This also happened with a piece of shit OTC Facebook app developer called SNAP Interactive when Snapchat was going IPO. I met their CEO at a conference in NYC, and he literally had business cards printed out touting how high their market cap got during this and their subsequent message board pumping.
I really don't get it. Twitter has five thousand full-time employees. I have to assume at least 20% of them are in product development in some capacity. What exactly are these people doing all day?
I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. And they continue to ignore the drumbeat of user asking for an edit button, and are completely unable to come up with any kind of reasonable solution to the abuse or bot problems.
I don't know Kayvon personally, but what exactly is wrong with Twitter that it's so bad and slow at product development? This should be #5000 on their list of things to do.
They're making tons of innovative new features for their customers, who are advertisers. People who write and read tweets aren't the customer, they're the product.
What exactly are these people doing all day? I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years.
Maybe Twitter is less caught up on the SV "gotta change/break something user-facing today to justify my job" treadmill than other tech companies. Or maybe the changes they make are on the back end. It's been a long time since I've seen a fail whale.
Considering the global societal impact that Twitter has, I'm surprised it has only 5,000 employees.
Maintaining the infrastructure needed to deliver ads that are targeted based on real-time event streams collected from users' interaction with the website and app. Stuff like that.
That's my guess, anyway. It's the kind of thing that can keep a lot of developers very busy, but not something they'll be talking about much in public.
But is any of this really stuff that should take 1000 engineers to build? Tweet length? GIFs?
I don't question that those engineers are working hard. I'm sure they're not sitting around twiddling their thumbs. And I don't question that there aren't some genuinely hard, complicated problems to solve at Twitter, particularly around scaling and security. But from a structural perspective, I do still kind of wonder if companies the size of Twitter and Facebook aren't just an extended, very public example of Brooks's Law.
Anecdotally, I've been in large teams and small teams and I work equally hard in both environments. But even with the same amount of work, somehow, more stuff gets done and more products get shipped from the smaller teams.
There's a ton of infrastructure to build and maintain at Twitter. Yesterday's solutions don't scale and need replacing. Yesterday's "just get it done, we'll worry about cost (or quality, or operational burden) later" have happened and it's time to fix. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This post should give you an idea of scale at Twitter. When I worked there, I spent about 2 months focused just on creating software to help automate the Clos migration mentioned. And there are just tons of things like this that are constantly being worked on.
Having made the same observation as you, I always preferred the formulation in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringelmann_effect. Although the Wikipedia article lists "loss of motivation" as a cause, it originally focussed more on coordination problems growing with group size–sort of a reverse Metcalf'.
In that sense it avoids the lazy cynicism of writing off whole groups of people as stupid or unmotivated (i. e. all of Dilbert). Instead, it's a starting point to consider how much we can still improve what's arguably humanity's claim to fame, the ability to cooperate.
None of those things strike as 1) important or 2) indicative of a high-performing product development team given their size. But we can agree to disagree!
Ads and security are both extremely important to Twitter. It's hard to imagine any product concern being more important than those two, other than perhaps uptime.
The only comment on HN more tiresome than "lol I can build twitter over a weekend" is a comment by a throwaway implicitly claiming that fixing the twitter product problems is easy.
A lot of features never make it past experimentation and never see the light of day. The lifecycle of these experiments can last months and multiple code paths on mobile clients have to be carefully maintained. Failure to catch regressions on experiments cause unclean data and prevent experiments from re-starting until the new client reaches app stores.
Could it be that they're just bogged down in fire fighting and paying off the tech debt accumulated over years?
(Genuine question, as someone who has never worked in >50 eng company, I always wonder how those companies tackle stuff like this.)
Jack has discussed this. It won't happen. Even in 5 minutes a tweet can reach MANY people, and then it would be able to be changed entirely?
