Everyone is tired because they are overworked: engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, bankers, police, cooks, janitors. Long shifts, split shifts, long commutes, homework, constant interruptions, questionable management practices, weak labor laws, weak enforcement thereof, asymmetric legal costs, self-training on your own time, expectations of faster and faster turnaround times, less and less support staff...
From my personal experience, there are two camps: people who are working hard, and people who are on cruise control.
Because so many are on cruise control, anyone who wants to make something happen has to work to make up for the lethargy all around him/her.
I don't think it has ever not been this way except for short stints where entire tribes felt a sense of urgency. Most people's idea of an ideal life is sipping cocktails by the beach and gossiping about who said what. There is some wisdom in that :)
I think it's just a consequence of a free market/capitalism. Everyone is competing w/ everyone, so working as hard as possible, to beat the competition.
Remedies? Either cultural (it just becomes unthinkable to work beyond X, because that's taboo) or legal (limits on how much you're allowed to work).
How much of the market is actually owned by the middle class? I would say not much in the US.
See page 44 of the paper below.
You can look at Income, Wealth (net worth) or financial resources. Net Worth is probably the best estimate. You'll notice the top 1% has ~40% of the wealth. The next 4% have ~30% of the wealth.
So it would be very inaccurate to suggest that the "majority" of wealth and upside is accrued to the middle class, at least in the US.
"Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962 to 2016: Has Middle Class Wealth Recovered?"
Edward N. Wolff
One hint was the rise of new management with generic new chiefs with no field experience and few human skills. Highly inhuman large scale management too (playing with people's mind, parking them), profit seeking rather than service and dignity.
I'm convinced that a lot of people would be ready to work 'harder' when the work is well organized and done.
Yes but those voluntary hours are necessary signaling to justify one's place in the contemporary social order. Without them, someone's peers might think them undeserving of their salary and/or status. So they wouldn't want to be the one VP at the company who has adequate leisure time, fulfills family obligations, and regularly gets a full night's rest. Or if they are somehow that person, they keep quiet about it!
I began typing this intending it to be sarcastic, but at its conclusion, I am no longer certain about that.
According to what? Just because you're not in survival mode in the truest form of the word doesn't mean you aren't trying to maintain whatever you have. Expectations can still be set, email doesn't turn off, and personal relationships (kids, family, friends) continue on, along with personal goals, health, increased cost of living, etc.
Just because it's 'voluntary' doesn't mean it's not work or it's not stress or it doesn't affect you.
my point is there’s a lot of people who complain about work that could in theory never work another day in their life again but do for non-financial reasons anyway
Sounds edge case-y (and only decreasing as wealth inequality increase)... but as you said, there are other reasons that keep them going. It’s not about “survival” in the most basic sense. That doesn’t make it any less real to those people.
I don’t understand your point. 39% of the country would have to borrow to cover a $400 surprise medical expense. Not many have $1MM in savings to “aggressively invest” (what does that even mean? Risky investments? Which means sometimes the luck will run out?). I also don’t know many ordinary managers with $5-10MM in savings. That’s quite some income, and those people must not be married with kids.
Regardless, none of this negates that they can still feel valid pressures no matter what their success is. Typically having such success invites even more pressure as one is expected to keep it up, either by others or themselves. Few make it to such largess without overworking themselves.
I mean you’re proving my point exactly. People who have the savings to not work convince themselves that their identity is their job and do it to “keep up.” My point is that is all in your head, and if you’re going around complaining about how busy you are you then you’re doing it voluntarily and not because you will literally be homeless if you stop.
$1M in a high quality REIT can generate 12% dividends, which is $120K. A single person could easily live off half that.
You can live off $60K pre tax as a single person even in a high cost city. I don’t spend more than $3.5K a month total right now in a normal month in SF.
If your health insurance coverage denies any procedure you consider necessary (which they do not), you're looking at 6 figure bills. These balloon with age. I'd agree on the $1M figure, but only without the monkey wrench of US healthcare.
I see these types of comments here quit a bit, and I'm guessing they're mostly from folks with no kids or ever having kids.
Certainly there is an argument to be made for working less and living with less, but for most people $1M invested doesn't check out. If you're relying solely on returns from that investment, then conservatively you can only safely withdraw 3-4%, which works out to 30-40k a year. That's close to full time on minimum wage in some states. While that's enough to survive, not sure if that'd be a fulfilling life for most, even while single. What happens if you have a family later?
