I've heard YC has an internal VC review database (somewhat alluded to in the 2nd footnote). I'm curious, has any consideration been given to making it public or semi-public? Or at least to publish a list of "The X best-rated VCs/seed funds/angels" every once in a while to gamify better behavior?
It is in their wheelhouse, but this information is probably deemed to be part of the "secret sauce" which would be hard for any "information economy" company to part with.
Agreed. That said, I think sharing a "top 50" list would be helpful to the community + encourage good behavior for investors who want to get on the list, but at the same time the full list would be even more valuable and would be proprietary to YC and its alumni.
This felt similar to me to the academic world. I'm a lowly graduate student, but one thing I've been consistency surprised by is the way the most senior people in the field are often the nicest. Sure—there are assholes everywhere. But when you hear horror stories of a professor mistreating their advisees or writing horrid reviews or submitting trash papers, they are often the junior folk. Partly because this behavior doesn't pass muster in the community, and so people who act this way don't get tenure; partly because senior professors have tenure and thus less to lose by acting nice; and partly because, just as I think in the startup world, being nice actually carries large benefits. In fact, I might argue that recognizing the benefits of niceness—valuing future rewards, trusting other persons—requires intelligence, so that maybe nicer people are in fact more intelligent as well.
But maybe that is Berkson's paradox: I'm more likely to hear about mean or successful researchers, so they appear anti-correlated even if they are in truth independent.
Having dealt with a wide range of great to a-hole scientists, I think you're subtly onto something here.
Great scientists propagate through having a strong lineage. They effectively train, nurture, and then spin out more great scientists. The a-holes drive their progeny away from science. They effectively kill their own future. The great scientists end up promoting and extending their work through their academic children and grandchildren. I've seen both patterns up close and personally.
The big difference with investors is where academic progeny are closely related, usually in one field, investors are challenged by investing in closely aligned companies, given the many conflicts of interest. That's not to say an investor can't have a sector bias. But even companies close to one another are unlikely to benefit from each other.
This is a general principle; the meanest people are, as pg once put it, "the nervous middle classes" on a status hierarchy:
"Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks."
"If I remember correctly, the most popular kids don't persecute nerds; they don't need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes."
In this case, though, I would object to this idea of bullying being a bad strategy. I think the general consensus of literature on adolescent bullying in US and US-like countries, including some not, like Japan and China, is that bullies are among the most popular people in the school context.
There are also studies showing that bullies experience protective effects against some psychological issues, such as social anxiety and loneliness.
Also, both bystanders rate bullies as the most popular people, and they also list them as the most desirable people (victims do too, which is very unintuitive).
Also very interesting: bullying behaves like a social position, with people moving in and out as bully one year, but not the next, whereas victimhood is more stable, like an identity, and may persist from school to school and to online social contexts.
Here's what I'd like to know. Since I haven't read a shred of literature on adult workplace bullying, I'm curious to see if bystanders still behave the same way. Because if they do, that means backstabbing, mudslinging, and office politicking are still vibrant strategies, because it's bystanders who bring the rewards of bullying. The people emote to the tyrant emperor their whims regarding an office gladiator.
It has to do with confidence. The nicest scientists are often very old, without anything to prove, and genuinely passionate about their subject.
Hotshots that are mid career have a bimodal distribution - there's some incredibly nice ones, and there are some sharks that enjoy pushing their students to the brink of exhaustion to crank out another paper so they can feel bigger than the person with the office next door.
The meanest people tend to be mean not out of malice or spite, but out of insecurity and a constant need to prove themselves.
If Napoleon was good at judging people, they are driven by 2 things only: greed and fear. The most successful people career wise have to be greed-driven, confident, and mentally strong. The meanest ones are typically fear-driven, insecure and mentally weak. My life lesson is to stay away from those driven too much by fear, who are usually losers in Darwin's game in the long term.
I'm glad he did, I felt that his "Mean people fail" essay to be one of his weaker essays, and judging by the comments it got when it was released so did pretty much everyone else on hacker news:)
I tend to agree with him that good people get further along in life. In my industry, finance, I tend to see that the good people do much better than the assholes, contrary to what hollywood would have you believe:)
I think the reason for this is similar to what pg pointed out, finance is a very information and relationship driven business, the better caliber of friendship you cultivate the more people there are who will give you the first call, or preferential treatment on new issues.
My gut feeling is that personalities are not fixed, and there are feedback cycles in action here. For example, I find it believable that the more successful a person becomes, the less likely they are to feel a bunch of emotions that might cause them to behave unkindly (e.g. desperation, jealousy, and so on).
I wonder if pg's view of top investors as 'good' or, maybe more accurately, consistently moral has changed since he has gotten to know more of them personally? Not a charge of corruption or cronyism, but sometimes one has different standards for friends than for people one doesn't know.
[1] I'm not saying that if you sort investors by benevolence you've also sorted them by returns, but rather that if you do a scatterplot with benevolence on the x axis and returns on the y, you'd see a clear upward trend.
[2] Y Combinator in particular, because it aggregates data from so many startups, has a pretty comprehensive view of investor behavior.
Why can't YC, of all firms, publish this scatterplot? Wouldn't it hold people accountable in a way that nothing else would?
First, because there's no objective measure of benevolence, and second, because ranking VC's on a spectrum of benevolence vs. malevolence would strain the relationship between YC and these VC firms. You get a lot more traction making general statements like pg does here than you do by calling out individual firms.
