One thing that I didn't do at that age and very much regret is to be really conscious of being healthy and physically fit.
That's the right time to learn what you should and shouldn't put in your body, and how to be constantly active. There's a million different ways to accomplish that but it's important to find one.
People at that age often don't really understand how closely linked physical fitness and mental health are. But if you ignore it there will be consequences.
I agree - it took me until ~25 to focus on my health. I've felt myself get younger and more energetic over the past few years.
Observing my family, I have realized how much exercise impacts your quality of life as you age. I've seen family blame "just getting old" for many symptoms of poor health choices, such as problems walking up stairs or type II diabetes. If they focused on health, they might be able to improve their quality of life significantly!
As a specific example - various studies have correlated the ability to stand up (or, doing a squat) not only with how long your life is - but also how long you will live independently. Extrapolating this - not only does exercise have the potential to extend your life, but it also extends how long you can continue to do what you want in life - such as traveling, walking, living alone, etc. Being specific - I know one 60-year-old who ran a half marathon last year, and another who can barely walk up the stairs to his bedroom.
I wish I had learned better health and exercise routines as a teenager!
And the general, consistent feeling of well-being and attentiveness is seductive - it makes you feel like it'll always be there, without any maintenance.
If you look at the places where people live longest they are not health nuts especially and have quite a nice lifestyle. eg
>Ikaria, Greece, three times more likely to reach 90 than Americans, almost no dementia
>residents stay active through walking, farming and fishing, but they also make sure to take time out to nap and socialize. In addition to their Mediterranean diet, they eat a lot of wild greens and drink an herbal tea that’s full of nutrients. Their community lifestyle also encourages good health habits and regular social engagement.
Same here, I actually lost 200 lbs in my mid-late 20s and it's amazing how many positive ways it has affected me beyond the physical health benefits. Growing up I never had an interest in sports/physical activities but I wish I had.
That's an incredible achievement. That's more than I've ever weighed. I can't imagine what it would be like to be carrying that much excess weight every day, I'm sure you were physically quite strong. And even mentally stronger for the commitment to lose the weight. Kudos for your transformation!
Ahh thank you, I've never been good at accepting compliments and don't really feel like I did anything too special since many people each day are able to handle their nutrition/weight in a much better way than I can. But I appreciate the kind words.
I am in the same boat. And the damned thing is it's not that hard to do right by your physical health with moderate amounts of exercise and some self-discipline with meals and alcohol.
Yes, that's the greatest component of my regret. I cannot even make the excuse of "it was so hard, and I was focusing on other things".
I started weightlifting at age 40. I never seriously exercised or did sports regularly before. After one year of exercising 30 minutes a day, I am in a better physical shape than ever before. Those 30 minutes a day are totally worth it. And I regret not doing it twenty-five years ago, when I had much more free time than today.
Why did I even think it would be hard?
Seems to me that most people are bad at giving "80/20" advice -- an advice that is not literally best in the world, but is close enough to the best, and it easy to understand and remember. People often make things sound much more complicated than they are; for example there are dozen of exercise methods, and everyone says their own method is the best, and doing any other method is just a stupid way to hurt yourself. It all you have is contradictory advice of this type, it doesn't sound encouraging. Then some people say "well, it's a science, you have to study it", but I don't have extra 5 years of life to research exercise, then 5 more years to research nutrition, 5 more years to research finance, etc. for each important aspect of life.
(Then there is another line of useless advice, which is "just do what feels natural". Well, what feels natural for me is using internet all day long, and not exercise. Because that's what I have been doing most of my life. And of course, my natural shape is fat. But this is all because "feels natural" simply means "your habits". If you have good habits, following them is a good advice. But if you have bad habits, it is a harmful advice.)
If I tried to give advice to younger people, I would probably just give them one book per topic to read. "Convict conditioning" for exercise. "How not to die" for nutrition. "Early retirement extreme" for financial planning. I would have to think longer for books on other topics; perhaps some topics do not have the right kind of book. (The right kind = one you can read without much previous knowledge in the area; and which will give you advice that is maybe not perfect, but pretty good and not actively harmful.) I believe that sending these three books by a time machine to a 15 years old me would have dramatically improved my life.
I didn't start eating well or exercising until my 40s, but now am in the best shape I've ever been at 45.
I would say that I regret not doing these things earlier, but a large part of the issue is that it's somewhat expensive (both in terms of time and $$) to exercise and eat well, so it would have been hard for me to afford living like this (both in terms of time and money) when I was younger.
(Yes, you can eat well and exercise well without much money, but it's super challenging if you can't afford quality prepared foods and a decent gym membership: I don't see many 24 year olds that have a full time job, are in top physical health, but also still have time available for other interests...)
Also, a physical sport. You will never have the time, interest, and enthusiasm that a kid has to get good at a sport again. I grew up surfing and am proficient at it. This makes it fun. Which means I do it regularly. It’s a great fitness activity and much more fun than my gym workouts. I’ve seen countless adults try to pick up surfing and 99% never become proficient. It took several years as a kid before I gained anything near proficiency. I’d be one of those 99% if I tried to pick it up as an adult. I got lucky I guess to have been introduced to it as a kid. That would be my advice.
> If you think something is important but people older than you hold don't hold it in high regard, there's a decent chance that you're right and they're wrong. Status lags by a generation or more.
I winced a little bit at this one, though it's worded strangely so I may be misinterpreting it. The way I took it is poor advice -- when there is a mismatch between yourself and another in terms of "what's important" or what should be kept in "high regard", do not immediately assume the other person is a moral failure. This is the kind of thinking that leads to division and mistrust between people. The proper way to react to this is to make a good faith effort to understand why the person doesn't care about the issue you do, and be conscious that you may also change your mind one day. "Strong opinions, weakly held."
Agreed. The older I get the more I’ve learned to listen to other people and to question my own ideas. I’ve gotten to the point where I actually view people who listen to others and are open to changing their opinions when confronted with good advice as being much more intelligent than those who are sure they are right about everything all the time.
As the Bob Dylan song goes, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”
> I’ve gotten to the point where I actually view people who listen to others and are open to changing their opinions when confronted with good advice as being much more intelligent than those who are sure they are right about everything all the time.
I also find this to be a useful heuristic. Particularly "How seriously does this person take my ideas? When I'm wrong, do they make an effort to explain why? Are the open to me being right?"
This works best when you're a student or otherwise new to something Obviously, it won't work when you have status over the person; they'll listen to you anyway.
Are you the co-founder and CEO of Stripe? Were you a millionaire at 19 and now, at 29, worth north of a billion dollars?
Why would anyone want to listen to your advice?
(/s Be careful about listening to people who are obviously statistical outliers, who are young and apparently have succeeded at everything they've touched.)