EDIT: Also not sure how many can actually save that much in 5-10 years. That's 100k - 200k of savings after tax. Even with compound interest, that's pretty tough for most I would think.
There are REITs that generate 12% dividends you can easily buy, which would be $120K before tax. 3-4% is extremely conservative and you could certainly withdraw more.
It’s also less about “never making another dime working” and more that you don’t need a traditional 9-5. You can and should figure out other sources of income.
There are investments that return 10+%, but that doesn't mean that's how much you should take out every year. The 3-4% (usually 4% for retirement savings) is to buffer for years where you get negative returns. I've never seen anyone recommend withdrawing 12% a year with plans to have the nestegg last a long time.
I was suggesting 6% not 12%. You can live off $60K as a single person even in higher cost cities pretty easily. Taxes aren’t actually that high even in CA at that level.
"Lack of bandwidth, hyper-velocity, a pittance of sleep"
If we are just going to put together words to describe concepts that make no sense then you are probably meeting people that have never made a dollar on their investment.
Some of the best VCs are original thinkers and will take their time making investments. The thing about them is that they will be the first to making an investment in a company even before it has become the hot new thing.
Venture capitalist success is indistinguishable from randomness. It's pure, unadulterated luck. "The best VCs are thinkers and visionaries" is post-hoc bullshit justifications to make their wealth seem the result of wits and hard work, and not just the product of luck + the pre-existing capital to invest.
Ron Conway alone disproves your thesis. Some people are just very good. Some prescriptions are also very good, like Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins. And the success of the good is not purely Matthew Effect, rich gets richer stuff, as Andreesen Horowitz shows. If you’re good enough you can go from not a VC firm to top 5 VC firm in under five years.
That would imply mean reversion. Investors who have been successful in the past should be no more likely than average to be successful in the future. That is not what we observe in VC.
Here’s an explanation in terms of folk probability. Ron Conway is playing poker, not roulette. He’s exposed to many opportunities and he chooses the ones he thinks are good bets. He earns far higher returns than he would if he picked randomly from the set of opportunities he is offered. The difference between him and the average angel investor is due to skill. No doubt he makes many bad bets but he is on the far, far right tail of investor returns for angel investments and has been for decades.
I don't see how that can be true. Gambling is pure luck. I've heard too many stories of impressive moves by VCs that paid off for it to be exactly equivalent to gambling.
I think it may look a lot like luck because they make so many speculative 'bets' and so many don't pan out, but that's more a function of the vast sums the successful ones end up being given to invest combined with poor deal flow. But they still aren't random odds.
Simple example: the VC that invested into WhatsApp and got a massive payout when Facebook bought them. Nobody in the Valley VC community knew about WhatsApp because it had no penetration in the USA. But the firm had hired a developer intern to write a script that downloaded the app store listings for every country in the world individually and calculate fast risers. So this VC was the first to realise that WhatsApp was getting huge everywhere except where they actually lived. But then he visited the WhatsApp website and discovered there was no address or contact information anywhere. He did some research and discovered they were based in Mountain View, but literally couldn't find an actual address anywhere.
So he did the obvious thing - he walked the streets of Mountain View systematically looking at every single office building until he found them, tailgated his way in and then sweet talked the receptionist into giving him a meeting with the CEO.
Well the CEO didn't want to take VC investment. So then the guy started on the final stage: convincing him it was a good idea. Eventually the WhatsApp founders concurred and took the money.
Those sorts of actions aren't the actions of gamblers. The guy had a thesis, he worked to put it into action, he even did a lot of physical work and ended up getting a distinctly non-random reward.
Can’t help but feel like they could literally just take a trip outside SV and get:
1. Easier access to deal flow
2. Lower valuations
3. Less competition
If any VCs are interested, HMU I can show you strong deals your peers saw way before you because they looked @ Miami + deals your peers haven’t seen because I live here & I am plugged in.
I'm a fan of Miami, and I don't mean this as a dig: could you point at some venture-sized exits from Miami, especially ones that SV VCs seem to have missed/been late to?
