What I've learned from that resume is that you can fail 100 times, but all you need to be "set" is one ZipX that gives you the cash freedom to chase other dreams.
That item being several orders of magnitude above all the others is an interesting context, for sure. Regarding the "being set", it would be helpful to have a date on that item in particular. The Forbes "30 under 30" is from 2021, but I haven't been able to trace the age of the company on first try...
I co-founded Trusu in 2018. We were acquired in 2020 and that revenue came within the first year of that. I ended up providing over 100 million Facemasks around the world and South East Asia. Technically my company was 1 full time person and 1 full time contractor at the time of that revenue but obviously had a ton of help from the company that acquired us and spun out the company.
It's also a lot of luck and being at the right place at the right time. It seems like the company that became ZipX was acquired for 50M but before that it only generated about 200k in revenue. If the timing wasn't right (with the onset of COVID) or no one knew about his company then he wouldn't have that success.
It really demonstrates the importance of continuing to work even after failures and pivoting often because you never know when or which idea will take off.
Amazing! I think failures are just as important as successes when learning what works.
Unfortunately, many business books just take the top X people by net worth and analyze what they did, but that is not enough.
Stated in Bayes' theorem terms: to compute P(success | actions) you also need P(actions) and P(success), not just P(actions | success) which are the success stories.
P(actions) and P(success) require knowledge from failures as well, not just successful actions.
I would like at least one person to see this and think "Man, a lot of those ideas are actually pretty dumb and he couldn't even pass a tech interview, I could do this better and faster."
It’s a warning how you can waste your life when you don’t appreciate it and instead are constantly yearning to be in some other reality. The end result is you are still mediocre and are closer to death with understandings that won’t help you.
At first I was like, yeah, another one of those "follow my life as an indie dev" promos, then I scrolled down to your list of job "failures", and it was incredibly interesting to see just HOW MUCH some people get done in life.
If you tend to be somewhat critical of self-promos, I'd still recommend you take a moment and at least scroll down on that page and see for yourself. Very impressive. Just goes to show that you can indeed turn the dial well up to 11.
I can't even get 10% of the number of interviews. I feel like you have little justification to say "In fact, almost everything I have tried to do has failed". Clearly you've been very successful in general. Much more so than people like me.
My dad never got promoted in 40 years of work. When I got my first promotion (to team lead) I had been working as a dev for over 15 years and I kinda felt like I had let him down
I don't think I am anything special nor was I a super go-getter and I've moved up fine in the same time span (came in as an ~associate, moved up to senior in ~2 years, got principal in 1.5 years, sat around high-level senior / defacto tech lead for a few years until I finally got a break with an actual lead title).
You are either in too big of a pond (ie: you should work in a smaller place to have a bigger impact) or you are too focused on your own work to appear as someone worth bringing up.
I am not a boomer but if you are a software engineer who is wanting to move up past associate and especially senior, you need to be looking out for others, mentoring, writing documentation on why certain decisions were made; something more than just nose in the code.
The adage of "dress for the job you want, not the job you have" is kinda true. You don't even have to kill yourself for it either. I did the 10+ hour days for a year as a junior then I realized no one I wanted to care cared nor saw it as a point of pride.
I'm not doing shit now. I gave up a few years ago. I was an acting senior dev for a year and a tech lead for another. I had great reviews and was performing beyond my role. I was involved in stretch assignments/groups too. I even had a tech lead from another team I was working with send an email to my manager praising my help. Then that project was outsourced and I helped bring the sourcing team to speed.
I went to another area of the company and volunteered to be a security champion (above my level at the time) which turns out I was the only one for 6 teams across 2 departments. I had awesome reviews from the people I worked with on this. I volunteered for other assignments too and "won" (asshole manager would give teo people a task that one person could do to see who would step up). I was a regular attendee and contributor at the tech lead and manager meetings (like a design/architecture/SoS for the app). When I was leaving that team one of the tech leads asked what role I was taking on a different team. I told them it was a midlevel dev. They then asked why I was taking a demotion - they thought I was a senior dev the whole time. Maybe just to be polite, but a few others echoed the same sentiment at hearing that.
The security and tech lead years were a lot more than being in the code. In fact, I was focused on a lot of PM related stuff during the tech lead year and feel my lack of coding actually hurt me in the future because I was no longer coding on a daily basis but doing stuff like coordinating, troubleshooting, etc. So then I wasn't as fast at actual coding.
In 2016, you had 45 failed interviews. At a 400-1 ratio, you're saying you put out 18000 job applications that year? That's staggering. Even at 20-1, that would be 1000-ish applications.
