
Myths About Failure - rustoo
https://greylock.com/reid-hoffman-myths-about-failure/
======
highfrequency
> _In the very early days of LinkedIn, our team included a bunch of people who
> had families. Thus, we decided to have a “have dinner with your kids”
> culture. Team members were expected to go home and have dinner with their
> family so they could see their kids every day. Then, after dinner, everyone
> was expected to get back online and work together for the rest of the
> evening._

That did not go where I was thinking it would go...

~~~
curiousllama
Some industries are just like that. I now Consulting companies that advertise
things like this as a recruiting differentiator

~~~
askafriend
> recruiting differentiator

Words like that suck all the humanity out of business.

~~~
curiousllama
idk its easier than saying "thing that firms brag about during recruiting
conversations in order to set themselves apart from other, similar companies"

What's a more human way?

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rmah
Not directly related, but the line "Finally, you need to remember that failure
is not the end. Your company might fail, but that doesn’t make you a failure."
in the article has me thinking a bit...

What is it about our culture (is it mostly a western culture thing?) that is
so obsessed with the question of identity?" Am I a success? Am I a failure? Am
I a programmer? Am I a mother? Am I a nerd? Am I X? Am I Y? It seems to me
that all these things are either descriptions of attributes, feelings, past
actions, past results, etc. No such statement is even close to describing a
person in totality. And thus, is never, strictly speaking, true.

You may have failed at something. But are you, literally, a failure? No,
you're a person who happened to fail at something that one time. I guess, most
of the time, this is just semantics -- a convenient shorthand. Perhaps
problems only arise when one takes the shorthand "I am X" phrase too much to
heart and actually starts to believe it literally? Is this even worth thinking
about? Hmm...

~~~
majormajor
> What is it about our culture (is it mostly a western culture thing?) that is
> so obsessed with the question of identity?

There are a lot of people now who don't have the traditional anchors that
answered these questions for people. Religion has always been a big one - and
shows how important group membership or not has always been, with often deadly
consequences - but it's less important to many people today than in many times
in the past in the west.

Many people also no longer have a lot of the pure "I do these things because
they are necessary for mine and others' survival" driving factors in our life.
Most jobs, at an individual level, could be given up without much impact on
everyone else. Often even the person who quit would still land in a safety net
and still survive fairly easily.

And a lot of these changes have a lot of _benefits_. It's good that you can
fail at a job, it's good you can have more free time, it's good you don't have
to belong to the same church or stay in the same place as everyone you group
with.

But then what do you replace it with, if you seek your own way? You have to
answer that question yourself.

------
baxtr
_> Given the parallels between starting companies and playing games, I like to
recall the title of an excellent book on the early days of Nintendo. That
title? Game Over. Press Start to Continue. Words to work by._

Maybe that’s one of the reasons wealthy people succeed more often as
entrepreneurs because they can afford to re-play (no, I don’t have a source
for that).

~~~
dhosek
Good point. I started a magazine in 1994 and over the next seven years lost
enough money that I spent the seven years after that digging out of the hole I
ended up in. It was a good concept and had good response but was severely
undercapitalized the whole time. If I were wealthier when I started out, it
might have been a bigger success and would be my means of making a living now
instead of existing as a few boxes of back issues in the basement.

~~~
neonate
What was the magazine? Did you ever put any of it online?

~~~
dhosek
It was _Serif: The Magazine of Type & Typography_. A couple articles were on
an earlier incarnation of the website, but they've disappeared in the course
of one or more hosting changes since the magazine failed. I published among
others, Robert Bringhurst, Charles Bigelow and Christian Schwartz (this last
while he was still a high school student).

~~~
TYPE_FASTER
I found a few articles cached in the Internet Archive:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20010511052527/http://www.serifm...](https://web.archive.org/web/20010511052527/http://www.serifmagazine.com/).

------
mmhsieh
>One issue to watch out for are investors who lack operating experience but
believe that they are “pattern matchers”. That’s like hiring a coach who’s
never played the game, but still thinks, “Hey Michael Jordan, you need to
listen to my advice.” There are some really smart people who’ve been great
partners to founders without having done it themselves, but that’s the
exception.

