Comment by ogre_codes
6 years ago
My big mistake?
Not being buddies with Peter Thiel in 2003. Don't make my mistake, go back in time and be buddies with Peter Thiel in 2003.
Just the fact that he had a buddy who could cut him a check for $70,000 before his startup succeeded says a whole lot about the situation he was in. If you have a buddy who tosses around this kind of cash, your options are different from the options available to the overwhelming majority of us.
Life is a lottery.
I had the opportunity to take a job as lead programmer at a dot com that ended up becoming one of the biggest entertainment companies of the early 2000's and I passed for a job at a company that went bust in 6 months.
The only lesson I got from this post is one I already know - don't regret your decisions because you can't see the damn future.
The butterfly effect is also worth considering. There’s no telling that the current outcome is inevitable if you had chosen to participate.
>> There’s no telling that the current outcome is inevitable if you had chosen to participate.
True. Judging from the author's terrible decision-making abilities, the company would probably have gone belly up before it got to series A if the author had joined sooner as a director.
Going into the unknown can be guided by things other than luck and randomness. Did you figure out why you chose what you did?
This is a shallow dismissal, which the HN guidelines ask you not to do, and especially not out of indignation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's obvious from early in the article that Garry wasn't "buddies" with Thiel. He had just graduated, and a college friend was the connection. That means your point reduces to: people who go to elite colleges encounter opportunities as a result. No one disagrees with that, certainly not Garry, but it's a tangential, generic and therefore a weak response to the point of this article, which is about taking the opportunities that do come your way.
I disagree with this. Why was Thiel willing to cut him a check - would he have done so for any software engineer straight out of college? Did he technically interview Tan?
If the original comment is revised from "Be buddies with Peter Thiel" to "Be in the set of <1000 people who has connections with Peter Thiel sufficient to get him to write you a check," the point still stands - this article is not generically applicable advice, and your point (which I agree with) that you should take the opportunities that come your way generally implies you should take the Microsoft job and hold out for promo - and I think you're shallowly dismissing this comment.
Having finished the article, I was just coming back here to edit my comment, because I described it inaccurately. The article isn't only about taking the opportunities that come your way; it's more specific. It's about owning more of the value that you create and having more creative autonomy in your work.
Some people are going to respond positively to that message, others not, for various reasons, but it obviously has nothing in principle to do with Peter Thiel or "Be in the set of <1000 people who has connections with Peter Thiel sufficient to get him to write you a check".
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As feedback, you are overreacting and not being empathetic to the opposing view. The post you are calling out does not strike me as a rule violation at all; it is just normal discussion.
In a real sense, this article is very biased. The author had a rare and unique combination of luck, timing, and privilege where the normally highly-irrational calculus of throwing away such a highly prestigious job actually made sense.
Nowadays, FANG dishes out 200k TC offers to new grads even — work hard and do well, and you will make 400k as an L5 in five years at Google or Facebook.
Meanwhile, startups are staying private and only enriching their founders at the expense of their employees (see Adam Neumann), and the standard 120k plus “equity” new grad offer for the first engineer employee at some YC company that just graduated Demo Day no longer makes any sense.
People are just making decisions in their best interest, and you cannot fault them for that. I think it’s a bit disingenuous to encourage talented young people to waste their time otherwise by working for a startup. Let’s revisit the terms of the deal for talented young people first before lamenting that most of them are not willing to be volunteers.
I don't think pointing out that the article only applies to a very tiny minority of readers is a shallow dismissal.
I seriously doubt the overwhelming majority of people reading this article lost $200m from any single decision in their lives. Hell, most of us haven't lost $1 million from any single decision in our lives.
If anything, what this article most effectively points out is the fact the value of being born with or building connections is greater than ever in history. Maybe if the author had spoken about that it would have been an interesting piece. As it stands, it's more or less meaningless.
Keep in mind, the author has a huge vested interest in developers like us working at startups for equity stakes.
The article plainly doesn't apply to only a very tiny minority of readers. It's an argument to talented people not to undervalue themselves.
The sensational detail of "a check from Peter Thiel" is blowing the stack here, and flushing everything else the article says out of memory. I think it's worth keeping to the point.
I have a friend exactly like that and it’s been basically worthless for me. I don’t really engage with him any more.
His car is worth more than my house. He seems to think that gives him the right to allocate my labor to his pet projects. Had I quit my job when he urged, years ago, I would have had a boss with untreated ADHD and unlimited money waste a half-decade of my life.