> He approached me because he was really into startups and wanted to become a tech entrepreneur, and make the big bucks
It's a shame that so much of tech culture has become about money. Money was always a part of it, but living in the Bay in 2010, there was more of a focus on building things. But once people started getting rich, especially off bitcoin, it brought in a whole host of people whose primary passion seemed to be money. We moved out in 2018. Still bums me out, SF was my favorite city, and I hoped to live there for a long time, but the values weren't my values anymore.
> Money was always a part of it, but living in the Bay in 2010, there was more of a focus on building things. But once people started getting rich, especially off bitcoin, it brought in a whole host of people whose primary passion seemed to be money.
This is funny to read because I remember hearing someone complain about the exact same thing in the Bay Area, but their dates were shifted by about 10 years before yours.
I think it's kind of like Burning Man, where everyone's favorite experience was their early days when they were young. As you get older, you complain it's gone downhill and the new generation is going for all the wrong reasons.
I find people's view is based on how much they're personally "winning" financially. If they're making money, then daily life seems more about building. If they're not making money, then the oppressive cost of living makes money seem all-important in the culture (which, in fact, it is and has been for generations).
SF and the Bay Area are constantly shuffling through and recombining ideas. What generated money relatively easily in 2010 would've started becoming low value in 2018, rapidly approaching an asymptote of relative uselessness today. 2018 is about the point where you needed to be pivoting to AI if you really wanted to remain part of the city's "upper class", where money feels like it doesn't matter because it's abundant and automatic. 2010 was the era of mobile apps.
I think it is interesting how now, a lot of the selling to individuals regarding AI is the ability to do what was popular in 2010 (building apps, websites, games) is easy now due to AI. I know so many people who have made workout apps, CRMs, planners, etc. that are baffled by why their work isn't picking up traction (keep in mind, we aren't in SV).
Makes me wonder how long we have before, "create your own ChatGPT" becomes the next big thing and people wonder why their "AI Labs" aren't making as much as the big boys.
> Makes me wonder how long we have before, "create your own ChatGPT" becomes the next big thing and people wonder why their "AI Labs" aren't making as much as the big boys.
We're already there. It seems like every intern I see has built a custom chatbot with a RAG pipeline integrated into an internal application.
And every legacy SaaS is paying millions in consulting to add the same to their app.
I think the focus on building things is the wrong framing - that seems to be still there. But this AI wave is centered around automation, which has a different flavor to the previous cycles (1970-2010), which very much felt much more positive sum and less hyper capitalistic.
> This is funny to read because I remember hearing someone complain about the exact same thing in the Bay Area, but their dates were shifted by about 10 years before yours.
Another perspective is just that SF's culture has been declining for decades. As someone born in SF, I'd agree.
I've just been reading The Making of Prince of Persia (highly recommend [1]) and it's amazing how the journal feels exactly like today's startup scene. But everything is dated 1989.
Another theory is that things has gotten worse as more and more petite bourgeois prospects for class travel lose faith in the invisible hand and turn to pure grift.
And when it comes to culture as festivals they are very much victims of getting hallowed out and sucked dry.
And for me 10 years before that - not in the bay area but in my CS program at UCSD. Going into the junior year in '96 there was a clear inflection point, we suddenly had a flood of finance bro types all over the CS lab as the dot com bubble was quickly inflating.
I think there was a time when people who generally went for MBAs started going into CS and other majors angling to get into a tech company. There was also a coincidental proliferation of tech “bootcamps.” I think that’s when things tilted away from technology as a way to improve things to a vehicle to greater riches.
SF, from my perspective (I work there part time but don’t live there) is interesting because it feels like one of the few cities one would still move to to “make it” in an industry, at least in tech.
There seems to be a human desire to start a new and better life somewhere, and career-wise SF is almost the only place that seems compelling to try. There are lots of good companies in other cities, but I don’t know would you hear someone say they were going to move to Seattle because of the tech scene and try and get involved in some startups? SF still feel American dream-y.
I think the real watershed wan't bitcoin, it was the internet bubble, before that the rule of thumb was you couldn't go public without 5 consecutive quarters of profit - you really had to build something real - suddenly you could do it on hype alone and the focus turned to that
It’s always been a travesty, it was just harder to see through it because back then morals hadn’t been completely dismantled by the last 15 years of whatever the US has become
As long as there is money people will come just for that. That's where we got tech bros, like finance bros, instead of just a bunch of nerds making cool stuff.
Tech startup is one of the few remaining ways still allowed for plebs to build wealth unless they're born into it, because digital stuff isn't influenced by real estate feudalism.
Also why generative AI scares people who want to build wealth with tech, as it removes a vehicle to create moats to build wealth and concentrates existing wealth that can avoid having to hire labor. At least the illusion of meritocracy and skill (versus connection and luck) leading to wealth is evaporating.
Fwiw, without naming names, I helped someone at a hackathon make their first app on something he was passionate about, later found out he had been recently homeless living on an abandoned boat, and now years later, afaict he turned that into a $10m/yr business with ~millions of users
Persistence > Intelligence , and being able to code isn't some sort of superiority thing, it's just one skill of many
Edit: being able to take risks, and doing so, does lead to higher variance outcomes, so that is something I have also come to appreciate and look for in people. It may look reckless, and attracts weirder people almost by definition, but that is what startups are ultimately about, betting you can do better than the regular path!
> Jim had participated in drug-fueled “founder parties”, group orgies and all other crazy experiences in San Francisco. This naturally led to the breakup with his fiancée and a nervous breakdown.
