
After First Succeeding, Young Tycoons Try, Try Again - wyday
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/business/28invent.html?ex=1351224000&en=955d89f1af988cd4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
======
eusman
"After a certain point, money is meaningless. It ceases to be the goal. The
game is what counts."

Aristotle Onassis

------
jamiequint
this article implicitly raises very interesting questions about motivations
and work/life balance. Dedication is one thing but at what point does it
become unhealthy? Where is the line between making your company all it can be
and is that neccessarily opposed to the success of personal relationships. Do
you think you can have it both ways?

~~~
imsteve
Trick question.

If you stay as healthy and have as good relationships when you're starting a
startup as not then "you're doing it wrong." Or you're just unhealthy and
antisocial to start with.

Tradeoffs...

~~~
jamiequint
Sure there are always tradeoffs, basically you are trading your time (a
limited resource) so necessarily other things will suffer. But where do you
draw the line, how do you find the balance?

~~~
staunch
You face reality and narrow your priorities down to the very few things that
really matter to you. Then you work hard on them and hope things work out
okay. That's as far as I've figured it out anyway ;-)

The idea of balance seems pretty academic to me. Maybe it makes sense in the
long-term, but if you mean splitting your time equally at all times I think
that's the path towards doing an equally bad job at everything.

~~~
akkartik
I agree. The right way to find balance is to focus on one thing, to be hugely
imbalanced in your pursuit of it, and then to leave it when the time is right.

If you follow a routine in what you eat, and eat the same set of foods all the
time, you risk exaggerating small imbalances over time, with implications for
your health. To avoid this you can either spend a _lot_ of time thinking about
what you eat (with implications for balance in other areas), or you just
change it up and chase some variety every now and then. Try new things. Listen
to your body when it tells you it's had too much of this or that.

With 'listen to your body' this thread connects up with this one where
DanielBMarkham talks about introspection:

<http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/17541151>

(Context:
[http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/?http://news.ycombinator.com...](http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/?http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=73433))

------
Agathos
I feel like I've read this article before. That would be at least once last
year, and a few times in the 90s.

~~~
wyday
One reason may be that it's in a series of articles in the NYTimes called "Age
of Riches":

[http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/series/age_of_ri...](http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/series/age_of_riches/index.html)

------
altay
Here's a great NerdTV interview of Max Levchin:
<http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/guests/#l>

He did the interview on no sleep, so he's kind of loopy.

But that makes it even better. Nothing inspires entrepreneurial solidarity
like a cracked-out hacker slurring his speech after an all-nighter.

------
altay
Does anyone have any idea how Max could top PayPal with Slide?

Flickr -- that other photo-sharing site -- sold for, what, around $30 million?
Paypal sold for $1.54 _billion_.

~~~
falsestprophet
It looks like he only owned 2.3% of PayPal, so he 'only' made $34 million
dollars.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Levchin>

~~~
augustus
Yeah, you are right. I think his $34 million stake was in eBay so it grew
overtime. That's my guess.

------
daniel-cussen
From a biological standpoint, an animal is genetically designed to only do
things that make it a successful animal (with lots of surviving babies). This
can include certain amounts of sleeping and socializing. Happiness is a
positive reinforcement for doing the right things (like eating and sleeping).

Though humans are more complex and different, it may not be too far-fetched to
say that everything we do is work, in some form or another. If Max Levchin
might not be happy doing anything else, that makes a lot of sense.

~~~
Mistone
a couple things I get from Max's story, one that has certainly been told
repeatedly but is none the less quite amazing:

1) at 22 - he was not trying to be the CEO - he was hacking away at someone
else's startup.

2) He was lucky enough to hit it huge with PayPal - but the result they
achieved was a direct result of that 18 hours a day mentality and tenacity.

3) Age 29 or 30 is no time to be retired, lecturing, or enjoying long winey
lunches at Boulevard - this is the classic "go out and get it phase of your
life"

4) Starting a startup with 100 million in your bank account makes it much
easier but is no guarantee of market success.

5) And for all of those winter 2008 YC applicants that didn't get the call
(myself included) - the greatest startups in the valley did it without YC - so
can you

------
DanielBMarkham
None of my business, but this guy needs to take a spritz. I know it's fun
being wonderboy and all, but once you do that 2 or 3 times very well, either
you graduate into something tougher and better or you're just like a stupid
little dog chasing a fake rabbit around a racetrack.

If I were him, I'd see if I could train a dozen startups at once, like YC. If
that sounds too easy, try 20, or 40. I guess as a software architect I'm
always looking for that next higher level of generalization. Once you do it a
few times -- time to move on.

