
The Real Silicon Valley - jfornear
http://jfornear.co/the-real-silicon-valley/
======
cabinguy
Bah Humbug (please excuse me, it's just a seasonal expression). While I can
feel your pain, this story has nothing to do with SV - it's the story of an
entrepreneur. The same story exists in every state in the U.S. and every major
city (and most small ones) in the world. Entrepreneurship is very hard.

I'm 41 y/o and bootstrapped my first internet company at 24. I owned a nice
home, a beautiful vacation (lake) home, a big office building, 2 Mercedes Benz
(wife's SUV, my car) & an awesome FICO score before I was 29. It all went away
(except for my primary home) by the time I was 35.

As entrepreneurs we believe that the charts will always go up and to the right
(we can't help it) - but they don't.

This year, after TEN (10) F'ING YEARS of working on what everyone in SV would
label a little "life style business," we hit $1M+ in revenue. I am confident
we will hit $2M+ next year and $100M eventually. Our company is debt free and
my co-founder (and best friend since kindergarten) own 100% of the company.

My point: It's not easy. We have been working very, very hard for TEN (10)
F'ING YEARS on this thing. I lost almost everything along the way...but I
never, ever stopped believing in what we were building. When you hear those
billionaires claim that "perseverance" is the key to success - listen to them,
they are telling you the truth.

~~~
jseliger
>I owned a nice home, a beautiful vacation (lake) home, a big office building,
2 Mercedes Benz (wife's SUV, my car) [. . .] It all went away (except for my
primary home) by the time I was 35.

One lesson here might be to not buy the fancy, expensive stuff and the
lifestyle that goes with it. I bet things would've been a lot smoother with
fewer gee-gaws and more cash in the bank.

~~~
sliverstorm
Yes, ideally you should earn as much money as possible, and spend as little as
possible. Money only does you any good when you don't spend it.

~~~
arethuza
Though, if you never do _anything_ with your money then it's pretty pointless.

~~~
sliverstorm
That's what I was attempting to sarcastically point out :)

~~~
arethuza
Sorry, I'm British so I have to turn my sarcasm detector off to read HN!

------
nodesocket
Jesse,

I completely feel your pain. I moved up to San Francisco the previous June
with the grand vision of building out my team, raising a round of investment
and building my PaaS for hosting node.js apps (NodeSocket) to something really
special. I left a cushy director level job in San Diego and left a core group
of good friends as well. I simply packed up everything in my car and made the
drive up. The first couple of months I stayed on friends couches and did
AirBnB, essentially living out of my suitcase, and hacking all day and night.

The trough of sorrow is deep, with extreme peaks and valleys. One day I was
talking with Sequoia Capital and first tier angel investors flying high and
optimistic, the next day, they are all passing, and I realized that I have
burned through my entire savings.

The thing about startups is they are born easy, but die a very long and drawn-
out death. I recently just came to terms, and announced that NodeSocket is
shutting down (<http://blog.nodesocket.com/shutting-down>) to pursue a new
opportunity Commando.io (<http://commando.io>).

Keep with it, take some time off from startups and entrepreneurship. Doing a
startup is the hardest thing most people will ever do.

~~~
VexXtreme
Why move to San Francisco? One of the benefits of living in this day and age
is that you can start a business from pretty much anywhere in the world. Sure,
it is presumably easier to acquire VC, talent and deal with general logistics
if you're located in the valley but still... It's pretty obvious that leaving
your job, friends, moving to a different city and living off your savings is a
high risk move vs staying where you are and working from there. Not knocking
you or anything (I don't know your entire story), I'm just saying.

If I were to start a company now, I'd probably stay right where I am and keep
my job until I saw a level of success with my new project.

~~~
untog
I think he answered the question- he was looking for funding. You can do a
great many things remotely these days, but investors want face to face
meetings, so you have to go to tech hubs to get them.

~~~
fudged71
Seems like a flight would be more appropriate than moving and losing your
friends.

