Codecademy is smart - they realize that collecting use/accomplishment data on high-quality lessons carries much more upside than trying to sell the content created on their platform.
Either you get money directly, or your left trying to monetize -accomplishment- data? Are we expecting the ad-market targeting newbie programmers to explode or something?
Your answer is based entirely on the premise that working for a startup boils down to killing yourself for the chance to get rich, which couldn't be further from the truth.
The "rich people" who do startups do it because they love building things that solve big problems, the work hours and payouts are, if they're lucky, just a byproduct.
Sure, I'm 24 and I have basically nothing to lose, but really I have no choice - I have to build things. I can't deal with just performing maintenance.
And even if you are ok with just performing maintenance, working in a small team is simply more fun than working at a larger one.
Seriously, reflect more on this. Writing off startups because they're "in a business of greed" is a straw man at best.
Well that was a very arrogantly-worded post. Maybe you didn't mean it to be, but that's certainly how it comes off.
I'm working at a small company doing some incredibly cool "building" stuff, and not in maintenance at all - and I get a steady paycheck and good benefits. There doesn't need to be this dichotomy. There are tons of us out there who work 9-5, enjoy life, don't kill ourselves, yet get to build incredibly cool things with small teams of cool people.
Really, the only downside of my job compared to a startup is that I don't have the potential payout of $[millions], and somehow I'm okay with that. The quality of my life is incredibly high, I set my own hours, and yet because we're not busting our ass just to survive I get to stop and smell the roses. It's pretty cool.
> Well that was a very arrogantly-worded post. Maybe you didn't mean it to be, but that's certainly how it comes off.
Possibly its a bit strongly worded because he's responding to someone who names start up founders as "punk kids" with "nothing to lose", then declares that he's not doing a startup because he's found things that are more important.
Or course I'd much rather receive my $2MM+ over the course of a couple years building a company rather than over 40 years of letting a boss or HR decide my pay.
And you bet when I'm done I'll be investing in even more start-ups. I love helping people with dreams in the tech industry.
"Your answer is based entirely on the premise that working for a startup boils down to killing yourself for the chance to get rich, which couldn't be further from the truth."
What, you didn't read any of the ten thousand or so posts on here about burnout, 70 hour work weeks, or PG's opus on how doing a startup packs an entire career worth of work into three or four years?
Incidentally, your prima dona attitude towards maintenance makes you a serious liability on anything larger than a look-what-I-wrote-over-the-weekend web app. Children want to play in the sandbox all day. Mature programmers embrace the entire software lifecycle. I bet you don't write documentation or tests either.
"Writing off startups because they're "in a business of greed" is a straw man at best."
Strawman? I'm not sure that means what you think it means. I dealt with a lot of entrepreneurs during my consulting days. I mean a lot. Seriously. Like an entire fuckton of them. Some where looking to build something truly awesome. Others where just enamored of the idea of being an entrepreneur, with no real conceptualization of what that meant, and no business-worthy idea to build upon. The only common denominator among them was this: they where all looking to drag off a huge pile of cash once the project launched.
Do I think there's anything wrong with dragging off a huge pile of cash? Of course not, I definitely enjoyed dragging off small piles of their cash and would have enjoyed it even more if the piles had been larger. Is that a greed-based incentive? Clearly. Ergo the "business of greed".
If I were on the tropical island, obviously I would still make things. But I would only make things I cared about, at my own pace, and for free. If I already have enough money for food, health, and shelter for the rest of my life, I don't need any more.
Also, anythign I did build would be something that would make the world a better place. Some startups do try to change the world for the better. Most are just doing some advertising, social nonsense, crappy games, or something else completely trivial and useless as a money-grab.
Simply because you cannot understand the motivations of someone who has their basic needs covered but continues to build does not mean "they are fundamentally in a business of greed".
Just because something is "advertising" or "social" does not mean that it is "completely trivial and useless". Very few big problems are solved in one fell swoop. Most of them are overcome by thousands of people chipping away at various parts of them at the same time.
>Nobody wants to give me money because they know that as soon as the check clears I'll be out the door never to be seen again.
vs.
>Most are just doing some advertising, social nonsense, crappy games, or something else completely trivial and useless as a money-grab.
>But I would only make things I cared about, at my own pace, and for free.
vs.
