
Finding Time to Invest in Yourself - yarapavan
https://nav.al/finding-time
======
ditonal
Founders want employees to have the founder mentality without giving them
founder equity. AngelList (which this author is shilling) salaries and equity
grants are pathetically low. So they write fluff pieces about how you’ll learn
so much doing a founders laundry. I learned a lot more, faster, as an employee
at big tech than at early stage startups. Startup VCs and company need to get
out of the business of writing fluff pieces about how great it is to be a
startup employee and get into the business of fixing early employee equity
grants. The “standard” is pathetic.

~~~
dang
I've been wondering about this for a long time. On average, what equity level
would you say counts as "pathetically low" and what range would you say counts
as fair?

It seems to me that early employees are underpriced these days, the way that
founders used to be, so a correction is probably inevitable. At the same time,
there's no way seed-stage startups can match FB levels of compensation—the
math just doesn't work. So what would a correction look like?

~~~
genbit
i think vc/founders need to innovate on this topic to: provide better
effort/reward incentives, and reduce risk for employees, giving that they have
less voting control over equity.

Could be something like:

\- companies keep lower number of employees, higher grants, but demand
founder-like effort for early years

\- early employees get substantial equity grants 5-10%, that must be sold to
VCs on secondary offering at next rounds. In that case, employees could
directly benefit from startup grows, while reducing risk compared to FAANg,
and founder can keep their equity size. Yes, upside is limited, tax/legal
work, but could be covered by new refreshment grants from employee pool

\- YC creates/funds employee union-like organization, that funds/organize
activities/benefits for early stage startups

\- help legally with paying/hiring employees remote with equity package

also joining startup and buying out $$$$$ worth of stock options that could
turn to 0 is a downside compared to stock grants from FAANg.

~~~
takanori
Idea #2 is genius. In my experience early employees become a liability as you
scale and exceed their experience skill level. This makes it a win for them
and for the org. Nothing worse than an early employee who is hanging on to a
high level role when everyone knows they aren’t cutting it. What are some
possible downsides of this?

~~~
alain94040
In other words, idea #2 is to have a mini-IPO (liquidity event) for the early
employees, by round A or B. B might make the most sense. Kind of like a super-
bonus or extra warrants. So at least the early employees don't have to wait
7-10 years to see an outcome, but can expect a (smaller) windfall within 1-3
years, to put them on par with high-paying jobs if the company is successful
enough to raise a B round.

------
gdubs
I avoided Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits [...]” for years and years — but when I
finally read it, it was much deeper than I’d imagined, and less superficial
than a lot of “self help” books out there.

One central habit in the book is around “saw sharpening” and essentially
making time to invest in yourself, so ultimately you can invest in
interpersonal relationships. It’s kind of a “hierarchy of needs”. You need
time, and money — and sometimes neither seem to be available.

I can’t do the whole thing justice here, but for the sake of advancing my
point — it begins with sorting out what’s urgent and important from what’s
trivial and unimportant, and learning to be proactive. Personal finance is
something to consider as well, because saving and reducing expenses can buy
you some additional flexibility in your life.

With some spare time and money, you get to the question of — what do I do
next? How do I learn, where do I start? Personally, I think the best way to
learn is to build something! Build something that you’re passionate about, and
try to solve a problem. Then, see if you can demonstrate value to others —
speak to real people who use your product, empathize, and try to make it
better.

In terms of big company vs startup, both — like anything — have their ups-and-
downs. In my experience, if there’s something worth optimizing for it’s this:
try to work with great people. Kind, brilliant, considerate people.

~~~
chrisweekly
Great comment. Finally reading 7 Habits and couldn't agree more.

------
ccthr
I feel like this is promoting wantrepeneur lifestyle and taking low paid long
hour start up jobs to get on the ladder.

Whilst innovation is important, and earning your stripes too, I get sick of
this unspoken attitude that anyone who doesn't work for a "cool" startup must
be unambitious and lack talent.

Big tech are dominating most of the interesting problems. Startups likely can
not compete with google - if they choose to let you exist it is because they
have decided the problem isn't profitable enough.