------
SeoxyS
If you're buying into the Silicon Valley hype, and then get disappointed,
you're doing it wrong. Silicon Valley is not a place that's amazing a first,
and then awful once you fail. It's simply a place that happens to have the
highest concentration and best resources for building tech companies.

Ultimately, though, surviving Silicon Valley comes down to one simple rule:
don't build stupid shit. Work on a _business_ , get revenues from the start,
and don't fall into the trap of trying to build an Instagram.

Frankly, most of the stuff everybody here is working on is idiotic. The
business models & grand vision plans people come up are ridiculous. With a
little more care for building things that are actually useful and that people
will pay for, we'd have much less "blew my life savings trying to make a
social network for pets and am now homeless and girlfriend-less" stories.

~~~
agorabinary
I could not agree more. I wonder how much of the SV environment is created
from the trickle down investments of legitimately good ideas --- that is, a
Facebook spawning thousands of millionaires, some of which happen to invest in
their brother's friend's silly idea not out of any rational analysis, but from
just being young and stupid and lucky enough to grab up a few early FB shares.

Furthermore, consider the difference in building a startup and building a
typical brick and mortar business. Think of how simple the thought was to
create a social network where users choose friends to create a distinct social
circle. Or Drew Houston allegedly conceiving of Dropbox by repeatedly
forgetting his USB drive in college. Very many SV startups build themselves
off of some eureka moment that, being based on the internet, requires minimal
investment, effort, connections, and reputation to establish early stage.
Then, as long as it is a good idea, investment and employees flood in. Compare
this to the enormous barriers of entry extant in a traditional brick and
mortar with the bank loans and industry connections and disparate business
resources, and combined with a barely-out-of-college aged potential CEO with
or without good ideas. You get two entirely different standards of
discrimination. It almost seems sometimes like SV considers bad ideas as a
normal state of affairs, as a "learning experience" to future brilliance. Fail
to succeed? Most successful startup founders hit it right on their debut---
why? Because they have a mentality of, "Should I do this?", and not merely,
"Can I do this?".

I'm not saying low barriers to entry are necessarily a bad thing. It just
seems like either there are one, a lot of fools with grand visions or two,
ulterior-minded entrepreneurs looking to pad their resume or impress their
friends with some social networking rip-off that only cost them $10k to build.
Bustling, metropolitan environments often offer that billion dollar jackpot or
Hollywood walk of fame, but require in turn a more demanding degree of
discrimination to tell that shiny metal from mere fool's gold.

------
noname123
Why be depressed? If you are young and a programmer making 100K at 25, party
with your hipster friends and sock away 40K in savings every year. You'll end
up with 200K by 30, not a cool billion dollar but with 6% muni-bonds, you
suddenly have tax-free interest income of equivalent of $1.2 million at
regular 1% CD rate.

Work on interesting projects that you want to work on. Do some traveling. Go
back to grad school for fun. Learn a new language, sport or talk to girls. Go
to your favorite startup or software company website and click on the mugshot
of the guy who's in 40's in blue dres-shirt, is that who you want to be when
you want to be?

If no, don't get on the VC rat-race; it's just as soul-crushing as the
investment banker's rat-race except less lucrative.

~~~
fearless
Everyone knows startups are not the optimal economically rational way to make
money. But to an entrepreneur, living off 6% muni bond interest is profoundly
uninteresting, and dare I say soul crushing.

Repeat after me: If you think it's only about the money, you're missing the
point.

And even if it is all about the money, most 25 year olds would jump at a 1%
chance to make $10 million over a $100% chance to make $200K. Not
mathematically rational, but if everyone was rational there would be no
outliers.

~~~
noname123
Better way to make money is to take out a personal loan for 100K, same
opportunity cost of two years of programmer-salary on startups. Buy out of the
money options on small-cap pharmacuetical facing FDA decisions, you have the
ability to also make $10 million overnight with 30% success. Go for insider-
tips to max out on your success.

