The “It” Crowd Doesn’t Like Me and I Finally Don’t Care(juliefredrickson.tumblr.com) |
The “It” Crowd Doesn’t Like Me and I Finally Don’t Care(juliefredrickson.tumblr.com) |
Everyone here should think long and hard about what can be done to prevent a community from degenerating to the point where it is colonized by trivial attention whoring.
In fact, whoever thinks hardest might just make the next billion dollars.
See if they're not begging you for jobs a few years from now.
The valley clique isn't a privilege for 20-something men; it's a trap for them. It eats their time, and, at least where it intersects with Hacker News, serves to out people you'll know never to work with professionally.
I understand you were venting here, but in this paragraph it sounds like you still care deeply about how the It crowd perceives you.
Of course as a result of hitting that tipping point many more people know who you are now which isn't a bad thing and could have some future benefits.
MongoDB has made me a nice chunk of change as a consultant. These days when I mention MongoDB people don't even hide the crazy looks. The interview/meeting might as well be over then and there.
Since mentioning mongo sets the conversation back, I've instead choosing to focus my energies delving deeper into ecosystems like Riak-Core/Erlang which many developers still don't have a firm grasp on and are considered "serious" databases.
It seems to be working, but we'll see where I am a few years from now.
Only in the last five or so years have large groups of people been carrying around high-quality usable digital cameras with permanent internet connectivity, and even in those years the picture quality, usability, and connectivity have been getting better, and the number of devices out their keeps growing.
World wide web search has been thought to have been solved several times until Google came along, and even now, fortunately, folks have not given up on solving the problem of people searching for things.
So in five years how can a bunch of male 20-something storage fetishists in SV have solved all of the problems of photo sharing for everyone? Surely there are problems to solve remaining for them, or for anyone else who do not share their particular needs and want to take a crack.
And there are quite a few more problems to be solved in people sharing pictures of things.
Yes, but not the one you describe, I think. The opportunity is for someone to present a coherent mental model for what's going on in tech that will fit so well that, even as it undresses VCs and startups in all their pointless glory, they will thank you for the insight. Someone who gets most of the large-scale points right is Carlota Perez. I think that her ideas can and should be applied to the "attention economy", ubiquitous computing, and human psychology, particularly with a certain moral bent that admits, for example, that moving someone's attention from what is more valuable to that person to what is less valuable for them (but more valuable to you), is wrong.
P.S. Homebrew is a package manager for osx, not a storage backend. </pedant>
Big valuations usually stem from not knowing how much a company will make once they start charging for stuff. So the "it" crowd works itself into a frenzy and VCs take a big gamble.
But once you make a dollar, all the mystery is gone. You're judged & valued pretty much on your revenue alone. Which is usually low (startups are hard) and unsexy (so not a ton of buzz).
Not saying a agree with it. But that's how it is.
1. Explosive Growth
2. ???
3. Profit!
All that is fine of course and true. But there are side benefits to "it" status. For one thing it can help you attract talent and get the type of attention that can lead to success.
Let me give you an example. I've helped both high profile people and people who are nobodies with advice. In general the nobodies are much more thankful for the advice (and have even sent me gifts as thank you's). The high profile people say "thank you".
"Name dropping". But the fact that I do the work for high profile people, well, I use that in my marketing to attract paid customers that actually put money in my pocket. And it works.
I think OP's issue relates to the weird, self-referential culture of Silicon Valley, where success is measured in buzz and money raised. It goes something like:
Build free software product -> ? -> profit
where ? = Get lots of buzz/hype, grow userbase quickly, raise VC money
Or course, this is similar to another business plan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts
You might want to put that front and center in your home page message.
Also your "playapi" logo is totally unreadable in both Firefox as well as Safari (v-latest).
This is likely to have been raised before, but the two are similar in many ways: vast and fragmented with many paths to and definitions of success, prone to fads, full of both hard workers and poseurs, controlled near the top by gatekeepers who pride themselves, correctly or not, on evaluating potential success, jealousy of success, rules that apply to the majority of aspirants and smaller players but not the minority of the very successful, people who look with disdain at others' choices, seeing those choices as more important than they really are, etc.
So it is good to realize that, just as in music, success is context-dependent, and one's popularity with the current stars and hangers-on is a weak indicator of success, and it's good to act on that realization in a useful way, including planting a stake in the ground saying "I'm done with that."
That said, once one's self-confidence and happiness are restored it's also good to not completely reject all aspects of whatever and whoever are popular. Unless someone is a close competitor (in which case they must be crushed or scared off to other pastures ;) ), why not wish for their success and celebrate it? Similarly, conferences are a great way to learn, to teach, and to meet those with the same interests, and so long as attending the conference is not only about being seen by others as attending a conference (or, say, being invited to a panel), and going does not interfere with work, why shouldn't one go?