Twitter won't get an edit feature, it just doesn't work for the platform. The only way I see it happening is as an 'undo' send feature like Gmail has. You can see the tweet for 15 seconds before it actually goes out. This has also been discussed as an issue since Twitter is supposed to be real-time, but maybe certain people wouldn't care and enable the feature
I think all 5000 of them are busy "moderating" complaints. My account was suspended for 7 days for telling a youtuber (one I'd spoken with back and forth many times) that she had some clothes fluff in her armpit on pic she posted. Apparently that falls under harassment of a sexual nature and my appeal was denied within 15 minutes.
I really don't get it. Twitter has five thousand full-time employees. I have to assume at least 20% of them are in product development in some capacity. What exactly are these people doing all day?
I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. And they continue to ignore the drumbeat of user asking for an edit button, and are completely unable to come up with any kind of reasonable solution to the abuse or bot problems.
I don't know Kayvon personally, but what exactly is wrong with Twitter that it's so bad and slow at product development?
I'm increasingly of the opinion that technology like this will never see broad regulatory approval. I just can't see an argument where any agency will be comfortable with acceptable losses, and I don't see any endgame in which this technology does not result in an infinitesimal, but non-zero amount of fatal errors.
On a regulatory basis true self driving only needs to outperform humans. Humans are good at driving but imperfect we have a nasty tendency to get ourselves into accidents, both fatal and non.
My thought was that the public would fear and refuse to use the technology but some brave souls are jumping right in.
My opinion: full self driving is only a matter of time. At some point in the future insurance companies will figure out that self driving is less dangerous than human drivers and start offering cheaper premiums and deductibles to self driving only cars.
The facts around current car safety is that it's already really quite good. In modern cars and "autopilot-feasible conditions" you are talking well below 1 fatality per billion vehicle miles travelled with regular human drivers.
This means that if a model has sold 1 million cars they each need to drive 100 000 miles with autopilot enabled before the insurance company has enough statistics to say "this is safer than a human".
They might be able to extrapolate from non fatal accidents because they care more about damage which costs money to repair than fatalities. But I take your point - a lot of miles need to be traveled before you'd want to build it into your actuarial models.
No, the "facts" you keep reading about (from the same companies trying to sell you on the technology) are extremely misleading.
Tesla for instance does that statistic against "average driving" but the "Average driving" happens in cities. And most Teslas enable Autopilot on highways, where Tesla recommends enabling it, too.
Accidents happen much less on highways, so of course this "statistic" looks better. Put Autopiloted Teslas in the cities and then see how that statistic fares. My guess is it will become much, much worse.
The more real statistic is that even Waymo, which is about an order of magnitude better than anything else on the market, has an "incident" where a human driver would need to intervene every 5000 miles. For everyone else, a human driver would need to intervene every few hundred miles.
That's far from the "self-driving" technology we were promised.
Two relevant posts from someone that used to lead the Waymo project, before it was named Waymo:
If you go back to stirring up drama on HN with offtopic meta comments, we will ban you again, much sooner than the years-long, hundreds-of-emails, dozen-accounts process it involved last time. That was more agony than any other user has single-handedly managed to cause on this site, and we won't go through it again. No more of this please—nothing of the kind—nada—period.
"At some point in the future insurance companies will figure out that self driving is less dangerous than human drivers and start offering cheaper premiums and deductibles to self driving only cars"
Where does the faith in the tech and its future come from though? Wouldn't it be more logical to wait and then say "hey, Geico is offering a 20% discount if I buy a new car with these features, guess they must really make a difference" rather than going around proclaiming how much safer they are in advance?
> Where does the faith in the tech and its future come from though?
Well now that you've put me on the spot like that and I have to think about it: baseless I suppose. Just a general faith that technology always improves.
> Where does the faith in the tech and its future come from though?
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/security-tech... (The Cambrian Explosion in Technology, and How It's Affecting Us |
Seeing the progress made across various fields over the last few years, we can ask if we are witnessing a Cambrian explosion in technology today)
Companies who raise $75mm don't lay off massive chunks of their workforce because they found product-market fit.
