
My First Job Interview was with a Billionaire - adambrod
http://blonk.co/posts/yar25WjW9c9XL7Kwo
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jseliger
Brilliant story.

That being said, Page should learn to be a better writer. Take this, for
example:

 _As for my right ear, I was born deaf in it lol. This was not a fun
experience to say the least._

Being born deaf in one ear is rarely a cause for "laughing out loud," and the
"lol" adds nothing to the first sentence. "To say the least" is a cliché and
should be eliminated.

Anyone could be guilty of these writing sins and in a large enough sample of
my own writing I'm sure someone could find clichés. Nonetheless they're
pervasive enough to detract from the piece. It wouldn't be a bad idea to get
_Write Right!_ (my favorite short, pithy writing book) and William Zissner's
_On Writing Well_.

~~~
steven2012
I agree. I thought the writing was really poor and very hard to follow. One
moment he's talking about losing his hearing, then his vision and then having
Epstein Barr.

That being said, it seems like a pretty interesting story, good for him for
fighting through his problems!

~~~
mcpat
I think there's room for the perspectives offered by both formal and informal
writing.

Given the informal context, reminiscing about first job interviews with
friends, I feel that the author wanted to share that setting with us as
readers.

It may not have been the same decision you would have made, but take it as a
chance to learn a new perspective rather than opening with hard criticisms.

~~~
steven2012
I disagree, I don't think the style was informal, I think it was simply poorly
written. There is a difference between the two. The blogger never purported to
be a good writer, so I don't fault him for it and I was able to get the gist
of what he wanted to say, but it wasn't well written..

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dublinben
Your site doesn't show anything without javascript enabled. You might want to
have some graceful fallback of some kind.

~~~
logfromblammo
This is one of my pet peeves. What makes is worse is that if I temporarily
enable scripts for the page, there is nothing on it that actually requires
scripting. The javascript just displays formatted text. Every HTTP service in
existence already does that.

~~~
adambrod
Currently you could construct this statically (actually we used to host on
S3), but we're building out the desktop app at the same time, so it made sense
to host the blog on the same app. This should be rendering HTML server side
soon.

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7Figures2Commas
There's a good general sales lesson here: "research" is not "preparation",
even though they're commonly assumed to be the same thing in practice, as was
the case here.

It's hard to craft a viable proposition if you don't know your target, but
simply knowing your target doesn't mean you have a viable proposition.
Ultimately, the OP's pitch to Moritz ("my poker success can be translate to
success as a venture capitalist") was _interesting_ enough to land him a
meeting, but not _compelling_ enough to close the deal.

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johnnyg
Your sign in/sign up doesn't offer an option to sign up...

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adambrod
Sorry about that. In retrospect I should have hid it until that was ready. In
the near future we'll have a desktop site to log into and use as well as
mobile.

In the mean time you can also signup in the app.

Thanks for the heads up!

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carrotleads
I loved the email pitch. Seemed to the point and anyone reading it was clear
who you are and what you could do.

As Mark Twain said in a letter, "if I had more time, I would have written a
shorter letter".

Still a long way to go for me but I can see my pitches are becoming better. I
happy to start with a long winded sentence now and then gradually cut it down.

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primitivesuave
Cool story, but fix your site! You're missing out on valuable HN exposure
because of the general feeling of incompleteness.

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ScubaFarm
"Stay pathologically optimistic." Love it.

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rajacombinator
"Tinder for jobs" ... doublefacepalm.gif. good luck though maybe I'm wrong.

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bbg215
sup bro - nice post.

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kimonos
Nice story!

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typage
thanks, much appreciated

~~~
natecarroll
hey, what was your screenname on pokerstars/ftp/2+2? from the timeline, i'm
guessing we played together a lot.

~~~
adambrod
Tom's having trouble logging in (same IP issue?), but he said to email him at
tom@blonk.co and he would be happy to chat.