[1] http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/6415-girl-talk/ [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5235168
Who is brianvan5155 and why hasn't he made any comments?
How has this made it to the front page?
What can it all mean?
Good luck.
Also, getting all emo and throwing a public temper tantrum railing against the people whose help you might need someday isn't doing you any favors.
Get back to work.
Though I admit I wasn't quite expecting a personal Tumblr post to make it to Hacker News.
>>>It turns out I’ve got a startup that happens to be a business. You know what that means? We make money.
That second part. That is what is cool.
In reality, being happy seems to be the hardest thing to achieve, but I'm starting to think that is what success really is.
Perception Market. Also known as a "reputation bubble."
(Anyone know where the original "reputation bubble" article went? I've been trying fancy tricks with Google, but getting nowhere. The fashion industry and the "it" girl supermodel are prime examples in the article.)
That doesn't mean a company can't be technological and VC-funded, but the "cool kids" sideshow isn't about true technology. It can't be. The VPs and Product Managers are all imbeciles and the engineers, while smart in an IQ-sense, are too steeped in bad practices to know anything. (The Founders are talented marketers but 80% are sociopaths.)
The VC-istan "It" crowd is not comprised of technologists, but of people who've found it advantageous to incorporate technological fetishism into their vapid marketing. The jokers in the in-crowd don't know anything, and the best technologists only tag along to their projects if they can get something out of it... and those sorts of managerial conditions (hands-off management, high autonomy, interesting projects and self-direction) don't tend to last for long.
> I wanted to be one of those founders, you know, the type that gets silly valuations and love from the name brand ventures firms, the type that gets written up by the tech press, the sort that powerful angels vouch for and send around glowing intros for as being “the next big thing,” and the sort that jets around to conferences.
I truly hope you've come away from all this and understood that the problem isn't 'them,' it's you.
Once you focus on identity — worse yet, how others perceive your identity — then it's just a hop, skip and jump to narcissism, when 90% of your effort and emotions is about projecting and protecting your identity at the sacrifice of making things happen, or worse yet, forming relationships.
It SOUNDS like you figured that out.
On the other hand, since you've already found yourself vulnerable to identity focus, you should watch yourself and make sure this "I Don't Care!" thing isn't a new way to form a (fragile) identity in need of propagation and defense.
Focusing on other people, and your work, is the way to avoid this trap.
While I can't deny that I was responding to a certain kind of risk/reward perception that has a certain value it wasn't right for what we ultimately wanted to build as a company.
And I think this happens in so many areas of life. How we date, how we pick our hobbies, how we choose our education. Because forming a core identity and a core business is actually tremendously hard. Picking up one that is already socially validated seems easier. It just isn't a recipe for long term happiness or success.
I've been talking with Julie about her experiences as a like-minded professional and I also remain baffled why her extremely sensible business plan continues to //receive tepid interest// (EDIT: originally wrote "go unfunded" here but I'm speaking inaccurately and out-of-line) despite an aggressive half-year VC campaign while the most harebrained ideas in the world (founded by prep school dudes) seem to effortlessly accumulate resources provided by others... including free press from many of the news sources that get shared here frequently. I believe business leaders in our industry play favorites and manipulate us into believing their partners are somehow better and more deserving than the rest of us... and that it fattens their bottom line and increases their domination of the culture of this industry. I think more of us need to take a stand against this... if not just on principle, but because it's good business and certainly a better plan than the lengthy boom/bust cycles this VC ruling class keeps leading the rest of us through like lemmings, leading to capital shortages and employment drop-offs that starve families and stifle innovation.
So, let's use this as a forum to discuss what may or may not be wrong about this view of things.
I cannot imagine how many people's 20's have been wasted in the last decade chasing some mythical social web 2.0 dollar. We need to understand that most of the Instagrams of the world got lucky simply because of the bubble and the confusion over what's a viable business on the Internet not because they've actually created billions in value.
They won a damn lottery, they aren't creating models for new business.
Maybe cuz it's an API for social games. No Silicon Valley VC will fund anything that has to do with games these days. Untried harebrained ideas at least don't have dismal track records yet.
And there is always Kickstarter.
Do you also read tea leaves?
No VC we've talked to has ever wanted to hear we make marketing software for brands. But if I'm not caring anymore then yeah how we speak to our clients will be how we speak to everyone now. How very liberating.
Typically the hate comes from people being unprepared and not researching their database options enough before making choices. IMO the fact that it's so easy to get up and running with Mongo actually works against it because it seems like the database "just works" until you start needing something from it.
Ex[1]: Foursquare took their Mongo instances to bare metal recently, keeping everything else on EC2. Most people starting with Mongo aren't thinking "at some point I'll migrate my database servers to our new datacenter to run on bare metal".