Justin raised $75mm because he's Justin, and for all VCs posture like they're contrarian risk-takers, they're absolutely not and would have invested in shit in a box if Justin said it was his.
It may be a viable form of risk-taking but then it isn't contrarian risk-taking. However, has anyone ever actually ran the numbers on serial founders, the entirety of the cohort and not just the success stories?
I believe first round did a study that showed that companies founded by people who'd previously had a successful exit had better outcomes, but they also raised at higher valuations, and those effects canceled each other. So returns from investing in successful serial founders vs new founders are similar
Sure. But in my experience, the amount in which investors posture that they're contrarian and look for unconventional opportunities versus how much they actually do is quite notably different.
Ehhhhhhhh. Auren ran one of the shadiest companies in recent history (Rapleaf) and he's discussing Thiel, who in my opinion was completely in the wrong w/r/t Gawker and is incredibly thin skinned and petty for someone who talks about the things that he does.
The core point is correct: you want (for lack of better phrasing) "out of the box" thinkers in your leadership roles, particularly in the early stages. But I would take either of those two as a model with the biggest grain of salt possible; you can be courageous and out of the box without being insanely unethical or a vampire-like dick, respectively.
> who in my opinion was completely in the wrong w/r/t Gawker
I have a different opinion for four reasons.
I appreciate Thiel’s long term thinking and just the effectiveness of the plot. That’s rare and neat, I think.
But I also think it’s right because Gawker was a plague on society with its gossipy, trash journalism. We are better off as a society without the type of articles that out people because editors don’t like them or don’t like their politics.
Specifically, they were in the wrong with Hogan and what they did was heartless.
Finally, Gawker died legally. No laws were broken. Thiel had beef, for whatever reason and he used the law. While I don’t think Gawker is anywhere near more useful and professional news outlets (eg, NYT or Post) I think if other newsmakers break the law in such a way, they should be treated exactly the same way.
> Finally, Gawker died legally. No laws were broken. Thiel had beef, for whatever reason and he used the law.
Not to mention the fact that Gawker probably didn't have to die but instead basically committed suicide. Going into court and saying that you'd happily publish a toddler's sex tape isn't exactly sound legal strategy.
Are you seriously making the case that the writers who quit Deadspin over issues of editorial freedom — not, to be clear, the freedom to publish salacious gossip, but to publish articles that weren't strictly sports-related, no matter how provably popular and critically acclaimed they were — were "just bad people" because they refused to sit down, shut up and get in line?
Gawker certainly crossed a line they shouldn't have, and maybe that line was so egregious that they deserved to die and have their remains put through the shitshow that they've been through the last few years. But that's entirely orthogonal as to whether sites related to Gawker ever did good journalism. They did. They had some terrific writers — particularly at io9 under Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz (both now award-winning science fiction authors), but around the network you'd find Brian Lam, Jason Chen, Stephen Totilo, Gina Trapani, Erica Sadun, Sam Biddle, and yes, love him or hate him, Gawker founder Nick Denton himself was a pretty damn good writer. They published some terrific articles. And the world of online publications is a little dimmer with them effectively gone.
They did call out that Clinton and Dershowitz went on the jet that Epstein used to let powerful men have sex with underage women in 2015, and that alone is worth quite a bit. Probably more than any slight against Thiel.
Thiel being poked in a way that paints him as a hypocrite is constructive, all things considered. Seeing billionaires as "regular Joes" is something that probably needs to stop for the long-term viability of the American experiment.
Thiel, a conservative who's been donating thousands a year to Republican politicians since at least 2000 (this is all public record; it's worth a glance if you're interested), who recognize the people in the sexual demographic that Thiel belongs to as degenerate, is in fact one of the people they hate.
This is important for the public to know for a few reasons.
An obvious reason, of course, is "Hey look, you don't matter at all to the types that have millions of dollars!" is an important thing for LGBT people who don't have that. Highlighting Thiel as a man who adheres to "Got mine" philosophy is really good, because it allows everyone else to know that once you get to a certain level of protection, solidarity doesn't really exist.
