I often wonder of VCs actually have a secret website where they go on it, select from a half dozen drop boxes of platitudes they want to include, and then out spits a message along these lines. Over the years my inbox has gathered enough of them that I could probably extract most of the patterns.
Have you considered you're doing it wrong? If you asked out 100 girls and they all blew you off, it would be time for some introspection. VCs are just ugly girls with more money.
Someone had made something like that for internship reports, when I was in college. Very handy, when you needed a bonus paragraph here and there on "How this experience made me a better person".
Also generalizable. Email pattern-mining software, anybody? It would classify patterns within social groups as defined by LinkedIn and Facebook social network topography.
VCs, management consultants, business gurus... all the same rubbish.
After working in Big 4 management consulting jobs for almost six years, I'm constantly surprised that phrases like "value-add" and "validate a couple of the core assumptions" still have the power to bring me out in a cold sweat.
But what is it going to take to end this nonsense? We know we're talking rubbish. Most of us hate these stock business-speak phrases, yet still most of us choose to hide behind them. Clients are partly to blame, but an industry that tries to differentiate itself by the bizarreness of its terminology (thereby fabricating "exclusivity")is more to blame.
When are we going to wake up and realise that speaking in plain, simple, understandable English does not make us look stupid and simple. Quite the opposite.
I've always enjoyed that one, especially this part:
"One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field."
It's hilarious, even though I have since decided I don't agree with "curing" the not un- formation.
FWIW, my position is that the difference between strict opposite and negation in English means that there is often a subtlety of meaning accurately expressed with a "not un-". It's essentially the English language equivalent of needing ways to express less than, greater than, less than or equal to, and greater than or equal to. I know Orwell was criticising people who misuse it, but he beats his fists a bit too hard for my liking in that essay. Related, I get annoyed when people aggressively attack "I don't disagree" with "then just say I AGREE!". The phrase "I don't disagree" is useful to convey "I might agree, I don't know whether I agree, I don't have an opinion, I agree with some of it and disagree with small details, any or all of these or more, but I'm certainly not disagreeing with you outright at this moment". In a lot of arguments these opinions fail spectacularly, since for the most part a combination of aggression, loudness, and a veneer of logical reasoning tends to win out over uncertainty and an attempt to consider all cases.
Your irony detector needs adjustment. As pg wrote in his introduction to this letter,
"I sent the YC partners an email saying I was growing increasingly impressed with one of the startups in the current batch and asking what they thought of them, and Harj Taggar replied with this brilliant piece of VC boilerplate."
The joke is on the people who think that Taggar was expressing what he thinks, rather than what he has heard too many venture capitalists say when they aren't willing to say what they think.
Nothing in GPs post is dependent on the thing being serious. This kind of language is unfortunately real (cringe), regardless of this particular piece of business poetry.
When are we going to wake up and realise that speaking in plain, simple, understandable English does not make us look stupid and simple.
In my experience, this kind of speak is not about sounding sophisticated, it's usually about saying nothing while coming across as sophisticated. I see this from business folks all the time; you rarely see it from technical people, but when you do, it's very annoying.
I've been playing around with the theory lately that the buzzwords and nonsense are an elaborate ritual not only to hide personal ignorance, but the fact that there is no known reliable way to solve most of the major issues surrounding the management of firms at all - yet, most peoples' careers revolve around pretending that the opposite is true.
I might be misreading this, but it seems like PG is humiliating one of his partners in public.
EDIT: Yep, I was misreading this. It wasn't so clear that it was an inside joke. I guess the joke's on me and the stereotypical non-partner VC, ha ha?
From Wikipedia:
Harjeet Taggar (born June 8, 1985), is a British businessperson and partner at the seed-stage investment firm, Y Combinator. He was formerly funded by Y Combinator and sold his company Auctomatic to Canadian company Live Current Media at age 22.
In 2010 he was named as the first new partner at Y Combinator since its founding in 2005, aged 25. In 2011 he was named on the Forbes 30 under 30 list.