~~~
dang
If that argument is correct, then startups are toast and it's big
conglomerates from now on. I think that's going too far. Not everyone wants to
work for a big company; not everyone wants to work for an ad company; and so
on. What I'd like to know is whether startups can narrow the gap enough to be
worth it for early engineers, once these non-compensation factors are
included.

~~~
genbit
Disclaimer: worked only in startups as early-stage engineer.

I feel like early stage startups are getting closed to be toast, at least in
bay area, from different angels conglomerates are better at non-compensation
factors as well. And in current environment, when startups stay private
longer, any engineer has a better chances to go to mid or late stage startup,
wait till IPO and repeat. It is better from money, career, networking.

If put aside equity, as a decision factor, I think, early engineers can go to
a startup because it's a faster growing environment with more freedom. Faster
for career, business skills, networking, engineering skills... But founders
are focused on growing a startup (or stock price) at all cost, short term,
from round to round. And people personal goals are usually longer term and
founders don't have time/will for that.

More thoughts on non-compensation factors that startups could get right if
they want:

1\. Advance in career faster.

Some go to startups because they feel they can progress faster in career
ladder. In reality early engineers do not have enough experience for
management/lead positions, and there is not enough experience to gain in early
days (not enough people, tasks). Founders usually end up bringing ex-big
corp/cool startup management, because "they worked at scale".

For management career development working at big corps are usually better,
since there is a clear path you can take to grow, and you can estimate how
much it will take you to do it.

Founders could be upfront about they goals and as part of offer could promise
people a chance at management, some management coaching. Organizations like YC
could offer early engineers management/leads coaching programs to their
portfolio companies.

2\. Grow as engineers

Startups usually don't have enough scale and tech is not perfect. More like a
different peaces "glued" together in a hurry, and always constant change.

Anyone working at startups as early engineer and trying to go to big-corp for
money will hear "yeah cool, but we are looking for tech experience at our
scale of usage"

Startups can compete in this area (if they don't have scale) by allowing
people to develop as public figures, encouraging blogging, talking at
conferences.

3\. Unlimited vacations. Flexible time.

Early engineers are always on, and harder to take long vacation, or completely
disconnect. Compare to big corps, there are some where you can take several
months sabbatical.

4\. Full business transparency

Founders can be fully transparent in terms of business, funding in front of
employees. This can go long way in developing loyalty and trust. Compare it to
big corps, where there are layers of management.

5\. Remote-first

More startups allow people to travel and work from whatever hours, location
they want - more employees/engineers they will attract. Founders could be
upfront about it: we pay 80% of market comp, but we don't care where you work
from, as long as you available from some reasonable time online.

6\. Networking

I feel like startups suck at this. It's expensive to send people to
conferences, startup team is small. Working at FAANg you have better
networking opportunities.

YC/VCs could have a networking events not only for founders, but for engineers
as well. From YC perspective it's better if engineer leaves for another YC
company and stay in ecosystem, than to leave to FAANg.

7\. Family friendly

I feel like big corps are more family friendly: insurance, time off,
activities. Startups figuring out how to make it or compensate for luck of it
— could help.

------
6gvONxR4sf7o
It's incredibly depressing that "finding time to invest in yourself" is about
furthering your career. Sure that's part of it, but it's just one piece.

I'm so lucky that I've almost forgotten how lucky I am to have an employer who
lets me work on myself in job related aspects _at work_. They give me time to
get better at my job at treat me well enough for me to stay. It sure as hell
pays dividends to them as I get better at making stuff for them.

Meanwhile, that means that outside of work, finding time to invest in myself
doesn't have anything to do with career. I've got that covered at work. Now
it's about finding time to make myself feel fulfilled. This is what I'm
happiest to be able to invest time into, and it's not even mentioned in a post
about finding time to invest in yourself? It feels like another symptom of the
broken work-life balance culture I see in the early stage startup community.
More like work=life balance.

------
unlit_spark
> People will say, “Well, I’m not the founder. I’m not being paid enough to
> care.” Actually, you are: The knowledge and skills you gain by developing a
> founder mentality set you up to be a founder down the line; that’s your
> compensation.

Basically what I understand is that I should care as much as the founder even
though I don't get paid enough. It's about other skills I gain by doing this.
I highly disagree. No matter what I'll do it's all about the short-term
compensation when working for others because I can get other skills both if my
pay is low or high. And I prefer having a high pay and also getting soft
skills. This guy sounds like he's a founder and tries to convince readers to
be a good employees and care about others' businesses.

------
auston
I think the takeaway here is that no matter your circumstance, you should find
a way to gain "specific knowledge". It boils down to:

\- If you can afford to apprentice / intern under someone success or on a
trajectory to success, do it. \- If you can't, then work your paying job,
whatever that is, but feel around for opportunities that no one else is
looking to own yourself.

Not bad advice, but IMO, not exactly "finding the time to invest in yourself".
I actually think finding the time to invest in yourself is getting better at
time management:

1\. Instead of reading tweets, opening instagram, swiping on tinder, etc - go
start an essay, article, etc.

2\. That time you'd normally zone out and listen to music on the bus/train -
read or watch something that you learn from in a big way.

3\. Instead of staying in and watching netflix, hulu, etc get out to a meetup
of people that are interested in the same thing you are.

But these - I think - are all obvious things to people that are reading this.
️

------
abbadadda
Too much preamble. I stopped reading when the author started shilling his "How
to Get Rich" article before he even started his point.