If startups are mostly luck, then this guy sounds like a habitual gambler. If
they are mostly skill, then he's stuck in a rut. Either way, I hope he's not
doing the same thing ten years from now. That'd be sad.

~~~
wyday
Has "spritz" taken on a new slang meaning? From what I remember (as does the
dictionary) it means carbonated water.

> once you do that 2 or 3 times very well, either you graduate into something
> tougher and better or you're just like a stupid little dog chasing a fake
> rabbit around a racetrack

Does this apply just to the tech industry? Or would you say that artists,
architects, and novelists should move on to a new profession once they produce
a few good works?

Maybe J.K. Rowling should have stopped after the 3rd Harry Potter book. She
was already a popular and financial success by then.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Take a spritz: have a break; stop for a minute; chill out.

Any field of human endeavor has various facets to explore. Usually there is an
entry position, where one becomes familiar with the terms and issues of the
field an achieves some initial success. Then one moves on. The other poster
pointed this out, and for some reason you guys down-modded him.

I could get into a long list of people who did great in a field when they
started and then matured and took the field with them. Beethoven: great
pianist. Went on to become great composer. Started composing symphonies. Went
deaf but still composed symphonies. Went from there to completely change music
as we know it.

I could add another dozen examples. Your example of J. K. Rowling doesn't fly
since she considers all of the books one unit. This would be her initial
success phase. Now she could continue in the field of book writing, pushing
the genre (as Beethoven did with music) or she could move into a more
generalized form of literature, say training, editing, or something else. She
has an opportunity to redefine writing -- whether or not she could pull it off
is up for grabs. I kind of doubt it. Or she could just cranking out that
schlock that all of us read. It's up to her, and to say that she's somehow
giving up her dream is BS: her dream should be about something big enough to
keep pushing for. Being an artist and just making yourself and other people
happy is a great dream! There are a lot of artists who find a comfortable
niche and stay with that their whole life. But they aren't Beethovens. And
they aren't innovators.

Like I said, none of my business.

~~~
wyday
> Beethoven: great pianist. Went on to become great composer. Started
> composing symphonies. Went deaf but still composed symphonies. Went from
> there to completely change music as we know it.

You're rewriting history. Beethoven started by playing organ, viola, and piano
while composing keyboard works. His collection of piano works alone outweighs
his symphonic works. That's disregarding his enormous collection string works.

Also, it was hardly a unique thing to do. Mozart, Haydn, Sibelius and various
other composers followed precisely the same path: start with piano training,
produce piano works and expand outward. In fact, this paragraph actually
supports what I was sarcastically suggesting: stick with what you do best. In
this case, composing. You just got the details wrong.

> She has an opportunity to redefine writing -- whether or not she could pull
> it off is up for grabs.

That's ambiguous as hell. Explain "redefine writing".

> Or she could just cranking out that schlock that all of us read.

Is its "schlock" factor based on whether or not a writer's works are read and
enjoyed by the general populous? In that case, Shakespeare cranked out a fair
bit of schlock in his time.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Look. I don't mind being wrong, but I just don't think you're understanding
what I'm saying.

Beethoven started out as a keyboardist, sure. His father made him practice
like crazy. At first he was a great performer of other people's works, not a
composer. He received some acclaim as a performer and went to Vienna. At
Vienna he was supposed to develop his composition skills. Hayden took him
under his wing, and let's just say things didn't work out. Ignoring all his
other great works (if such a thing is possible!) and concentrating on his
symphonies, you can see where he started in the classical form and eventually
blew the doors off of it, substituting motif development for the typical
lyrical development of the time. His use of rhythm and instrumentation
(including a chorus in the ninth) was completely unheard of. Music critics
attending his symphonies for the first time were outraged. He was taking a
field and innovating. The place he took the symphony, for instance, was
somewhere the day-to-day practitioners of the time would never have went.

Glad to continue the historical bantering if you find it productive.

You ask for me to explain redefining writing? Sure as heck it's an ambiguous
statement. That's the whole point! We can't see where the field can go because
we're not practitioners at the top of our game. That's the purpose of pushing
forward. It's not a question that has an answer that I can provide.

Interesting that you would choose Shakespeare as writing schlock. In fact, he
did write a lot of stuff that was considered pulp at the time, but not only
was his works popular with the masses and sometimes low-brow, he was also
cutting-edge. His use of language and meter was, once again, unheard of. I
could start listing all the new phrases he came up with that are common today,
like "into thin air." Geesh! He coined over 2000 new words! He started a
completely new way of constructing sentences in English. Shakespeare was
probably more radical than any writer since him, yet he also appealed to the
masses. You don't have to choose between popular and innovative. Sorry if I
represented it as such.

Of course, Beethoven could have stayed with Hayden and wrote Baroque material
his entire life. Shakespeare could have used the common vernacular and still
been a very successful writer. There's nothing wrong with just wanting to do
one thing the best you can. But doing "the best you can" to me means trying to
change the world, not just plodding along in it.