I don't want to diminish anyone's accomplishments, as I think they are impressive too. However, it is worth noting that some of these projects are relatively simple and don't require a significant time investment. Additionally, some of the projects never launched and are counted as "fail".
Agreed. All that work and website loads up fast and is very clear and concise. I did enjoy 'lessons learned' section. Frankly, the entire thing is almost inspirational.
On the other hand, I wish more people shared their failures-- otherwise all we see is survivorship bias and people selling get rich courses "I made a million dollars doing this ONE TRICK and you can too! Only 9 payments of $999.99"
I only have 4-5 failures (compared to his dozens), but then I only started 4-5 projects :)
When it comes to entrepreneurship the act of creating serves someone else, when you are an artist the act of creating itself has value.
So if you consider yourself an artist this is fine. If you consider yourself an entrepeneur, I will offer the following advice:
You take way too little time to build something.
Spend a year per site/idea, not a month.
Take Lazy Reminders. It might be a challenge to be profitable with this idea, but to get to a 1000 users in a few months should be easy. Could be useful in many ways, but now it looks more like a back of the envelope idea that's never been finished, way to soon to move on. Make it something a non-developer would use, the bar is a bit higher for consumers then coporates. You are competing with Google, Apple & Facebook UX-wise. You can go 50% less but not more. Corporates are more forgiving, they are used to shitty software (SAP thank you ;)) Also. Integrate with users existing workflows, at least one: slack / whatsapp etc.
Only after 1-2 years you get a proper understanding of your users and you really start to create usefull things they actually need.
Anyway nothing wrong with creating, but if you are measuring success based upon usage standard, you should spend more time on one project.
I like the message of this website. The individual failures aren't the point. The failure is too much ambition and not enough appreciation. It seems like the OP was running from something and they are warning us from wasting our lives chasing mediocrity.
"CTO at Loyalsnap (02/23/2017): The CEO rejected me then used the code I wrote in the interview in production. When I pointed this out and said an estimate of the hours I worked on that if he wanted to use it, he told me I would have to sue him to get it. 20 minutes later he venmo’d me the amount and said don’t sue him."
Happens more often then you think. Get 200 approaches on something that team can't get right. Use one.. usually in the backend. Or get inspired and use parts. Ghost person who wrote the code.
I can't wrap my head around why companies do this. If you find a competent programmer whose work is good enough to use, wouldn't your team be better off if you hire them full-time? That seems more efficient than interviewing 200 people every time you need some code written.
If the culture is that rotten that this behavior is accepted (as it requires multiple people in the hiring process to be complicit) I doubt anyone would want to stay for very long if they were hired.
Desperate strategy to steal developer code done by people that is as immoral as ignorant on how tech isn't reusable or modularly scalable like they imagine and how obviously bad it will all invariably end but they are "just giving it a try"?
they are hiring them as a contractor __for free__ , but just not telling them they are writing their production code prototypes for free while interviewing.
Pessimistic point: there a lof of competent programmers out there. So, why not to choose someone that you liked or someone who ready to work long hours, under stress, for minimum salary?
Came here to post this. Your engineering team is a fail, your problem is a joke, and your hiring process is overfitting. Maybe you could post stackoverflow questions...and then wrong answers...and get better results from people correcting you?
I felt the same. The presentation is innovative and impressive (for sure a SUCCESS), but I do not feel like there's anything broadly meaningful in the content and the whole thing feels like a massive exercise in namedropping.
Yep. Marketing yourself as partly a failure when you have managed to do so many projects in the first place feels off. A true failure page would be an empty page, just of sadness. Yet not only does he have many projects, but also multiple big successes.
The mentioning of school slights and "failures" seems disturbingly petty. It concerns me that someone remembers this kind of stuff as some sort of personal failure. He didn't "fail", as much as his 18 year old self did or was just unlucky. What does that matter?
The metrics being up top made me pre-disposed to ignore this, but I kept scrolling anyway. After seeing all your failures, I actually think this is a great resume to show that you likely understand quite a lot about finding product-market fit, which is usually the most difficult piece of launching something new. I think this is a great idea to share, and I am considering perhaps doing something similar in the future.
Mixed emotions. Just thinking here.. the build piece you have down pat.
Have you thought about investing in a community or many for a year or more. Understanding their needs then build products? 90% community / rep building 10% building.
The profitable projects took 2-4 years each of my life. If anything what I learned from this is to move on much much faster when it isn't working but leave it up for future opportunities to happen.
