
Employee #1: Reddit - craigcannon
http://themacro.com/articles/2016/07/chris-slowe-interview/
======
zoeysaurusrex
"The thing about that time was we were all learning how to program web apps
while we were building them and there wasn’t really a standard operating
procedure or anything."

I'm going to have to disagree and say 2005 wasn't all that much "wild west"
when writing web apps. Maybe it was for them, but not the enterprise world.

~~~
the_watcher
Rails didn't exist yet. People were still building from scratch instead of
using a framework to get started. It wasn't the "wild west" in that no one was
doing it, but it definitely was in terms of ecosystems that had developed
around web development frameworks

~~~
nostrademons
Rails was available as open-source then, but hadn't officially reached 1.0,
and DHH was pretty much the only committer.

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stevebmark
Joining early stage tech startups is a gamble. Being an early employee at a
highly successful company is 99.9% luck. I'd rather hear about the early
employees at the hundreds of tire-fire startups without business models that
investors sink millions into. I think a lot of unshared knowledge lies in
those war-torn employees.

~~~
mathattack
An interviewer once told me (when I mentioned a startup that I had worked at
imploded) "You need some road rash to understand how to do things."

I agree with your point - it's worth learning about how things go at the
failures too.

~~~
amelius
> You need some road rash to understand how to do things

This is assuming there _is_ a guaranteed way to become a successful company.

What the road rash will teach you is probably that starting an IT company
right now is more like being a golddigger. It is all gambling, and the VCs are
laughing their way to the bank because they know this, and they wisely spread
their money.

------
birken
Great series. As a fellow early employee I love for their stories to get told!

> That said, startups have culturally matured in the last ten years and it’s
> been fun to watch ... What’s really great to see is that all those people
> who were working 16 hours have now grown into their thirties and realized
> that, “Oh, sleep is really cool.”

Something I've noticed as well, though I think it is much more-so the people
and not the startup culture. I know some younger people in the early stages of
their companies and it seems they are still working really hard and devoting a
large section of their life to their company. It does seem natural though that
when people get a little older they diversify their life a little bit more.

~~~
wingerlang
Definitely not startup culture, more a computer/tech thing I think. Because
this is accurate for anyone that grew up playing games. Also for LAN parties
where initially you'd go 2-3 days without sleep but after a few of them you'd
start sleeping.

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elt0n
I guess a touchy question I would've liked to see is "How was it working with
Aaron Swartz?," because he seemed like a wonderful person to work with.

~~~
redthrowaway
Except that the entire team hated him. They don't talk about it since his
death, likely out of respect, but they were pretty open about him fucking off
to Europe and deciding not to show up for a few weeks. They were really angry
about him claiming to be a cofounder and insisted that he had very little to
do with reddit outside of writing web.py.

Funny how the accepted narrative changes after someone dies.

Edit: Background: [https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Aaron-Swartz-and-Steve-
Huffman...](https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Aaron-Swartz-and-Steve-Huffman-and-
Alexis-Ohanian-not-get-along)

~~~
the_watcher
> outside of writing web.py

Very little to do with it except for writing the framework that scaled it to
acquisition? Seems like a fairly important contribution to me.

~~~
nostrademons
They ended up rewriting it in Pylons soon after the acquisition. So yeah, it's
technically true that he wrote the framework that scaled it to acquisition,
but were he not there, they probably would've just written it in Pylons to
begin with - it was available around that time, and was fairly popular among
YC startups of that vintage (DropBox also started out with Pylons).

~~~
the_watcher
You can say that about a lot of things though. The fact remains that he was
there, and they did use web.py to get to the acquisition.

~~~
Rapzid
But what conclusions are you drawing from that? I think perhaps that might be
where you and the OP could find some actual points for discussion vs just
throwing facts around.

~~~
hellomoto998
The point is that a spiritual cofounder is just as legitimate as an actual
blood-and-sweat cofounder.

------
taurath
I would've liked to hear about more of his earlier life, pre-cambridge. How a
person working on a phd at cambridge happened to have 2 open rooms in their
apartment. A lot of what I'd be interested in is how people actually end up
getting the ideas, or meeting the people, or being in the position to take the
leap to the success that people have had.

