freaking idea what i was doing, the VIM screen was empty and had no idea where to start or how to solve what i wanted to do (specially if its a new language, new team or new technology your working with). Team always tells me to sit down and get back to work (jokingly) after i joyously get up and do fist pumps but i get happy when i have no experience in something but manage to stumble over things until i get it to work, cause the joy is not simply the thing works, its that i feel having no experience and getting something working no matter what the topic of concern is, is a big deal, whether its programming, math or traveling the world by your self when you have never left the house. It is a big deal ...

Right now though, i am working on a startup, just small, making some revenue to live of but finding it tough, very very tough, competition is aplenty, constant new technical problems ,design choices, no idea how to market cause just no experience (so far its been organic but we need a faster rate of growth)and i can honestly say this feels like it could be a particular case where i might not be able to make it out with a smile on my face. In all the other problems i had no experience with, i got this voice in my head that says, mate... you will do this no problems, you will get the problem solved but for this startup the voice is there but just not as strong cause its been told to shutup in more then one instance when things didn't turn out as planned. However, since I know in the past when i kept going things turned out alright I just keep going.

For a startup, there are just so many fronts that need some experience and as far as i can think back , I only ever had to face a single topic at a time for which I didn't have experience. Some examples have been when I worked on new math or programming problem or studying for any exam, solving a problem at work that is more inter personal, asking for a raise when i had never asked for one before, its all just one thing so its easier to focus all the attention on how to make that single thing work. But for a startup there are just so many fronts that experience would really help to make the event of starting a startup successful. Its painful sometimes ...

I guess this is the first step towards getting more experience :) and hey .. its fun

Thats because there is a hell of a lot of coding in mech eng degree now. I actually did a few programming courses in my comp sci degree as an elective that were titled mech302 mech326 and didnt have the equivalent in the comp-sci department (which was disturbing actually).

I think reason being is that before, mechanical engineering was just purely, mechanical engineering, where as now the mechanical engineering degree (in my old uni anyway) was combined with mechatronic, which was robotics, and alot of low level process control type courses that for obvious reasons required alot of programming ... They basically fell under the same department

Depends what you are doing. I did quite a bit of work from indonesia, philippines and singapore. Singapore no problems , indonesia & philippines it depends on what you do. If your main data consumption is video then it can get annoying, specially if your looking at more shady sites to get your movies and even non shady ones can be slow, youtube is probably the best out of all of them (mind you this was about 3 years ago so things could have gotten much better now)

For example assume an above average connection, you still cant take watching videos for granted as you do in say AU or US. If you are heavy on the streaming whilst you work then it can be annoying, so there is some wait for a video to load, not long but at times the video is not loading faster then it plays so you get pauses.

However if youre just browsing or working from a terminal screen there really isnt to much issues, its fast enough.

What i found though is the 3G connection was terrible, mainly because the population is so large (specially) in indonesia that at busy times the service providers just can't keep up and the slowdown in 3g data can be felt.

I dont know what to say ! i get angry when i see a domain name that i want being parked on and going to absolute waste, but on the other hand the business this guy has created and the money he has made could be viewed as a smart hack in some perverse way. He has basically seen a market where no one else did in the early days (or only few did) and has managed to capitalize of it very sweetly (all of which he did skillfully and legally).

This is so true. I met people during the course of my life whom i sometimes think back on and say, why didn't i just do what s/he said and i wouldn't be in this mess.

It was only after i screwed something up, lost money or ended up not exactly where i wanted did i think back and say .. so that is what s/he meant. Then only after the fact can i take positive action towards the advice previously given and rectify the situation

One of the things i sometimes wonder is, is it just me that can not take advice unless i live it or does everyone else experience it ?

Reason i wonder this is i see people take advice and avoid getting themselves in a jam and i just wonder if they interpret advice differently and possibly have the ability to play out the different situations in their head better and hence can see what the advice really means before they actually need to live it.

It all comes down to the development you like to do. There was a time when i really didnt like paying extra cash for a macbook (that at the time) seemed like it was more expensive then the equivalent spec'd windows laptop for no reason.

However now, i cant do without my macbook because for web and mobile you really dont need anything else and the frameworks can be configured locally without silly things like cygwin.

