Most things that are new but not working can be solved by "I should try this again later" after the landscape has changed a little, whether that's supporting technologies, how receptive your market is, if your market even exists yet.
Also interesting that it seems like his relatively minor 1 year stint at pre-IPO Google was successful enough to pay for many other endeavors.
It's a great example of the power laws in startups: it's much more lucrative to have a minor role in a major success than a major role in anything minor.
I would go even further, it would have been much better statistically to work at any of the BigTech companies even in the past 10 years than take a chance at a startup.
Seeing the outcome of the startups he listed, it would have been much better to work as an enterprise CRUD developer at a bank, insurance company, etc
That really depends upon what you are optimizing. Someone with a PhD who wanted to be a professor, worked in an academic role in a big org, worked at the edge of many technologies; doesn't seem like someone who would be happy at an insurance company.
I will also repeat the obvious (but oft missed) observation: working in a revenue-generating industry, not a cost center. This doesn't need to be a startup, but very few banks or insurance companies generate their massive products within IT.
That’s true. But the author wanted to be a “successful startup founder” and that never happened.
I said in another reply, that I made plenty of mistakes and had plenty of “failures” so I’m not faulting him for that. But where did he say that he learned from his failures and worked on his weaknesses that allowed him to succeed based on his goal of becoming a successful startup founder?
> Seeing tts outcome of the startups he listed, it would have been much better to work as an enterprise CRUD developer at a bank, insurance company, etc
Enterprise CRUD developers don't make that much. I'm confident OP made more over his career than them.
OP would have to speak to his experience, but between a Google IPO and the $10M Virgin acquisition I would be surprised if he didn't average >$200k lifetime.
Throughout this thread, it's clear you have an ax to grind. Startups are obviously not for you, but many enjoy them and benefit.
He wasn’t a “founder” at Google. Google IPO’d in 2004. How many of the $n number of startups founded around the time that Google was founded and it IPO’d were successful and how many disappeared into obscurity?
There are so many people especially on HN who succumb to survivorship bias. Most failed startup founders never admit it. The original author is not one of them and he was willing to be open about it - that’s a compliment by the way.
“Many” may benefit from them. But statistically, most don’t
I think he wrote that he didn't make anything from that. He held onto the equity because he (unfortunately) thought Virgin would turn it into a success.
I think this is actually not as obvious as it seems as equity is also power-law distributed. An executive founder may have 10-50x the equity of a founding junior employee, who themselves might have 10-20x the equity of a key early employee.
The power laws actually cut both ways. I think the optimal path is not entirely obvious without some particular understanding of whether or not you are a stronger player as a leader or a follower.
You can get a much higher hit rate with more constrained agents, but unfortunately if it's too constrained it just doesn't excite people as much.
Ex. the Grit agent (my company) is designed to handle larger maintenance tasks. It has a much higher success rate, with <5% rejected tasks and 96% merged PRs (including some pretty huge repos).
It's also way less exciting. People want the flashy tool that can solve "everything."
This shows that it's not that easy to get the AI right even with the sizable funding available. OpenAIs moat is its actual capacity to provide and develop better solutions.
OTOH, some users seem able to talk to Apex about their shares that had been via an "app", and are still frustrated… with Apex:
> My own personal experience with Apex - I transferred measly GME positions out of Stash app (Apex) to Fidelity in June. My Apex/Stash account is still locked from this transfer. My CS requests have been escalated to the broker (Apex) repeatedly. Finally today, Apex confirmed they will unlock my account in 4 business days. That’s 34-36 calendar days after share transfer. All this DD is much smarter than me, but even in little ways these big explanations offer a simple reason for these shenanigans. I have NEVER had my account locked for share transfer past the confirmed transfer date for any other position. They had the gall to tell me today that they needed to speak with Fidelity directly to confirm receipt and Fidelity “received” my shares 3 weeks ago, which was 3 weeks after I initiated it. Why all the runaround?
In my previous life at Facebook, I worked on the infra team and worked on a cluster manager similar to kubernetes, thats where I first heard the term sidecar. Something about the concept of a binary running alongside the pod powering other related things felt strong.
In most parts this is the inspiration for naming the AI brain: sidecar
Unfortunately, there are a distinctly limited number of words that can communicate a particular concept - the pigeon-hole principle suggests duplication will be inevitable.
Ambiguity's only really a problem when the same term is used multiple ways in similar contexts. I think it's very unlikely that anyone will get confused between these two usages.