Asking YC companies to crowdsource benevolence is hardly earth shattering. I'd be surprised if they don't already. The difference is offering this guide as a public resource. The risk is that firms could still treat YC companies well then treat others less well, but as pg notes, this type of duplicity is hardly worth the trouble.
My albeit limited experience suggests to me that there's a U-shaped curve with super-rich / powerful / "effective" people. One end of the curve is "pathological sociopath," and the other is "extremely benevolent."
I don't have enough experience to tell you which side is higher than the other, though the fact that we do not live in some kind of absolute hellhole suggests that the curve is tipped toward the right (benevolence). Yet I do get the impression that it's one extreme or another.
The sociopaths do tend to burn themselves out eventually though. There seems to be some kind of what's effectively karma, which probably comes from peoples' lies eventually catching up with them. It's overall better to be benevolent.
In the big picture, mutually beneficial cooperation works. That's what civilization is, and why we still have it. What we consider sociopathic is often highly cooperative, in an absolute sense. It's just that our standards have risen so high that that basic level of cooperativeness isn't enough.
Illustrative example: hooligans riding loud motorbikes stopping at red lights.
Hooligans riding loud motorbikes are at least riding together, too. Most problems don't come from sociopaths because individual sociopaths can only do the work of one person, and are only motivated by their own personal gain. Most problems come from groups of people working together and against an outgroup, either for their perceived collective benefit or for some ideological or religious cause.
I like the traffic lights example, because it demonstrates civil obedience; cooperation with their fellows in society, in general, regardless of their relationship, or agreement on ideology or religion.
I agree on in-group/out-group (and, eg, monomanical movie villains, abusing their blindly obedient minions, are unrealistic). I'm claiming the benefits of civil cooperation are so enormous that these in/out-group clashes will occur on an increasingly higher base of mutually beneficial cooperation. Because an in-group too separated is too weak.
I think that's mostly true, although there's also the case of the pathological sociopath that after making their pile of money, decides to whitewash their legacy through philanthropy, in order to appear to jump over to the other side of the U.
Armchair psychiatry is unwise. It's very possible for someone to be extremely ruthless in business while still being a genuinely empathetic and kind person in general. Not all sociopath-seeming executives are actual sociopaths.
People are what they are, in business or private, there is no such thing as 'another person'. Unless you're suffering from some form of multiple personality disorder.
Most people act differently in different contexts. (Do you tell your wife "Before I agree to take out the trash, I just want to make sure we're on the same page on what compensation for this will be?" Do you tell your investors "Shit, my investors are assholes. I'm getting reamed on this deal") It's not uncommon that different people will have different perspectives on whether someone is a nice guy or an asshole.
That's a questionable point, whether it is ethically right to be an "asshole" through your career and then donate it all once it ends.
I would say it (up to a point) is right. Donating/helping early in your life has a low impact, so the main reason I think it's reasonable to argue that way is that not everyone will donate at the end of their lives. So by gaining leverage early on (not contributing to philanthropy, not helping, etc) you will compensate for those who wouldn't donate and help make the world a better place once they got rich.
If you look a the billionaires out there quite a few will sit on their growing pile of cash until they die.
If PG is right, then sociopath's will be fairly indistinguishable from nice people.
True sociopath's don't care about your feelings, either positively or negatively, they just care about advancing their own agenda.
If the best way to advance their own agenda is by being nice to people, then that's what they'll do. That's what vegabook got mercilessly downvoted for saying.
And as PG said, lies are really expensive, so smart sociopaths won't use them.
So maybe Ron Conway is a sociopath. But who cares why he's doing so much good? What matters are the results, not the inner reasons.
So it matters whether or not Conway or anyone is a sociopath, because IMO the only useful definition of 'nice' is an inclusive one. The more inclusive, the better.
Being a charming marketer while benefiting yourself, your network, and primarily yourself and your network, doesn't make you nice, it makes you an exemplary professional.
There is a difference, and it's not a trivial one.
That Ron Conway SF housing debate clip is so mellow, I mean, only a west coast millenial could call that an eruption. ;-)
But seriously, I am all for challenging the notion that anyone who defends torture is "nice." However, if that is an example of Ron Conway angry, he really is one of the nicest dudes I've ever seen. They are discussing a topic that matters, and where ideas matter. Regardless of who is right, it is much more "not nice" to allow flawed thinking to propagate in matters of public policy, and shouting from the back of the room may be the "nicest" thing a person could do. An asshole would just snicker to himself and count his money.
> What does 'nice' actually mean? It's famous for being a low-entropy word.
Brooke Allen got a bit of attention on HN recently with a post he wrote (incidentally called "How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire"), but that's not the one I mean to point to here. Instead I mean to point to an earlier one in which he touches on the fickleness of "nice". < http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-... >
"My albeit limited experience suggests to me that there's a U-shaped curve with super-rich / powerful / "effective" people. One end of the curve is "pathological sociopath," and the other is "extremely benevolent.""
Time also changes people for better in many cases.
Want to add that something that I have noticed is that people may start out one way (assholes or very self centered) and then move toward "extremely benevolent" when money, fame or power is already "in the bag" and as they age. At that point they will become more generous and it's quite possible that people that they didn't treat nice are no longer around or visible to tell the story. Not taking a jab at Ronco here but do we really know what he was like in his 20's on the way up? (It's only a question for discussion so everyone keep calm..)
