Comment by cj
2 months ago
I don’t think his problem is money.
I think his problem is his identity (founder of Loom) suddenly disappeared.
Now he needs to develop a new identity.
This is especially difficult for single founders without kids (in the sense that people with spouse/kids already derive much of their identity from those 2 things).
Selling a company isn’t all that different from going through a divorce (in the sense that your identity needs to be completely rebuilt from scratch)
William Storr writes about this. His stance is humans are hard wired for status within their social group. The problem is when all your status eggs in one basket and it disappears, it’s not good for your mental health. He advocates for having your identity spread across many different pursuits and disparate social groups, although he admits he’s not very good at doing that himself.
> humans hard wired for status within their social group.
Not always "status". Humans benefit from cooperative behaviour but may have many reasons for joining and adhering or leaving.
Having varied interests means different networks. The important point is to see meaning and value. This is where ostracism and rejection can be most painful.
To put a finer point on it, Storr’s thesis is there are three main domains that humans try to achieve status: dominance, competence, and virtue. Same end goal, but different means to get esteem. Put differently, people ultimately need to feel valued by their tribe.
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I took 1.5 years off to work on an open source project (also because I was struggling with health issues), and the hardest thing was describing what you're doing to other people. I thought I was "above" social status, that it wouldn't affect me, but it did. I was essentially unemployed, that's how it felt at least. It's so much easier just saying "I do X for a living, I work at company Y". It means some company thinks you're good enough to pay good money for.
Keep it simple, then pivot. Most people don't care that much about what you do unless they're in your same industry (in which case, they'd empathize).
> What do you do?
Write software.
> Oh yeah, for who?
$GitProjectName
> What do they do?
It's a project that <short explanation>.
But enough about me, <pivot to different topic | shift focus to the other person>
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In what book? Searched but can’t find anything that sounds like this.
My guess is The Status Game by Will Storr.
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Hard to take such general advice seriously from someone who apparently doesn’t practice it. In fact, it seems mistaken to do so.
do as I say not as I do is core of all parenting… :)
if the first person to notice a correlation between alcoholism and cirrhosis was an alcoholic, you'd dismiss what he said out of hand and keep drinking?
Probably needs to develop a soul first.
NPCs don’t actually exist outside of video games, those are real human beings.
Not sure what to do with all that wealth? Try asking one of those NPCs… spend a day with each one of them, learn what being human actually is
The dude also dumped his long time girlfriend right after coming into a large chunk of money (and thinks she cares enough to read his blog!), and truly thinks he was going to "save our government". Also, the mountain climbing (IYKYK).
He sounds pretty full of himself and seems to struggle making personal connections with people. Being the founder of a startup gave people a reason to care about him, and now that he's lost that along everyone around him. He beat the game and now the characters in the story have nothing left to say to him.
The guy should put down the physics book and go learn to be a person that others enjoy being around. Go get a job waiting tables and hang out with coworkers after work, learn to surf, etc.
100% this! Calling one's colleague an NPC is not only demeaning but also shows a lack of awareness and empathy. Does the author even understand that by his logic, he is a NPC in his colleague's world?
You are misinterpreting. He’s talking about how at big companies, you always have people who don’t seem to bring any actual value. They're in every meeting, but don't say anything, don't set any direction, don't produce any documents or any code, don't exhibit any sense of urgency or even involvement, and don't contribute in any noticeable way. "NPCs." They are completely passive as far as you can tell -- or worse, they actively slow others down when they happen to be on some critical approval path.
I'm sure they are lovely people outside work, and loving parents and good citizens. But when the rest of us are busting our butts to get work done, they're unfortunately useless.
The guy who started a video conferencing app called Loom (2 years after Zoom came out) then miraculously sold it for almost a billion dollars has no business calling anyone an "NPC".
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It’s a very easy trap to think that all of these idiots aren’t doing anything. However, the more you talk to them, the more you realize that not only are they doing something, they’re definitely not idiots, and many of them are doing the best they can with what they’ve been given.
You get some leeches in there. You get some jerks. They’re the exception, not the rule, even in ur big globocorps.
They're still people. Just because the company doesn't motivate them or they have a bad manager or are on a bad team or a million other reasons they don't feel empowered to "participate" (specious since clearly they're employed) doesn't mean you can act like they're soulless bots ffs.
This whole mindset has got to go. You and OP going around like this, it's gross for the world and it's a bad look on you.
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>and don't contribute in any noticeable way. >They are completely passive as far as you can tell
Fundamental attribution error strikes again?
Reminds me of the apocryphal/anecdotal tale of the management conultant who wanted to fire a "secretary" who he could only find taking coffee breaks and long lunches with lots of different people, only to be told (or finding out after the firing) that the person in question was critical to inter-team dynamics and functioning.
Negatively Producing Characters? Or maybe Null Producing Characters.