~~~
lvturner
"If you’re a barista at the coffee shop, figure out how to make connections
with the customers. Figure out how to innovate the service you offer and
delight the customer. Managers, founders and owners will take notice."

I stopped reading here, because... no, no they won't, and even if they do -
they won't/can't reward you appropriately for it.

------
productfella
Although I love Naval's ideas, I don't think there is a singular model to
accountability and skin in the game.

It is to compete with yourself every day given the constraints you have as an
individual.

As an example, I would rather find the best happy me than copying a so-called
successful person.

To me, owning a business is the ultimate experience for people skills which
you can never learn in a classroom. But I would rather do it on my own
individual terms than copying a mental model.

------
christiansakai
These kinds of articles that talk about hustling, startup life, versus the
other kinds of articles that talk about FAANG salary and perks are like the
yin and yang of HN articles.

Always popular, always divisive enough, no clear compromise in sight.

I think it speaks of how actually a lot of HN readers really want to work at
startups (including me) but these days they cannot find any justification to
do it, financial wise.

------
brenden2
I really wouldn't want to work for someone who's so full of themselves that
they can't even do their own laundry. Worse yet, someone who'd make their
_employees_ do their laundry for them.

I personally find Naval and his platitudes to be overly simplistic, and his
"get rich quick" advice is mostly impractical (and often bad) for normal
people.

------
whalesalad
Lots of negative reactions to this post but I find it to be a very accurate
and fresh take.

------
teachrdan
This fluff piece was written so quickly that the author did not correctly
comprehend a two-word quote that he uses:

> Coming out of college, Warren Buffett wanted to work for Benjamin Graham to
> learn to be a value investor. Buffett offered to work for free, and Graham
> responded, “You’re overpriced.” What that means is you have to make
> sacrifices to take on an apprenticeship.

No, what that means is that, as a fresh college graduate, Buffet added
negative value to Graham. (Hence, even at $0 he was too expensive.)

Blog posts are often a bit like code: They take more effort to read than they
do to write. In this case, the author spends so little time trying to produce
something worth reading that I couldn't finish the article.

Even for free, this post was overpriced.

~~~
neonate
It seems to me that the author comprehends the quote perfectly well. His point
is that since Buffett was adding negative value to Graham out of the gate,
he'd have needed to do something extra to make hiring him worth Graham's
while. And that doing that something extra would have been a good investment
because of the learning opportunities it would bring. That's the
apprenticeship part. Disagree with the argument if you like (I do too), but
don't read it unfairly and then rip him for it.

~~~
teachrdan
Perhaps what we disagree on here is semantics. When I read,

> you have to make sacrifices __to take on __an apprenticeship

I understand that to mean that in order to even apply for / commit to an
apprenticeship, you have to make sacrifices. In the context of the rest of his
narrative, that means sacrificing a safer, better paying, more conventional
career for being a gopher for a would-be titan of Silicon Valley.