I can think of at least one person in the valley who is very well respected now and more or less a father figure that was viewed as quite the asshole back in the 90's when he actually was still working hard to make his mark on the world. (This isn't the only example actually the others were more or less meat and potatoes business people who wouldn't give anyone the time of day if there wasn't any benefit to them).
This reminds me of The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing[1], in a funny way (bear with me).
In pricing, if you have features in common with other vendors then those features are commodities and basically valueless. But the features you have that no one else has - those make you priceless.
For example, S3's uptime record makes it a different product than e.g., DreamObjects, even though they are API compatible.
Similarly, while VCs are all providing the ultimate commodity product (dumb money), its the features which no one else has that make investors like Ron Conway priceless. There's plenty of other VCs, but they are not substitute products for Ronco.
Finally, the way to find these unique, priceless features is to look for extremes:
- Cloud hosting with not just 99.99% uptime, but 100% uptime
- Email inboxes with not just a lot of storage, but *unlimited* storage
- Photos developed not just faster, but *instantly*
- A VC with not just a great track record of doing the right thing, but a *perfect* record
And as a consumer, these are the companies you want to do business with: the Rackspaces, the Ron Conways, and the Stripes of this world.
[1] If you read one business book this year, make it The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing. If you don't think a book on pricing can change your life, you haven't read this book. Protip: get an older edition and save a ton of dough.
But honestly any edition is great - its sold as a textbook[1], so they seem to make periodic, cursory updates, but the substance remains unchanged. I suspect the 1994 edition is fantastic as well, and perhaps available in your local library.
I hope you like it, and get as much out of it as I have! And thank you for taking my recommendation, that made my day. :)
[1] That its a textbook is perhaps my favorite meta-lesson of the book itself. How do you charge $100 for a book? Call it a text book!
For what it's worth, Seth Godin's book All Marketers Are Liars also covers the material in your specific example. It probably doesn't cover most of what's in the rest of The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing, though imho the idea of 'going to the extremes' is so important that it's really worth reading an entire book just on that idea.
That's a great book too - I like Seth's writing style. I believe he calls this "finding a edge".
TSATOP is different because teaches you to actually quantify the value delivered to the customers. i.e., how much, in real dollars, is 100% uptime going to save us over 99.99%?
It seems like a small difference, but its not: 100% uptime unlocks new business models that don't work with "only" 99.99% uptime (e.g., banking software or API companies). That's what TSATOP really explains - how to quantify the seemingly minute differences in your offering, and how to communicate that value to the customer so that you can charge accordingly.
To use an example actually from the book, how much money will a DNA testing kit that requires 10% less sample material be worth to a customer?
Well, first that depends on who the customer is - its a lot more valuable to a pharma company than a university, for example. But how much more? The book would do something like calculate the number of new drugs the pharma company can release each year based on having this better DNA testing kit, and calculate how that affects the customer's bottom line. Eventually this would result in something like: every time you use our product instead of our closest competitor, it puts $50 in your pocket.
Seth Godin's writing is awesome for motivation and to get your brain moving, but this book really drills down on the nuts and bolts of pricing, and provides templates and worksheets for performing your own Economic Value Estimation of your product. Both are really useful, but this one is more like a textbook, whereas Seth's is more like a (very) motivational speech.
Nice, I'll definitely go through this. For a typical freemium product, do you see it as being most useful when one is ready to start building out monetizable features, or do you see it as being essential for building an mvp and finding the most basic level of product-market fit? (Given that understanding the implications of pricing would probably be useful immediately, but learning it would also take time away from building the product.)
I think pricing is the very first thing you should think about, before features. Once you know what's actually valuable to your customers, it'll be easy to figure out what features to build to deliver it.
This book probably isn't an excellent fit for freemium pricing models. Its more about pricing B2B products, instead of consumer products. But you should still read the book anyway, because it teaches you to understand your customers' problems (and the value of solving those problems) at such a deep level that you would never be willing to part with that much value again for free.
Furthermore, and this is the big takeaway from the book, you're[1] looking at the problem backwards. The question is not, "can I find someone to whom my product is worth at least X" - that's flawed from the start.
The correct process is this:
1) Find a customer with a problem
2) Figure out how much its worth to the customer to have that problem solved ($X)
3) See if you can design and a product for less than $X
For example:
1) The local cab company wants to grow its business
2) It is currently making $300,000 per year. A 50% increase would be worth $150,000 (naively)
3) Could you create a white label Uber that would increase ridership by 50% for less than $150,000?
Thinking about it that way, there's no room for freemium. If you're thinking about freemium, you should find a new customer base or a new problem to solve.
(BTW, I love talking about pricing. Please shoot me an email any time if you'd like to talk more. I have a new SaaS that I would love feedback on, and I would be happy to offer my feedback on yours as well.)
Thank you so much Brian! I'll start reading it right away.
The class sounds great as well, and I hope you enjoy it. If you find yourself compelled to share anything in particular, I'd be very interested to hear it. Maybe you could do a blog post?
It seems there are two books with the same title but different subtitles. Are you referring to "A Guide to Growing More Profitably" or " A Guide to Profitable Decision Making"?
Yes Mr Graham, many people are just "nice". It is weird that you sound so surprised. Perhaps it would be worth moving out of the money circles. Unfortunately, in my experience there is a correlation between those who are genuinely nice, and the people who are wealthy. Afraid to say, the correlation is negative. Ronco must be very nice indeed.