The Bay Area is a weird place. There are countless companies staffed by smart people doing amazing things. There are also countless people cosplaying as smart people and founders who are going through all of the motions, but producing little value.
In my experience (which is as limited as any other one person's experience) the environments at the companies doing the amazing things are on the boring side. Nobody wants to hear about those because it's uninteresting. So instead all of the public stories are about crazy parties, quick wins, huge exits, and the glamorous stuff.
People go there seeking it out. Some get lucky with some early wins, like Jim from this story. But when the time comes to do work, they flounder and get pushed out, also like Jim. It's a big place, though, and there's always some connection willing to hook you up with another referral if you press hard enough. That's the step where the performative, partying people start getting grouped up with other performative, partying people, and it snowballs from there.
Meanwhile the real companies are off quietly doing boring work and getting things done, pushing the Jims out if they accidentally get hired or acquired into the fold. It's a weird place.
SF is such a weird vibe in general. I've watched a lot of founders/tech bros go to burning man for the first time, completely miss the point of it but adopt an air of superiority for attending. I watched a founder weave in his experience on peyote into a company all hands. They also, for reasons I simply cannot fathom, go out and buy a green Range Rover. And as someone who's been in the ENM space for a long time, SF is the LAST city I'd want to experience it in...
> I've watched a lot of founders/tech bros go to burning man for the first time, completely miss the point of it but adopt an air of superiority for attending.
I can't say I see a lot of green Range Rovers in other cities, but I assure you this one is universal across places and industries.
I have friends who go to Burning Man and don't post anything on their social media or bring it up in conversation because they don't want to be one of those people. Others go once and it becomes 50% of their personality for the next year.
I think much of this comes down to wanting to be a type of person vs. wanting to do the actual thing.
It’s easy to be consumed by “I’m the wealthy San Francisco founder guy” and doing everything that lifestyle requires, including things that may not be good for you.
I've been to some weird SF events where you immediately recognize that most people there are in their fake it till you make it stage. Then you realize that many of them aren't interested in the part where you have to do a lot of hard work, they just want to be impressive and charming to a broad network so they can insert themselves into the best opportunities that come up.
Every startup collects a couple of these hires during their growth phase. Some times it can be really hard to separate the charm, charisma, and credentials from ability to get things done. The smart founders will push these people back out, much like this Jim guy got fired from the startup he managed to get into at the right place at the right time. It doesn't happen immediately, though.
Bit of an aside but I found it somewhat amusing that one example the author uses of Jim’s financial recklessness was getting into home brewing.
Home brewing is one of the cheaper hobbies available (though like all hobbies you can spend as much as you want). The only real requirements are a bucket and a pot.
> He lost focus and became reckless. He bought some fancy tree slice table for 10k bucks, got into brewing beer, got a dog, a cat, and overall, went completely over himself financially.
Well, he also mentions getting a dog and a cat in that context. Recklessness is relative I guess.
The cat would certainly agree though I suppose, when it sees that dog walking in the door...
Same with a $10k tree slicer, when the actually expensive alternatives that really get people in trouble are day trading, real estate, car collecting, divorce, and starting new businesses that fail.
it’s infinitely easier to become an alcoholic by buying alcohol at a grocery store. brewing is pretty much the least direct most delayed gratification way to get drunk. i guess it can be pretty cheap if you optimize for that but it sounds like jim made enough money and high flying friends it’s unlikely to be major factor.
Though, after you've home brewed the beer, you've now got potentially gallons of beer in a giant pot that you have to bottle yourself. Or you could be lazy and just drink it yourself. True, you could just go down to the store and grab a 30-rack of mass produced beer if you wanted to be an alcoholic, but having a vat of beer in your kitchen that isn't going to drink itself and is gonna go bad if you don't, is a different kind of peer pressure.
You must not drink or like beer. Brewing something until it ferments into alcohol is the most basic thing ever. There is the very simple problem of taste that is the issue.
I don’t trust anyone who has the general, abstract goal of being a “founder”. If there’s no great idea to go with it, it just seems like vanity. And sure it does work out really well anyway sometimes, but it’s just something I can’t get behind aesthetically.
I met a number of really successful founders who came in just wanting to build a business and found a niche later (sometimes waaay later). I suspect majority of founders with “great ideas” discovered them after the company was started and the great idea they started with wasn’t actually that good
It's really hard for me to understand that people who have the chance to achieve basic financial independence (say $1M net worth) don't take that chance and make sure to stay financially independent forever.
If you do that, you're almost guaranteed to stay in the top 2% globally for the rest of your life. You've made it in life, at least financially.
The approach of not taking advantage of the lucky and privileged situation exposes you to a huge risk that your NW will go down to zero and you never get a second chance.
I think $1M net worth in the US these days is a nice little nest egg, but not anywhere near financial independence. Unless your needs are simple, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply, and you don't have any dependents.
> Unless your needs are simple, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply, and you don't have any dependents.
As a human, your needs are simple[1]. With a $1M net worth, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply. And your dependents can live in that same place, also cheaply.
All you need to do is show the Joneses the door out of your mind and never let them back in, nor look toward their lives in envy.
[1]: Healthcare being a notable potential exception, depending on the individual.
$1M invested in a reasonably diversified portfolio gets you about $3,000/mo lifetime at ~3.5% safe withdrawal rate. That might be quite restrictive in the more expensive cities.
Silicon Valley bats for 0-to-1 startups. If you swap "Revenue" for "Risk," that is culturally the same.
People who don't have a "1" full-risk-on mode by default self-select themselves out of this game.
A toy model game is poker. If opponents know you'll never call an all-in/go all-in, they will always outplay you on the river.