"In fact, almost everything I have tried to do has failed"
My life in a nutshell. Although I'll contend that the author comparatively has no right to say it. It seems like they have moved up the ladder and into higher paying roles. I have not.
129 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadAnd yes, this is the time for my favorite quote of all time:
Ever tried, ever failed, no matter!
Try again, fail again... fail better.
- Samuel Beckett
(punctuation by me, probably)
What I've learned from that resume is that you can fail 100 times, but all you need to be "set" is one ZipX that gives you the cash freedom to chase other dreams.
It really demonstrates the importance of continuing to work even after failures and pivoting often because you never know when or which idea will take off.
Never stop trying!
Unfortunately, many business books just take the top X people by net worth and analyze what they did, but that is not enough.
Stated in Bayes' theorem terms: to compute P(success | actions) you also need P(actions) and P(success), not just P(actions | success) which are the success stories.
P(actions) and P(success) require knowledge from failures as well, not just successful actions.
Thanks for the courage of sharing your failures!
Kudos to him for putting it all out there
If you tend to be somewhat critical of self-promos, I'd still recommend you take a moment and at least scroll down on that page and see for yourself. Very impressive. Just goes to show that you can indeed turn the dial well up to 11.
I don't think I am anything special nor was I a super go-getter and I've moved up fine in the same time span (came in as an ~associate, moved up to senior in ~2 years, got principal in 1.5 years, sat around high-level senior / defacto tech lead for a few years until I finally got a break with an actual lead title).
You are either in too big of a pond (ie: you should work in a smaller place to have a bigger impact) or you are too focused on your own work to appear as someone worth bringing up.
I am not a boomer but if you are a software engineer who is wanting to move up past associate and especially senior, you need to be looking out for others, mentoring, writing documentation on why certain decisions were made; something more than just nose in the code.
The adage of "dress for the job you want, not the job you have" is kinda true. You don't even have to kill yourself for it either. I did the 10+ hour days for a year as a junior then I realized no one I wanted to care cared nor saw it as a point of pride.
I went to another area of the company and volunteered to be a security champion (above my level at the time) which turns out I was the only one for 6 teams across 2 departments. I had awesome reviews from the people I worked with on this. I volunteered for other assignments too and "won" (asshole manager would give teo people a task that one person could do to see who would step up). I was a regular attendee and contributor at the tech lead and manager meetings (like a design/architecture/SoS for the app). When I was leaving that team one of the tech leads asked what role I was taking on a different team. I told them it was a midlevel dev. They then asked why I was taking a demotion - they thought I was a senior dev the whole time. Maybe just to be polite, but a few others echoed the same sentiment at hearing that.
The security and tech lead years were a lot more than being in the code. In fact, I was focused on a lot of PM related stuff during the tech lead year and feel my lack of coding actually hurt me in the future because I was no longer coding on a daily basis but doing stuff like coordinating, troubleshooting, etc. So then I wasn't as fast at actual coding.
It reads like a ridiculously long list of jobs you took and failed at.
On the other hand, I wish more people shared their failures-- otherwise all we see is survivorship bias and people selling get rich courses "I made a million dollars doing this ONE TRICK and you can too! Only 9 payments of $999.99"
I only have 4-5 failures (compared to his dozens), but then I only started 4-5 projects :)
So if you consider yourself an artist this is fine. If you consider yourself an entrepeneur, I will offer the following advice:
You take way too little time to build something.
Spend a year per site/idea, not a month.
Take Lazy Reminders. It might be a challenge to be profitable with this idea, but to get to a 1000 users in a few months should be easy. Could be useful in many ways, but now it looks more like a back of the envelope idea that's never been finished, way to soon to move on. Make it something a non-developer would use, the bar is a bit higher for consumers then coporates. You are competing with Google, Apple & Facebook UX-wise. You can go 50% less but not more. Corporates are more forgiving, they are used to shitty software (SAP thank you ;)) Also. Integrate with users existing workflows, at least one: slack / whatsapp etc.
Only after 1-2 years you get a proper understanding of your users and you really start to create usefull things they actually need.
Anyway nothing wrong with creating, but if you are measuring success based upon usage standard, you should spend more time on one project.
Happens more often then you think. Get 200 approaches on something that team can't get right. Use one.. usually in the backend. Or get inspired and use parts. Ghost person who wrote the code.
Have you thought about investing in a community or many for a year or more. Understanding their needs then build products? 90% community / rep building 10% building.
My life in a nutshell. Although I'll contend that the author comparatively has no right to say it. It seems like they have moved up the ladder and into higher paying roles. I have not.