Can someone expand on this point?

~~~
gumby
Let me provide a counterpoint: true operating people rarely make good
investors as they think “well I could probably work my way out of this
problem” so don’t cut their losses. These folks can be good to have on your
board, but can also be bad.

OTOH in my experience people with _no_ operating experience rarely have good
advice (but there are significant exceptions to this too, e.g. Michael
Moritz).

Most likely to succeed: enough operational experience that you can pattern
match accurately and insightfully. A good example of this would be John
Johnson at august (maybe he’s retired by now?) who once ran a factory in Hong
Kong (making clothing? I can’t remember). Nothing tech, yet an excellent tech
investor (Palm, Be, Cygnus, many others) and board member.

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somedudetbh
> Fortunately, Max Levchin had an answer: ”Oh, that’s easy. We can sync
> payments for email.” Scott Banister (who was the other outside board member)
> and I looked at each other and said, “That’s a great idea.” Email payments
> turned out to be the product that made PayPal a success, and about a year
> later, the company quietly dropped its PalmPilot application.

> Max, Peter Thiel, and the PayPal team didn’t need to run an experiment to
> realize that the PalmPilot approach wasn’t going to work, and to switch to a
> different thesis (email payments) in which they had much greater confidence.

Maybe they didn't _need_ to run the experiment, but they certainly _did_ :
[https://www.paypalobjects.com/html/pr-121799.html](https://www.paypalobjects.com/html/pr-121799.html)

Of course, I have no idea what actually happened here (other than it certainly
seems like PayPal spent a lot of time building the palmpilot app, going so far
as to doing a classic corny '90s splashy launch with a nerd-celebrity _built
entirely around the beaming concept_.

The tale told in the paypal wars ([https://www.amazon.com/PayPal-Wars-Battles-
Media-Planet/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/PayPal-Wars-Battles-Media-
Planet/dp/0974670103)) is essentially that

1) The initial vision of Confinity/PayPal was an alternative currency enabling
cross-border/cross-currency low-fee payments (similar to a lot of
bitcoin/blockchain rhetoric)

2) The go-to-market strategy was beaming on palm pilots

3) Musk & Co had raised a bunch of money to build a vague "consumer finance"
portal called "x.com" (Musks's strange fixation on the letter 'x' goes way
back)

4) (not remembering this part for sure as I read the book a long time ago)
PayPal/Confinity was running out of money because the beaming product was a
flop and no one cared about their alternative currency payments usecase.
Musk's company was also a slow-motion trainwreck because there was essentially
no product vision and no actual customer pain being solved, but they had more
money in the bank so Confinity agreed to sell to them to extend the runway.

5) The email payments thing was built as almost an afterthought to allow graph
completion to enable the palmpilot beaming usecase to actually work

6) A random PM noticed that a surprising percentage of their traffic was
coming from eBay users.

7) eBay, being the worst-managed incredible first-mover opportunity of the 90s
dotcom boom was incapable of building a functioning payments product, despite
the massive first party advantages and huge incentives to round out their core
offering

8) PayPal was very popular but was burning cash at an insane rate that scaled
at least linearly (possibly supralinearly) in engagement. They basically were
able to survive due to a fortunate massive fund raising just before the 90s
window closed (very similar to stamps.com). They might have been able to get
the business to work but instead eBay acquired them so we never found out.

Of course, I read this in a book, and I read the book well over a decade ago,
so I'm sure I'm not remembering things right, and I have no idea what
particular axe to grind the author had, etc.

But there is evidence online that they at least believed in the beaming thing
long enough to _build the product and hire Scotty from star trek for a stunt
launch_. And this might be a minor detail, but if it's true, then Hoffman's
point doesn't hold up, and it undermines the whole thesis of the post.

In general, I don't think there's much reason to believe that people who did
really hard things are particularly able to explain why they were able to do
them. It's great that they were able to do them, and maybe that even predicts
that they'll be able to do more of them in the future. I think in Silicon
Valley, if you asked a bunch of these guys to flip a coin ten times the guy
who got heads ten times in a row would immediately start a Medium account to
explain how his unique perspective and grit and determination enabled him to
do it.

I mention this because I completely don't understand why these puffy VC
content-marketing articles are on the front page of hackernews every day.
There is very little evidence that there's any more value in them then say
calling the psychic hotline and asking them for startup advice, and they're
essentially just ads for VCs and SV thinkfluencers.

~~~
seebetter
I'm pretty sure he just had access to X.com, plus it's a cool domain. Is it
really a strange fascination?

I suppose it is if you follow the Dark Journalist's X series on Youtube. Some
great mythical modern tales of fantastical (but untrue) possibilities.

~~~
somedudetbh
> I'm pretty sure he just had access to X.com, plus it's a cool domain. Is it
> really a strange fascination?

I just think it's funny that he went out and bought the x.com domain for a
consumer finance startup in the 90s, and then ended up running a company
called SpaceX, and then ran an electric car company whose top-of-the-range
model is called the "Model X", then he had a baby, and named the baby "X Æ
A-12 ", or "X" for short. The dude is crazy for X!

------
cko
Tangentially related... an entertaining blog post involving Greylock.

[https://random.waxy.org/arsdigita/](https://random.waxy.org/arsdigita/)

------
austincheney
I always find it saddening to see people misuse the word _myth_ to mean a
simple falsehood or lie. That is not what this word means at all.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth)

If they cannot get a basic use of the language correct, and in their three
word title no less, I have little interest in examining the article.

~~~
sedatk
That's hasn't been the only meaning of the word for a long while:
[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/myth](https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/myth)

~~~
austincheney
A misuse isn’t corrected by commonality, or rather ignorance doesn’t improve
with popularity.

The definition you pointed to only vaguely resembles the meaning you hope for
in a secondary sub point. No other dictionary provides a definition that even
remotely comes close.

~~~
dghf
> No other dictionary provides a definition that even remotely comes close.

Shorter OED:

> Myth (miþ). Also †mythe. 1830 [- mod. L. MYTHUS, late L. _mythos_ \- Gr.
> _μῦθος._ ] 1. A purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural
> persons, actions or events, and embodying some popular idea concerning
> natural or historical pheononema. Often used vaguely to include any
> narrative having fictitious elements. 2. A fictitious or imaginary person or
> object 1849.

>1\. It is chronicled in an old Armenian m. that the wise men of the East were
none other than the three sons of Noe 1899. 2. Parliamentary control was a m.
1888.

The second example is exactly the usage you're objecting to.

~~~
austincheney
I am not objecting to its use of a fictitious or imaginary person. Perhaps
poor reading comprehension is to blame for the words common misuse.