>Also, anythign I did build would be something that would make the world a better place.
It's like you waver between taking a self serving "Take-the-money-and-run" attitude and complaints that others are in business solely for greed.
I don't know if I'm more blown away by that, or your cynicism toward startups. Ideas that are trivial and useless are not going to make money. However, ideas that YOU find trivial and useless could very well make money.
I think it's important to consider the viewpoints of others and perhaps while Farmville brings no joy to your life, it doesn't mean it can't be a fun and rewarding experience to someone else.
many entreps are good at starting businesses and bad at maintaining them. Some better serve the economy helping launch more businesses rather than fumbling around trying to grow one.
Why is "resume comes in" always accepted as a given first step?
Redesigning the tech hiring process starts with discovery. You can't keep posting your hiring needs on HN, Github and Stackoverflow and just expect a great person to find you, read more about you, and pull a resume together for you to make your life easier. We expect you to make our life easier because we know we can work just about anywhere.
As I guess pg might say "Go to your users!" to founders looking for help making a decision, you need to go to us if you want to grow your team! We're real freaking people who hate creating a BS piece of paper for you that means absolutely nothing. Find us in person and spend time with us so we can skip this resume crap and focus on actually building things that we both actually enjoy.
Good point--I should have clarified, but this is more often a referral. I should have called it "first point of contact" or something more appropriate. Often we don't get the actual resume in into much later in the process...
HN is growing, and with growth comes a dilution of focus. Inevitably there will be subsets of the community who feel their needs aren't being met on HN.
For example, if HN has 99 employees for every one founder, what do you think will happen if you try to discuss how to set up options and vesting such that in a liquidity event, the employees are still bound to the company and won't quit when they discover they have new bosses?
You aren't going to get the same conversation as if you just discuss the question with other founders. I'm not saying the HN discussion will be less valuable, but can we agree that some conversations will be different?
I have no idea if it's "worth it." What you see is the sweat of Stu's brow, not mine. All I can say is this: If you celebrate the idea of founding things, then you celebrate the idea of building entirely new things and finding out if it's worth it, and dealing with people who complain that the old thing is good enough.
Also, I could be wrong about this, but I don't see people moving to it any more than people moved from HN to Facebook or vice versa. Different communities for different purposes.
HN is a place for people who are interested in web startups not a place for founders. There's overlap, but it's simply not the same audience.
Somebody who is actively spending their life trying to grow a business doesn't have time to "actively participate" in HN, because HN is a timesuck. It's largely filled of stories that have little or no impact for somebody who is actually on the ground, executing their business.
None of this means that HN is a bad place. But active participation in this community is a bad idea for the entrepreneur whose target market is something other than startups.
HN is optimized towards links and news, despite the high quality Show HN and similar posts we get frequently. HN is also optimized toward a small content/big audience model which makes it hard to throw ideas around.
A site aiming to be the "Forrst for founders" would give entrepreneurs (budding or established) a space to throw around ideas, small screenshots, or bits of business knowledge that are just too "small" for HN.
As easy as that is to say, this isn't a get-bought-and-get-paid company; it's a shake-up-the-world company. I'm sure he and his co-founders discussed that at length and understand it.
And ultimately, if you have a remarkable team with strong financial backing, isn't that the type of company you really want to work for?
how exactly is it going to shake up the world?
I see the best case as more of a mild rattling of the world- a more human social networking, which will either softly nudge people in this direction, move other networking players closer to the real-world social model, or be a sort of nice subtle tool in the mobile social web.
In no way is it something that as currently formed has a really big dollar exit potential- i mean, ideally, the product will never become very valuable to advertisers. If they monetize some other way which can scale big, then they're way smarter than I can imagine, but i don't see the data aggregation model or traditional ad model working with this product...it's a very techie-oriented app at this point in time. The benefits are not visible at all to "normals", and there is no business use case like twitter/FB have to accelerate adoption as a platform.
The world has no idea Path exists yet, so there is a while to go before anything is going to be shaken up at least outside of the bay area.
I'm sure he and his co-founders discussed that at length and understand it.
Well, from the article:
The decision to turn Google down was not unanimous, according to sources, and may have become what some people are describing as "extremely contentious."
So what is your speculation about what they discussed or agreed on based on?