This is mail from Harjeet written as if it's from a VC to a YC partner like himself. Since Harj is not a VC and is part of YC, he wouldn't write Paul a mail like that. It's satire.
If it's an inside joke, then it's probably a good idea to explain it as such instead of downvoting the parent (not everybody on this site is an insider).
I wonder what that's about, if anything. The last time I really encountered inside jokes was in high school. It always seemed like some way to establish a dividing line between cool and uncool people.
It's meant for everyone, from the cool people who got it right away at the A table where Paul and Harj sit (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371321 ), right on down to the D table where people like me and you sit. You can't have popular without unpopular.
When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."
We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.
... and the people at the E table are the hellbanned ones like losethos / SparrowOS, who incidentally might just get up and leave if someone at the A table told them nobody was allowed to talk to them.
Increasing your connection with someone else through an inside joke cuts off anyone who both hears it and isn't in on the joke. That's why the last time georgeorwell encountered inside jokes was in high school: someone else made the joke, he didn't get it, but everyone else did.
Of course georgeorwell has almost assuredly heard inside jokes since. The difference was that he got it and it didn't occur to him that other people wouldn't.
At least this one is funny. pg is really overestimating the HN brand and the obviousness of the joke if he really thinks that t-shirt was a "pretty bold assertion of brand power" (which is the point ju6ernaut was making when he asked, "would someone who frequents HN recognize it if they did not already know its affiliation" (emphasis mine)).
I've been here a long time and that shirt wouldn't make me look twice (if I hadn't happened to have seen it on HN that day). That's not a very good inside joke.
It wasn't clear to me that "YC partner" meant somebody working at YC, rather than a VC firm that had a formal relationship with YC. The satire went completely over my head on first reading.
"On a separate note, I feel like we could be doing more to help YC companies. We're in awe of what you've built over there at the Y and we'd love to grab a coffee and talk more about how we could be helpful to both the companies and you."
I think they get messages like this all the time, which is why they think it is funny. So, satire for this specific example, but suggests an increasing level of annoyance from the Y partners when they actually get these messages.
Brillant, and there is a common denominator across all this kind of communications: there is no real information, so after some practice it's easy to spot it's just bullshit.
Btw this style is not just common to VCs, but also to clueless management.
Here's what I gleamed from the message:
1. Taggar doesn't want to invest in the company.
2. He wants Graham to keep referring other companies to him.
3. He may want to invest in the company in the future.
4. He introduced the founder to some of his acquaintances (see 2).
Yes but, what is the value added by the people they want to get involved? Why is too early to invest? Just because there are not already a zillion of users and they are not able to evaluate? Why later it could be interesting?
Basically there is just boilerplate to say "no thanks" but no real information. Just a general feeling that they are not able to really evaluate.
Email is prone to misunderstanding so you have to be verbose. If I would have gotten a "no thanks" that would have left me guessing "Why?". Possible reasons which are ruled out by this message: 1) I don't trust YC anymore; 2) The guy you referred to me was a jerk; 3) I'm out of the VC business; etc.
I don't know the guy, but... consider the power dynamic. PG sends him a sales pitch and the guy pushes back. What's he supposed to do, fall all over himself and say "where do I sign"?
No, he says, "yeah, maybe".
Wouldn't you do the same if someone came to your door looking to sell you something?
> Wouldn't you do the same if someone came to your door looking to sell you something?
My usual reaction is "what else d'ya got?"--until they run out of "else"s.
This way, the situation is reframed as them not having anything I like, rather than me not being willing to accept what they have--and it's then much easier to just politely end the conversation.
I tend to agree. On one level, you could say it's a satire and even a mockery to VCs in general (which I found hilarious when I found out who Tagger was).
However, in real life I think this would be a polite response. It might read like bullshit but it's quite fair to see he's trying to make these points. Everything else not in the email (e.g. why does the VC not want to invest) would be speculation.