Because advice comes in many forms and is almost never universally applicable. Something that sounds great when applied to one case can usually be flipped on its head with a thousand counterexamples. I'd rather listen to someone who was an expert in whatever problem domain I was seeking advice in than someone who demonstrated massive success in a completely different area, yet I see people do this all the time. Mark Cuban is regularly on CNBC discussing his stock picks while he has actually underperformed the markets for many years. Yet his opinions and advice on stock-picking are highly respected because he top-ticked the sale of a startup that no longer exists and hasn't really created anything lasting since.
The Stripe founders I'm sure have incredible expertise in the payment and startup space and are clearly brilliant. Yet from reading this piece I can sense in a way that he himself probably can't, a sort of ignorance that comes from a lack of life experience. I wouldn't really be too interested in their ideas on most other subjects whereas I would be very interested in reading someone who (gasp!) hadn't created a 10-figure net worth before 30 if they had experience in that area. What a concept. I can't recall how many times I've looked back on a time I dismissed someone else's opinion only later to realize I was completely wrong. The realization that your opinions very often will prove incorrect and the associated behavioral change is what makes you wise, not the refusal to admit you are wrong and the dismissal of everyone who disagrees with you.
Where did the OP limit his claim to be about a specific thing like technology? And why did you interpret my comment as having universal applicability? There are categories of things which if you firmly believe that you are right and the other person is wrong in ascribing importance to them (following the OP's heuristic) you'd necessarily assume that person is a moral failure. For example, if I highly regard the ideas of a specific political philosophy, and others dismiss them as bad ideas that have been disregarded, it seems like a bad idea for me to conclude I'm correct in respecting them simply because people in my age group similarly hold those ideals in high regard.
My point was that a heuristic that urges one to have confidence that they have "correct" value judgements simply due to their age is a bad rule to have in your mental model of how to navigate differences with others, even if it's not a hard one.
Context. Patrick Collison is famous around here for building a SaaS business and writing a lot about helping others to do so. This is Hacker News which focuses heavily on business and tech.
> My point was that a heuristic that urges one to have confidence that they have "correct" value judgements simply due to their age is a bad rule to have in your mental model of how to navigate differences with others, even if it's not a hard one.
The entire world nudges young people in the opposite direction from the very moment they're born. That nudging is frequently incorrect when it comes to technology, so some nudging in the direction of young people believing in themselves is appropriate.
In 2006, there were a bunch of college students who thought Facebook was a pretty big deal. Most 50 year olds in 2006 probably would have disagreed and didn't see why it would be important to post pictures of your friends drinking online. The older people were wrong. It's not a value judgement. They weren't bad people because they were wrong about a technology trend. But they were still wrong.
When any new thing comes along there's always a few older, well respected people who dismiss it and say it isn't important. They end up being wrong. It you want to be the one bringing those new things about, you need to learn to ignore those people, even though they're older than you.
> In 2006, there were a bunch of college students who thought Facebook was a pretty big deal. Most 50 year olds in 2006 probably would have disagreed and didn't see why it would be important to post pictures of your friends drinking online. The older people were wrong.
This example falls apart for lots of reasons. First, the assertion that someone wouldn't find value in Facebook simply because of their age is demonstrably false. There are millions of 50 year olds who use Facebook today and because Facebook is 14 years old, that adoption happened very quickly. 50 year olds in 2006 wouldn't have found Facebook useful at that time and for a very good reason- it wasn't a community for them, it was a community specifically for college students. I doubt Mark Zuckerberg envisioned Facebook/Whatsapp/Instagram when he first created the site in his dorm room. The use case (and usefulness) expanded over time.
> It's not a value judgement. They weren't bad people because they were wrong about a technology trend. But they were still wrong.
Wrong about what? This seems like a straw man to me. Nobody other than college students at very elite colleges were able to use Facebook in its early days. Did that mean that students at community colleges didn't understand the value of sharing photos with their friends or was it just old people? I think it's a mistake to try and explain the complicated in such simple terms.
> This example falls apart for lots of reasons. First, the assertion that someone wouldn't find value in Facebook simply because of their age is demonstrably false.
This assumption would be false, but it's not the one I was making. The first people to recognize the potential of a new technology are usually young. Yes, Facebook is popular with older people now. It wasn't in the beginning, even when it opened up to everyone and not just college students.
Uh sure, but for every Facebook there are a ton of things that young people embrace as important, from tech products like the one you mention, to bits of pop culture and art, and even political ideas that ultimately they reject and so eventually agree with their elders who rejected them too. I mean, who didn't go through their "Ayn Rand phase?" My point isn't that these are unhealthy things or that the young are unable to see things others can't, my point was that telling the young that if they feel passionate about something and others roll their eyes, the fact they are young is an insufficient reason to them assume others must be "wrong" to not value it, and doing so will lead to negative consequences since it will undermine empathy for those who have more experience.
So, funny story. I was in YVR waiting for a flight when I decided to get my shoes shined.
The shoe shine had been reading a manga take on the bible. Just a regular guy that in another life could be a computer programmer if the circumstances were different.
He asked me what I do: mobile apps. And he went on and on about how his favourite iPhone app downloaded all of Wikipedia but it didn't work on the latest version of iOS anymore.
> Then in November of 2007, I went to visit my friend in Japan for a month. And in Japan they have all of this incredibly advanced cellular technology and all of the rest. And so because of that, they had very few wireless networks, and my phone didn’t work. As a result, I actually had very little access to the Internet. I sort of realized without Wikipedia how little I really knew. And I had just got an iPhone, so I decided to try basically putting a copy of Wikipedia on the phone, so that I’d have it as I was walking around in Japan.
"Go be an autodidact iconoclast, and hang out with everyone else does that, too." is a great recipe for being an interesting person. But changing the world requires not just being interesting, but understanding the status quo, and finding ways to bridge them. This advice won't give you both sides.
Also, there is nothing wrong with living a pedestrian life. Millions (billions?) of people do so, happily. And there are many small changes you can make in the world even while walking a typical path. The world changes over time, as many people make those small changes. Feel free to pursue large changes, but don't reject the power of incremental improvements.
Agreed. I'm quite happily pedestrian, and I've met too many people who "went deep" only on a few subjects but were very boring people unless you talked to them about their chosen subjects. Some of my best friends are boring from an economic standpoint because they're poor. But they're wonderful people and I wouldn't trade them for any of the learning I could get from someone who makes more money.
I think Hunter S. Thompson's advice for young people is much better, because in it he makes the point that anyone seeking to give you advice can't possibly know enough about your situation to give good advice.
Wrong, don't be anything. Pedestrian or Deep. Labels do NOT matter. San Francisco has got this wrong. And most of the world is following San Francisco, that is wrong.