> If you can't tell who to be nice to, you have to be nice to everyone. And probably the only people who can manage that are the people who are genuinely good.
No, being nice to everyone is not being nice. It's being a liar. Nobody likes everyone (though there are many kind souls - few in positions of power - who try hard). The only people who are (superficially) nice to everyone are the ones who are in it for themselves. And that's not nice.
I was really hoping this was about Ronco, Ron Popeli, or something related to that business. It's too bad because Ronco is an interesting business story in its own right.
Anyone interested in reading more on this topic should check out Adam Grant's Give and Take.
Incidentally, one of the interesting takeaways from the book is that if you look at plot of people mapped to career success, you'll find that benevolent givers dominate -both- ends of the distribution. The theory goes that those who are in the left tail got there by being too preoccupied with others' needs, to the exclusion of their own success. Conversely those in the right tail got to where they are both by helping others and by consistently asking others to help them. In the latter scenario these folks have harnessed benevolence as a strategy for career growth, and the collective goodwill "out there in the ether" nets out to measurable success over the long-run.
Excellent summary and thank-you for the book recommendation.
The first chapter is conveniently available as a free PDF from the book's site.
It seems like something for those people who are grinding away, doing good work at a great value for their investor/employer/client/customer, but remain underpaid and undervalued; a sort of self-defeating benevolence.
I think the Beatles had this principle down when they sang "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make." Clearly, they had to make it fit a lyric, but I think the idea is very similar.
Sometimes when I hear stories of mean people getting ahead I wonder how accurate the sentiment could be. Its good to see a case where doing good over time results in success.
Terrifying thought: what if the causality goes the other way? What if all the bad are bad because "that's just the way the business works" and "hard choices"?
My experience so far( early 30's) has been exactly the opposite, most people/bosses I've meet that were successful in business were complete assholes, with several nice people working for them exclusively for the money.
That has in fact made part of my life very miserable because I really don't expect anything from anybody anymore. If been tricked/robbed/scammed so many times by people I trusted that my trust is mostly gone for now, and I only expect bad things from people when I depend on them for something. (If something good happens it's awesome, but I don't count on it)
Maybe I trust people more than I should have done, maybe it's the place I live... I don't know.
Don't take this the wrong way, but if everyone you are encountering is screwing you...you have some hard questions to ask yourself.
My experience has been that when someone "only expects bad things from people when they depnd on them" it means one of 3 things.
1. They have a hard time accepting responsibility and taking ownership of their own problems.
2. They are running with a really bad crowd, and need to go to the library to make some new friends.
3. They project an image that lets people walk all over them.
Everyone has problems that come up in their life, but if you haven't experienced nice people as being the norm... there is a better that 66% chance its something YOU ALONE CAN AND MUST CHANGE.
I have a problem with your point 3. With all respect but I think I heard that argument before in the context of women being sexually assaulted and the way they dress being to blame...
The correlation to this instance would be..."If someone is constantly sexually assaulted to the point where they EXPECT EVERYBODY to sexually assault them..."
In that case, I would offer this same advice... ask yourself if you are projecting an image that leads everybody to sexually assault you.
I am not justifying the behavior of walking over people (or assaulting people...)
I am simply offering a strategy to improve your lot if people are screwing you constantly.
There is a definite correlation between the image you project, how you are perceived and ultimately how you are treated.
Ignoring that reality is just being naive.
We are also talking about someone who is constantly being screwed, not someone who was assaulted once.
Robert Ringer, in his book "Winning Through Intimidation" postulates that the result you get from a negotiation is inversely proportionate to how intimidated you are."
just think about the last time you had to talk to a big VC or someone you were initimidated by, and consider whether you stood up for yourself or whether you were too scared to stand your ground.
Branding and image building is all about exactly this. Creating a deliberate impression on people before they need your product.
This is actually really great advice - albeit a bit harsh. #2 makes sense, but any advice on solving #1 and #3? Is this yours or did you read about this somewhere?
#1 - Go through psychotherapy until you root out your self defeating behaviors.
#3 - There is a ton you can do to foster and project and image the leads to more positive results. I would recommend reading up on human perception and branding to better understand how to project the right image. Robert Ringers, "Winning Through Intimidation" is a good anecdotal strategy... Dan Kennedy's takeaway selling is another..As is Jay Abrahams Law of Preeminence.
The basic idea is to not care that much about the end result. When you raise VC money when you don't need it, you are in a much stronger position to negotiate. So too with Image, create the impression that you don't need the opportunity, deal, or whatever you are getting screwed out of and you will be in a position to demand the protections you need.
In a utopian world you would be right...But in the real world, even the good guys might screw you if it ever turns into a situation of You Vs. Them.
Ultimately, if having to choose between feeding my family or feeding yours, the choose is obvious even to nice guys.
Especially when you consider that sometimes being nice to one person is being cruel to another.
The key is to protect yourself...when dealing with bad people you know where you stand, so you have strong motivation to demand contracts, etc...
When dealing with genuinely nice people, whom you would never dream could possibly screw you, thats were you are most vulnerable, because you are less likely to demand the contract and protections you need, and when it comes to them vs. you, they will often choose themselves...
Semi Related - I read a quote from Warren Buffet that really resonated with me, "Honesty is an expensive gift. Don't expect it from cheap people."