What I don't get is what's so subversive/ironic about any of this. What part of this seemingly-polite note can't be, or shouldn't be, taken at face value? He doesn't think the investment is a good fit right now but agrees that the company is worth keeping an eye on, and is appreciative that YC took the time to think of him.
Not a business for introverts or borderline aspies like myself, I guess...
I was totally confused reading through this the first time - it made me roll my eyes at least 5 times. Then I realized it was satirical and my faith in PG was once again restored.
I... I hope I'm not ruining it by asking if this is a test to see how the HN comments respond to subtlety?
<strike>I suppose that's part of the joke, though like some good jokes it makes me sad. We get upset that VC's respond with boilerplate and knee-jerk, but then we do the same thing.</strike>
Update: egh, looks like we're not doing too badly.
Even if it sounds impersonal and lazy, this is just called being polite, most people still prefer an answer of this kind to "lol no, sorry, you suck". And that's why we do it aswell. Perhaps we should work more on make it seem less impersonal, but the message is clear and loud in any case.
Dude I would take a cut to have someone as a vc who said "lol no, sorry, you suck." I mean jesus christ these are the last people we want patting our egos.
Not me, I like people being polite with me. Which doesn't mean these messages couldn't be more informal and direct. But "you suck" is not impersonal, is rude.
I have my ego pretty much under control, exagerated compliments won't do any damage here.
I prefer when people are realistic. Polite and impolite are immaterial.
VC boilerplate is etiquette, which means formalized behavior designed to reduce conflict, but also at the expense of communication. It's not really about politeness, so much as being noncommital both ways.
I got the distinct pleasure of describing my big physics idea to Murray Gell-Mann, who is both a Nobel laureate and expert in (one half) of the specific topic I was interested in. He told me very bluntly he thought it was hopeless, and I consider it a sign of respect that he didn't feel the need to sugarcoat it.
There's politeness--with which I've only seen Gell-Mann flirt--but then there's the sticky-sweet bullshit the OP was parodying.
(He's wrong though, and I'm still working on it :)
In the time I've spent as an entrepreneur, I learned that I actually much prefer the "Your idea sucks and here's why" approach than the polite and encouraging response, mainly because if they try to keep things positive, you're likely to continue to spend time trying to get to a point where they WILL invest, which turns out to be never, because they're not interested. It's a sure fire way to waste a boat load of your time.
The problem with universally sugar-coated answers is that, unless you're psychic, it's impossible to know for sure where you stand and what to improve, and you're left to randomly walking through the self-improvement space until you get lucky or run out of resources.
Vu, try this: "Hi. What are other companies in your batch we should invest in?" <- seriously, first question. I think our conversation ended shortly thereafter.
I couldn't help but chuckle at this as Harj even included the concept of "grabbing coffee", which is discussed in "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" [1]:
"Business people in Silicon Valley (and the whole world, for that matter) have speculative meetings all the time. They're effectively free if you're on the manager's schedule. They're so common that there's distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you want to 'grab coffee,' for example.
Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you're on the maker's schedule, though. Which puts us in something of a bind. Everyone assumes that, like other investors, we run on the manager's schedule. So they introduce us to someone they think we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab coffee. At this point we have two options, neither of them good: we can meet with them, and lose half a day's work; or we can try to avoid meeting them, and probably offend them."
Not to veer too far off-topic, but these "speculative meetings" are often (but not always) well worth the schedule disruption, even if it ripples out across several extra "productive" hours. Perhaps for Paul Graham, who has all the VCs in the world scrambling to fund his picks, it's not so important, but for the little people like you and I, the value of a good network is immense.
Business is primarily a social thing. It always has been, and is no different today. This is why inferior products can make tons of money.
Seconded. While inefficient, they are often more valuable than spending that time heads down coding a feature that's not going to bring in any extra revenue or users.
Thanks for linking this. I just sent it to a few Project Managers friends. Along with:
"I find myself reading this while waiting for a build to QA. This is the time I have to write code. When the meetings are done. Meetings are important, but this is worthy of a read if you can schedule it in. Also, I'd be happy to discuss this over coffee."