Politics are war, and when you have a person regularly dropping $4,000,000 a year on political donations to causes that are directly harmful to you, it makes sense to combat them.
I'm close to the same side as Thiel politically, but even I can't say that Gawker doing that was a bad thing. That Thiel doesn't believe in freedom of speech is ridiculous, given the views he claims to espouse. But if you see it for what it is (a billionaire wanting free speech for himself, but not caring whether it's a thing for others), it makes sense.
Gawker reported on Weinstein at a time when other publications wouldn’t for fear of reprisal. We are not better off as a society when billionaires with histories of poor morality can arbitrarily destroy media companies. Get a grip.
Please make your substantive points without personal swipes like "Get a grip". Those aren't allowed here, because of the degree to which they poison discussion. Your comment would be fine without that bit.
Thiel didn't destroy Gawker with a mercenary army. He financed a lawsuit which was found to be meritorious. This is not an "arbitrary" thing at all.
Whatever Thiel's beliefs or motives, Gawker published a private sex tape for no legitimate reason. When a judge ruled they had to take it down, they disobeyed the injunction.
As Thiel points out, one social problem that this exposes is that even a single digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan didn't have access to the legal system. Hogan should have been able to get the result himself, but needed a billionaire to finance him.
>Gawker reported on Weinstein at a time when other publications wouldn’t for fear of reprisal
They also created, hosted and pushed a "celebrity stalker map" for the express purposes of stalking people. There is a laundry list of reasons to have no sympathy for Gawker, and enough for many people to have wanted to see some comeuppance.
>We are not better off as a society when billionaires with histories of poor morality can arbitrarily destroy media companies.
We are better off when a company that goes too far, legally, faces ramifications for their actions. Even if the cause for those ramifications was less than pure; The motivations of the person who caused the action are kind of irrelevant to the action and result that occurred.
The worst part of this situation is not that Thiel funded someone else's lawsuit, but that access to justice required and requires that kind of funding. Not that Terry Bollea had his case handled without worry, but that everyone else does not.
He didn't arbitrarily destroy it, and other media companies are generally not in danger of the same fate as Gawker.
Gawker was exceptionally stupid both in their reporting and in court, joking (so they say) that they would post a sex tape of a child as long as it was over the age of four. That doesn't play well with jurors. They had no respect for any concept of personal privacy. We are absolutely better off as a society without them, and without any other media companies that behave in a similar shitty manner.
Being a media company is not and should not be a shield from civil lawsuits or prosecution. Media companies should be in danger of being sued to death if they behave as badly as Gawker did.
Everything Gawker did fell under the First Amendment, and so they should not be in danger of being sued to death if they behave as badly as Gawker did. The entire point of the Constitution is to protect essential liberties. Get rid of the Constitution, and we descend into an authoritarian state.
Not that I agree or disagree, but he didn't say that, he said we're better off without Gawker, or rather, the type of articles that it published. There's a difference.
Out of curiosity, I wonder how Gawker compares Breitbart News. They sits at the opposite side of the political table, both claims to be media companies, and both got targeted by activism by people who want to shut them down. Both also seems to have walked a rather thin line between legal and illegal.
Great, but how does that impact you? How are you going to edge companies who are much larger than you, for the finite number of skins allowed in each state? What's your plan for working with the regulators, including the necessary amount of lobbying and retail adjacency you need?
Just saying "Well, we can eventually become a paid host of these games" isn't enough and you haven't done that; just because it's now legal in a singular state doesn't mean that just anyone will be able to get licensed and regulated.
1. It's unclear how, at least in the context of March Madness, this is preferable to any number of alternatives. Given that they don't touch money, it's functionally equivalent to either running an offline pool, or using an existing site with years upon years of consumer behavior and content integration like CBS, ESPN, or Yahoo!. Better UX? Yeah, maybe, but there are dozens of companies that have tried and failed on that premise in the fantasy space: FleaFlicker, Sleeperbot, and on and on. Some guy from the Apprentice had a company doing exactly this and spectacularly failed. People go where they already go as a habit, not to some new destination.