Off the top companies that were acquired after their first round:
eBuilder | raised $8.4m -> sold $500m
Chewy.com | raised $450m -> IPO $8.7b
BelugaCDN | undisclosed acquired by SSL provider Comodo
Willing.com | raised $7.1m -> acquired by Life Insurance provider MetLife
Octopi | undisclosed acquired by CargoTec (logistics company)
LiveNinja | raised $3m -> acquired by Net2Phone
If we go by funding round/private valuation:
Magic Leap (I saw the founder pre ML @ local meetups)
REEF technologies (saw them as a competitor for years on a side project before SoftBank dumped $100m in)
Papa (met the founder a few times pre YC)
OnSwipe (saw it before Yuri Milner invested after the company moved to NY)
There’s not a lot of them BUT they are super easy to get to & write checks into if you’re here. Email is in my profile if you want access to a few that are still easy access / low valuation.
That seems like an unfair question -- how can any city be expected to generate venture sized exits before the money even rolls in? SF/SV have generated the exits they have after decades of continued investment.
This is a great article, especially because the solution is right there in the text:
> forcing everyone to chase the same set of SaaS companies
> everyone can read the gridiron of SaaS metrics
There was a perfect storm: huge seed rounds leading traditional firms to move upmarket, VCs raising larger funds and so needing to hit the winners hard, which caused Series A metrics to swell, and so VCs are all chasing the same deals.
Of course those deals don't need them: those companies are already winning and don't need their expertise, just their money, which is commoditized by the swelling of funds.
The answer is simple: chase less successful. Stop just trying to get into the big SaaS deals, and target smaller companies, lower metrics, earlier stage companies.
Of course, if the firm staffed up and raised a larger fund as the article says, then it may be structurally impossible to survive. Innovator's dilemma in action.
Yeah I generally agree. There’s a lot of risk averse investors it seems. I don’t have the data so I can’t say for certain, but it feels like VC is just betting on companies that already have product, revenue, a solid customer base, and almost zero chance of completely failing.
a16z, benchmark, SV angles (when they were around), etc. only got where they are by taking massive risk - on founders with no track record and often just a prototype of demo.
Now, just to get a seed round, you need a fully featured product, with distribution and revenue.
It just feels like the wonder and risk of creating world changing tech without worrying about financial outcome is dead. Which, honestly makes sense from an investment thesis standpoint. You minimize risk by following the leader or investing later stage. It’s growth equity, not true or traditional VC that requires a 10x return. Most VCs are happy with 1.5-3x now (relatively happy).
Aren't these the same VCs espousing China style 9:9:6 work hours [1], promoting myths of 10x-ers who only sleep once a week, and demand from their portfolio every last breath of effort, or esle ...
Please, apply some of that 9:9:6 to your VC workflow, don't sleep and definitely try to be a 10-X investor. And definitely turn up the paranoia on FOMO - not because it yields dividends, but because every VC peaches it, so practice what you ...
if you have a small fund the 2% barely keeps the light on
I see some articles congratulating people who’ve raise $5M funds. If the fee is 2% you only have $100K to pay yourself and run the business. Not exactly rolling in dough.
I have a really hard empathizing here, VCs in many ways represent the robber barons of the 21st century.
In WeWork, the world saw a blatant attempt by VCs to dump a severely overvalued and overhyped company into the public markets so they could cash out.
In Facebook, we saw VCs fund one of the world’s largest and most successful surveillance capitalist enterprises, one that still seems to be going strong, despite the ridiculous number of scandals plaguing Zuckerberg. VCs made him invincible.
We’re seeing gig economy companies find new and creatively unsavory ways to screw over their “not workers” (looking at you, GrubHub).
But yeah, screwing over the middle class has to be draining work.
Assume for a moment the guy is right by whatever circumstances. There are three supporting pieces of evidence and perhaps the last sentence is "charged" but I don't see how it is offensive even if wholly incorrect. How would he present the very ideas as "curious conversation"?
It's simpler than this. A post that begins "I have a really hard time empathizing here" and ends with a snarky punchline is playing the flamewar game. The comment is obviously denunciatory rhetoric. There are lots of other places for that on the internet; on this site we're trying to avoid it.
We can't have both the flamewar game and the curious conversation game. That's not a moral observation, it's an empirical one: those roads lead to very different places. Since HN exists for one and not the other, it's a moderation issue.
“Curious conversation” means working towards understanding, as distinct from heaping blame.
In all the examples cited, there are many actors and circumstances that have brought these things about; investors, sure, but also customer demand and behavior, technological evolution, social and economic factors at micro and macro scales, and countless millennia of evolution.
Angry scapegoating might be briefly cathartic but doesn’t effect actual change.
A healthy, curious conversation explores all factors and yields ideas for new solutions to present day problems.