Be and do what must be done, not get advice from Collison or Musk et al. This is something I have learned along the way. Sure, respect achievements.
Please for God's sake do not try to become like someone or be something or change the world. It is not worth it. Others can label you. It doesn't count.
This 100x! Falling in love with "making things" in my mind might the single most important trait to be come a successful entrepreneur. The other trait might be "insatiable curiosity", but I think someone who "makes things" demonstrates a curiosity to identify interesting spaces and the resourcefulness to piece together a solution.
I would suggest travel over most of these. Particularly if you live in a fairly inward looking society like the US. Forget SF - live in another country, learn another language while your brain is still plastic enough to become truly fluent, understand your own culture by spending time among others, realise how fortunate you are to be born in a developed country.
That quote just makes me sad. It feels like every time I visit a new city abroad, my understanding of the world expands twofold. SF is great if your life revolves around tech and startups, but I find it hard to perceive as the center of anything but money and hubris. I can't help but roll my eyes at the utterly self-absorbed and vapid conversations I overhear in cafés from day to day. Nothing remotely Weird about any of it.
Seattle is (or was) great at many things but as someone who has lived here all my life, I disagree with this categorization. From what I know of Portland, it describes that city even less well.
We're politically liberal (sometimes to a fault), not any more optimistic than average (and quite possibly less), and definitely not what I'd call "energetic". It'd be more accurate to say the PNW has positioned itself as the laid-back alternative to SF. I've known a couple companies who have left the area because they couldn't find enough people here in their particular field who wanted to really work hard.
On these particular axes (which may or may not be important to you), Seattle/Portland simply aren't in the same league as San Francisco or New York City. People in those cities are mercilessly open, optimistic, and energetic.
Having spent a year in the Bay Area after living in Portland for 10, I really do feel there is much more creative energy in places like Portland, and also that it's a far better place to start most companies.
The problem is that the Bay Area might be full of more creative, interesting people, but the quality and cost of life down there is terrible (and nobody's fixing it), and the problems associated with that more than mitigates the benefits.
You meet smart people, but in order to pay their exorbitant rent they need to work long hours for companies that can pay them an enormous salary, and that's usually the big ones you know about already. That financial burdon, combined with chronic transportation issues, prevents the congealing of people and free time required to form the really creative new ideas and companies, and you just end up with whatever the VCs want to throw a pile of money onto.
So naturally, the thing I do find the area useful for is companies that could be considered VC/10x plays. But I feel like most companies, even very successful ones, don't fall under that criteria. And it only works for companies VCs are willing to fund, limiting your ability to get creative and outside the box.
My advice would be to go there for 1-2 years after college, then decide if all the problems with the area are worth it. Anecdotally, most people I've known eventually get sick of it and leave. And infact the problems are so bad now that the area has started losing population.
I think in order for the Bay Area (and California in general) to really become good for creatives, they need to take a deep existential look at themselves and really decide that they're willing to solve the problems. That means making radical, Marshall Plan levels of reform to zoning and property tax laws, establishment of strong regional metropolitan governments, and significant investments in better transportation. I have zero confidence in the idea that the region will continue to be successful unless they aggressively tackle these problems.
>I think in order for the Bay Area (and California in general) to really become good for creatives, they need to take a deep existential look at themselves and really decide that they're willing to solve the problems. That means making radical, Marshall Plan levels of reform to zoning and property tax laws, establishment of strong regional metropolitan governments, and significant investments in better transportation.
And this will never, ever happen. California is going to continue it's slide into something resembling the third world, where the ultra-rich elite 10% live in their exurban gated communities with armed guards, and a permanent underclass of service workers provides for their every need while barely scraping out an existence. The incentives pushing things in this direction are simply too great for any kind of change to happen. I've been here for 4 years now and have seen it visibly getting worse in that time. The place is completely unlivable. I'm now just biding my time to save for a down payment in Seattle or Portland, because the thought of buying a house here has literally become a punchline for even high income earners.
Having lived there and now living in a cheaper real estate market I am grateful for having lived there, where I could not afford a house. I am now no longer interested in owning residential real estate no matter where I go!
The housing market is flooded with buyers right now, all-cash offers and waived inspections. It's obvious to me that most buyers don't realize the risks associated with their investment, don't understand how to monetize them against rents from long-term buyers, and are just generally thinking emotionally and irrationally. Terrible market to buy in if you don't like spending the rest of your life paying off a money pit, unless you're somewhere like Cleveland where there's a lot of decent supply and less demand (I saw some pretty solid houses there for ~50k).
Good general rule of thumb is your cost of housing shouldn't exceed 30% of your income.
To that I'd add if you buy make sure you are pretty sure you will be in the local market for work for 6-7 years, so even if the mortgage is below 30% and rent is more like 50% if you aren't confident you'll stay put for a while you still shouldn't buy. I think there is an irrational scramble to buy going on now too although I think it is not at the scale that caused the global financial crisis.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted... I've lived here the same amount of time and absolutely agree. It's maddening the complete inaction and lack of desire to fix the problem.
Nah, there are still plenty of optimistic people in SF. Many of them right now are working on a blockchain something-or-other or an AI-powered something-or-other.
The type of folks you want to meet, if you're interested in doing something that will be seen as important in a generation, are generally fairly apolitical. Politics (at least the hyper-partisan variety pursued in the U.S. today) consumes a lot of energy for the purpose of opposing other people who are expending a lot of energy. It makes sense that neither one of them makes much progress, though they generate much heat and noise in the process. Real change comes from people working on stuff so weird that nobody bothers to oppose them.
By definition only one place can be the Schelling point: the one that, in the absence of any coordination, a plurality of people think would be picked as the one that a plurality of people think would be picked as... etc.
As far as "changing the world" goes; the reality is you mostly have to be very lucky. The amount of people setting out to do world changing things vs. the ones that are successful is a staggering ratio.
Hitting 40 this year my advice to any young person is do what will make you feel happy and fulfilled. Whatever that is. It's hard to figure that out, but we only live once and the old adage "You'll regret the things you didn't do more than the things you did." is generally true.
The one sentence version is; say "Yes!" to more things.
The things that make you feel happy and fulfilled today might be the very things that make you feel unhappy and empty tomorrow. The challenge is that most people can't tell till they find themselves in that unhappy state.
My advice for any young person is to learn to think for themselves and figure out things for themselves. There is no magical advice out there that will work for everyone. The same thing that will transform someone's life in an amazing way will ruin someone else life.
nah. that's just too vague. Let's be more specific. Specifically, you are less likely to feel happy and fulfilled if you do not find something that you really enjoy actively doing. Actively working on something that is yours is more likely to make you feel fulfilled than sitting around the house after 9-5 work. But many people end up mostly sitting around the house, with occasional break for travel and vacations, etc.