~~~
arbuge
Wouldn't the insider tips be illegal insider trading?

~~~
Alex3917
IANAL, but I don't think it would in this case. Insider trading generally
applies to using private information held by the company. But in this case
what you're looking for is information from the CRO or FDA.

------
jenoneal
Hey Jesse, great post though I'm sorry to hear about your startup. If you need
a place to crash, I have a spare room for friends who are starting companies,
folding companies or just passing through the Valley. Feel free to get in
touch anytime.

In the meantime, thought you might like this quote from a piece Michael
Arrington wrote a while back:

"Some of the richest people I know aren’t really entrepreneurs. They worked at
HP and then moved to Netscape when it got hot. They made a fortune and then
jumped to Google and made another fortune. And now they’re jumping to
Facebook.

They may be very good engineers, or sales people, or marketing, or execs. But
they ain’t entrepreneurs. They’re just resume gardening and they’re really no
different from everyone else.

I don’t care if you’re a billionaire. If you haven’t started a company, really
gambled your resume and your money and maybe even your marriage to just go
crazy and try something on your own, you’re no pirate and you aren’t in the
club."

<http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/31/are-you-a-pirate/>

~~~
neilk
You hear that, loser marriage-having people?

~~~
zainny
The title of the article should really be "Are you a Broken Human Being?"

------
oscargrouch
I quit my TI job, lost my beautiful fiancee, lost my friends and came back to
live with my parents, and all of this after thirty.. Im pretty sociable guy..
and had a very rich and good social life before all this..

Im living in Brazil, without access to this garden of VC funds you guys have
in the Valley..

But i live in front of a beautiful beach, where i go out everyday to run, and
let some stress behind me..

Im still here.. working.. penyless.. and you know what keep me moving?

is not the money i can make.. (i dont even know if this dream im pursuing will
make me any rich).. but the simple fact to be able to live working on my
dream.. have the possibility to not only change my life, but also the life of
many others for better.. make me go everyday.. believe, work hard..

i dont know if i will succed.. but i know that the most important thing in
life is to try.. to make diference.. to make this place better.. im sure
theres no payment better than this..

You see, the right amount of money that we all really need, is enough to give
us freedom to do what we thing we should..

So i think you need to get another sort of payment, while you are (dollar)
broke.. you must be payed by your own dreams.. this may look stupid.. but when
we are in the edge of our lifes, because we believe in something.. we have the
ultimate freedom.. a freedom that not only can change our lifes.. but make a
wave of new unthinkable possibilities become reality

Im sure that when all this im passing now has gone.. i will remember this time
with joy..

Try to imagine your future you, talking with your present you.. the future you
are happy? what he got to tell you..

Im here man, im a warrior and i wont give up...

If you think you have made a mistake then, go on .. and maybe latter you will
try again something else.. and succed tremendously.. but deep inside we all
know if we are in the right path.. Your heart will tell you this everyday..
and if thats is the case.. go on man! the world are made by the hands of the
ones who didnt give up. The ones who dare to dream..

Life for game changers are hard.. and they only succed because they are
harder.

Its a wonderful time for you to discover your real you, and what you capable
of.. you will probably surprise yourself.. No better payment than this :)

Good luck in your path!

~~~
braco_alva
This is exactly how I feel, Im in Guatemala, where we don't have much access
to VC funds either.

