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February 27 - February 27, 2018
To paraphrase the very quotable Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, in the future there will be two types of jobs: people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.
This emulation is merely a result of the organic progression of our mad and clever species from one technological toy to another.
Of course, some very protective publishers like Facebook and Google, with unique media offerings, refuse to get arbitraged so openly, and to one degree or another, attempt to own the technical and business connection between them and the advertising dollars. This is how online advertising works: money turns into pixels and electrons in the form of ads, which turn into a scintilla of attention in someone’s mind, which after a few more clicks and electrons shuffling about, turns back into money.
If the time frame is very short, like browsing for and buying a shirt at nordstroms.com, it’s called “direct response,” or “DR” advertising. If the time frame is very long, such as making you believe life is unlivable outside the pricey mantle of a Burberry coat, it’s called “brand advertising.” Note that the goal is the same in both: to make you buy shit you likely don’t need with money you likely don’t have.
imagine that every time you go to CNN.com, it’s as though a new sell order for one share in your brain is transmitted to a stock exchange.
In the midst of it all you must take your stand, good-temperedly and without disdain, yet always aware that a man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.
Here’s the lesson: when the company’s employee retention strategy is cultivating Stockholm syndrome, you’re in the wrong company.
What is writing? It’s me, the author, taking the state inside my mind and, via the gift of language, grafting it onto yours. But man invented language in order to better deceive, not inform. That state I’m transmitting is often a false one, but you judge it not by the depth of its emotion in my mind, but by the beauty and pungency of the thought in yours.
All with mere words: memes of meaning strung together according to grammar and good taste. Astonishing when you think about it.
Specialization of labor was already happening. The boys were good at making computers do hard things via code. I was good at making people do hard things via language—and good at figuring out what big bets were worth making.
Ideas without implementation, or without an exceptional team to implement them, are like assholes and opinions: everyone’s got one.
They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel. British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work—be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast to someone’s back—required doing.
One of Mark Twain’s more uplifting quotes maintains that small people always belittle your ambitions, while the great make you feel that you too can be great.
They’d be better served by reading less Neal Stephenson and more Shakespeare and Patricia Highsmith.
Reid Hoffman, a large man, thundered like an emperor at the head of this troops, and spilled wonderful stories about the PayPal saga, the founding of LinkedIn, and going to war with Microsoft. He was by far one of the best speakers; you felt like kicking your way through a brick wall when he was done.
It doesn’t even need to figure out what a search query is worth and price it accordingly. It simply holds an auction for every search query entered, at the moment the query occurs. The net result is that billions of times a day, Google runs an auction of keywords and accompanying bids. By looking at the bid, and estimating the likelihood of a click, Google takes the product of the two (which is how much it will make per query) and picks the highest. Then it displays the associated ad that the advertiser has created and uploaded to Google for that keyword.
the top ten is always composed of some combination of “insurance,” “loans,” “mortgage,” “classes,” “credit,” “lawyer,” and so on. These are Google’s moneymakers, which pay for the Android phones, the Chrome browser, the self-driving cars, the flying Wi-Fi balloons, and whatever weird, geeky, philanthropic shit the company is up to recently.
Nothing is keeping the entity going except your shared delusion. And there you sit, working, raging, doing both the best, and also the most poorly thought out, work of your life.
Such decisions aren’t data-driven collaborative conclusions, driven by spreadsheets and pie charts. No, they’re bold, intuitive, bet-the-company moves decided by one individual, similar to a ship’s captain in a storm, or a Wall Street trader in the midst of a market move. You live and die by such decisions, and they may well be wrong, but it’s more fatal to not make decisions than to make them.
In those early days, we were doing an entire ballet of product “pivots.”
That whole dark, Latin/Mediterranean thing was my usual emotional state of being as well, but I (sort of) recognized that it just doesn’t fly in the staid Anglo-Saxon world.
every real problem in startups is a people problem, and as such they’re the hardest to solve, as they often don’t have a real solution, much less a ready software fix. Startups are experiments in group psychology. As CEO, you’re both the therapist leader, and the patient most in need of therapy.
There was one day that made us realize exactly what flavor of shit we were in.
In San Francisco, people don’t pay two months’ rent to a real estate pimp: they create Craigslist and make the pimp obsolete.
The church disallowed Christians from practicing usury, granting Jews an unexpected windfall in the form of a religiously ordained monopoly on moneylending.
Fund-raising is an operatic drama on the order of a Latin American telenovela. Avoid the company-wide noise, and contain the pointless din of the begathon to yourself (or someone) at all costs.
Thus did the tombstone commemorating the initial $25 million funding round for Google beam forth its rays of divine benediction, like the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City’s basilica.
Naturally, one of the elite Valley confabs revolved exclusively around kiteboarding. A senior venture capitalist at Charles River Ventures named Bill Tai (along with professional kiteboarder Susi Mai) hosted the punnily named MaiTai kiteboarding camp in Hawaii. Like all things Valley, it mixed a certain hippie, back-to-nature transcendentalism (the organization supports several ocean charities), that American obsession with athletics, and the hard-nosed hustle of the entrepreneur.