And so, let the market pump funny numbers, and matriculate the lucky survivors.
> don't take that chance and make sure to stay financially independent forever.
What means do you see? Buy some S&P500 ETF and live off the interest rate? That seams easy but without investing in AI, you’re at risk of AI making the existing economy irrelevant, it’s the same as having all investments in local craftsmanship in 1700 and the steam machine happens, except much faster.
And move to [insert home country]? (What if I want to keep my friends)
Is it the AI companies though that will capture the value that AI creates, or will it be the still-private startups, or new to-be-founded startups altogether?
Startups are taking longer and longer to reach public markets, so more and more value creation requires you to be a family office, angel, or hedge fund.
Founder culture definitely has fraternity vibes - people with no other discernable talent other than being above average looking and having connections with other similar people end up in positions they have no real idea how to do.
In other words, there are a lot of people "playing startup" in the valley - some of the VC money flows too easily and there is always going to be an ecosystem of people to try to put it to work.
> The establishment scions pouring into tech take on the trappings of subversion, while remaining fundamentally conformist. Meanwhile, rampant success inevitably causes the former tech counterculture to morph into posturing “Prada revolutionaries,”
Unfortunately the article ends on praising crypto and surveillance, so this has been going on for a while
Even better who you know, then you can become wealthy and get away with almost anything, as Epstein realized when he said there are out lots of hard working people who never become rich.
Interesting. I am sure there are Jims outside of startup world too. There will be finance Jims and entertainment Jims.
Is having a couple of pets and a ridiculous table lifestyle creep. Maybe. I think of lifestyle creep more in terms of you are not saving any money at all.
I think that comment is more telling of what is expected of founders and engineers. At least from authors point of view.
No life allowed. Definitely don't reproduce. You work, and work so you can work more.
I mostly stayed clear of the SV world while building and exiting my startup, but people like this came and went through my network constantly. They were always easy to pick out based on how much they glorified certain SV personalities and were desperate for their approval.
I always found it interesting how different things are in US (well, more so startup hotspots) and Europe. In the US you're simply given more chances if you have the right personality and superficial elements.
In so many European countries, unless you happen to have bootstrapped your way into success, you'll be written off as a bozo if you don't have all the correct credentials.
Someone like Jim (read: No formal relevant education, no industry experience, only hopes and dreams) would in the very, very, VERY best case get a €100k funding - and that is only if they had other more attractive looking co-founders with them.
I mean, it is something everyone knows - but the sheer risk averseness you often see here in Europe is really something.
The reality behind that is that the US is much much richer than any single European entity, and that the US is a country founded by Europeans (note that I'm talking about the country, not claiming Europeans are the first to arrive in North America) who felt they'd run out of opportunities back home. Hundreds of years of European migration to the US suggests that social stratification and lack of opportunities outside of the old boy's network remains a problem.
There are different kinds of founders in Silicon Valley now. Some are more like founders from the previous generation, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Others are more like Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann.
There are lots of earnest, sincere, and interesting founders. There are also lots who probably would've been happier on Wall Street.
This gets to a point my dad always made when I was neck deep in startups; so many of them felt unserious. People go to the most expensive west coast city, raise money, and then move to the next most expensive east coast city and open a second office. A lot of founders are clearly inexperienced, and to defend their inexperience, hire under experienced teams. It all sort of gets back to the root of the issue, which is that the hardest part is never the engineering, it’s networking and finding product market fit. Finding people who actually get up and do meaningful things is hard, and so Jim’s sneak in under the guise of being an outsider who understands a market and can make things happen.
>and to defend their inexperience, hire under experienced teams
It's also a bit of "I like you because you're like me" thing plus some "it's useful to me that you're like that".
I've seen plenty of startups where the CEO/CTO has been trained to under one specific stereotype (common ones these days are: the asian twink, the athlete, the nootropics guy, etc.), and then lots of their friends/hires happen to be of the same or adjacent/compatible stereotypes.
You really have to believe your own narrative to do well as a startup founder, even when evidence is initially scant. This likely also has a tendency to slide into self-delusion.
woah woah... a bartender becomes the head of engineering at a high flying start up? This isn't the .com. Did the bartender also go to MIT?
Drug fueled founder parties? Orgies? I've clearly been doing silicon valley wrong. Or right, depending on your perspective... but not this? I've seen board game fueled parties where maybe one or two people do drugs, but it remains very nerdy? And no sex parties. Mostly sausage parties?
... so yeah. Do people really know Jims? Because I just read posts about them.
I've met the type. But usually, they're on the marketing side, not the ones who develop something. I knew one who blew through 8 figures and ended up an alcoholic, then dead.
The startup market rewards first to market and first to scale. This creates a game of "chicken", where the competitors spend like crazy trying to achieve a near monopoly. That's why some of the fake-it-til-you-make-it crowd gets ahead.
But most of them crash. The historical success rate for VC-funded startups is only about 1 in 10.
Re: sausage party - Based on the salary of these guys, if they wanted they could easily afford nightly visits at something like the now closed strip club, the Mitchell Brothers theater in San Francisco. I went for a bachelor party in early 2000s, and every dancer who got close enough to have a conversation with you propositioned you with sex acts for a price in a private room. I worked at a startup in Houston in the early 1990s and the founder went to strip clubs it seemed every time he was in town, he took the whole company one time (it was less than 20 of us) and that strip club seemed to work on a similar if less brazen vibe. The other startups I’ve worked for did not have strip club trips. :)
The whole SV “let’s go to burning man” crowd has always had a very active sex aspect to it. This is one of the things neo puritan pichai era Google struggles to deal with about its past.
