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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Old 'Sparkling Elites'
New 'Founder Mode'
mastodon has an appropriated twitter meme for this:
Image description: social-media post from "sophie", with text reading,
This text is followed by an image of a man and a woman sitting in the audience of some public event. The man is talking at the woman while holding one hand on the back of her neck. The woman is staring past him with eyes that have seen the death of civilizations.
thank you! it completely slipped my mind to add a description (and the linked post doesn’t seem to have one), and the one you’ve written is excellent
The man's fingers making contact with the woman's flesh have given him the first stirrings of an erection, but they cannot hold her soul back from fleeing her body.
Founder? I never even lost 'er!
it’s still fucking incredible that in order to start reading this for sneers, I had to request the desktop version of the site because paully g still redirects mobile user-agents to the fucking unreadable Shopify storefront(!) version of his blog, then cause that was awful I had to also render it in reader mode, which Shopify blocks. all cause the god of programming Paul fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccccccccccking (OW woo) Graham couldn’t figure out how to make his site render on mobile worth a damn. how dare I expect fucking Paul fucking Graham to learn flexbox ever, or even lazily ship an open source reader mode rerender library with his shitty fucking site
Thankfully I have never tried to mobile his site, because those kinds of UI things really annoy the shit out of me. (Same with so many sites, including youtube for fucks sake, breaking the back button on mobile (Same is also happening more and more on desktop btw), just basic stuff we are all throwing away).
I think the suggestion that delegating is the problem is hilarious. Like, from everything I've seen, what happens when successful startups start floundering is less because anything has changed and more because the fundamental problems with the business finally catch up to the amount of money they have to burn. The problem isn't that founders are hiring liars as managers and delegating to them, it's that the founders themselves are primarily bullshit artists rather than people with good plans.
What finally got me to post this here was somebody on bsky saying "'What is common knowledge in your field but shocks outsiders?'
most tech “businesses” don’t make money. they can’t figure out what people actually will pay for, but they get huge wads of cash to fuck around with until they make something useful or threatening enough that a megacorps buy them" and "i consider working at a startup a negative signal for success in actual business (aka selling things for a profit)"
Which reminded me of this founder mode post. Which also reminded me of how the founder moders have even stranger priorities than the manager moders (Who often also just are too much number must go up). Paul just saying 'we need more bullshit artists' while running a bullshit artist factory is quite something. (Also, that Musk proofread the article is just the cherry on top).
I'm always a little bit torn, because there is definitely a specific skill set involved in running a business, and a lot of those skills should be pretty consistent regardless of what the business does. Like, there is a lot of finance, contracting, negotiation, communication, etc. work that has to be done to go from a theoretical model of a light bulb to experimenting to make a working product that can be mass produced. And there's a specific skillet needed to go from there to replacing all the gas lights in New York City with GE electric lights.
But at the same time, the recent trend to prioritize those skills by rewarding absentee shareholders, venture capital, and "founders" has created a situation where if you have those skills you can get impressively far and do a lot of damage to the overall economy and the lives of your customers and workers, even if those business skills are completely separate from an actual concept of what the business should do. You get all the Edison exploitation and bullshit but with no light bulb.
Yes there certainly is a skill to running a business (some of it applies to all businesses, some skills are business type specific, runnign a research lab is different from running a franchise vs running the company on top of the franchises vs SV style tech companies etc). What makes it sneerable for me is that PG only sees the later as valuable, and then makes up a Rationalist style binary option for managers which is also nebulous as fuck. It is the sparkling elites + hedgehog/fox style thing.
It also feels very post hoc, you have founder mindset if your company is 'successful' (that he picked Airbnb as an example caused me to eyeroll so hard my optic nerve now has a knot in it). The talking about being gaslit now means I have a Gordian optic nerve.
Well, he is a founder of companies like PayPal and Tesla, legally speaking.
Yes but does he have founder spirit?
Sure Andrew Eldritch claims he is not Goth, but he certainly has Goth spirit.