Actually I think most happy and fulfilled people find that outside of work, risking your wellbeing on the whims of an employer or the current state of the job market is a fools errand.
Aren't they? If youre on this site you're smart enough to know he doesn't mean holistically but in terms of interest and achieving things relatively young.
Most of my interests formed, solidified and shaped me in this range. 20-30 is more so improving aptitude. I am not saying people do not find new lifelong interests past this range.
haha im sure he knew that was going to be a bit unrelatable.
in general i like that he scoped his advice to his own years though. very humble thing to do despite having done more than most of us will in our lifetimes.
After being trapped in a rut at 30, I decided to rethink many aspects of my life just 4 months ago. I made a major overhaul of myself, and it worked out so well I couldn't imagine.
It's never ever too late to do anything, the important thing is whether someone's willing to admit they didn't know as much as they thought.
I totally would share it. I do write my blog at my profile. It will take a while for me to organize my thoughts to write this down (in a month maybe?), but it is coming :)
Why is this kind of vague advice popular? Just because the author is famous? If someone else had written this would anyone care?
Personally, I got tired of hearing famous people tell me I should read more, work on things I love, be an expert (or don't be an expert), "make things", blah, blah, blah many years ago.
>The internet is one of the biggest advantages you have over prior generations. Leverage it.
Most powerful statement in there. It's one thing to 'know' about Internet's power and another thing to utilize it to your personal best.
Internet can be an incredible personal force multiplier -- if used in a good way -- leading to never-before-imagined opportunities. This truly is an amazing time to be alive. [0]
> If you think something is important but people older than you hold don't hold it in high regard, there's a decent chance that you're right and they're wrong. Status lags by a generation or more.
I feel like I'm missing the point of this one. For basically 100% of the things I thought were important between 10-20 years old, as I got older I realized I was wrong and older folks were right.
Conversely, if someone older than you thinks something is important and you do not, you should probably reserve judgement until you're older...
Seems less like an answer to "How do I change the world?" than a rough description of what almost any intelligent person does in an idyllic environment.
It's very common for successful people to over-analyze their specific behavior rather than acknowledge the harsh reality of what actually separates them from others. A description of reality is both less flattering and seemingly less useful. But it does have the virtue of at least being real.
IMHO there are three major factors in changing the world:
#1 High general intelligence and ambition (genetics)
#2 Highly educated well-off parents (environment)
#3 Support of powerful people (opportunity)
You probably can't do much without at least one of these factors. Most people that do big things have all three.
I wish someone would write a useful version of this for the question “what should I do to make the most of my life when my family is poor or somehow less fortunate?”
A lot of this would still apply but there’s a huge percentage of the population that has to deal with major difficulties in life before they can heed the kind of advice Patrick offers.
I come from a considerably poorer background than you based on your other posts, poorer than most, with birth defects that have caused me constant problems and... I could add a bunch of things to this list but it's quite accurate, I'm just past 30 now and by being poor, smart, open, hardworking and going where the energy/money is you end up ticking all of these boxes.
You'll end up more closely identifying with first gen immigrants which puts you in a pretty good place out in SF.
You'll get used a lot in your 20s, people will make a major buck off your skillsets, but if you keep growing them you'll skyrocket a few years after most everyone else plateaus, the joy of working and fear of poverty never leave, but they are rocket fuel later.
You get used to deprivation, develop a non-fragile sense of self, and learn to let most things go too, you'll get used to sweating in secret and it'll give you a great pokerface, it's great training for doing the hard things once life gets easier financially in your 30s and temptation to coast lays most other people low.
I feel relatively successful now at 28 as a programmer, speaker, founder etc after having had to eat with the homeless every day when I was 20, so this comment hits pretty close to home.
I haven't been in such situation, but my good friends was, and what he did fits what you wrote:
He grew up in a city with 50% unemployment. After he realized he has no future there, he left. Just bought a ticket to a larger city, and then applied to companies there until he found one that took him. (His friends from the original city keep meeting in local pubs and dreaming about how one day they will somehow get lucky. They haven't.)
At his first job they abused his inexperience, paid him about half the market price, and as he kept learning new things, they gave him more difficult work, without increasing his salary. But the work still paid bill for living in the city, he learned a lot of stuff, and then one day he left for another job that paid several times more.
Yea I did, what is it to you? Do you take joy in asking that question? Does it make you feel better to know my mom was a single parent without very much money?
Do you feel like you productively added to the conversation?
It’s absolute bullshit that you assume you know so much about me from browsing my web presence
I didn’t ask for an apology and what I said about my life is true. You seem to have some kind of complex about class where you feel you need to make a point but without actually expressing anything of significance. I am not at all trying to prove any kind of point about what your class background means or doesn’t mean. I made a very clear comment and you replied snarkily with assumptions about what my background might be. And I replied that you are wrong, which is true.
What are you trying to get at? What is your point? It looks like you want to be an asshole unless I can somehow prove I am the poorest kid from the roughest situation still posting on hacker news. But all you’re posting is pithy bullshit.
What did you expect? That I had a website that says “I am very poor, please donate money to me?” Or maybe “I am a tough SOB from the hood that made it good at google and now i’m a crypto millionaire who boxes in my spare time to drown out the aggressive tendencies I acquired in my youth”?
I was scratching my head at the popularity of this article before seeing the author. In my opinion, it's a rose-tinted picture of success as filtered through Patrick Collison's extremely unusual life experiences, and comes off as terribly naive without that context.
One thing I'd love to add is that is to make friends with people: People who are older than you, people that don't do stuff you do, people with radically different ideas and lifestyles, people in different countries/cultural backgrounds, people who are successful and unsuccessful.
If it is possible, you should find ways to talk to people you adore. Many people will spend the time to talk back to you. They will be the fuel in your life when you need advice, help, inspirations.
If you're a person in STEM, you should listen carefully to/date people studying arts, literature, social studies, education, politics... Never ever look them down as not as smart as you are. Think of people who don't think the way you do as being different rather than inferior to you. This is easier said then done, if you have a good job and in general, probably have a higher position in the food chain compared to them.
> If it is possible, you should find ways to talk to people you adore.
This. I was often surprised to find out that a famous person whom I admire is actually a very nice person, replies to my e-mails, and sometimes even agrees to meet and talk in person. Sometimes you may even be able to help them with something, and that feels really awesome.
> you should listen carefully to/date people studying arts, literature, social studies, education, politics...
But you should always listen to more than one person in each category, and compare what they said.