Let's look at what a VC is trying to accomplish here.
- They don't want to invest for reason {X}. Could be as trivial as someone not liking the founder or they could genuinely think they don't know whether the company will do well.
- They don't want to tell the founders what they really think. Mostly because they want to hold open the option in case they are proven wrong as often happens. As much as founders say they like honest replies, I've seen so many founders say "VC X said he doesn't want to invest in us because he disagrees with us on {reason}- I'm going to prove that moron so wrong".
- They want to help out the founder with a couple of intros so that the founder doesn't feel like he got nothing from them in return.
The boilerplate/corporate B.S language? Terrible and everyone could easily do better. But there's no easy to tell someone you don't believe in something they're putting their heart and soul into.
YC has the nicest rejection mails of all of VC-land and I've still seen YC-rejects get really angry and make it their life's work to prove pg wrong.
Are you sure these YC-rejects are building their companies just to prove pg wrong? They are probably just pursuing their dream, which is what led them to apply to YC to begin with. If they succeed, proving YC wrong is just a nice side-effect for them (see: http://lightsailenergy.com/ and others).
Actually, having something that matters to you held back by someone's rejection is exactly the sort of thing I'd expect to make a person angry. In most situations it will lead to the rejectee pushing harder for what they want to do - likely a winning strategy in simpler situations.
How do other founders deal with non-committal VC nonsense? I feel like only taking targeted meetings where social capital gets spent on introductions to avoid this takes too much serendipity out of the equation.
My only issue with this email is that he used the subject "we" when mentioning grabbing a coffee. The current accepted standard of phrasing in business circles eliminates the subject and would read "would love to grab a coffee".
Is that really an accepted standard? I have to go out on a limb here and ask if that's even a proper sentence? Who/what is the subject? It certainly helps to know who you would be having coffee with.
The subject is an implied first person. (i.e., "I" or "we.")
I see this kind of omission as a way for cowards to avoid explicitly standing behind their request, both to diminish their own disappointment if the recipient says no or ignores them and to mitigate the chance that the recipient perceives their note as 'needy.'
I was wondering about this construct several times in the past.
AFAIK English is not a pro-drop language, which means that the construct should be ungrammatical.
My impression was that it was introduced to American English be immigrants with pro-drop native languages (Italians? Slavs?) Am I completely off track?
the more spanish i speak the more i want to drop english words, and the more confortable i am moving the subject of the adjective to the end of the sentence.
"Pro-drop" languages usually incorporate the person in the verb. So "grab" in "we grab" is different than "I grab". In Greek, it's "πίνουμε" vs "πίνω". You omit the subject because you lose no information. In fact, it's redundant to include it, so you only do it if you want to emphasize it.
Right, technically English doesn't let you drop pronouns. On the other hand there is a pretty long tradition of dropping first person pronouns in writing. You see it in informal correspondence and journals from before electronic media were omnipresent. Stuff like, "Went to the store today. Got stuck in a snow bank and had to call a tow truck."
I don't think it comes from immigrants that speak other languages, so much as economizing long passages of text that's all in the first person. The "I" at the beginning of every sentence just gets dropped.
It depends on whether you think "ungrammatical" means "not approved of by prescriptivists", or you mean "not used and/or not understood by fluent speakers".
Given that you know the word "pro-drop", I assume you know this, and I'm not sure if I should bother continuing in this vein. Maybe you're asking for a descriptive grammaticality judgement from fluent English speakers?
I agree that from a prescriptivist perspective, this is improper formal writing.
From a descriptivist perspective, I try to avoid biz guys, but I suspect the GP post nailed it, with respect to common usage in the appropriate sociolect (the same sociolect that has "proof points", "value-add", "circling back", etc). Although maybe not for the last sentence of an email that already had that much circumlocution.
Ungrammaticality changes over time. For a new grad emailing her boss, douchy pro-dropping in English is ungrammatical. Eventually, it sinks in as an acquired taste, and becomes grammatical.