This is like a pharmaceutical company that dumped opioids on the public through legislature, perverting the medical community, advertising and reputation saying "well there are many factors and your brain has countless millennia of evolution to seek out these compounds".
Sorry, I just don't buy it.
People can be wrong, and in fact it is necessary for people to be able to be wrong and state their case and sometimes emotion without tonal arguments to dismiss the hardest of questions.
The root of the comment, the curious part, is: are VCs somehow causing undesirable pathology that leads to their "tiredness"? The moderator happens to work for a VC. I don't think the parent of this thread makes a compelling case, but the sentiment is rooted in reality and can be used to start a useful if uncomfortable discussion.
Perhaps this is not a true intellectual community and I should just leave.
If there was anybody who would be motivated to scapegoat a single actor or cause for dysfunction in the medical industry it's me.
I've endured debilitating health challenges, including severe pain, for almost half my life. I've had plenty of time and motivation to research and contemplate everything that's wrong with the medical system, including corrupt dealings between pharmaceutical companies, regulators, research institutions and medical practitioners.
And, much like apportioning blame to VCs, there is some truth to this point of view.
But it's not the whole story.
At least as significant a factor is that there is a real, legitimate need for pharmaceutical opioids, and a widespread epidemic of "pain" that is little-understood by mainstream medical researchers and practitioners, which is mostly to do with the fact that physiology is extremely complex and still only partially understood.
Fortunately, I've never had to turn to opioids or other pharmaceuticals to treat my pain conditions, and after many years of research and experimentation, have been able to become pain-free via natural - though unconventional - approaches.
I think it would be great if other people had the access and motivation I've had to achieve good health, rather than ending up dependent on opioids or languishing in other ways.
But 10+ years of thinking about it, including plenty of, yes, curious conversation, has taught me that problems in the medical system can't all be simplistically blamed on corrupt pharmaceutical companies.
> tonal arguments to dismiss the hardest of questions
What "hard questions" was the root commenter raising?
Real "hard questions" involve honestly considering all facets of a topic, and taking on the responsibility of contributing to the formulation solutions that are practical and effective.
> Perhaps this is not a true intellectual community
In what way was the root comment more "intellectual" than what I'm advocating?
Sorry dude I'm not really tracking with you at all. The OP posited some plain issues that can be dissected and dismissed but was muted by a mod that works for an organization that benefits from just burying said issues. I lean conservative and can't really see how anyone in tech says with a straight face the "gig economy" is good for anybody except the 10^5 or so technical staff and their management and financiers. A modest understanding of history (i.e. what technology meant in the 60s and 70s) just leaves me bewildered with what constitutes tech now, and the flow of money from monetary policy down to banks and VCs is they main cause of overall stalling out of fundamental, worthwhile, and simply interesting progress. The cashout culture of things like WeWork is a totally different dimension of the bizarre and unsavory. VCs should be tired enabling and propping this farce up.
A desire for intellectualism comes from allowing airtime for ideas that you disagree with, that might even confront yourself, and maybe even elucidating and moving the tonal argument you disagree with to the very roots of the things that need to be discussed and providing ample discourse for the thoughts to be explored. Whether you are doing this or not I can't really tell right now, but you are not the target of my comments, the mod mute is. I'm happy to just go away at this point, this site and surrounding culture has changed for the worse in the 12 years I've seen.
It's almost as if capital is too concentrated, to the point that the people with who control it don't know what to do with it. Oh wait.
The basis of capitalism is markets, and the wisdom of the crowd (the "invisible hand") controlling them and making them efficient. VC's (and wealth concentration in general) are the opposite of that. They are the very-much-visible hand.
We'd solve this problem with progressive taxation and a basic income (a healthy side-helping of better funding for public services wouldn't go amiss either).
IMO, if you believe in free markets, then your position is inconsistent if you also believe if you also believe in unconstrained wealth collection. Because once that wealth is concentrated, the market is automatically distorted.
> IMO, if you believe in free markets, then your position is inconsistent if you also believe if you also believe in unconstrained wealth collection.
But if you believe in free markets, then your position is also inconsistent if you don't believe in unconstrained wealth collection. Because that's one of the things that the market sometimes does when it's free.
And I'm sure that someone will say "That means that the idea of a free market is self-inconsistent, and therefore we should abandon the idea." I think it is more likely that the logic in the parent's last paragraph is incorrect. Instead, one has laws to prevent wealth from distorting the market. (Tax the wealth to extinction is not the only possible form that such laws could take.)