Pretty sure my choosing to work for companies ran by stable sane people is responsible for the complete lack of drug fueled orgy invites on my calendar.
Actually the one drugs + stripper party I was invited to was so damn sad and pathetic I left after a few minutes. A bunch of geeks who got rich, using money to do an impersonation of the crazy lifestyle reality TV taught them they were supposed to be having.
I left the party and went back to playing board games in another wing of the hotel.
More prison gay than anything else. I'd go down on a man for a million dollar OpenAI offer even though I'm into women. I don't think commenters here realize how desperate people can become for money.
Weird article. The original Tweet is all about the "hacker house scene" and it refers to some people she met who went on to work for OpenAI.
The journalist is trying hard to tie it all back to OpenAI, but the original Tweet only mentions OpenAI as an eventual destination for some of the people involved in what she witnessed.
The shared "hacker house" scene in SF is really weird, though. Especially the more you get into EA/rationalist circles. There were groups that were basically cults emerging out of some of them.
> A few months post-acquisition, he got fired for an allegedly silly reason, but my intuition is that he was coasting hard and couldn’t focus at all because of home office and lifestyle creep.
This seems like a pretty dubious conclusion to make from the outside. There are a lot of reasons somebody would get fired after an acquisition. Hell, even if he was coasting, an acquisition followed by a rapid change in environment and culture can cause somebody to lose motivation for a wide range of reasons. Blaming this on "lifetstyle creep" is rather premature and, frankly, pretty judgemental or moralistic.
This is downstream of a pretty frustrating belief I've seen repeatedly in the tech industry: that whether a person is "motivated" or "hard working" is some kind of inherent quasi-moral characteristic of the person, rather than something substantially affected by environment. But hey, it's much easier to blame individuals and lean on the perf review process than it is to change organizational culture or leadership!
Or the only thing they do in life is come to the office and then mix life with work so effectively it’s a combination of hanging out with friends, eating free food, and working, but it all goes into the work bucket when claims are made about how much they work.
Nothing wrong with that per se, I basically did that in grad school. It’s completely different than actually grinding 100 hours a week though. Also tough to be a part of if you have a life or family outside work.
Yep, that's what I thought too. I contrast it with an accident and emergency consultant I know in the UK. He actually is grinding 70 hours a week and not compensated for it. He works long hours because there aren't enough staff to cover the reality of what's needed.
We will look back at the easy access to amphetamines - especially for children - in a similar light to the opioid epidemic. To be fair, I think they are less harmful than many opiates, but they are still serious drugs and usage has ~doubled in the last 10 years [1]. Anecdotally, it feels so common/casual for people - adults and schoolchildren - to be taking adderall, vyvanse, concerta, etc. Over 20 million subscriptions in the US [1] means thats something like 5-10% of the adult population.
Will we? Opiates leading to a homeless population not being productive, just looking to get high and be high all day and not do anything other than be a zombie, hits different compared to stimulants that makes people work harder and clean things.
The whole of the bay ran on Adderall and Ambien + what ever else one could get their hands on. It was so pervasive that even a decade later you could find Adderall references in Bay Area hip hop.
Almost 30 years on, and this still has not really changed.
His family is also insanely rich and helped him w/ the IP contracts.
John W. Spiegel: A prominent business litigation and securities lawyer who graduated from Yale University and worked as a partner at the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson.
Real bummer of a story.
> He approached me because he was really into startups and wanted to become a tech entrepreneur, and make the big bucks
It's a shame that so much of tech culture has become about money. Money was always a part of it, but living in the Bay in 2010, there was more of a focus on building things. But once people started getting rich, especially off bitcoin, it brought in a whole host of people whose primary passion seemed to be money. We moved out in 2018. Still bums me out, SF was my favorite city, and I hoped to live there for a long time, but the values weren't my values anymore.
> Money was always a part of it, but living in the Bay in 2010, there was more of a focus on building things. But once people started getting rich, especially off bitcoin, it brought in a whole host of people whose primary passion seemed to be money.
This is funny to read because I remember hearing someone complain about the exact same thing in the Bay Area, but their dates were shifted by about 10 years before yours.
I think it's kind of like Burning Man, where everyone's favorite experience was their early days when they were young. As you get older, you complain it's gone downhill and the new generation is going for all the wrong reasons.
I find people's view is based on how much they're personally "winning" financially. If they're making money, then daily life seems more about building. If they're not making money, then the oppressive cost of living makes money seem all-important in the culture (which, in fact, it is and has been for generations).
SF and the Bay Area are constantly shuffling through and recombining ideas. What generated money relatively easily in 2010 would've started becoming low value in 2018, rapidly approaching an asymptote of relative uselessness today. 2018 is about the point where you needed to be pivoting to AI if you really wanted to remain part of the city's "upper class", where money feels like it doesn't matter because it's abundant and automatic. 2010 was the era of mobile apps.
I think it is interesting how now, a lot of the selling to individuals regarding AI is the ability to do what was popular in 2010 (building apps, websites, games) is easy now due to AI. I know so many people who have made workout apps, CRMs, planners, etc. that are baffled by why their work isn't picking up traction (keep in mind, we aren't in SV).
Makes me wonder how long we have before, "create your own ChatGPT" becomes the next big thing and people wonder why their "AI Labs" aren't making as much as the big boys.
> Makes me wonder how long we have before, "create your own ChatGPT" becomes the next big thing and people wonder why their "AI Labs" aren't making as much as the big boys.
We're already there. It seems like every intern I see has built a custom chatbot with a RAG pipeline integrated into an internal application.