A year has passed since we started, and we still don't have a steady income,
but it is worth it, totally worth it, when I realize that I am doing exactly
what I want to do, even if the odds are against me, I know I have to keep
trying.

~~~
oscargrouch
I think whatever we do, we should avoid the trap of being payed to be
unhappy.. we pass the most part of our living time sleeping and almost all the
rest working (with little to something else, family, fun, rest..)

We should have fun in what we work, in what we do.. trying to be excited just
for the profit of it, wont do..

things like; "I Will work for 3 to 5 years on this thing and then sell
it(because i cant stand working on it) and buy a boat, put some chicks on it
with champagne and travel the world with my fortune" wont make anybody stood
still in harsh times.

faith is the engine of soul and in the end you are what you believe. by
corrupting and selling what you believe, you will become void, empty, bitter..

It starts from there, money or success is a consequence

------
jacoblyles
And nobody will ever advise you that the large cost and huge risk might not be
worth it because then they would have to admit the same thing to themselves.

Have you ever met anybody that works on the weekend, even when the startup
doesn't need them to, just because they don't know what else to do?

There are incredibly amazing things happening in Silicon Valley. And also lots
of people burning their lives away for little reason or return. Keep your eyes
open to both sides of the ledger is the best advice I can give. Be sure that
what you are doing is something you truly love, and not just something you
want to love or want to portray that you love for the benefit of others. And
it's okay to give up and/or take a break.

~~~
eric-hu
> Be sure that what you are doing is something you truly love, and not just
> something you want to love or want to portray that you love for the benefit
> of others.

Can you expand on this? How do you ever know? Whether I love what I do has
been one of my existential questions for the last decade, and why I didn't
immediately follow through with my CS degree out of college.

I feel like I can never know whether I'm doing something I "truly" love...but
I'd like to be wrong

~~~
jacoblyles
It's fine to do something that you don't "love". But you better damn well love
it if you're going to sacrifice your financial, emotional, and physical health
for it like the typical Silicon Valley founder.

------
tarr11
It'd be great if the author wrote about something _specific_. This article
contains little detail about anything that actually happened.

~~~
Wilduck
Agreed. I read this:

> What Hacker News doesn't prepare you for, however, is when a competitor gets
> acquired for a billion dollars, work-life imbalance, and getting dumped by
> your World of Warcraft girlfriend.

and was pretty interested. It sounds like the start of two pretty interesting
stories. Instead of actually telling these stories, however, the post
descended into platitudes. I'm beginning to feel that I should be flagging
posts that are as meatless as this one.

~~~
zacharyz
From his site it sounds like he was a designer working on picplz and app.net.
My guess is the competitor he was talking about was instagram.

~~~
fudged71
To me, Instagram (a competitor) being bought by Facebook is a huge
opportunity. Just look at all the people "leaving Instagram" right now due to
predictable changes in their TOS.

------
zaidf
_The real Silicon Valley will never be televised._

I feel this way as well but I am curious as to why. My reasoning is that the
incentives for entrepreneurs to swap dirty laundry for publicity isn't a
worthwhile exchange for most entrepreneurs. I hear about how startups are
extremely boring but I think people overestimate how much "fun" other
professions are and how television works. It doesn't matter if 90% of a start-
up is writing code like a robot; what matters is the other 10% and I think we
have plenty of true, crazy stories to go around if founders had much of an
incentive to play them out on air. I sure don't. I don't want my B2B customers
nor investors to judge me _only_ from the 10% dramatic part of my life.

------
spdy
Sometimes Silicon Valley looks from the outside like Las Vegas but for
programmers. Make a billion dollars with an idea you have no clue about how to
monetize in the first place.

------
timjahn
If this is what the "real Silicon Valley" is like, this explains why I've
never had the burning desire to move there and build a company there instead
of Chicago.

That and the realization that there's more to life.

------
phatbyte
I advice everyone on HN to view this video:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nif01WZ9aI>

Maybe this won't change anything, but there's more in life than just getting
funded with millions of dollars. I feel pretty bad for people who get
depressed or worse because they didin't made it in SV...that's so superficial
about life and things in general. Do we all really need millions of dollars
and IPO to be happy and be considered "successful" ? What does that even mean
?