2. On the other formats, I'm skeptical that you'd have enough people willing to join pools around The Bachelor or what have you, or else you'd see it already. Even if I'm wrong, you run into the problem of (#3) plus generally a scale problem; that maxes around at a very low total unique visitor count.
3. Under the thesis that this might eventually turn into a platform that accepts and handles money, that seems extremely unlikely if you've seen how skin regulation has gone now that NJ is up and legalized. I can't see a world where an existing license holder would take a flyer on this when you've got the FanDuels and the DraftKings (not to mention the inevitable strong European entry in the market) with vastly larger budgets and user databases to leverage. Further to that, in the event these guys take off, there's absolutely no reason why those companies wouldn't just replicate this functionality. Anyone who follows Europe knows that over time, features diverge to parity.
It's going to be a dickish statement, but I don't see how it's not 100% true: there's no way this gets invested in if this kid's dad wasn't Joe Montana. Literally the only logic I could theoretically buy is that the name recognition of Joe Montana + YC would give them a shot at a license in a multi-skin state where a lower-end holder would be willing to give them a shot. Free to play either as a service (Chalkline, Sportcaller) or as the end game unto itself (#1, #2) is dead on arrival.
Plenty of current athletes with lots of money to burn as well. I can count on one hand how many cases I've seen an athlete actually be value-add; in most cases they're the dumbest of dumb money who vastly overrate the influencer value of their social network.
As opposed to the usual rigorously meritocratic VC funding decision, where they scan the application for the words "Stanford" and "Harvard" instead of "Joe Montana."
In 2009, the startup where I was working was hitting the skids, and our investors (correctly) were not willing to back us. We all kept grinding for a month or two in honorable futility, but after a while, my bank account depleted and I had to go.
To make various ends meet and to keep my mental health during the wind down however, I took up some contract work that I found through various friends in the SF startup scene. One company that I really liked and did some small stuff for was Burbn, which was a mobile-only location check-in that was hinged around taking photos of your location.
Missing my friends in NYC (I made a lot of friends in SF, but my inner circle were my college buddies from CMU; I went to tech and they went finance, sigh), I decided to leave SF to head to NYC and get a fresh start.
As I was leaving, I wanted to tie up a few loose ends, so I emailed my contact at Burbn and said I was likely to be unavailable for any more work, but that I liked the project and hoped for the best for him. He responded and said that he was near funding on a small pivot, and that if I was interested, there might be a full-time role available. I declined - I was mentally done with SF and the startup scene (Larry Chiang, 111 Minna, the rise of FB spam-crap like RockYou, etc.) as it was then.
That person was Kevin Systrom; that pivot was Instagram.
A lot of commenters seem to be bemoaning this poster as missing out on endless riches. Why? we already know that being super rich doesn't really make you all that much happier compared to being rich (and if you are a programmer in work in then you are pretty rich).
I feel that they missed out more on the rocketship journey of being on a startup. And even then that's not everyone's cup of tea.
There's a gigantic difference between $200,000 a year and "I don't need to work again."
The "money doesn't make you happy" camp compares $70,000/year and $200,000/year; not $200,000/year and "I have enough money to never work again if I don't feel like it."
Those two goals are only separated by about a decade of normal work, which is not even much more time than it takes to bring a startup to an exit.
If you can put 1-2.5M dollars into investments you can pull safe returns of enough to live on indefinitely and never need to work again.
Making >$200k a year and being frugal it is not that hard to put together 1-2.5 million dollars in capital.
At 10 years of 250k with a 40% tax rate and 30k in annual expenses with 7% average returns, you pull down about 70k in capital gains at 5% returns in year 10 (so you can keep 2% extra nominal in to keep up with the fed's inflation target and maintain that purchasing power forever). $70k is less than you made, but is more than enough to live on without working for the rest of your life.