And every legacy SaaS is paying millions in consulting to add the same to their app.
I think the focus on building things is the wrong framing - that seems to be still there. But this AI wave is centered around automation, which has a different flavor to the previous cycles (1970-2010), which very much felt much more positive sum and less hyper capitalistic.
> This is funny to read because I remember hearing someone complain about the exact same thing in the Bay Area, but their dates were shifted by about 10 years before yours.
Another perspective is just that SF's culture has been declining for decades. As someone born in SF, I'd agree.
I've just been reading The Making of Prince of Persia (highly recommend [1]) and it's amazing how the journal feels exactly like today's startup scene. But everything is dated 1989.
[1] https://press.stripe.com/the-making-of-prince-of-persia
Another theory is that things has gotten worse as more and more petite bourgeois prospects for class travel lose faith in the invisible hand and turn to pure grift.
And when it comes to culture as festivals they are very much victims of getting hallowed out and sucked dry.
Yeah, I was reading along but the date 2010 surprised me.
In reality, you could probably put any date in there and it would work.
And for me 10 years before that - not in the bay area but in my CS program at UCSD. Going into the junior year in '96 there was a clear inflection point, we suddenly had a flood of finance bro types all over the CS lab as the dot com bubble was quickly inflating.
I think there was a time when people who generally went for MBAs started going into CS and other majors angling to get into a tech company. There was also a coincidental proliferation of tech “bootcamps.” I think that’s when things tilted away from technology as a way to improve things to a vehicle to greater riches.
SF, from my perspective (I work there part time but don’t live there) is interesting because it feels like one of the few cities one would still move to to “make it” in an industry, at least in tech.
There seems to be a human desire to start a new and better life somewhere, and career-wise SF is almost the only place that seems compelling to try. There are lots of good companies in other cities, but I don’t know would you hear someone say they were going to move to Seattle because of the tech scene and try and get involved in some startups? SF still feel American dream-y.
I think the real watershed wan't bitcoin, it was the internet bubble, before that the rule of thumb was you couldn't go public without 5 consecutive quarters of profit - you really had to build something real - suddenly you could do it on hype alone and the focus turned to that
It’s always been a travesty, it was just harder to see through it because back then morals hadn’t been completely dismantled by the last 15 years of whatever the US has become
As long as there is money people will come just for that. That's where we got tech bros, like finance bros, instead of just a bunch of nerds making cool stuff.
Tech startup is one of the few remaining ways still allowed for plebs to build wealth unless they're born into it, because digital stuff isn't influenced by real estate feudalism.
Also why generative AI scares people who want to build wealth with tech, as it removes a vehicle to create moats to build wealth and concentrates existing wealth that can avoid having to hire labor. At least the illusion of meritocracy and skill (versus connection and luck) leading to wealth is evaporating.
Fwiw, without naming names, I helped someone at a hackathon make their first app on something he was passionate about, later found out he had been recently homeless living on an abandoned boat, and now years later, afaict he turned that into a $10m/yr business with ~millions of users
Persistence > Intelligence , and being able to code isn't some sort of superiority thing, it's just one skill of many
Edit: being able to take risks, and doing so, does lead to higher variance outcomes, so that is something I have also come to appreciate and look for in people. It may look reckless, and attracts weirder people almost by definition, but that is what startups are ultimately about, betting you can do better than the regular path!
pg wrote about this a while back: https://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html
true :)
> being able to code isn't some sort of superiority thing, it's just one skill of many
Nah, bro. You’re elite level intelligence if you can /s
> Jim had participated in drug-fueled “founder parties”, group orgies and all other crazy experiences in San Francisco. This naturally led to the breakup with his fiancée and a nervous breakdown.
The Bay Area is a weird place. There are countless companies staffed by smart people doing amazing things. There are also countless people cosplaying as smart people and founders who are going through all of the motions, but producing little value.
In my experience (which is as limited as any other one person's experience) the environments at the companies doing the amazing things are on the boring side. Nobody wants to hear about those because it's uninteresting. So instead all of the public stories are about crazy parties, quick wins, huge exits, and the glamorous stuff.
People go there seeking it out. Some get lucky with some early wins, like Jim from this story. But when the time comes to do work, they flounder and get pushed out, also like Jim. It's a big place, though, and there's always some connection willing to hook you up with another referral if you press hard enough. That's the step where the performative, partying people start getting grouped up with other performative, partying people, and it snowballs from there.
Meanwhile the real companies are off quietly doing boring work and getting things done, pushing the Jims out if they accidentally get hired or acquired into the fold. It's a weird place.
SF is such a weird vibe in general. I've watched a lot of founders/tech bros go to burning man for the first time, completely miss the point of it but adopt an air of superiority for attending. I watched a founder weave in his experience on peyote into a company all hands. They also, for reasons I simply cannot fathom, go out and buy a green Range Rover. And as someone who's been in the ENM space for a long time, SF is the LAST city I'd want to experience it in...
> I've watched a lot of founders/tech bros go to burning man for the first time, completely miss the point of it but adopt an air of superiority for attending.
I can't say I see a lot of green Range Rovers in other cities, but I assure you this one is universal across places and industries.
I have friends who go to Burning Man and don't post anything on their social media or bring it up in conversation because they don't want to be one of those people. Others go once and it becomes 50% of their personality for the next year.
I think much of this comes down to wanting to be a type of person vs. wanting to do the actual thing.
It’s easy to be consumed by “I’m the wealthy San Francisco founder guy” and doing everything that lifestyle requires, including things that may not be good for you.
That's a really good way of putting it.