That's a really overlooked point, and perhaps the most contrarian nugget of wisdom in this damn good piece of advice. Point is, whatever successful thing you do, it'll always end up gaining you a certain degree of prestige (which is ultimately a form of bullshit, but that's another topic).
The converse also seems to be true: Some currently seemingly prestigious things are long past their relevance, society at large has just not caught on yet; it is good to recognize these and to avoid building your future on them.
I was in SF for the last WWDC, mostly to see and visit these people I keep hearing about. But I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where they were or how to talk to them. I went to WWDC, a couple of meetups, the Computer History Museum, walked through Stanford, ate hummus in Palo Alto, took only public transport or shared Lyft rides. But other than a chance meeting with the CEO of Mode Analytics in one can ride that lasted three minutes, basically zero interaction with the type of people mentioned.
Granted, I am an introvert and don’t strike up conversations as much as I should, but it seems like saying visit SF is useless. Is there a club or some secret society or library or bar that everyone hangs out in? I’ll come back and visit if I have an address to go to. SF is way too broad.
If you want to do this, then decide who you want to meet, make a list and email them all to ask to buy them coffee. Maybe 5% will say yes, so email some more...
Note the advice about making friends over the internet. Do that and then ask to say hi.
Reply to the person on this thread who suggested places to go and ask to buy them a coffee.
Yes. The secret is to find a few well-networked people and then get invited to gatherings/parties in the homes of said people. You'd be shocked at both how connected all of the important and wealthy people in SF are and how much business gets conducted at intimate gatherings.
What's nice is it's somewhat less insular than other status-oriented hierarchies in that you can break into these circles by being reasonably good at generating value (particularly as an engineer/technologist) and even vaguely charismatic.
That said, in my opinion the primary focus should always be on figuring out how to create value. These days the upper echelons of the Bay Area are alarmingly saturated with talkers and bloviators, as opposed to doers.
You don't need to get on pmarca's radar. The point is that there are tertiary personalities, who are much more accessible, that can bootstrap you to the higher social tiers. If you're serious about it, it just takes concerted effort and the right attitude (i.e. not sarcastic defeatism).
I think just visiting for a couple of days doesn't work. You need to spend considerable time in SF, at least to build a base for your network.
- You can meet people by emailing them and asking for coffee. A cool thing about SV culture is that people are pretty open for that.
- The favorite way I like meeting new people is through friends (friends of friends) at non-work related parties
- You can meet people at networking events, but I find that there's a self-selection bias (i.e. interesting people usually don't go there, at least in my experience)
- You can just meet people randomly at bars, etc. but that takes some time :-)
I've basically done the exact same thing as you (though I was there for a different conference) and pre-organizing meetups online is essential, you just don't run into people, as you noticed. Even if you go to somewhere like Red Rock Coffee it's jam packed with people busy working on their thing, so you'd need to be pretty forward to strike up good conversations.
nl's advice seems to be broadly on the money. Get in touch with people online first, and also spend more time there so you don't have to pack the schedule too hard.
I would scout specific meetups of interest on Meetup.com before you go next time. You can definitely find several good ones in the same week in SF.
Besides that it helps to be around other similar people, but I wouldn't necessarily spend my day in Philz / Ritual / Sightglass / Four Barrel / a co-working space if the trip was for vacation. I came to SF for a pre-accelerator once that brought a similar crowd.
Do the interesting people really come to meetups? Almost all the tech ones seem like glorified networking or recruitment watering holes.
I'd love to hang out with chill tech folks à la Homebrew Computer Club, but I get the feeling that kind of thing doesn't really exist anymore. Everyone is too busy peddling their wares.
I've had good luck at niche meetups like for one particular language or framework.
And then less good specific but decently good networking at interesting side projects meetups.
I think the general purpose tech meetups can be hit/miss. It takes some work to find the best big one in a city. The best one in my city asks that only startup employees attend and not third party recruiters unless they're sponsoring.
It also helps if the meetup is hosted at an incubator or accelerator type space — one signal of quality vs a random place.
That's correct. 2600 is a hacker quarterly. The 'zine has all sorts of interesting writeups, including hacker politics, 0-day discussions, free software talks, notes from people (including fuckyous as well). And the back is a picture of payphones from around the world.
And the name is a throwback to the 2600Hz tone that was used to gain operator rights on pre-digital trunking phone lines.
Sorry, but that's just not true. Silicon Valley is filled with stories of successful stalkings.
For example, in 2007, I loitered outside Facebook HQ on university ave until I had a chance encounter with someone who also attended my alma mater (!) and was starting his first day of work, so he took me inside with him[1]. I tried to meet with Zuck but they sicced Dave Morin on me. I ended up getting incredible access to the FB engineering team and my app was ultimately acquired, and I partially attribute that to unfair advantage.
First, as the other commenter said, FB had something between 150 and 450 employees in 2007 (depending on when in 2007 you did that). You can still do that with "smaller" startups today, of course. But you can also just email the CEO of a 150 person startup and they'll reply if you're not full of shit.
Second, just because it worked for you doesn't mean it works in general. I'm sure if 1,000 people did it, a couple of them would be successful. But that's definitely not the best way to get peoples attention. Some YC partner says in one of their Investor Startup School lecture that they hate it when people stalk investors at their favorite coffee shop or whatever and that it leads to an adverse effect.
I think you need to pick your targets. 2007 FB isn’t the same as 2018 Google.
Also it seems like you might be good at talking to people (based on the story above). The OP says they are an introvert and might find that more difficult.
It's terrible that friendship these days is based on superficial/selfish character features like confidence instead of more socially beneficial features like altruism.
If evolution keeps going in this direction then there will be a point where capitalism won't be able to support it anymore.
Capitalism was designed for a certain kind of species and we are no longer it.
I wouldn’t be where I am today without 2600. Hacking (real hacking, not pg’s definition) is what lead me to learn to code when I was a teenager back in the 90s. Many of the folks I met via 2600 may not be CEOs but are extremely successful. Sage advice.
do you really think people are that interesting in SF? there are a lot of people trying to make a lot of money by building tech startups in SF, but are those the kind of people that are interesting to meet? Yes, if your aim in life is to build a startup or invest in one, probably no otherwise?
His point was that openness is highly valued. The way I'd put it is that in SF, it is completely OK to be a nonconformist and to do things your own way.
It's actually hard to be fully aware of the high levels of conformity one finds elsewhere until you have spent 6+ months in SF.
That's not to say that there aren't widespread prejudices held in SF.. the biggest one I have encountered is the belief that people living in "flyover" states are idiots and are less enlightened than those living in SF.
Saying SF is open to nonconformity is not another way of saying SF is "enlightened". It's just an aspect of enlightenment that SF culture does particularly well compared to other parts of the world.
