Comment by catalystic
6 years ago
I feel a lot of the folks here are focusing on the wrong parts here. The $200M loss was a cheap way of getting user attention, but hey it worked!
The core of what he was trying to convey was the sooner you get to understand real user / customer problems the better off you'll be in life as an entrepreneur.
He stayed away from this in his early days as he opted for stability and that he seems to regret.
> The $200M loss was a cheap way of getting user attention, but hey it worked!
Many Hacker News submissions get flagged to death for such tactics alone.
True, but the ones where upvotes defeat flags in the tug-of-war stay afloat, and usually (well, sometimes at least) that's because there's some other substantive aspect to the article. In such cases we eventually notice the titles and change them to stick to the site guidelines—preferably using representative language from the article itself. I've attempted to do that above.
In this case the substantive aspect is at least partly that Garry has had a close relationship with HN over the years. And vice versa.
I feel they should be as well. If left unmonitored, this can lead to spammy / crappy experience. In this case the individual speaking is a well known and experienced figure who has a lot of insights to offer, hence I feel this made the cut.
> I feel a lot of the folks here are focusing on the wrong parts here. The $200M loss was a cheap way of getting user attention, but hey it worked!
It "worked" in that that it got people's attention but distracted from the post's main message.
Agreed .. bait and switch technique i guess. But since we've invested time looking into the content, might as well talk about the core / useful content rather than focusing on the bait :)
> The core of what he was trying to convey was the sooner you get to understand real user / customer problems the better off you'll be in life as an entrepreneur.
And sometimes you're better off learning this at an actual company that ships products to millions of people than grinding away at a startup that won't exist in a year or two, with options that are worth nothing and a salary much lower than you'd get at a more established company. And there's a good chance the startup never ends up shipping anything of value. Startup vs Big Co isn't always a no brainer, lots of factors to consider.