I've been to some weird SF events where you immediately recognize that most people there are in their fake it till you make it stage. Then you realize that many of them aren't interested in the part where you have to do a lot of hard work, they just want to be impressive and charming to a broad network so they can insert themselves into the best opportunities that come up.
Every startup collects a couple of these hires during their growth phase. Some times it can be really hard to separate the charm, charisma, and credentials from ability to get things done. The smart founders will push these people back out, much like this Jim guy got fired from the startup he managed to get into at the right place at the right time. It doesn't happen immediately, though.
Bit of an aside but I found it somewhat amusing that one example the author uses of Jim’s financial recklessness was getting into home brewing.
Home brewing is one of the cheaper hobbies available (though like all hobbies you can spend as much as you want). The only real requirements are a bucket and a pot.
> He lost focus and became reckless. He bought some fancy tree slice table for 10k bucks, got into brewing beer, got a dog, a cat, and overall, went completely over himself financially.
Well, he also mentions getting a dog and a cat in that context. Recklessness is relative I guess.
The cat would certainly agree though I suppose, when it sees that dog walking in the door...
Same with a $10k tree slicer, when the actually expensive alternatives that really get people in trouble are day trading, real estate, car collecting, divorce, and starting new businesses that fail.
Now general aviation on the other hand..
A boat that flies lol
It's cheap until you think "we should start a brewery!" Then it becomes wildly, absurdly expensive.
The hobby itself can get costly though. So much equipment to buy. And space.
Same with the cat and the dog.
Home brewing is one of those hobbies that are only expensive if you poast hard enough
How much more likely does becoming a home brewer make you to develop alcoholism, especially for someone who sounds a bit predisposed like Jim?
it’s infinitely easier to become an alcoholic by buying alcohol at a grocery store. brewing is pretty much the least direct most delayed gratification way to get drunk. i guess it can be pretty cheap if you optimize for that but it sounds like jim made enough money and high flying friends it’s unlikely to be major factor.
Though, after you've home brewed the beer, you've now got potentially gallons of beer in a giant pot that you have to bottle yourself. Or you could be lazy and just drink it yourself. True, you could just go down to the store and grab a 30-rack of mass produced beer if you wanted to be an alcoholic, but having a vat of beer in your kitchen that isn't going to drink itself and is gonna go bad if you don't, is a different kind of peer pressure.
If it's just sitting there in your kitchen beckoning you, I think that's called beer pressure?
A standard home brewing batch is 5 gallons. Or 40 pints.
While it is a crazy world and I don’t want to say no one has ever done what you described, it would be an outlier to say the least.
Home brewed beer is generally bottled or put into a keg and tapped.
(Almost) no one is just drinking warm uncarbonated beer from the fermenter.
Even if someone did it wouldn't be the worst thing. That's a pint a day for a bit more than a month.
The median Drinker / non teetotaler consumes about 0.5 drinks per day.
People with severe alcohol use disorder often consume 10 to 20 drink equivalents a day, most commonly cheap hard liquor.
Basically no alcoholic is going to be brewing a keg every couple days for self consumption.
beer pressure you meant?
You must not drink or like beer. Brewing something until it ferments into alcohol is the most basic thing ever. There is the very simple problem of taste that is the issue.
I don’t trust anyone who has the general, abstract goal of being a “founder”. If there’s no great idea to go with it, it just seems like vanity. And sure it does work out really well anyway sometimes, but it’s just something I can’t get behind aesthetically.
I met a number of really successful founders who came in just wanting to build a business and found a niche later (sometimes waaay later). I suspect majority of founders with “great ideas” discovered them after the company was started and the great idea they started with wasn’t actually that good
> I don’t trust anyone who has the general, abstract goal of being a “founder”.
The goal isn't abstract - read it as - goal of "not being a wage-slave" and have a shot at being more. It's an ambition type of thing.
that's 99.9 of them. the ones with the strong feelings towards ideas most of the time is already post-idea-du-jour narrative
It's really hard for me to understand that people who have the chance to achieve basic financial independence (say $1M net worth) don't take that chance and make sure to stay financially independent forever.
If you do that, you're almost guaranteed to stay in the top 2% globally for the rest of your life. You've made it in life, at least financially.
The approach of not taking advantage of the lucky and privileged situation exposes you to a huge risk that your NW will go down to zero and you never get a second chance.
I think $1M net worth in the US these days is a nice little nest egg, but not anywhere near financial independence. Unless your needs are simple, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply, and you don't have any dependents.
> Unless your needs are simple, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply, and you don't have any dependents.
As a human, your needs are simple[1]. With a $1M net worth, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply. And your dependents can live in that same place, also cheaply.
All you need to do is show the Joneses the door out of your mind and never let them back in, nor look toward their lives in envy.
[1]: Healthcare being a notable potential exception, depending on the individual.
Interest would put you around median household income.
$1M invested in a reasonably diversified portfolio gets you about $3,000/mo lifetime at ~3.5% safe withdrawal rate. That might be quite restrictive in the more expensive cities.
Some people can't get enough of yachts and other really expensive things
I don't think these people NW ever goes down to zero.
they often go into the minuses I'm sure, spending culture in the US is bananas
Silicon Valley bats for 0-to-1 startups. If you swap "Revenue" for "Risk," that is culturally the same. People who don't have a "1" full-risk-on mode by default self-select themselves out of this game.
A toy model game is poker. If opponents know you'll never call an all-in/go all-in, they will always outplay you on the river.
And so, let the market pump funny numbers, and matriculate the lucky survivors.
> don't take that chance and make sure to stay financially independent forever.