This isn't even necessarily all kinds of nonconformity... it's just some that are rare elsewhere.
If you pick a person at random from anywhere in the US you'll find roughly equivalent levels of enlightenment and judgmental views. What's unique about SF is that being different is way more acceptable than it is elsewhere.
When you live in SF for a while and then go to other major cities and see how people dress it looks like they are all wearing a conformist costume, trying to look acceptable. But acceptable to whom? It's this instinct toward conformity that is so repellent about many areas of the country. The example I used about fashion is just an example, the same exists when it comes to life choices, values, etc.
That being said, I can see how -if you identify as a non-conformist in some way or the other- it makes sense to move to a place with a higher-than-normal ratio of other non-confirmists.
After all, even if they are not of the same bent as you, at least they are familiar with the feeling of not fitting in and, hopefully, as a result are more tolerant of other people who deviate from the norm - whatever that norm may be.
I suspect that even though SF at one point may have been a gathering point for people who didnt want to do things the normal way it has been filled with people who want to make money off the previous group, which makes it less interesting for future trailblazers. i wonder where they will go in the future
If "Texas" is a downside for Austin, then surely Portland has the same problem? Isn't the rest of the state strongly conservative?
Honestly I doubt it will be a city on the tier of Austin/Portland/Seattle, when San Francisco was still the obvious place to go for people who wanted to do weird things it was much cheaper relatively. The same goes for NYC back when it was a musical/artistic hotspot - living space was much much more affordable than any of these cities.
>If "Texas" is a downside for Austin, then surely Portland has the same problem? Isn't the rest of the state strongly conservative?
It definitely does, but to a lesser extent. Oregon is a reliably blue state because the population is extremely sparse outside of Portland, whereas Austin is just a bubble amid a sea of red. Oregon is also a lot less of the "southern redneck confederate" type, and more of the "libertarian don't tread on me" conservative, which is far more tolerable.
> In particular, try to go deep on multiple things...deep on languages, programming...
I fall under the target audience for this piece and by now I've dabbled with at least half a dozen of programming languages and their celebrated frameworks/libraries- from Front to the Back. I tried my best to go deep on all of them just for the sake of learning. But, now I feel lost and can't figure out which path am I supposed to pursue in this vast CS space. Where did I mess up ?
I can only speak from personal experience, but I have noticed that I easily get excited to learn a shiny new tool or skill, but once I have basic familiarity with it, my eagerness dries up because all that was driving my desire to learn was the intrigue of an unknown experience. Times where I felt like I actually went deep (and it didn't require superhuman discipline to spend time on something I had lost interest in) were when I was working on a problem I was passionate about that required deep knowledge of a certain set of tools or skills. Then I had reason to keep pushing and along the way I realized I had become halfway decent at that tool/skill set.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. True, it is in fact the desire to learn was the intrigue of an unknown experience sensation that makes me jump from one ship to the other, frequently. I guess I need to work on my discipline and focus on a single tech stack for a considerable period.
Languages are just ...tools, instruments. So desire to learn a language (or framework, whatever tool-kit) for the sake of learning .. isnt going to hold far. BUT.. once u have that half-tool, and the half-transparent-new-window that comes with it, u can use it (and bunch of others) to be able to desire to learn something completely different... AND then use that as a stepping stone for the next.. (repeat..) until u find what u want to do, and all those stones either become the polished fundaments or just mark your steps searching around for the way.
There's saying.. if u fall on your face, dont forget to take something as a souvenir...
You’re taking the right approach for your age IMO. Breadth is good because it acquaints you with the solution space for any problem you may encounter. Depth is good because it enables you to build solutions. But you don’t need depth until you know you need it. Depth is rarely realized through academic exercise. You develop depth through trial and error while solving real problems with practical use cases. Once you have a problem, and you’ve used your breadth to identify a potential solution, then it is time to dive deep.
My advice to my 20 year old self would be the opposite: Don't go deep on a thing unless you are absolutely convinced that it's going to be lucrative. You might bet your career on the wrong horse and find yourself with no other skills to fall back on.
For maximum flexibility, aim to be a jack of all trades, and learn to fluently translate between tech-speak and business-speak.
I like this point in particular -- "Don't stress out too much about how valuable the things you're going deep on are." The general stance of people is to stick to the practical stuff -- knowledge or skills that you can use right away. But, it's important to have a long view and given enough time the impractical could turn into something practical. Serendipity is underrated, and in my experience the impractical stuff is what enables serendipity.
Hackernews, Medium and Slack groups related to what you like are great ways to get to know people in SF that are into tech/startups.
Anyone has any other suggestion as to where to meet people that built something interesting? I tried tech/startup meet ups and Startup Grind but they sucked. I had more luck with unrelated events.
When I was a teenager, I listened to "Everybody's Free (to wear sunscreen)," which prompted me to read the essay "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young." Probably one of the only real bits of advice I listened to in my teens, thought about, and then attempted to follow.
I'm actually old enough to write a 20-30 column. My only advice is to know the different between wanting something and how you want something to happen. In my 20s, I despised the idea of luck, but I've learned so much of what happens in life is outside your control. The only thing reliably in your control is your attitude.
I used to read in bed every night. Sometimes it was technical material and at other times, it was entertaining fiction. It helped me in many ways - it made it so that I had an activity that helped me relax before I put the book aside and slept. It also helped me make big leaps in my understanding of certain technical topics. I found that (at least in my case) reading before bed led to high retention.
Also, doing it this way, it was an easy ritual -> brush teeth, shower, lie in bed and read, feel tired and can't focus anymore, set book aside, turn off bedside lamp and close your eyes and fall asleep quickly. This adds up to a lot of reading over the months and years.
I've never been able to get into audiobooks. I listen to podcasts already, and to be honest I find my retention on audible things drastically less than the written word.
Get it on your phone. Use downtime to read. It's not as tactile as a physical book, but you always have your phone on you. Any time you'd pull it out to browse/eff about, read instead.
I'll read waiting in line. During unproductive meetings. Riding in any sort of public transport/lyft/etc. In airports. On the toilet.
Perhaps it isn't that important to you then. Most people who read a lot do it because they like it, not because they feel it will improve their character in some way.
One of the things I like about getting old is I can let go of all those things I should be doing, in my case writing but in your case perhaps that's reading.
Something I've thought a lot about is how to educate people, specifically on a larger scale. In general I think it's a really underrated thought-space for tech people, probably because it's a hard problem that most likely won't make you a billionaire. However, in my thinking/reading about this issue, I've discovered that especially at the 10-20 age a lot of time you have to work towards making kids curious and encouraging this behavior without explicitly demanding it. In other words, I think this article is almost better read by parents than the kids themselves.