Obviously, if you have the chance to be the gopher for an actual titan of
industry, it's probably worth any reasonable sacrifice. But that's not what
the author is promoting. He's promoting the "hustle 24/7" mentality even as a
barista in the hopes that your manager will reward your entrepreneurial sprit
--or, more likely, a newbie founder who will at best will exit their startup
somewhere in the high six to low seven figures and leave you with little more
than a few hundred thousand dollars of opportunity cost.

~~~
neonate
I totally agree that the value of such an apprenticeship depends on how
titanic the master is, which means it's mostly not going to be all that
valuable.

I still think Naval understood the point about negative value perfectly well.

------
sjg007
Take time every day to invest in yourself. Your employer is lucky to have you.

------
HNLurker2
I don't buy this Naval guy he is too pseudo scientific

------
the_gastropod
Oh, wonderful. Another Naval article that's ultimately about how awesome and
knowledgeable he is, and none of his success has anything to do with luck.
He's truly self made!

I find his writing reeking of arrogance and axe body spray. Have some damn
humility.

------
SandersAK
“In many cases, the person is way overqualified. Someone with multiple
graduate degrees might be running the CEO’s laundry because that’s the most
important thing at the moment.“

These sort of ideas telegraph that the author knows they got rich but don’t
actually understand how they got there.

~~~
dang
Ok, but please don't post shallow dismissals to Hacker News.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
SandersAK
This isn’t a shallow dismissal. I’m literally quoting a part of the piece that
is absurdly bad.

Would it be edifying for you and others if I explained why I think suggesting
that a smart startup employee should not be doing the CEO’s laundry?

~~~
dang
It's not edifying to cherry-pick the most sensational detail in order to
hammer it. What you wrote is shallow because you haven't engaged with the core
idea of the post at all. That's exactly what that guideline is supposed to
discourage.

You seized on "CEO's laundry" because it sounds absurd; no doubt the fact that
it sounds absurd is exactly why he included it. If you reduce his argument to
that, you're breaking another site guideline too: " _Please respond to the
strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that
's easier to criticize. Assume good faith._"

What would be more edifying is if you delivered on the claim your comment
makes for yourself, that you know how someone got rich better than they
themselves do. How?

~~~
SandersAK
It's hard to edify and spend that time when you routinely flag and kill my
comments.

You claim that HN is "better than this" but Naval's post is totally devoid of
insight. It is hackneyed and the commentary responding to it is a reflection
of that. If you want better commentary on the front page, then do a better job
of making the front page articles worth talking about.

As to me claiming to know how Naval got rich - that's easy - he's a person who
cashed in on a golden era of startups when it was easy to sell off bad
properties for big money. Instead of realizing that he was extremely lucky to
be at the right place and right time, with the privilege of having enough
personal wealth to take those risks, he instead spends the rest of his career
trying to justify his wealth and position. That's why all his advice and
"insight" are the sort of trite self-help aphorisms that anyone can say and
make it sound true.

You always ask others to be better on HN, but maybe take a step back and ask
yourself if maybe the state of HN is a reflection not of the community but of
the guidelines and leadership that drives it today.

as for me? I gotta get back to my day job ;)

~~~
dang
The last comment of yours that was flagged and killed was six months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20348091](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20348091).
It was done by users, and rightly so.

I have no opinion about Naval one way or the other, but your argument there is
flawed. There were tons of people trying to do the same thing at the time.
Plenty had privilege and money. Why didn't they all succeed too? To just say
"luck" is a non-answer; that's assuming your conclusion. A real argument would
need to show how it wasn't anything else.

~~~
alexpetralia
It might be useful to think of "luck" as an error term on a regression model,
where the covariates are well-known factors (e.g. wealth, ambition,
connections) and the error term is everything else.

Given that plenty had privilege and money (i.e. those are the covariates), and
many didn't succeed, we'd expect those weren't significant variables.