Requires budgeting and is a bit of a standard of living lower than most people would prefer. Especially if they got kids.
Plus how you going to live in SV on $30,000 a year when rent alone is that much?
> 7% average returns
So requiring those 10 years are during a bull market.
There's a big difference between "work at a startup for a good salary living an average life for 10 years" and "live in a shoebox with 10 other guys, eat nothing but lentils and beans, and own no possessions for 10 years"
Anecdotally, when you don't need to work it makes you happier (though you can still work, but only when you want to). High wage vs passive income is a big difference and the research you are thinking about only captured the former.
I have a passive income of €1.5k/month without being a millionaire. Some of my friends are millionaires and we are basically equal. We all can choose to work and are free, this makes all the difference.
The main differentiator between rich people and others is the fact that rich people don't have to work. This is the biggest freedom. I figured out that I don't need to be rich to do that.
I still work, but I mainly do this because I want to. I say no to things that I don't like and I've never been employed (I'm an employer myself).
I wouldn't trade this freedom for 10-20k/month (which I could achieve, but I would have to work my a* off). Deciding what to do with your time is the ultimate freedom.
edit: I worked like this in the past (making good money and having lots of stress), but nowadays I don't see the point anymore. Even if you like your work, wouldn't you prefer to work on your own visions and on your own terms?
May I ask what kind of business are you running for your passive income and how you got there?
Background of this question: Also form Europe (Austria), an EE engineer but modestly paid and overworked. I figure I should pivot to a passive income source as even switching jobs won't imporve my quality of life since companies are overly stingy on paying competitive salaries and most try ot burn you out in the long run as they try to be more competitive and government will tax the hell out of you the more you earn so I figure why bother, my healh is worth more than that.
Ok, I will give some instructions. Unfortunately, it's not an easy way. It's mainly websites.
1. Know your numbers: How much do you need to live? How much do you spend each month? How much money can you save up in your job every year?
2. Save up. Live extremely cheap and save every penny. You need enough money to live for ~9-12 months without any income, e.g. if you need 1200€ you need to save minimum €14k - no holidays and expensive stuff until you've reached your number. This is your lifeline money.
3. Save a little more: You need to invest money to make money. You need about €5-10k minimum for investments (buying domain names, themes, content, designs, ...)
4. You have saved up €20-30k? Continue the plan. Otherwise continue to live extremely frugal and increase your income.
5. There are many ways now: build websites, AirBnB, flipping stuff, writing books ... - first, you have to build something. After you've found something that works, you continue to increase the profit margin and automate the process (also utilizing manual labour). You can only do this if you already have some money, this is the reasoning behind step 1 and 2.
- - -
In my calculations, you need to invest roughly €30-40k to make €1-3k/month in completely passive income (I achieved it with 5-10k, but I was lucky).
It's definitely achievable in 3-4 years to save this amount of money if you commit to a frugal lifestyle, save up and invest it correctly (I achieved it in some months, but as I said, I was lucky).
I think it's not fair to sell you the idea that it's easy - although my journey was extremely straightforward, I know that most people struggle to even make a dollar online. But I can assure you that you will find a way if you're committed to leave your day job behind.
But please make sure that you have enough savings, I know many people who left their job and after 6 months they ran out of money. You don't want to be the defeated one who wasn't well prepared for this type of lifestyle.
It's still valid in a couple of other countries though. I'm sure I don't make more than my friends in England for example, and I know some in Brazil that make really good money (compared to those around them who are not programmers) and I'm sure there's other countries who pay their software engineers well enough. But yeah I'm aware that there are countries where being a software developer is not that profitable sadly. I always hear of outsourcing software development overseas for simple things like having a website done.
In many cases it’s because that’s what we demand of them. The “you get what you pay for” line works well here, we demand low cost so they have low time to build anything right. Long term impact is that they never fully developed into seasoned and deeply skilled staff. Then we complain about quality, its kind of funny in a sad way...