The Prince: war is never avoided; it’s only postponed to someone’s advantage.
I’m a catastrophic thinker. I enjoy apocalypse films and zombie-invasion flicks. The Road Warrior (a.k.a. Mad Max II) is probably my favorite action film. 28 Days Later is a close second. I don’t know if it reflects a murderous antipathy to all humanity, or just a taste for anarchy and societal collapse. Either way, I always expect the worst.
As Sun Tzu informs us, no matter how cowardly by nature, anyone fights to the death when his back is against the wall. A wise combatant always allows his opponent a way out,
Their employees are mercenaries who don’t deeply care, and suffer from the diffuse responsibility and weak emotional investment of a larger organization.
It wouldn’t be a startup without some glib optimism, so I included revenue numbers based on a near-term launch and some percent growth rate in users and monetization. Finally, I plotted our running cash on hand on a line graph, with time on the lower axis, and pondered the trajectory.
Like many hardcore engineers, the man was incapable of lying and/or reading a social situation.
Fast-forward thirty-five years: Gates now tours Africa as a great philanthropist and single-handedly cures malaria. Kildall eventually succumbed to alcoholism, dying in mysterious circumstances—probably a drunken brawl—in a Monterrey biker bar at age fifty-two. To quote Balzac, “The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a forgotten crime, as the crime was properly done.” Never was a crime better concealed.
The harsh reality is this: to have influence in the world, you need to be willing and able to reward your friends and punish your enemies.
First, the ability to monomaniacally and obsessively focus on one thing and one thing only, at the expense of everything else in life.
Incidentally, it helps to have enemies. While love is a beautiful emotion, far more empires have been built, books written, wrongs righted, fights won, and ambitions realized out of vengeful desire to prove some critic wrong, or existential dread of some perceived enemy, than all the love in the world. Love is grand, but hate and fear last longer.
Fortunately, the iteration cycle in a software business is fast (we don’t need to retool milling machines here), and from some approximately correct starting point we can converge on a final product, almost like successive guesses at the solution to an equation. The quicker we iterate, the more steps we can take in the direction of this mythical point of perfect fit. Each such step costs money in wages, server costs, and lost time. When that cash balance goes to zero, the game is over and we’ve lost.
The combination of these two elements, enchantment and surrender, is then essential to this love we are discussing. Their combination is not a mere coexistence; they’re not two parts placed together, one next to the other, but rather one is born and nourished from the other. It’s love due to surrender via enchantment.
Walking into any meeting, you should know every goddamn thing there is to know about the other person; if you don’t, you’re failing.
Leaving at precisely four years means they’re plodders, punching the equivalent of the white-collar Silicon Valley clock until the next shift.
What do they look like in photos taken over time? Do they look fit and healthy, with shots of them in corporate-branded nut-hugger biking outfits on a group ride on scenic Skyline Boulevard? Do they keep a stable work-life balance, with regularly scheduled two-hour workouts and time for a Thursday date night? Or do they look like they got ingested by a blue whale and spent three days transiting its digestive system? Total commitment, like unconditional love, is the only type that matters. The bike-riding, date-night-going types will never give everything to a company or an idea, and are
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Much distressed wood and hot-rolled steel furniture. Faux stag’s heads molded from synthetics, and those nightmarish flocks of birds—not the bland corporate logo, but what you see populating a truly Hunter S. Thompson–esque psychedelic freakout—on bare walls, usually in some shade of bluish pastel. The company canteen continued the preening design, but at this point I’m running out of cute ways to describe the shit you see at Restoration Hardware, so you can just imagine it instead.
The visionary CEO doesn’t care about money, only the user experience, and manages by looking at usage dashboards, not revenue ones.
Elad Gil, a YC investor and noted blogger, whose eloquent and knowledgeable takes on the early-stage startup game I routinely devoured.
Like the best Valley law firms, they played the long game, and were big believers in the “first dose is free” business model.
An error at the hour of signing a big contract, or negotiating an acquisition, could easily cost you millions, or be the deciding factor between summers in Ibiza with your model girlfriend or taking a consolation-prize job as product manager at Oracle instead (look, you get pretax commuter cost benefits there!).
European powers competed for favor from potential Asian allies to use against other Europeans—imagine France teaming up with Iran against the United Kingdom these days, as Napoleon did in 1807—and Middle Eastern governments meddled in European affairs in a way unthinkable now.
key actor in this fascinating civilizational face-off was the dragoman (the etymological root is the Arabic word for “translator”). More than a mere interpreter, the dragoman was a cultural matchmaker who selectively (mis)translated missives in order to achieve a desired diplomatic result (often unknown to either communicating party). Thus did the Sublime Porte’s imperious message to Queen Victoria greeting her as a tributary get toned down to that of an esteemed diplomatic partner. When Victoria wrote back with a stiff upper lip, the dragoman would layer on the subservience an Oriental despot
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