Do what you love, that's my advice. My girlfriend is a nurse and when people
are in their dead bed, she said that the thing most people regret is not doing
what they loved, spend time with their families, going on trip around the
world. And that hospital is used mostly by high class people, with lots of
money.

~~~
martinced
My only regret on my dead bed is going to be to have make the world progress
faster than I could have.

I've writing technical books helping to share knowledge and that's the one
thing I feel the most proud about. I won't regret having brought my
contribution to sharing knowledge.

I love my family, but I also _love_ my work. I love R&D. I love trying to
create something that shall help people. I'll never ever have any regret about
moving to California (not there anymore) and worked there like crazy for
someone else's startup.

Then "success" has never been measured only by money: there are very succesful
non-profit organization out there. But people are typically working hard to
make them work too.

It's not about "making an IPO" or "getting rich". It's about "making a
difference".

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on
the unreasonable man."

~~~
phatbyte
I got nothing against people who pursue that, I speak against myself on my
first post. I also want to create something that makes a difference, I want to
generate value and create something meaningful for other. But I would never
replace my dream with all the other things I love in life. In the end the
balance will always be negative for me.

With this said, It doesn't mean I aim low on things I want to achieve, I just
thing balance is the correct path to have in life.

------
pvdm
Narcissism (Delusions of grandeur) is a psychological affliction, not a drug.

------
svachalek
Don't ever gamble more than you can afford to lose. That applies to a lot more
than just money.

------
acchow
> Technically I am now homeless and unemployed.

But if you can code, you could be in a 100k job with a 10k signing by Monday.
That's hardly "homeless".

~~~
yen223
Where are these 100k jobs that people keep talking about? Because there is no
such thing where I come from.

~~~
intellegacy
Silicon valley, Boston, and NYC are paying $100k for senior level developers.

Of course Malaysia and S.E.Asia and the rest of the world has a lower level of
salary (except perhaps Singapore).

------
mahyarm
I get the impression from your post that balls to wall burnout effort isn't
the key to success, so why do you do it that way?

------
seanlinehan
Entrepreneurship truly is a roller coaster. You constantly swing from ecstasy
to depression, sometimes on a day by day basis. The underlying truth is that
over time this cycle does not cease; it will continue in full force. However,
over time things get better. I may be an optimist, but I believe that in the
long run things always get better. One of my professors showed my class a
graph that described this effect, which I have recreated. [1] In the long run,
an entrepreneur's lows can be better than the rest of the world's highs. That
is the future we seek.

[1] <http://i48.tinypic.com/20hxbbt.jpg>

------
amirhirsch
author appears to be an expert in start-up vernacular.

------
hnriot
Real life is seldom like a tv show. I don't think this should be news to
anyone. I bet physicians don't like Grey's Anatomy either.

While I'm sorry things didn't work out for you, I don't see this as anything
to do with this area. Your story is one that is playing out all over America
in this economy.

------
peripetylabs
I read countless horror stories before launching my own startup, without
hesitation. If your goal is to do what you love, and hopefully earn a living
from it, you have my sympathy; if your goal is to get rich quick, well, that's
always been a fool's game.

------
shmerl
Sorry for off-topic but why specifically Silicon Valley? While it has many
historical technological centers and is often hyped, it's not the only
possible place to open a technological startup.

------
spitfire
So is there anywhere people outside the US could watch this silicon valley
show? I'm curious but can't find a source that doesn't block those outside the
US.

------
pla3rhat3r
The race to the "American Dream" is not a one lane road. Keep pushing. Someday
your tenacity and passion will be rewarded.

------
suyash
You need to update the photo before you speak about SV..SV !== San Francisco

------
michaelochurch
I really wish there was a way to: (a) have the autonomy and interesting work
of a startup tech founder (while a full-time technologist, not a manager) but
(b) without the extreme income variance. If your job requires you to take
personal loans, there's something wrong. I also think there are a lot of
people who have the talent but not the ability to afford the risk.

The extreme income variance is a bug, not a feature, in my opinion. I'd be
willing to sell all upside past $100 million (which would have median value of
zero, but reasonable expectancy given the autonomy I'd have) in exchange for
downside insurance, because I can't possibly imagine why I'd even want $10
billion.

~~~
dxbydt
you are looking for a rose without the thorns:) you'd be better off with a
lily ( ie. straight job at big-co/small-co, no income variance )

~~~
SatvikBeri
There's plenty of in-between. The key concept is career capital.