I hate when people make it like its a feed my family choice like they live in a hut somewhere. Above a certain level of income the "feed my family" excuse is simply that. An excuse for otherwise inexcusable behavior.
Just be nice to people, its not that hard. The world especially the tech world isn't a zero sum game.
I used to work for a guy who cared deeply about all his employees to the point where he bought me a car when mine broke down.
Than the recession hit, times got tough, he had triplets, got a divorce and even had to lay off half his company.
He made promises to me when times were good that he couldn't keep when times were tough.
He cared about me, and yet, for a long time I thought he screwed me when he went back on a deal he made with me.
Lots of people are nice, but back them into a corner (even only in their own minds) and their survival instincts will kick in.
It is simply naive to think otherwise.
Protect Yourself, especially with Nice people who you trust.
> But in the real world, even the good guys might screw you if it ever turns into a situation of You Vs. Them.
Then I guess the "good guy" in your world is only a seemingly good guy (as PG may state it) in my world, since it would be at the core of my definition of a good guy to be fair even in a "you vs. them" situation.
> Ultimately, if having to choose between feeding my family or feeding yours, the choose is obvious even to nice guys.
It is rarely as easy as that. How about feeding your family involving you screwing me over vs feeding my family involving nobody screwing anyone?
Again, in a utopia you would be right, but in the real world, there are legitimate conflicts of interest, and times where its a question of who to screw not whether to or not.
Even the nicest guys when backed into a corner will kick into survival mode.
Like I said, sometimes being nice to one person is being cruel to another.
I would imagine no one ever does this unless they feel they have no choice.
I am not talking about opportunistic jerks waiting to screw you...I am talking about good people in bad circumstances... It is a very rare breed that can maintain perspective when their home is in foreclosure, etc...
That you're still saying things like "survival mode"† suggests that you're not absorbing what's being said. Call it maintenance mode (as in, "to maintain(2)"‡) if you want, and I'll buy that. But survival mode is far, far off.
You got me on a semantics issue... I think my point is still valid though.
Even really nice and good people might act in their own self interest when faced with a conflict. The perception of the magnitude of that conflict is relative, and a nice and good guys self-interest mode might be different than a jerks, but...
I still believe it's naive to think that when someone truly FEELS like they are backed into a corner, they will rationalize acting in their own self-interest, even if from someone elses perspective they are screwing them over.
We all have priorities, where we draw the line might be based on how good or bad we are... but everyone has a breaking point.
As of this writing, there are three responses to the comment of yours that I first replied to, each of them posted near-simultaneously with respect to each other. It's important to point out that all of them are calling you out on the same thing here.
(You downplay the issue when you throw out the "ah, semantics!" style resignation. This kind of comment is almost designed to frame it as if you were engaged in a debate over something and I caught you on a minor technicality that doesn't have any real importance to the actual topic at hand.)
Look, I'm not interested in "winning", or points-scoring, or something juvenile like that. What I am interested in is seeing the feeding-my-family "move" eliminated from honest discussion among reasonable people. This is precisely because the "I have to feed my family" refrain is dishonest and–as I said before–an unworthy tactic.
I don't know how to make you to understand this if you don't by now.
> I don't know how to make you to understand this if you don't by now.
I feel the same frustration as you :)
> This is precisely because the "I have to feed my family" refrain is dishonest and–as I said before–an unworthy tactic.
One last time I will try to explain my point. I agree, This argument might be dishonest, and should be eliminated...
but... That doesn't change the reality on the ground that many people, when feeling like they are about to lose something important will view it as a You vs. Them Scenario.
Not taken, but don't get me wrong. I don't mean friends/family/coworkers. I've got plenty of those that I can and have trusted.
I mean Bosses and people that I've done business with on a you pay me level. In those cases there was almost nothing I could do besides filling a lawsuit and spending large amounts of money, time and sanity. I settled with the understanding that they had the upper hand and I was a fool for trusting my money/time to them.
One case:
Owner "Shit you are leaving??? Who is going to do XXX? Can't you stay at least until xxx so we can deliver xxx and save our asses? That is our only client right now."
Me
"Hum... I really need to start next week, but I will do my best"
I stayed for one month more that I needed in contract, my new employer was pissed but agreed with it. In the end the Owner didn't pay me my leave that was due and was agreed to be paid and delayed the pay of that last month for 15 days. I had to threaten them with a lawsuit to get that last month payment.
> I settled with the understanding that they had the upper hand
Sounds like #3 is your primary concern. While some situations are beyond your control, you should put some effort into understanding perception and how you can manufacture the perception that you have the upper hand, not them.
The simplest example of this is Dan Kennedy's takeaway selling technique..Basically you make it seem like you are unavailable to work with them, and because people want what they can't have, they stop thinking about whether they want you but rather how to get you. This puts you in the drivers seat.
That sucks. I thought I was the only guy who had to have those kinds of experiences. :-)
In my case it was years ago, and since then my situation has improved dramatically. The things that seemed to help were:
1) Identifying the kinds of people I worked well with in the past and pitching those kinds of people on projects (I did some of this by learning the Meyers-Briggs function stack, which unfortunately doesn't have an axis of evil but is otherwise helpful in finding new clients who are somewhat similar to clients I liked in the past; ENFPs are a perennial favorite)
2) Identifying non-profits and other less rip-offy types of clients and showing them how I could help them
3) Saving enough money that I didn't have to work with any given client
4) Establishing firm policies like "You will pay 100% down if X and Y conditions are not met or do not apply, or if the total is below $N; otherwise 50% down and 50% prior to delivery"
5) Doing background-checking on all new clients, especially if they have fired one of my kind before (I usually call up the fired guy).