~~~
antisthenes
Luck and being born to well-off parents.

------
PhasmaFelis
> _I think the thing we learned most of all there was that breaking into
> travel is really hard. There are a lot of big players and most travel
> companies aren’t technology companies. I can’t tell you how many times I was
> on a call and the other person on the phone was referring to their
> engineering staff as “IT.”_

And then they both laugh about it for several lines.

I don't get it. Is IT not what they're doing? I like being called an
"engineer" as much as the next coder, but there's been plenty of ink spilled
over how modern dev work has none of the discipline and care found in "real"
engineering disciplines, which is why shit breaks all the time. Insisting that
you do "engineering" instead of IT seems like naive egotism at best.

~~~
jnbiche
In the US at least, "IT" is the support staff that maintains networks,
provides staff support, approves/rejects new employee software requests
(mostly rejects), etc.

Software developers/engineers design new products for a company. It's a
significant difference.

I personally don't mind being called "coder", "programmer", "software
developer", or "software engineer" (the last two have been part of my formal
titles), but please don't call me "IT".

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I'm a coder and I've done all of those things, often at the same job where I
was coding. Insisting on a sharply-drawn distinction sounds like it's just a
way for coders to tell themselves that they're better than support monkeys.

------
slimsag
Interesting part to me:

> Craig : So you were essentially working part-time?

> Chris : Part-time in startup hours but it was like a full-time job. I would
> normally work from 6 to 2. Then go to sleep, get back up, and do it again.

> You know, your 20s are a magical period of time. I could get by on four or
> five hours of sleep without any major side effects. Basically it was like
> that for all of 2006. It was like two full-time jobs.

~~~
taneq
I dunno about most people but I can't function _well_ on 5 hours sleep. I feel
normal but after 2-3 days of that, I just start getting stupid. Things that
I'd normally figure out instantly will stump me for ages. I'll find myself
staring at my screen thinking "I know this is simple and I know I can do
this." If I'm only doing easy stuff I can cruise by, but if I'm working on
anything demanding my productivity plummets.

------
size12font
He got offended by the term "IT" when talking about engineers. In Europe and
most of the world that's actually the proper term for an engineering
department.

~~~
jeroen94704
No, it's not. Maybe where you're at, but not where I'm at.

~~~
qmr
Writing buggy code does not an engineer make. The pervasive, wanton disrespect
for the title in the valley and the tech industry at large is absolutely
disgusting.

------
vessenes
Money Quote: "The Internet has a long memory!"

------
pmarreck
When they cover "Employee #1: Thredup.com", let me know lol

~~~
zackkitzmiller
I couldn't get the damn modal to go away so I gave up. Too bad, seemed like a
reasonable site.

~~~
pmarreck
A lot of startups are going to this forced-signup model. I'm not a fan (I
don't work there anymore), but it does at least make the "funnel" look better
on paper, sigh

------
mathattack
_I would say the first three to six months is gonna be a slog. It’s gonna be a
tough slog._

For better or worse this seems to capture a lot of early startup experience.
It's not all the glory of sunshine, rainbows and TEDx talks.

------
a_small_island
>"Craig : [Laughter]"

I commented on the last article "Employee 1: Yahoo" [0] regarding interjection
of "Hahaha" by the interviewer. Seems it was changed to [Laughter], which
seems much more inline and professional.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009360](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009360)

~~~
richforrester
I missed the "hahaha", but came into this comment section to see if anyone
else thought the "Craig : [Laughter]" got awkward from the get-go.

It is phrased like it's a response currently. Very staccato and interrupting
the flow of the article.

I'd actually do the opposite and go more candid than professional, since
"laughter" isn't quite informative. Perhaps something that looks like it's a
side note, and less formal. So maybe;

(Chris laughs)

(Prompting another laugh from the interviewer)

etc.

~~~
type0
> (Chris laughs)

(Prompting another laugh from the interviewer)

etc.

I think that's right, the same as in play writing.