More likely is that there is no objective "free" market. Is it more "free" to include pricing information from externalities (say with a carbon tax)? Or is it more "free" when those participating in the market are able to harm me without my consent through those externalities?
There's no ground standard for non-interference in the affairs of others.
It should happen extremely infrequently, and when it does, the odds are it isn't because someone is that good, but rather in the right position to reap the benefit of a previously unexploitable network effect. This indicates the Market may be in a position to restructure/reorganize to take into account a new local maximum/minima.
The original point the poster made still stands. The point of the invisible hand is to parallelize capital expenditure decisions. Once everything consolidates in a few hands, the market is no longer operating in that mode. You have few people making increasingly large and underinformed decisions about capital movement, which coincidentally, further constrains the ability for money to move throughout the world unless your people sitting on top of capital are spending each and every day doing nothing but trying to unload capital to facilitate the rest of the world's business.
The idea of a Free Market does not discount the possibility of Market participants organizing to redistribute and reprime the Market optimizer in the name of shifting away from destabilizing economic circumstances. After all,a market that can no longer function due to civil unrest makes no one but the engines of violence any money.
The sooner people start to to take that to heart, the better we'll all end up.
> Because that's one of the things that the market sometimes does when it's free.
Correct -- a truly unconstrained market tends to devolve to a highly unfree market. This is why even Adam Smith commented that proper regulation is essential to ensure markets remain free.
The article actually hints that there are too many VCs (with lots of money, sure) and not enough good deals.
Doesn't mean your opinion is right or wrong or invalid, since I personally happen to agree with this line of reasoning, but I don't see how it fits within what the author is talking about.
Well, yeah, free market and capitalism are conflicting ideologies. It's the same with free software, you can't have both user freedom and freedom for corporations to take away user freedom. Second will always just subvert the first one.
Wouldn't the obvious capitalism solution to that be - loans become very cheap because people dont know what else to do with their money. Lots of people now have access to (other people's) capital. Wealth is no longer as concentrated, wisdom of crowds prevail?
We've been trying that for a good chunk of the last decade. That's why interest rates have gone to near zero, and in some places negative. It's not working so well.
>> That's why interest rates have gone to near zero, and in some places negative. It's not working so well.
To elaborate on the great comment above -- this is not working well because it creates asset bubbles. It also makes one of the most important things people need -- homes -- inflate in value beyond reach for many.
Once one's basic needs are met, which has a upper limit on how much needs to be purchased, what else is there to buy? In the olden days people needed to buy things to keep themselves entertained, but in this day of age we just hop onto the internet for free (effectively).
But can be obtained for free. People literally throw out perfectly functional machines daily. But anyway, "effectively" was meant to cover the marginal costs of getting onto the internet.
> streaming services aren't free
Okay. While I don't quite see the appeal when there is already an infinite depth of content that is not a paid streaming service, let's talk about streaming services.
The assertion was that if you make more money, you will buy more things. While there is some variation from service to service, streaming services have carved out a price point of around $10 per month. Does that mean for every $10 you make over and above the cost of necessities that you will buy another streaming service? If you are given a $10,000 raise above an income that already provides necessities will you buy 1,000 streaming services? Probably not.
Let's narrow our focus to music streaming services. I like to listen to music at work. Other places too, but work gives us a tidy eight hour window. 173 hours per month, on average. The average song is around three minutes, so nearly 3,500 songs a month. Using the Spotify free music service there are ads and time to queue up songs, so let's say 3,000 songs a month. For argument's sake, let's assume they are all performed by different artists.
When I was younger a CD sold for around $20. Not having much money, I might buy one or two a month, but that's it. If I had more money would I conceivably buy more CDs to access those 3,000 songs I listen to now? I think the answer is yes. I would have bought more CDs if I had more money.
But now I get that for what is effectively free. Even if I did pay the marginal cost to access a non-free tier on a music steaming service, that payment buys me all the music, so to speak. What would have cost $60,000 per month 30 years ago would now cost somewhere around $10 a month, with, most importantly, no linear increase in price with consumption.
So, sure, you need to buy a few things, like a computer and internet access. But the point is that, even given unlimited money, one quickly runs out of things to buy in this day of age.
Sure, you could do a lot of things. I'm not arguing for capitalism as a fair and moral system, just that i think that OP should account for why this isn't happening/doesnt work in order for his argument that the issue is concentration of capital (as opposed to some other issue) to make sense