The average 10 year old will most likely not go out of their way to "aim to read a lot" if it is hard to get books. Fortunately, I had a set of parents that highly valued education, and they really worked towards opening access to books for me and my siblings (we could go to the library whenever we wanted, and they prioritized driving us there). Obviously there will be the occasional 10 year old that will do anything to get more books but I don't think that is average, as are most things on this article.
This follows for most things on this list. Curiosity, taking hobbies you enjoy way way way too far (read that as "becoming an expert"), and "making things" are all things that I think happen better or exclusively under parental guidance. In addition to that, something I think I noticed (and I'd be curious if Patrick experienced this too) but doing most of these activities with my siblings significantly encouraged my habits. I built my first computer with the help of my siblings, and have read dozens of books I never would have without the suggestions of my siblings.
All these slightly random thoughts combine into the fact that my "resume education" did very little to get me to the point that I am today. I didn't learn how to program at school. I didn't write my first program at school. I didn't develop my love of reading at school. I didn't build my first quad-copter there, etc. So, rounding this out, I'd ask the question; what portion of these activities (listed here, or on Patrick's blog) should I have done at school vs at home? Should education move to a more Montessori[0] style to encourage this exploration? Should teachers merge more into parents as is the case in a lot of public schools? How can a company (non-profit?) garner enough of a child's time to encourage these behaviors?
On a more tangential note, have you done anything in the education/parenting space Patrick?
"People who did great things often did so at very surprisingly young ages". This is very true, Gates was 19 (BASIC), Linus was 21 (Linux), Wozniak 25 (Apple I), Ada Lovelace 27 (first algorithm), Bill Joy 21 (vi), Andreessen 21 (Mosaic), Turing 24 (Turing machine) and so on.
Babbage 41 (Babbage machine), John Backus 30 (Fortran), Tim Berners-Lee 34 (World Wide Web), Fred Brooks 30 (IBM S/360), George Bool 32 (Symbolic Logic), Vannevar Bush 55 (memex, forerunner to hypertext), Vint Cerf 29 (TCP/IP), Alonzo Church 36 (Entscheidungsproblem) and so on.
I would love to see data on the age they decided to master a given field. For instance if you decide to master programming (w.e that means) and it takes roughly 10 years to achieve mastery then you should expect a great accomplishment 10 years after you've started diving deep in a field.
My assumption that it's rarer for those who are older is probably due to the fact that they have to worry about making a living and there aren't as many resources where you can engage with your peers outside of university, and also the fact that as a kid, making mistakes is not frowned upon but merely a process of discovery, whereas when you're older there is a lot of negative emotions associated with failure.
I think it takes a bit more time to cultivate lessons learned from the past decade. There were things that made sense to do ten years ago, but twenty years, thirty years, forty years (or more) on it becomes more obvious of the validity of the choices made.
> But having good social skills confers life-long benefits. So, don't write them off. Get good at making a good first impression, being funny (if possible... this author still working on it...), speaking publicly.
I would be careful with this point. Young people who don't have great social skills already tend to feel that they are somehow missing out on something important. But those who have good social skills in our culture will have a hard time forming new and unique ideas, and will often get talked into believing big, fundamental ideas that are wrong or crazy. I'd compare it to being a smoker in the 1960s. In exchange for being cooler, you suffer irreducible risk, that is made more dangerous by the fact that few people realize it's there. Until our culture changes, it's probably better to encourage people to learn about human nature than about "social skills".
> But those who have good social skills in our culture will have a hard time forming new and unique ideas, and will often get talked into believing big, fundamental ideas that are wrong or crazy. I'd compare it to being a smoker in the 1960s.
I can assure you that having good social skills is absolutely nothing like being a smoker in the 1960s. And, there is no absolute relationship between having good social skills and getting talked into believing crazy ideas.
I have absolutely no idea where you get those ideas, but they are completely and demonstrably wrong.
I don't really think there are any negative effects to having good social skills. If anything, being able to effectively communicate with others probably helps with coming up with new/unique ideas. Very few great ideas are created in a vacuum. But, I do agree it's important that people don't feel afraid to be an independent thinker, and it's easy to fall into the trap of forced conformity in order to feel more socially accepted.. but I don't think that is really necessarily a product of having good social skills.
At ages 10-20 one has the time to go deep into many different subjects, would that be viable for someone late into the game (20-30s)? Or would they have to narrow the number of subjects they explore?
That statement is a bit of an oxymoron, you can't go deep into lots of subjects. You pick one and immerse yourself in it or you cover a wide range to a shallower depth.
There was a survey done at a home for the elderly that asked them what they would do differently. All of them, 100%, gave the same answer: Spend more time with their family.
Advice for SF people: Stop talking about changing the god damned world when what you're actually working on is a middleman payment processor. You sound like your head is planted so far up into your ass you can see daylight again.
E: Just to point out what I actually believe so I’m not just doing a drive-by insult - let capitalism and self interest be just that, like how a pizza delivery guy or payday loan provider probably isn’t deluding themselves about making an impact. Leave talk of societal impact to actual politics.
I agree with you in theory but I feel that Stripe is an exception in that they have made it vastly easier for people to start businesses that will change the world.
Related to this is the talk the founder of Asana gave at Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders. If you can make the people that are on the front lines of doing good a bit more efficient then you are doing good yourself.
> payday loan provider probably isn’t deluding themselves about making an impact
Having worked at a YC-backed alternative to payday lender (https://www.//lendup.com) and having spent a lot of the time in the call center listening to our customers, I'd suggest that a lender to folks without access to credit can have much more impact than you could possibly imagine. Being able to instantly inject $500 into the bank account of someone that needed it for a car repair or they'd lose their job when they couldn't get it elsewhere was only one of the many, many examples. Now multiply that by hundreds of thousands of customers, and the impact is not trivial by any measure.
Taking something that is incredibly painful and making it a delight at scale is a beautiful thing, almost no matter how trivial that thing is. I'm reminded of when Steve Jobs forced the Apple team to shave 30 seconds off of the startup time, because multiplied by the number of people who use Apple devices it's the equivalent of years in aggregate.
I love that there are thousands of companies trying to change the world by making the one thing they work on absolutely perfect. It's a great thing.
>Having worked at a YC-backed alternative to payday lender (https://www.//lendup.com) and having spent a lot of the time in the call center listening to our customers, I'd suggest that a lender to folks without access to credit can have much more impact than you could possibly imagine. Being able to instantly inject $500 into the bank account of someone that needed it for a car repair or they'd lose their job when they couldn't get it elsewhere was only one of the many, many examples. Now multiply that by hundreds of thousands of customers, and the impact is not trivial by any measure.