Many likely had drive, connections, know-how as well. Many of them probably
failed too. Again, insignificant covariates.

So what does that leave? The error term: luck.

In other words, during a tech boom like at the turn of the century, there are
so many winners (often outsized, which distort many basic statistical
assumptions, such as a normal distribution) that is almost futile to try and
identify significant covariates.

To speculate here, often with the pretense of certainty, is more often
reflective of post-hoc reasoning than actual science.

That, in my opinion, is why "luck" is an adequate answer. We can be fairly
sure that certain covariates contribute to success over the long-term in life
(i.e. we have a large sample size of being alive, and we can extrapolate from
many other people who have lived). It is far harder to do this with nonce hype
cycles (infrequent, low-sample size).

Chalking up more success to the error term, "luck", seems perfectly
appropriate during such unusual times.

~~~
dang
If I understand you correctly, then "luck" is another word for "we don't
know". That's reasonable, but then we shouldn't make strong claims to knowing.

There's a cruder version of this argument, according to which _all_ success is
luck. I hear that, or things that sound like it, a lot, but it's too
simplistic and usually too self-serving to be plausible. Though many
successful people will be the first to tell you they were lucky. (I always
remember
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621845))

~~~
alexpetralia
I think that's a fair opinion.

The only tweak I'd make is really around sample sizes and statistical
significance.

All success _may_ be due to luck (the error term), but we can be fairly
confident (say p < .001) it isn't. Said otherwise, we can be reasonably sure
that some covariates (e.g. hard work, wealth, education) are significant,
given a large enough sample size and we define what qualifies as success. One
of course could quibble about these - do we really have enough statistical
significance for each trait? - but the fact is that every person everyday
operates with some intuitive understanding that these things matter. In other
words, not all outcomes are due to luck.

This is much harder to do with small sample sizes or unusual occurrences.
Statistics is based on frequencies, and if we have low frequencies (such as a
tech boom), we should be much less confident in the significance of each
variable.

This is, presumably, why people intuitively chalk up much success during these
times as survivorship bias. It's not that it certainly, absolutely is; rather,
it's that we're far less confident on which variables are significant and
which aren't. The error term remains.

Again, attributing it to the error term, implies mostly that we shouldn't have
too much confidence in our speculations on which traits are significant during
such one-off events.

------
CPLX
The first example is basically find a successful person and take a menial job
sucking up to them and doing their laundry.

Welcome to America 2020

~~~
dang
Come on, you guys. HN comments need to be better than this—much better. Please
read and follow the guidelines:

" _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone
says, not a weaker one that 's easier to criticize. Assume good faith._"

" _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A
good critical comment teaches us something._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

I don't care about the author's argument one way or the other, but I care a
lot about degraded discussion on HN.

~~~
alexpetralia
On the other hand, I feel Hitchens' razor is useful here:

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without
evidence."

In other words, the "low quality" of comments may actually reflect a patent
and blithe dismissal of a perceived "low quality" post. I think you must
acknowledge, given the community's reaction, that this is potentially a low
quality post.

In that case, such a reaction seems appropriate.

~~~
dang
Ok, but the substantive way to dismiss something low-quality is to ignore it,
and maybe also flag it. It's not to add something even more low-quality.

------
SandersAK
"Now, persuasion is a generic skill—it’s probably not enough to build a career
on. You need to combine it in a skill stack, as Scott Adams writes."

Naval quotes Scott Adams, dilbert creator who has on the record said things
like this:

"But in general, society is organized as a virtual prison for men's natural
desires. I don't have a solution in mind. It's a zero sum game. If men get
everything they want, women lose, and vice versa. And there's no real middle
ground because that would look like tweeting a picture of your junk with your
underpants still on. Some things just don't have a compromise solution."

"Naval: Tony Soprano was a businessman who had to enforce his own contracts.
That’s a very complicated business."

Just for others' edification, I'd like to point out that Tony Soprano is not a
real person.

source: [https://jezebel.com/dilbert-creator-scott-adams-weighs-in-
on...](https://jezebel.com/dilbert-creator-scott-adams-weighs-in-on-
rape-5813290)