As a programmer in "other countries", you're very much wrong. You just get what you pay for, and when you're going for "cheap outsource" you get bottom of the barrel. Pay senior salaries, you get senior people.
Why did you assume he is missing out on being rich? Nowhere in his post he even mentions money. It felt more he missed out on being a part of a great success that every startup wants to live through similar to that of Instagram.
Why did everyone run into Larry so much back then and what happened to the startup party scene... which was so odd at the time.
Edit: Found my answers on quora, I’ll let you look yourselves as I don’t want to link to what may be gossip but I had a laugh and a wave of nostalgia for those heady nonsense days
You can see him, talk to him, ask his name - and still not know who is it. Is he a super-rich former founder? A VC? Chinese agent? Inherited money? Etc.
Hi everyone! Well, thank you for all of the comments - didn't expect my short little tale to be that interesting :)
As for me, it worked out - soon after arriving in NYC, I took a chance at starting a company for myself. Unlike Burbn/Instagram, which I would have liked from a market perspective, I went all-in on an idea and an industry that I truly loved. I managed to raise a little bit of funding, hired a great team, and exited 10x a few years later. Still at the company, now CTO. Love it more and more every day.
Right around the same time I started my company, I also met a beautiful woman who is now my wife. Bonus!
Do I think about what could have been? Sure. But I didn't let it stop me from plowing ahead and moving forward. What happened yesterday or last week or last year only impacts you to the extent that you let it. All you can ever do is believe in yourself and make the best decisions you can with the information available to you.
That is rationalization, where we try to apply "logic" to make ourselves feel better about a bad situation.
The chances are low that life is better now, after losing out on a chance to be an early part of Instagram.
That's like saying a homeless person's life may be better than if he had a home. Ya statistically that scenario is possible.
But if you had a choice, do you really want that homeless person to stay homeless and just keep telling him "your life may be better now"? Or do you want that person's life to improve so that he eventually has a home?
It’s not at all difficult to imagine a scenario where his life is better after turning down Instagram. I wouldn’t even say it’s unlikely.
Just name one important relationship he formed in NYC. Done. (Or any of the other infinite ways events could have unfolded more favorably in NYC than in a hypothetical SF)
An engineer in America is wealthy, and has lots of opportunity to see and experience new and interesting things. The idea that his life is almost assuredly worse just because he forwent one unlikely opportunity to become wealthy 50x over instead of just 5x over is silly.
Of all the choices he’s made and will make, I doubt that was a very important one.
Ya you can imagine any scenario you want. I can imagine a scenario where a homeless person's life is better than if he had a home. It's not hard to imagine. But if you had a choice, which would you choose?
I don't think the argument is conclusively "Done" after naming one important relationship he formed in NYC.
I can name one important relationship he would have formed if he stayed in SF. A relationship with the founders of Instagram. That relationship is valuable too.
What makes you doubt that this choice is less important than other choices he will make in the future?
You don't need to consider the infinite possibility of events that could have unfolded. You really only have to consider the origin event--if you had the chance to choose again, would you make the same choice.
> Ya you can imagine any scenario you want. I can imagine a scenario where a homeless person's life is better than if he had a home. It's not hard to imagine. But if you had a choice, which would you choose?
Homelessness is a financial hardship that actually will ruin your quality of life, which stands in stark contrast to being a homeowner. Whereas making 150k/yr in NYC instead of 2m/yr in SF just means you have plenty of space on hardwood, instead of too much space on marble. The relationship between wealth and quality of life is logarithmic.
That's not the question being asked. Obviously being an early employee at Instagram is better than having an above-average engineering job in NYC, and more money is better than less money.
The question is, do all of the events that unfold throughout the rest of his life after he moves to NYC sum to a better life than the events that would have unfolded if he had taken that job and stayed in SF?
It can't be known, we can only speculate on the probabilities.