What means do you see? Buy some S&P500 ETF and live off the interest rate? That seams easy but without investing in AI, you’re at risk of AI making the existing economy irrelevant, it’s the same as having all investments in local craftsmanship in 1700 and the steam machine happens, except much faster.
And move to [insert home country]? (What if I want to keep my friends)
But the S&P500 is ~half AI anyway! At least by market cap.
What’s your idea of investing in AI?
Is it the AI companies though that will capture the value that AI creates, or will it be the still-private startups, or new to-be-founded startups altogether?
Startups are taking longer and longer to reach public markets, so more and more value creation requires you to be a family office, angel, or hedge fund.
Founder culture definitely has fraternity vibes - people with no other discernable talent other than being above average looking and having connections with other similar people end up in positions they have no real idea how to do.
In other words, there are a lot of people "playing startup" in the valley - some of the VC money flows too easily and there is always going to be an ecosystem of people to try to put it to work.
Wish I could lay hands on some of that money they are pissing away out in California.
Most people start businesses for tax reasons, and to mitigate financial risks.
People dumping discounted equity to hyper-scale on debt is not a business, but just another IPO over-valuation scheme. =3
Reminds me of this 2015 article "Beware The Pretty People" http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/28/beware-the-pretty-people/
> The establishment scions pouring into tech take on the trappings of subversion, while remaining fundamentally conformist. Meanwhile, rampant success inevitably causes the former tech counterculture to morph into posturing “Prada revolutionaries,”
Unfortunately the article ends on praising crypto and surveillance, so this has been going on for a while
Even better who you know, then you can become wealthy and get away with almost anything, as Epstein realized when he said there are out lots of hard working people who never become rich.
Interesting. I am sure there are Jims outside of startup world too. There will be finance Jims and entertainment Jims.
Is having a couple of pets and a ridiculous table lifestyle creep. Maybe. I think of lifestyle creep more in terms of you are not saving any money at all.
I think that comment is more telling of what is expected of founders and engineers. At least from authors point of view.
No life allowed. Definitely don't reproduce. You work, and work so you can work more.
There's more truth to the "Forbes 30 Under 30 to prison pipeline" than people give it credit.
this is just an empirical fact
I mostly stayed clear of the SV world while building and exiting my startup, but people like this came and went through my network constantly. They were always easy to pick out based on how much they glorified certain SV personalities and were desperate for their approval.
I always found it interesting how different things are in US (well, more so startup hotspots) and Europe. In the US you're simply given more chances if you have the right personality and superficial elements.
In so many European countries, unless you happen to have bootstrapped your way into success, you'll be written off as a bozo if you don't have all the correct credentials.
Someone like Jim (read: No formal relevant education, no industry experience, only hopes and dreams) would in the very, very, VERY best case get a €100k funding - and that is only if they had other more attractive looking co-founders with them.
I mean, it is something everyone knows - but the sheer risk averseness you often see here in Europe is really something.
The reality behind that is that the US is much much richer than any single European entity, and that the US is a country founded by Europeans (note that I'm talking about the country, not claiming Europeans are the first to arrive in North America) who felt they'd run out of opportunities back home. Hundreds of years of European migration to the US suggests that social stratification and lack of opportunities outside of the old boy's network remains a problem.
Condolences, I've also met a few Jim's in Chicago and some even in big tech once money, privilege came.
some opportunities allow people reveal parts of themselves or things they always wanted
That story has more holes in it than Swiss cheese.
There are different kinds of founders in Silicon Valley now. Some are more like founders from the previous generation, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Others are more like Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann.
There are lots of earnest, sincere, and interesting founders. There are also lots who probably would've been happier on Wall Street.
“Who wants to make some real, positive impact on humanity,” says no one ever, anymore…
This gets to a point my dad always made when I was neck deep in startups; so many of them felt unserious. People go to the most expensive west coast city, raise money, and then move to the next most expensive east coast city and open a second office. A lot of founders are clearly inexperienced, and to defend their inexperience, hire under experienced teams. It all sort of gets back to the root of the issue, which is that the hardest part is never the engineering, it’s networking and finding product market fit. Finding people who actually get up and do meaningful things is hard, and so Jim’s sneak in under the guise of being an outsider who understands a market and can make things happen.
>and to defend their inexperience, hire under experienced teams
It's also a bit of "I like you because you're like me" thing plus some "it's useful to me that you're like that".
I've seen plenty of startups where the CEO/CTO has been trained to under one specific stereotype (common ones these days are: the asian twink, the athlete, the nootropics guy, etc.), and then lots of their friends/hires happen to be of the same or adjacent/compatible stereotypes.
I've met a few people like that, through what appears to be pure determination, they force success to give up what it has. Very impressive.
Complete bollocks people like PG say before anointing grifters with undeserved power. Has happened all throughout history.
Probably not right to diagnose an allegory, but does it sound to anyone else like Jim might have bipolar disorder?
You really have to believe your own narrative to do well as a startup founder, even when evidence is initially scant. This likely also has a tendency to slide into self-delusion.
woah woah... a bartender becomes the head of engineering at a high flying start up? This isn't the .com. Did the bartender also go to MIT?
Drug fueled founder parties? Orgies? I've clearly been doing silicon valley wrong. Or right, depending on your perspective... but not this? I've seen board game fueled parties where maybe one or two people do drugs, but it remains very nerdy? And no sex parties. Mostly sausage parties?
... so yeah. Do people really know Jims? Because I just read posts about them.
I've met the type. But usually, they're on the marketing side, not the ones who develop something. I knew one who blew through 8 figures and ended up an alcoholic, then dead.