#4 really rides on your reputation, so you may wish to have references on hand to give to potential clients.
I'm celebrating my ninth year as a solo freelancer in rural California and things couldn't get much better, so I hope this helps you somehow.
I worked in an industry which was tightly squeezed by government regulation. Every business I know which was run honestly and reputably had to close.
Those that remain are exclusively run by people who are willing to break any rules and any laws as it suits them and are intelligent enough to do so when they can get away with it. I feel very jaded by this experience. Is this what people really mean when they talk about 'hustle'? Is it not possible for an honest person to run a business?
In another context you would call these people sociopaths. They are happy to screw employees - and the conditions are currently just right for them to do that.
Good people who have skills or personal interest in that industry now have to work for that kind of person. They have no realistic choice.
You alone can and must change - we can agree - but your three options are not true to life.
I suspect, as someone early in his career, what you interpret as "asshole," pg interprets as niceness. From pg's perspective, those whip-cracking middle managers are getting the productivity they need to make his or Ron's investments increase in value. You're on the receiving end of some harshness, but the money-men don't care. Why should they?
Its amusing when we play the moralism card in business. I'm fairly personable and I'm sure would be considered nice, but if tomorrow I opened the worst sweatshop in Vietnam and turned $10,000 into $1m I would be praised. pg or my investors wouldn't care about the social issues of the young people working in my sweatshop, or if they cared, it wouldn't be enough to deem me a villain. They get to meet a fairly nice guy who can turn a little money into a lot. I'd brand myself a fashion entrepreneur, write some pretentious blog postings careful to never address labor concerns, and be done with it. The nitty gritty isn't on a level where investors and other money-men care about. They care about my workers as much as they care about the electrons in my CPU that powers my website. Its works, right? It makes money? Fine. You're "nice." No, I am absolutely not. I own an abusive sweatshop.
This is one of the problems of judging people by their forward facing personality. Its easy to be personable and charismatic when you have money or social capital. I have people below me who have to be mean. I don't need to be. The same way Putin kisses babies and tells jokes on TV while his troops murder civilians and annex land in Ukraine with impunity.
There's a meta narrative here that's concerning as well. Programmers tend to be INTJ males. We have bad social skills and are often naïve. What does this say about charisma and those who can use it effectively? Are we easy to game? I think so. pg's essays are usually top notch except when they're about soft social skills. These last two are questionable, at least to me. I feel the niceness question is a bit more complex than pg suggests, and often it fits not only into a hard game-theory framework but also a soft social skill framework that encompasses everything from salesmanship to how we talk to power or act when we are the ones with power.
And we are being conditioned to think of niceness in the personal level, and even worse judge with superficial BS like nice clothes, clean appereance, etc.
A well behaved rich person will immediately strike as "nicer" (with the meaning of "good" too) than a poor guy on the street or a homeless person, even if the latter has a heart of gold and the first is a huge negative for society. If the rich person is also famous, it's as if people lose their mind to its "aura".
This is probably because as a species we were "evolved" to look for immediate personal threat (attack etc), which looks more probable with a homeless person than with a well dressed oil baron or ruthless businessman. But the glitch is that we use that to also judge for "goodness" and morality.
Our entire economy is predicated on the notion that people get money by doing good things for society and the money is their reward. In that sense more money should correlate with more service to society. (Whether it does....)
We're also selfish, "good" is subjective. A homeless person can be as kind as they want but how much can they do for you? A rich person can benefit you in many ways and it may not cost them very much.
>Our entire economy is predicated on the notion that people get money by doing good things for society and the money is their reward.
Yeah. It's an idea of protestant origins (initially: wealth is a kind of reward for the fair from God), and one that, as someone from a non-protestant country, abhor.
>A homeless person can be as kind as they want but how much can they do for you? A rich person can benefit you in many ways and it may not cost them very much.
People are more often screwed in the large by rich persons than by homeless persons. For starters, homeless persons don't start many wars, nor do they get trillion dollar bailouts for collapsing the economy...
> pg or my investors wouldn't care about the social issues of the young people working in my sweatshop
I think it's rude to accuse people of hypothetical malfeasance. If there's evidence that someone is callous, show us the evidence. If you think you know of scenarios in which they would be callous, then just tell us what evidence led you to that conclusion instead.
Considering pg praises Ronco's investing background without even mentioning his controversial high-profile political background, I think its fair to say that pg probably isn't too concerned with the social issues at play here. None of his essays seem to address labor rights either. I'm certainly using him in a hypothetical for my argument, but its not an entirely fictional and unfair strawman. I think on the investor level, at least from my personal experience, skill workers are just cogs. They are part of a money making machine, and their concerns are very much at the lower end of importance. This is why we can have things like secret deals not to poach engineers and the H1B problem.
I think by the standards of casual internet commentary, my comment is perfectly acceptable and appropriate and using high-profile characters in hypotheticals to make a point is fine. If NVIDIA did something displeasing to the FOSS community and someone wrote, "Oh man, Linus is going to full asshole on them tomorrow," I doubt you would be white knighting him. Lets maybe turn down the pg fandom a bit, eh? He's certainly not above criticism.