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Yes. Thinking of others as NPCs has its own way of turning ones self into an NPC.
cf. Mean Girls
> Probably needs to develop a soul first.
More generally, if you cultivate yourself you will get more pleasure from your activities. If you take time to learn an instrument, or listen to classical, or gardening (you can grow exotic plants for example), learn a new language, or anything else. The more you put into refining your appreciation and knowledge, the more value you can get back from your activities. It's a self cultivation problem.
Calling people NPCs is one of my biggest pet peeves and a dead giveaway that someone is a soulless narcissist. It is dehumanizing in the extreme, the same way Nazis characterized Jews as rats in propaganda. When people say eat the rich… this is who they mean
>a dead giveaway that someone is a soulless narcissist
You're engaging in the exact same behavior, are you not? NPC and soulless are the same fundamental concept, that there is a certain threshold of humanity people can fall below to be considered lesser. They're soulless, they're NPCs, they're untermenschen... whatever the word for it, there are "dead giveaways" that a person can lack that hidden quality that separates man from animal. I'm sure it wasn't your intent, but from a certain reading, it seems like what you're saying isn't really all that far off from "calls people NPCs = is the real NPC".
I often see people decry specific terminology associated with dehumanizing beliefs without refuting the actual premise behind them.
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Well.. I've pretty much accepted that I'm more or less an NPC. So no harm done from my side.
Yep. I don't understand why the technological community accepts essentially sociopathic tendencies as long as your idea (regardless of what that idea is) is rewarded by the capital system. It's pathetic.
It's not pathetic, it's destructive and evil.
> I think his problem is his identity (founder of Loom) suddenly disappeared.
This is spot on. And I think it’s probably the biggest thing he’s going through
However, the money is definitely a big factor as well. Not because of the amount of money, but because of the suddenness that it happened with
In a very short amount of time, he found himself not needing (and realizing also not wanting), to maintain his identity at the time
The money and the suddenness also put him in a situation that is pretty hard to relate to for the vast majority of people
So not only he lost his identity, he also found himself alone (and made it even worse, by pushing people away or ending some relationships)
I don't think his problem is money.
I think his problem is he might not be a very good person.
If true, he probably knows this already and now just needs to work out how to fix it.
It says on wiki:
In 2022, according to Forbes, the firm was valued at $1.5 billion, having secured $200 million in funding from venture funds such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Coatue, and Kleiner Perkins.[1][2] It is remote, but is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with an office in New York.
Why would such a seemingly simple product need so much money? It seems like the business was already done. Web video recording or facetime has been around a long time, but somehow this company carved a niche in a crowded market.
They slapped the word AI on it and took advantage of temporary market conditions (wfh due to covid and AI hype), nothing more, nothing less. Unless I'm missing something, there is nothing special about this product and probably no one will remember it in ~15 years time.
Meanwhile OP seems to think he should have expected the same sense of fulfillment one might get from an actually meaningful contribution to human society, for some reason.
Very very well said. OP's vapid writing kind of tells the tale.
What does loom have anything to do with AI? It is a nifty way to share video recordings easily and quickly. In that they did a great job
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It catered to the specific niche of screencasts and thus needed a lot of custom software written that doesn't already exist in Zoom/Teams. After development costs there's marketing/CAC costs to be considered. For those that don't "get it" upon seeing the product, you need to spend money on salespeople to convince them they do. After those expenses, their AWS bill surely wasn't cheap.
Finally though, you hope not to raise too many times, so that $200 million needs to last years. Let's say they planned for a round 10 years. that's 20 million a year. say half on developers, that's 10-40 software developers all-in (meaning after HR and health care for them and everything). 10-40 people isn't all that many, though clearly enough to build the product.
Since the author of the blog post walked away with $60 million, it's possible they could have developed the product for less, but it's hard to argue with the results he got. Spending less money would have been penny-wise, pound foolish.
> Finally though, you hope not to raise too many times, so that $200 million needs to last years. Let's say they planned for a round 10 years
You had me until this. Nobody is raising money to last ten years. You would be growing and want to raise in future years at higher valuations that incorporate all the growth.
He doesn't think his problem is money either, because that would have a trivial and obvious solution that doesn't seem to be under consideration.
Reminds me of this Jim Carrey speech
https://youtu.be/YHIZ0Rb7lv0?si=TG_SIi-XUuP1iHYf
True, i would still argue that your identity might be fogged by these things and come out clearer after lifting roles you may stumbled into more than you chose them.
So sure hope for him and others they survive their 7 years of catharsis!
Is this not the same problem everyone faces when they retire?
No, only people who define their lives by their job. Most people have a life outside of work.
The vast majority of men develop depression at retirement. So you can say this with scorn if it pleases you, but the group you’re talking about is massive and doesn’t deserve this derision.
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We're supposed to have a life outside work? Oh shit
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