That said, the recent MongoSV didn't instill much confidence in the platform. You could overhear the frustration of 10Gen's event sponsors all day. Personally, I'm trying to move to distributed, masterless systems so Riak fits in very nicely. Yokozuna is also promising as a riak-solr type deal[2] and Riak Core can be used as a framework for creating distributed systems.
[1] http://www.10gen.com/presentations/mongodb-foursquare-cloud-...
There are very, very few situations where NoSQL databases are truly of any use. For practically all other cases, any time or effort savings promised when using a NoSQL database don't materialize in reality.
Take the claim that not having a schema is a benefit. This claim quickly falls apart when a huge amount of time and effort is needed to track data format/type/availability/constraints/etc. in an ad hoc fashion throughout all applications accessing the database. This is a huge amount of effort, and often duplicated code, in anything but the simplest scenarios. It's much more effective just to use a relational database and its support for defining a schema.
We see the same when it comes to querying using JavaScript. Maybe it works for simple queries, but those often aren't what we encounter in practice. SQL is by far the best we've got today when it comes to writing complex queries, and relational databases offer the best support for it.
Then there's ACIDity. "Eventual consistency" just doesn't cut it in the real world. Relational databases make it far easier, more practical and much safer to work with data in a transactional manner.
Many of the supposed strong points of NoSQL databases, like their sharding support, becomes irrelevant when using the replication support offered by so many relational databases.
It's not that NoSQL databases have been declared "bad", but instead it's just people realizing that the relational databases being used all along are really the best choice in all but a handful of cases.
Non-relational databases are good when the data is really mutable enough that each row may have fields of its own, or lack them. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see it as that common, and it certainly isn't our case.
Do you think there is benefit in using stuff like SQLAlchemy or should I write just SQL files/queries?
| Do you think there is benefit in using stuff like
| SQLAlchemy or should I write just SQL files/queries?
We are technically a suite of tools (which you know depending on your executional ability is an API, or a set of SDKs, or us hand holding you through using them) for brand managers and marketers to build applications and games with their own data. Layer up content + actions and out pops your very own custom THING.
We have found that there is a huge demand for brand creative, as digital marketing requires more marketing, not less, with newer storylines & media format being demanded w/ever more frequent turns.The advertising agencies are struggling to deliver quality, timely results, and brand managers struggle to afford the associated cost of traditional, all original (or custom) marketing.
We believe that if brands could rapidly create compelling new campaign media by leveraging a standing (and hopefully ever improving) body of component elements with their own brand data and concepts this is a powerful
Obviously this approach is well accepted today in software creation and the good news in we have worked with host of brands to try this theory out in practice- aka in client paid efforts.
Essentially what we're seeing, is if the tools allow quality brand marketing results, that reflect the brand’s story telling objective, then the brand manager is satisfied.
If the creative cost & delivery are both materially lower, this is a winning path—and the birth of a potentially formidable new cloud based SaaS business
The first 30 seconds of introduction to your concept is the most important - make sure people can understand it!
"We help businesses make compelling games using their own customer's data"
"We help businesses make personalised games for their customers"
"Personalised games for your customers"
Speak plain English and explain in a nustshell what you do for whom.
Investors and brands are busy, make it easy for them.
The background is that big companies like Coke or Nike need creative content to post on Facebook and Twitter. They pay PR agencies huge dollars to come up with that content.
My plain English translation would be something like: this company helps PR agencies make custom online games for their clients. The agencies will look good because lots of people will play the games. (Maybe the games also collect consumer preference data--not clear.) Agencies with developers on staff can self-service; agencies without developers can pay extra to get help.
Who really don't find us through our website but through word of mouth with ad agencies, brand managers and media partners. But nevertheless we say PLATFORMS! SOCIAL GAMES! SHIT WE THINK WILL PLAY WELL BUT OUR CUSTOMER BASE DOESN'T CARE ABOUT REALLY.
And well I suppose this is all true. But also framing.
I have signed up for a demo. Would like the handholding variety please. I have a brand in truck accessories (http://traxda.com) and one in phone cases (http://sascase.com).
You're website says:
"playapi IS A PLATFORM FOR CREATING SOCIAL GAMES"
And your name is "playapi." Sounds pretty accurate given the website. :)
Now as a total outsider to your business or it's history, having never heard of it, if this comment is like your pitch, personally, I think it is a little convoluted. HTH!
It's true that I have other friends who have very well-funded companies and who I believe have businesses with strong fundamentals. (One of them: a social gaming company) But I also can't deny that all of the friends who have received significant support in this industry have really similar backgrounds and attributes to them, and that the homogenous nature of the industry - in diversity and in thought - is disturbing. I think it discourages healthy growth of the industry from the sort of people who would disrupt the homogenous nature of the industry. The disruptors hate being disrupted!
That said, it seems like SV isn't really into the media agency industry, either. Even Apple's marketing is done mostly in Los Angeles. Maybe this particular company would be better off in NYC or LA?