The recent support pg gave to expanding the H1B program is arguably prima facie evidence of this "hypothetical malfeasance" behavior. Except I wouldn't characterize it as malfeasance. It is human nature to shy away from fractally complex issues, and supply chain ethics are very fractal. It would be a sufficient nightmare to validate the ethics of a lead pencil supply chain (cf., classic essay, "I, Pencil" [1], leaven with healthy critiques [2]), not to speak of programmer labor markets and laptop manufacturing supply chains.
It is counter-productive to use a binary evil/not-evil bit switch here. Rather, once you realize we all value our time, and an "I can't be bothered with those details" is an expression of that time preference (albeit in a manner that can be interpreted as malicious), it becomes easier to understand why we see this behavior. This doesn't mean you have to condone it and throw your hands in the air; understanding is the first step in debugging.
The line-crossing and bit flip can happen when someone else performs the dogged time-consuming legwork, assiduously gathers the evidence, and presents it on a silver platter, and the response is still a reflexive "I can't be bothered with those details". When that happens, at the very least Upton Sinclair's pithy observation is at play, and yes, at the very worst the basest of human nature is on full display.
There are nuances beyond all this of course, but that's a wall of text I shan't inflict upon you.
[3] It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! From I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935), ISBN 0-520-08198-6.
Mine was more like:
Owner
"Shit you are leaving??? Can't you stay at least until xxx so we can deliver xxx and save our asses?"
Me
"Hum... I really need to start next week, but I will do my best"
I stayed for one month more that I needed in contract, my new employer was pissed of but agreed with it. In the end the Owner didn't pay me my leave that was due and was agreed to be paid and delayed the pay of that month for 15 days. I had to threaten them with a lawsuit to get that last month payment.
I've had harsh managers and 2 of them are my friends now. That is nothing related to that is about being a scumbag.
For what it's worth, I know exactly the type of thing you're talking about. So I wanted to chime in and say "No, you're not crazy, even though everyone else in this thread seems to be trying to convince you that you are."
> Mine was more like: Owner "Shit you are leaving??? Can't you stay at least until xxx so we can deliver xxx and save our asses?"
Dude, you gotta learn to say no. I would categorize this as letting people walk over you.
I understand the desire to do a good job and help out others as much as you can but keep in mind that when you help someone the overall net outcome needs to be positive. If your helping someone results in more harm to you than help to the other person, you need to walk away.
I got the impression from your post that you made a commitment to your new employer that you're going to start on a particular date. And your old employer wanted you to break that commitment because they had some deadlines of their own to meet.
At this point you if stay longer at your old job, you're inconveniencing two entities: (a) yourself because you're not going to look professional to your new employer if you make a commitment (or even give the impression of a commitment) to join at a particular time and then not deliver, and (b) your new employer because they may have made certain plans based on your availability.
In theory, it's possible that the work you were going to do at your old place is so important that this situation could result in a net positive even if you broke the commitment you made, but I think it's unlikely. And in any case, even if your old employer really really really wanted you around, they need to compensate the new place too, not just you!
The way I would've dealt with this would be to tell my boss something like this: "I can't stay longer because I've made a commitment to the new company and they have made plans based on my availability. However, if you think that having me around is very crucial, let's bring them into the loop as well and we can work out some terms under which you can compensate them and me for being more flexible in my leaving dates."
At this point, my guess is that a scumbag will backpedal because any stunt they pull will now be documented by multiple people.
If your boss says "Before you quit, stay and do X at the usual pay rate", this is probably a boss that doesn't respect your decision to quit in the first place. (Probably you quit because you don't want to continue doing Xs at the usual pay rate). The correct answer is either "No" or "Sure, but it will cost you $TEXAS".
Getting To Yes, if you haven't read it, might be a good read for you. It's specifically about negotiating, but in general, the theme of the book is mutually beneficial arrangements are vastly superior to one sided arrangements.
I've been in similar situations to the one you described and I wish I had some of the knowledge and skills I have now. I could have helped the dude out and negotiated for some more money while doing it.
pg's theory is that transparency and unpredictability is what is supposedly making nice investors successful in startup-land. Maybe your industry is not sufficiently transparent or unpredictable to help the nice people rise to the top.
So, I'm trying to see whether this applies to us in academia, whether the "nice-but-no-push-over" types are more successful than the sociopaths. Unfortunately, I can't think of one either in real life or from anecdotes shared with me.
I think it's different when the system isn't run on money, but pride.
EDIT: Actually, I am able to think of one. It is of worth to note that he is pretty clever and a natural born talent and was a child prodigy.
"Good does not mean being a pushover. I would not want to face an angry Ronco. But if Ron's angry at you, it's because you did something wrong. Ron is so old school he's Old Testament. He will smite you in his just wrath, but there's no malice in it."
... like when smiting everyone who doesn't work in Tech or agree with him in SF by subverting democracy?
This is an example of where PG has a bias and we part ways.
Keep writing essays about software, and I promise I'll try to learn LISP, PG! ;)
This Ronco Principal, as Paul describes it, reminds me of a vision for a world in whereby the contract of a business deal is second to the word of your partners & colleagues. Where honor, trust and values trump contracts, laws and lawyers.
Why? Not only is this hypothetical business world a more natural and less expensive place to do business, but another advantage is that un-invited third parties can't easily interfere with your deals.
Some might say that defining terms on paper creates a record that can be used against you.