I think we (American English speakers) tend to drop pronouns in informal writing more than in speech. At least, thinking about how I'd say things, I might elide the pronoun almoooost to the point of dropping it, but it still "feels" like it's there, even if it didn't come out very much.
But "was thinking the other day, why don't we..." sounds fine to me in an email. wouldn't say it out loud, though...
Nailed it. It's a way to extend an invitation with minimal vulnerability.
I wouldn't agree that it's necessarily "for cowards," probably because I tend to employ similar strategies.
When I recognize it in communication from someone else, I understand where that person is coming from and consider the message delivered. It's kind of a fun game, striking that balance between nonchalance and making your intentions clear.
Interesting. I always thought this form of writing was to cut down on the number of words in an email, so that the reader can more easily skim for the overall message, while also reducing formality and increasing familiarity. I've even recently tried to start emulating this style for those reasons.
If you said text messaging then I would agree. That's the first thing that came to mind because traditionally everyone wants to save characters when texting resulting in ur, b, etc.
Actually, with texting, I find it harder to shorten words into misspellings like ur or b, because I end up fighting against my phone's autocorrect. Sure, once you use it a few times, your phone will learn to stop autocorrecting, but why bother? I don't understand why people still use "ur" when "your" is just as easy to type these days. SMS length isn't really an issue anymore either, with most smartphones automatically concatenating longer messages for the recipient.
That is true, with smartphones this has changed (or should have go away). The issue isn't really about concatenating--I had nokia phones with just a keypad that did that years ago--it's the fact that often you can keep a message short and only use 1 message with the shorter "words". This won't make a difference if you have an unlimited text plan but it still matters for some people.
It's not grammatical English, but nor are a variety of other constructs that we see as normal, such as "ain't no," or even "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun (this one matters only to sticklers). Convenience need not obey the rules. Would love to expand further if you are interested.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadI often wonder of VCs actually have a secret website where they go on it, select from a half dozen drop boxes of platitudes they want to include, and then out spits a message along these lines. Over the years my inbox has gathered enough of them that I could probably extract most of the patterns.
I know I do (textfile of course) for useful shell commands and the like
After working in Big 4 management consulting jobs for almost six years, I'm constantly surprised that phrases like "value-add" and "validate a couple of the core assumptions" still have the power to bring me out in a cold sweat.
But what is it going to take to end this nonsense? We know we're talking rubbish. Most of us hate these stock business-speak phrases, yet still most of us choose to hide behind them. Clients are partly to blame, but an industry that tries to differentiate itself by the bizarreness of its terminology (thereby fabricating "exclusivity")is more to blame.
When are we going to wake up and realise that speaking in plain, simple, understandable English does not make us look stupid and simple. Quite the opposite.
"One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field."
It's hilarious, even though I have since decided I don't agree with "curing" the not un- formation.
FWIW, my position is that the difference between strict opposite and negation in English means that there is often a subtlety of meaning accurately expressed with a "not un-". It's essentially the English language equivalent of needing ways to express less than, greater than, less than or equal to, and greater than or equal to. I know Orwell was criticising people who misuse it, but he beats his fists a bit too hard for my liking in that essay. Related, I get annoyed when people aggressively attack "I don't disagree" with "then just say I AGREE!". The phrase "I don't disagree" is useful to convey "I might agree, I don't know whether I agree, I don't have an opinion, I agree with some of it and disagree with small details, any or all of these or more, but I'm certainly not disagreeing with you outright at this moment". In a lot of arguments these opinions fail spectacularly, since for the most part a combination of aggression, loudness, and a veneer of logical reasoning tends to win out over uncertainty and an attempt to consider all cases.
"I sent the YC partners an email saying I was growing increasingly impressed with one of the startups in the current batch and asking what they thought of them, and Harj Taggar replied with this brilliant piece of VC boilerplate."
The joke is on the people who think that Taggar was expressing what he thinks, rather than what he has heard too many venture capitalists say when they aren't willing to say what they think.