If we know for certain that Instagram will be the success that it is, that means NYC and SF present two radically different sets of human relationships and life experiences spanning decades, but in NYC he will make a lot of money and in SF he will make an excessive amount of money.
When I consider the infinite variation and possibility contained within those unforeseeable human relationships and life experiences, and think about the impact those factors have on a person's quality of life, I don't think there's even a comparison to be made between that and the difference between making lots of money and making tons of money. The relationships and life experiences will be the dominating factors in these outcomes. Since they're both unknowable, the relative probabilities of either NYC or SF resulting in a better life lie somewhere close to 50:50, even if we know he would have been successful at Instagram in SF.
I actually do think it was an important choice, just not because of Instagram. He was tired of SF and the contemporary startup scene, and Instagram's success was still very unlikely at that point. Staying would have been a bad decision.
I think the more brutal reality is that just because you had been there then instead of someone else doesn't mean Instagram would have done what it did. Maybe as a first hire you'd have jerked around more than the actual person, or missed deadlines or just made bad choices which lead to zero traction.
It's egotistical to assume that it being you instead leads to the same result
Ya I agree, but on the other hand, it's possible that if you had been there instead of someone else, you would have made better choices leading to 10x traction and made Instagram 10x what it is today
I mean, what signals lead you to believe one scenario is more likely than the other?
It didn't sound like he was a weak employee in any way--if anything, he sounded like a strong employee because the founder of Instagram wanted to create a full-time role just to keep him, despite not having much money for the startup back then. I would assume the founder of Instagram is a better judge than I am, of who is good to hire.
It's possible that Instagram would have been more successful if he was there to support it back then.
I could boil it down to a thought experiment: If you could trade being alive and healthy today, for hitting it rich 10 years ago but you have no idea if you'd still be alive/healthy/happy today - would you do it?
Actually I think the point is that the universe is vastly complex and due to chaos theory and the butterfly effect all sorts of alternate outcomes may have resulted
If you trouble yourself over regret on how you didn't get rich that one time, while still living a life that is probably in the upper 90th percentile comfort-wise, you aren't doing yourself any favors. Money is just numbers, and in the end we are all dead, so spending your days regretting not winning the lottery has to be one of the most stupid things to trouble your mind with. A dose of some traditional values would probably help.
Yet I read a similar comment every day here on Hacker News. Maybe there's something cultural going on with a website run by an investment fund/startup incubator.
I identity with this - it bugs me that I haven't done as a Kevin (and people like him) when not only has he had the success but exited and moved on with his life.
I go to the gym most days and am pretty well disciplined but I still feel this way every so often (I've been ill earlier this week so I'm feeling down, which is probably what bought this on). How does someone get traditional discipline?
I can relate. I cry myself to sleep every night thinking about those bitcoins I didn't mine, back when you could get hundreds on a single GPU overnight.
Well, at least you aren’t the guy that bought two pizzas for 10 000 bitcoins. If he’d have held onto them until the $20 000 peak (a tall order in itself) he’d have netted a cool $200 million.
Did that guy who binned his hard drive with his bitcoin wallet ever retrieve it from the garbage dump? Last I heard he was planning on digging up the entire dump to find it.
I don't think that's accurate. A more apt anology (and one trending on HN, coincidentally) is the California Gold Rush. The prospectors (workers) are willing to work super hard and risk it all to find gold (unicorn equity).
"the most..." what? Is that an add-your-own-ending quote for reflecting on personal philosophy? :).
(Also, this is a plot point in Bostrom's "The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant" - the last people to die will really be mourned, and people will then start asking if, maybe, they could have started working on the problem sooner...)
Immortality will probably never work for those that die from getting hit by a train and the like. This will make their death so much worse for their loved ones.
Exactly. You can only make decisions based off the information you have. Heck, for all we know if this guy did go work at Instagram then the company could have never taken off! You can never be sure of anything.
Might be worth reaching out and saying best wishes.
Short & sweet. Not for any ulterior motive, just out of the spirit of an old, forgotten friendship.