Career capital is basically how much a company values you. You can more or
less trade career capital for things like money, promotions, freedom, etc.

Different companies will let you trade career capital for different things.
Small startups generally grant more autonomy and less cash. Investment banks
will let you get plenty of cash, but all the career capital in the world won't
buy you autonomy.

The mistake most people make is that they don't consciously invest their
career capital. They take raises and promotions when they should really be
negotiating for more freedom and interesting projects.

If you want to love your work, figure out

1\. How to become extremely valuable and earn lots of career capital,

2\. What you want to spend it on. There is usually a constraint in your life-
feeling that you don't have enough freedom, enough cash, etc. Spend your
career capital on your biggest constraints.

~~~
michaelochurch
This is excellent advice. The question is: what should people do to acquire
career capital fast? Work hard at their assigned stuff, or invest in self-
directed labor?

I think there's something to be said for the zigzag strategy. Take finance
jobs to improve comp, and more typical tech jobs to improve autonomy and
technical knowledge. No tech company will match a $250,000 hedge fund salary,
but most will compensate "out of kind" with a higher title and more authority.
Then you do something awesome at your tech job and become qualified for a
better finance job.

The other advantage of zigzagging is that you can overstate how politically
successful you are, because you're moving into a context where people don't
know how to evaluate your signals. If you claim you were at level X in finance
when you were actually X - 2, other finance people will be able to tell based
on what you actually did and how much you know about the industry. If you
zigzag a bit, you have more control over your story. But I think there must be
limits to the efficacy of zigzagging, because lateral movement without
progress becomes damaging after a while.

~~~
SatvikBeri
_What should people do to acquire career capital fast? Work hard at their
assigned stuff, or invest in self-directed labor?_

Cal Newport wrote a book on this[1]. The short answer is "acquire rare and
valuable skills."

If you have a track record of applying NLP to massive data sets today, that
makes you extremely valuable. Combine two or more valuable, but not
necessarily complementary, skills and it makes you a unicorn.

You'll almost never acquire rare & valuable skills by doing your assigned
work. That's because entry level employees do commodity work. You might
acquire valuable skills that way, but not rare ones.

My preferred method: survey the land. Try to figure out what skills are one
notch above where you are today. Come up with a side project that's beneficial
to your employer and would teach you those skills. Depending on the level of
autonomy you have, you might be able to get that project approved as part of
your official work. A few iterations of this should put you in a position to
get a promotion or a better job.

The danger in doing something purely on the side, and not as part of the
company, is that you don't have concrete results you can show at your next
job. You might have mastered Hadoop/NLP/Machine Learning on your own, but all
things being equal I'd hire the guy who used NLP to earn his company millions
of dollars.

By the way, one of the easiest ways to get a rare and valuable skill is to aim
to be 80th percentile at two things, as opposed to 95th percentile at one
thing. My current aspiration is a strong understanding of user
interaction/psychology + a strong understanding of Machine Learning. The
combination of the two will put me in a very unique position when designing
analytic software, even if I'm not the best at either individual skill.

[1]: [http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-
ebook/dp/B0076DD...](http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-
ebook/dp/B0076DDBJ6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1355927128&sr=8-2&keywords=so+good+they+can%27t+ignore+you)

~~~
michaelochurch
Good answer, for sure. The one thing that is dangerous is that it's hard to
know, when you're going off and learning "esoteric" skills, if those will be
winning horses or dead ends. A lot of people would rather max out on
enterprise Java (which has a well-studied, if commoditized, market) than take
a risk on a specialty that might be "hot" today but dead tomorrow.

The AI winter is one of the worst things to have happened to software, and the
decline of funding and even respectability of basic research has set
technology itself back 25 years, and there's a scary lesson in it, which is
that interesting, cutting-edge work can suddenly enter a funding drought.