In my experience, this kind of speak is not about sounding sophisticated, it's usually about saying nothing while coming across as sophisticated. I see this from business folks all the time; you rarely see it from technical people, but when you do, it's very annoying.
I've caught myself thinking it when I think about business concepts.
EDIT: Yep, I was misreading this. It wasn't so clear that it was an inside joke. I guess the joke's on me and the stereotypical non-partner VC, ha ha?
From Wikipedia:
Harjeet Taggar (born June 8, 1985), is a British businessperson and partner at the seed-stage investment firm, Y Combinator. He was formerly funded by Y Combinator and sold his company Auctomatic to Canadian company Live Current Media at age 22.
In 2010 he was named as the first new partner at Y Combinator since its founding in 2005, aged 25. In 2011 he was named on the Forbes 30 under 30 list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harjeet_Taggar
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5363290 (t-shirt story)
I wonder what that's about, if anything. The last time I really encountered inside jokes was in high school. It always seemed like some way to establish a dividing line between cool and uncool people.
(And yes, that's a joke too.)
When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."
We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
... and the people at the E table are the hellbanned ones like losethos / SparrowOS, who incidentally might just get up and leave if someone at the A table told them nobody was allowed to talk to them.
Of course georgeorwell has almost assuredly heard inside jokes since. The difference was that he got it and it didn't occur to him that other people wouldn't.
I've been here a long time and that shirt wouldn't make me look twice (if I hadn't happened to have seen it on HN that day). That's not a very good inside joke.
"On a separate note, I feel like we could be doing more to help YC companies. We're in awe of what you've built over there at the Y and we'd love to grab a coffee and talk more about how we could be helpful to both the companies and you."
Is the reason you should know this is satire.
This is what gave it away for me: "From: Harj Taggar".
This is an inside joke. Harjeet is imitating how VCs typically respond to YC when YC asks the VC for feedback on a meeting with the startup founders.
The writing is pretty much WYSIWYG...
Basically there is just boilerplate to say "no thanks" but no real information. Just a general feeling that they are not able to really evaluate.
No, he says, "yeah, maybe".
Wouldn't you do the same if someone came to your door looking to sell you something?
My usual reaction is "what else d'ya got?"--until they run out of "else"s.
This way, the situation is reframed as them not having anything I like, rather than me not being willing to accept what they have--and it's then much easier to just politely end the conversation.
However, in real life I think this would be a polite response. It might read like bullshit but it's quite fair to see he's trying to make these points. Everything else not in the email (e.g. why does the VC not want to invest) would be speculation.
Not a business for introverts or borderline aspies like myself, I guess...
On a related note, dilbert has a piece about how most management is basically BS: http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/managementsuccessleadership_mo...
<strike>I suppose that's part of the joke, though like some good jokes it makes me sad. We get upset that VC's respond with boilerplate and knee-jerk, but then we do the same thing.</strike>
Update: egh, looks like we're not doing too badly.
Even if it sounds impersonal and lazy, this is just called being polite, most people still prefer an answer of this kind to "lol no, sorry, you suck". And that's why we do it aswell. Perhaps we should work more on make it seem less impersonal, but the message is clear and loud in any case.
I have my ego pretty much under control, exagerated compliments won't do any damage here.
VC boilerplate is etiquette, which means formalized behavior designed to reduce conflict, but also at the expense of communication. It's not really about politeness, so much as being noncommital both ways.
There's politeness--with which I've only seen Gell-Mann flirt--but then there's the sticky-sweet bullshit the OP was parodying.
(He's wrong though, and I'm still working on it :)
I believe the correct expression is "grab coffee".
[Explain how your startup will make 90 billion dollars in the first year]
I'm sorry, I've already invested into too many companies, but if you know any other Y Companies, I would love to speak to them.
In fact someone should create a Yahoo like auto-memo creator from a few years back for this precise reason.