Alot of the developer tools are built in and you can do iPhone and android development also (obviously on windows or linux you cant do iPhone dev ) which means if you ever do decide you need to develop an iPhone app as part of your offering you are going to have to get a macbook anyway.

The only downfall is if your still doing any blackberry development you can't do it on a mac though you could always circumvent that by using a VM.

No one is asking for a prediction, just getting input from people who are experts and have real life experience pre and post bubble.

> ALL of these people are at the greatest risk - what will happen if this bubble bursts. We will be FUCKED

I have the same thoughts exactly. I was a junior at university when the last bubble burst so i have no idea what it was like. Currently i have been running my startup after quitting my job for almost a year and we are doing OK but this talk of bubble worries me because i dont know what to expect.

Will it only effect startups that are social types that dont exactly generate revenue but through capital injection( which i assume is what will evaporate the fastest during a pop) have the potential to become massive such as instagram etc or will it also effect the startups that actually do turn up a profit every month so that the founders can eat and re-invest their money back in the business.

When i try to draw parallels from 2000 from a technology stand point, i assume the bubble pop killed the tech industry because getting a startup of the ground required tons of cash, it didnt matter whether you could charge from day one or it was a great idea but needed to get to scale before you could make money, you still needed to buy servers, hosting and your development team was larger because there were no frameworks etc .. basically there was alot to spend before you could turn a profit, so when capital dried up so did the ability to start a new company or even continue to run an existing one. As a founder, unless you were already wealthy you could not bootstrap

Now with amazon, great frameworks that cut down development time many times over and other things of the like, founders can take savings of 10-15k and start a business that can return that investment maybe after 4-5 months and start making profit soon after.

The question is, do these kinds of startups still survive, could this be the differentiating factor this time if the bubble pops.

Maybe after the bubble pops we wont get those massive social startups that require millions of dollars worth of injection for a while but instead get many smaller bootstrapped business types that take a small investment and return a profit monthly that eventually grow into large business. Its slower but similar to more traditional businesses. If this is the case then i feel its OK, at least if we find an area there people still have a need and technology solves that need we can still make a living doing our own startup and work on things we love.

Im also interested because we are bootstrapped and we have managed to get our small startup to give us back about 60% of our salary that we used to get at our 9-5. its enough to live of and not make us wonder where we are going to get our next dinner, however we are thinking of starting something new because we feel there is a ceiling to what we can achieve with our current startup and its important for us to decide what startup to do next if we actually are heading into a bubble that may pop midway through our next project, 1,2 maybe 3 years down the line

What do you guys think the tech scene will look like in the valley and possibly around the world if such an event would occur again ?

Sorry for the long post but i thought it important to get ideas from the HN community on this topic.

there isn't. Not in the foreseeable future, hence microsoft, a power ONCE to be reckoned with , once king of the technology mountain will have to sit on the sidelines and prepare for the next "big thing" in technology ... whatever that may be.

As it stands now, unless they get their act together quick smart, they have missed the boat on many different things internet related of which they could have ALREADY dominated if they didn't think the internet was just a fad.

I am a GSD metric guy as well. I have two laptops , one mac for apple development (iPhone etc) and a windows machine to do blackberry development.

When im doing multimedia stuff , say using progs like xtranormal i have to use my windows because again, no port for mac is available. If im coding on an xterm connected to my amazon instances im using my macbook because its just alot nicer and basically all the tools i need come installed with the mac.

The thing i never understood is, if you are a mac fanboy and would never use windows or visa versa how do you manage to develop properly. How can an apple fanboy who refuses to use windows do blackberry development and how does a windows fanboy do any iPhone development, do they just restrict themselves to programming in objective C and dot net respectively ?

Yeh you could use a VM but i just found it easier to have two separate laptops with whatever OS i needed to run to get the job done

I guess you can have a preference , me i prefer my macbook when im doing general stuff because again all tools are included and if i need to fire up an xterm, run some network tool, quickly whip up a shell script or try some random thing its just easier on a mac but to be a fanboy who refuses to use the other OS makes no sense to me.

It just limits you ... doesn't it ?!