This is exactly the mindless "head-in-ass" crap the OP was talking about. You're not helping that person by lending them $500 at 400%+ APR [0]. You are trapping them into a debt cycle they will most likely never recover from until default. Subprime lending is a predatory practice which has been around forever, no matter how you flip it. It is legal under our system though, so you're more than welcome to do it and profit from people's financial ignorance. Just don't try to pretend like you're helping anybody.
Yes, clearly I just don't understand the complex problems they are tackling. I'm certainly not calling them out on being shady and awful like every other payday lender since forever [0].
A few takeaways from their most recent CFPB fine of $6 million :
>"Misled consumers about graduating to lower-priced loans"
>"Hid the true cost of credit"
>"Reversed pricing without consumer knowledge"
>"Understated the annual percentage rate"
>"Failed to report credit information"
It's honestly sad how weak the CFPB is, but at least it's something. This entire industry is a stain on humanity.
Yes, I was there for all that. I am incredibly proud to call myself a LendUpper and I have no regrets.
All of that stuff was either done on accident when the company was a small handful of people or is pretty innocuous (we got in trouble for not displaying on our advertising that the rate may differ from the imaginary icon we showed, which displayed one of the possible rates based on how much money you took out. Or getting nailed for trying to give people a discount if they promised early repayment and not giving the discount if they didn't pay in advance).
Literally any company that had that regulatory weight on it would have the same number of things the CFPB could go after if they could, but no one else is trying to play by the rules and just operate out of sovereign nations.
To translate what was just said: payday lenders do, in fact, delude themsleves into thinking they are making an impact. It’s always the same material about “helping people in their time of need”.
But the point isn’t about the immediate impact on people’s lives at the moment of funding ... rather the longer impact during the time that they will hold the debt, and the high interest cost to those who can afford it least. Multiply that into man-years per your Steve Jobs anecdote! ️(smh)
There’s a reason usury is illegal, and why payday lenders have to pair with sovereign nations and shady legal structures, and why google won’t even list you, etc.
shame.
But oh no. I’ve just bad-mouthed a YC company on HN! Here comes dang!!
Lending to subprime borrowers is hard, because there's high default. Most payday lenders solve for that by having those that don't pay enter into a cycle of more and more loans that compounds.
You know what LendUp does if a customer doesn't pay? It just stops, and tries to get you to pay back the original loan. No more compounding.
That's a big difference. I you think charging $30 total interest for an instant $200 loan to someone with bad/no credit is evil and doesn't make a difference, you probably don't understand the realities of what people would have to do if LendUp weren't there.
LendUp is run legally as a licensed lender in California. The shady legal structures in native american nations is what they're fighting. I'm damn proud to have spent a couple of years trying to solve it.
> LendUp is run legally as a licensed lender in CA.
Okay? ... every company has the same licenses. CashNetUSA, Quickloans, Captain America Loans, and hundreds of other companies. Including even most with the shady legal structures, based in Malta, etc. Google won’t list the Deleware ones either. Advertising platforms don’t like them. Cities don’t like them. Regulators watch them closely and frequently press charges.
> I’m damn proud to have spent a couple of years trying to solve it.
Look this is probably going to seem uncivil, but given the poor ethics of what you are talking about, I have no qualms shaming.
I spent a few years founding a payday business. Ultimately, despite having the same “forgiveness” policies and “innovative” loan structures, and telling myself all the same junk you are telling yourself (CFSA PR propaganda) I couldn’t bring myself to treat poor people like a crop to be harvested. You know that forgiveness or not, the majority of borrowers are repeats, and that there is a huge incentive to maximize this. Essentially, people use you instead of a bank.
There is no escaping that this means you are in the business of siphoning 10% off of an already poor person’s wages on an ongoing basis, and that’s without compounding. (Sounds like 15% by your numbers)
Do you really feel good that you did this? You drank some silicon valley koolaid, worked as someone else’s employee and harvested poor people? And then acted as the company’s mouthpiece afterward? Because you want to feel congruent with your resume?
Before you say I don’t know blah blah about LendUp ... hear this: A great many Payday companies came before LendUp, attempting the PR of being “ethical” and “innovative”, with the same practices. And by far they have not been the last. They’re all still in the business of fleecing at least 10% off of the people who can afford it least. There’s always money in stealing from the poor. The only innovative thing they did was to con YC. (hi)
Do not deceive yourself or others. It is not an honorable business. It is a called a VICE INDUSTRY for a reason, and you guys didn’t do anything to “solve” it (by your own admission of the word “trying”).
I know ... you want to stand by what you did, but if I were you, I would put that one in the rear view.
I have a serious medical condition. I was sexually abused as a child. I spent nearly 6 years homeless.
The last thing I want is someone trying to "rescue" me. I've spent enormous amounts of time trying to figure out how to solve some really hard problems without approaching it as charity and rescuing other people.
For example, I am trying to start a program to help homeless people and others with barriers to regular employment start making money online, even if it is only in dribs and drabs. I do what I can to advocate for more development of market-rate, inexpensive housing rather than "homeless programs" per se. I want to see the fabric of society change such that we have less homelessness. I absolutely don't want to see more Big Feels (TM) efforts to Help The Homeless because that almost always means giving them temporary relief that often actively helps keep them stuck and then expecting them to grovel in gratitude.
Having thought about this a whole, whole lot, I think good business models are the single best way to make the kind of civilizing impact I desire to see.
We need more Ghandis, who taught India financial self sufficiency as the antidote to being Britain's bitch, not more Jesus Christ Superstars, who at this point is a meme of "the only good man is a dead man who died a martyr." I assume that was what the world needed 2000 years ago. But I would like to see less charity and more healthy fabric of society that makes the lives of ordinary people work better without them having to prove they have some problem that merits positive intervention of some sort.
I"m fine if people feeling like their vision will "change the world" is the motivation they need to put themselves through the hell that starting a company can be. I'm extra fine if that framing has them thinking in terms of "How does this genuinely improve the lives of people and not just milk them for money to line our pockets?"
That's the magic of the whole setup. When you present the situation as "making the world a better place", it's easier to swallow ethical transgressions and other illegal or immoral behaviors (Uber is a great example of this)
My favorite is how if you check out any oil companies website, pretend you knew nothing about them and you’d think they were green peace by the messaging on their site.
The most basic form of this is undermining or exploiting a group of people as your core business model, and then donating a small portion to charities that help that same group. Or even better, the ceo’s unrelated pet cause, an astroturf group, or a foundation where they hire family members as a way to skirt gift taxes.
Compassionate capitalism is lovely ;)
That's the right time to learn what you should and shouldn't put in your body, and how to be constantly active. There's a million different ways to accomplish that but it's important to find one.
People at that age often don't really understand how closely linked physical fitness and mental health are. But if you ignore it there will be consequences.