I couldn't help but chuckle at this as Harj even included the concept of "grabbing coffee", which is discussed in "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" [1]:
"Business people in Silicon Valley (and the whole world, for that matter) have speculative meetings all the time. They're effectively free if you're on the manager's schedule. They're so common that there's distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you want to 'grab coffee,' for example.
Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you're on the maker's schedule, though. Which puts us in something of a bind. Everyone assumes that, like other investors, we run on the manager's schedule. So they introduce us to someone they think we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab coffee. At this point we have two options, neither of them good: we can meet with them, and lose half a day's work; or we can try to avoid meeting them, and probably offend them."
[1] http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Business is primarily a social thing. It always has been, and is no different today. This is why inferior products can make tons of money.
http://www.quora.com/Manners-and-Etiquette/How-do-you-polite...
and this follow-up:
http://www.quora.com/Manners-and-Etiquette/How-do-you-dodge-...
I consider both threads to be worthwhile reads.
== Very true.
- They don't want to invest for reason {X}. Could be as trivial as someone not liking the founder or they could genuinely think they don't know whether the company will do well.
- They don't want to tell the founders what they really think. Mostly because they want to hold open the option in case they are proven wrong as often happens. As much as founders say they like honest replies, I've seen so many founders say "VC X said he doesn't want to invest in us because he disagrees with us on {reason}- I'm going to prove that moron so wrong".
- They want to help out the founder with a couple of intros so that the founder doesn't feel like he got nothing from them in return.
The boilerplate/corporate B.S language? Terrible and everyone could easily do better. But there's no easy to tell someone you don't believe in something they're putting their heart and soul into.
YC has the nicest rejection mails of all of VC-land and I've still seen YC-rejects get really angry and make it their life's work to prove pg wrong.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this space.
It's not an ultra-formal construction, but it would be a stretch to call it incorrect grammar.
You know who you'd be having coffee with. The sender of the email. :)
(Yes, that sentence was even less proper.)
I see this kind of omission as a way for cowards to avoid explicitly standing behind their request, both to diminish their own disappointment if the recipient says no or ignores them and to mitigate the chance that the recipient perceives their note as 'needy.'
Just my 2¢.
AFAIK English is not a pro-drop language, which means that the construct should be ungrammatical.
My impression was that it was introduced to American English be immigrants with pro-drop native languages (Italians? Slavs?) Am I completely off track?
I don't think it comes from immigrants that speak other languages, so much as economizing long passages of text that's all in the first person. The "I" at the beginning of every sentence just gets dropped.
Given that you know the word "pro-drop", I assume you know this, and I'm not sure if I should bother continuing in this vein. Maybe you're asking for a descriptive grammaticality judgement from fluent English speakers?
I agree that from a prescriptivist perspective, this is improper formal writing.
From a descriptivist perspective, I try to avoid biz guys, but I suspect the GP post nailed it, with respect to common usage in the appropriate sociolect (the same sociolect that has "proof points", "value-add", "circling back", etc). Although maybe not for the last sentence of an email that already had that much circumlocution.
Hey, is it ungrammatical to call a woman Douchy?
But "was thinking the other day, why don't we..." sounds fine to me in an email. wouldn't say it out loud, though...
Not exactly. English is indeed considered not pro-drop, but that doesn't mean that dropping a pronoun is always ungrammatical.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language#English
So everything is 'me going to have drink' or 'them going to the park'.
Right now I am in a constant pattern of repeating every sentence swapping 'me' for 'I' or 'them' for 'they'.
Then..this morning.. 'I ate my cereal without spilling anything Daddy!'. It's the little victories that make you smile.
I wouldn't agree that it's necessarily "for cowards," probably because I tend to employ similar strategies.
When I recognize it in communication from someone else, I understand where that person is coming from and consider the message delivered. It's kind of a fun game, striking that balance between nonchalance and making your intentions clear.
Also: http://www.amazon.com/Eats-Shoots-Leaves-Tolerance-Punctuati...
Sent from my mobile device. Please excuse typos.
L