The startup market rewards first to market and first to scale. This creates a game of "chicken", where the competitors spend like crazy trying to achieve a near monopoly. That's why some of the fake-it-til-you-make-it crowd gets ahead. But most of them crash. The historical success rate for VC-funded startups is only about 1 in 10.
Re: sausage party - Based on the salary of these guys, if they wanted they could easily afford nightly visits at something like the now closed strip club, the Mitchell Brothers theater in San Francisco. I went for a bachelor party in early 2000s, and every dancer who got close enough to have a conversation with you propositioned you with sex acts for a price in a private room. I worked at a startup in Houston in the early 1990s and the founder went to strip clubs it seemed every time he was in town, he took the whole company one time (it was less than 20 of us) and that strip club seemed to work on a similar if less brazen vibe. The other startups I’ve worked for did not have strip club trips. :)
The whole SV “let’s go to burning man” crowd has always had a very active sex aspect to it. This is one of the things neo puritan pichai era Google struggles to deal with about its past.
Pretty sure my choosing to work for companies ran by stable sane people is responsible for the complete lack of drug fueled orgy invites on my calendar.
Actually the one drugs + stripper party I was invited to was so damn sad and pathetic I left after a few minutes. A bunch of geeks who got rich, using money to do an impersonation of the crazy lifestyle reality TV taught them they were supposed to be having.
I left the party and went back to playing board games in another wing of the hotel.
What type of drugs? Asking for a friend.
C&K
For sex parties, GHB is where it's at. It's like molly but sexier.
> And no sex parties. Mostly sausage parties?
Clearly you weren't cool enough to get into the drug-fuelled OpenAI gay sex orgies.
> drug-fuelled OpenAI gay sex orgies
What?! Source?
Source: https://futurism.com/researcher-openai-sex-drug-parties
More prison gay than anything else. I'd go down on a man for a million dollar OpenAI offer even though I'm into women. I don't think commenters here realize how desperate people can become for money.
Weird article. The original Tweet is all about the "hacker house scene" and it refers to some people she met who went on to work for OpenAI.
The journalist is trying hard to tie it all back to OpenAI, but the original Tweet only mentions OpenAI as an eventual destination for some of the people involved in what she witnessed.
The shared "hacker house" scene in SF is really weird, though. Especially the more you get into EA/rationalist circles. There were groups that were basically cults emerging out of some of them.
Ultimately this comes down VCs who fund people like this. Can we really believe the established funds look for "independent thinkers" anymore?
> A few months post-acquisition, he got fired for an allegedly silly reason, but my intuition is that he was coasting hard and couldn’t focus at all because of home office and lifestyle creep.
This seems like a pretty dubious conclusion to make from the outside. There are a lot of reasons somebody would get fired after an acquisition. Hell, even if he was coasting, an acquisition followed by a rapid change in environment and culture can cause somebody to lose motivation for a wide range of reasons. Blaming this on "lifetstyle creep" is rather premature and, frankly, pretty judgemental or moralistic.
This is downstream of a pretty frustrating belief I've seen repeatedly in the tech industry: that whether a person is "motivated" or "hard working" is some kind of inherent quasi-moral characteristic of the person, rather than something substantially affected by environment. But hey, it's much easier to blame individuals and lean on the perf review process than it is to change organizational culture or leadership!
“presumably under the influence of some strong chemicals”
This is a bigger problem in Silicon Valley right now than anyone seems ready to acknowledge.
I see the "we work 12 hrs a day 6 days a week" as a euphemism for "we take amphetamines".
Whenever you hear someone say they work 80- (or 100!) hour weeks, you should understand what they mean is they had a few crunch weeks once.
Or the only thing they do in life is come to the office and then mix life with work so effectively it’s a combination of hanging out with friends, eating free food, and working, but it all goes into the work bucket when claims are made about how much they work.
Nothing wrong with that per se, I basically did that in grad school. It’s completely different than actually grinding 100 hours a week though. Also tough to be a part of if you have a life or family outside work.
Yep, that's what I thought too. I contrast it with an accident and emergency consultant I know in the UK. He actually is grinding 70 hours a week and not compensated for it. He works long hours because there aren't enough staff to cover the reality of what's needed.
A lot of people also equate "face time in the office" to "real work getting done". Especially prevalent in finance circles.
ibb folks definitely work this much every week. big law too. medicine, sometimes.
We will look back at the easy access to amphetamines - especially for children - in a similar light to the opioid epidemic. To be fair, I think they are less harmful than many opiates, but they are still serious drugs and usage has ~doubled in the last 10 years [1]. Anecdotally, it feels so common/casual for people - adults and schoolchildren - to be taking adderall, vyvanse, concerta, etc. Over 20 million subscriptions in the US [1] means thats something like 5-10% of the adult population.
1. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-communications/fda-upd...
Will we? Opiates leading to a homeless population not being productive, just looking to get high and be high all day and not do anything other than be a zombie, hits different compared to stimulants that makes people work harder and clean things.
Elon
> Silicon Valley right now
Go back to early 2000's post dot com bubble.
The whole of the bay ran on Adderall and Ambien + what ever else one could get their hands on. It was so pervasive that even a decade later you could find Adderall references in Bay Area hip hop.
Almost 30 years on, and this still has not really changed.
Airbnb’s CEO, for example, is a Jim who got lucky
Snapchat's famously also is one
His family is also insanely rich and helped him w/ the IP contracts.
John W. Spiegel: A prominent business litigation and securities lawyer who graduated from Yale University and worked as a partner at the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson.
Drugs are bad, mmkay