Shaking hands and trusting in your partners that they will follow through on their word - that type of deal is more difficult for the state to compromise, exploit, or create laws against.
Let me just state that like people with autism I have a mental illness that affects the social part of my brain. It makes it hard to make friends as I lack people and social skills. It gave me an advantage to make me high functioning enough to learn programming at a young age and work with math and science better than average.
I am not a mean person, when people get to know me I am nice. But I have few friends because I lack social and people skills. I cannot seem to emotionally connect with people and what friends I have are also with a high IQ that I connect to intellectually.
When I worked, I worked with some mean people. They found high functioning coworkers of mine and pretended to be their friend and then stabbed them in the back and forced them to quit because they were competition. They took credit for their work and then decided to target me next. Calling me a nerd and geek, making fun of me, bullying and harassing me even with threats of violence trying to force me to quit. I ended up stressed out and developed a mental illness and was forced on disability.
Based on Linkedin those mean people who did all of that still have their jobs. They have social skills and people skills and use it to manipulate people, and then black-stab them and climb the corporate ladder of success. Until they make it to management where they can bully and harass people to do their jobs. All the while keeping their dark side hidden.
If you ever worked for Steve Jobs, you would say he was a jerk, he was abusive to his engineers to get things done just right. He had anger problems too. But he had the social skills and people skills to be well liked. There are a lot of people like Steve Jobs out there.
I'll most likely never work again due to my mental illness, but I am not a mean person, I don't treat people with disrespect, I don't bully and harass them. But due to lacking people and social skills, I'll never have enough friends to become a success.
After 911 there is a medical background check, once a company learns I am mentally ill I get the rejection letter that says "overqualified" that rejects me.
I had a hard time trying to find work, with a history of being mentally ill on the records and my background. Most people hide it and don't see a doctor and go undiganosed because of the social stigmas of being mentally ill.
I happen to suffer from schizoaffective disorder which is rare less than .05% of the population has it. It is like bipolar and schizophrenia combined.
When I did have a job as soon as they learned I was mentally ill from my communications, I was bullied, harassed, and picked on, and then eventually fired when I had a panic attack from the stress.
I am sure if I found the right company that wouldn't treat me that way or understand mentally ill people and don't let their employees pick on, bully, and harass them.
I used to earn $150K/year as a programmer, but now they say that is too much money to trust to a mentally ill person. In all honesty it was never about the money, I just loved programming and happened to become good at it in Visual BASIC and Active Server Pages, which are 13+ years out of date now. But I still try to keep up and learn.
My wife doesn't want me to relocate, or else I've have worked for Google in 1999, and I might have avoided the stresses I had that made me mentally ill in 2001. So I am sort of stuck in St. Louis MO and what companies there are here to work that don't like mentally ill people working for them. We tend to drive up health care costs for their insurance and when they think of disabled people they think of people in wheelchairs not the mentally ill. They tried to justify firing be by having a software contractor work $100/hr to do my job while I was in a hospital claiming that none of my coworkers could operate at my level of work. This fits the undue hardship clause of the employment law.
I had about three employers do that to me in a row, and my doctor put me on disability because I couldn't get a stable job.
I was usually hired to debug software to get a company to the next level. I optimized ADO recordsets, SQL Server tables and stored procedures, optimized Crystal Reports reports, and fixed broken Visual BASIC code so it wouldn't crash the machine and it runs faster. I also did web development in Active Server Pages using VBScript and HTML and CSS and JavaScript.
But like I said, no company wants to hire me now, and if they did it would only be temporary to use me to get to the next level and then fire me after I got them there. I feel like a third stage rocket booster.
It is no coincidence Ronco is the most coveted Angel in the Valley - he epitomizes integrity. This value is the most desired aspect an entrepreneur will strive for in finding early stage investors. We, especially in the early stages of building our company, need people who will do the right thing.
The problem with this as a strategy, and problem is a strong word, is that it is insanely hard to replicate.
I can happily not steal money or diamonds all day long, I can always not persuade a founder to sell me his stock for pennies because deep down being dishonest is not how Mrs Brian raised her children.
But not dishonest is different from good. Good is active - not bad is passive. I know people who have righteous anger on their side - they actually find dishonesty offensive, something in need of fixing. Conway sounds like that - someone who goes past not being bad and over to trying to fix a world gone wrong.
Good is a hard balance - you need to know right from wrong, and believe that if you confront wrong, the world has your back.
I view this in the light of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
In a one player game, it pays to be nasty.
It only pays to be nice in an ongoing game.
Ron Conway seems to have been playing the ongoing game long before increased transparency made it fashionable, and has reaped the benefits of it. I have never met him, but he seems to be the one guy people universally acclaim for support, integrity and doing the right things. It's easy to see why he's Call #1 for folks seeking an angel, and he's the call who entrepreneurs take.
Disclaimer: I don't know enough about the personalities, politics, finances, or economics involved to have a substantive opinion on the matter under discussion.
248 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadBut maybe that is Berkson's paradox: I'm more likely to hear about mean or successful researchers, so they appear anti-correlated even if they are in truth independent.
Great scientists propagate through having a strong lineage. They effectively train, nurture, and then spin out more great scientists. The a-holes drive their progeny away from science. They effectively kill their own future. The great scientists end up promoting and extending their work through their academic children and grandchildren. I've seen both patterns up close and personally.
The big difference with investors is where academic progeny are closely related, usually in one field, investors are challenged by investing in closely aligned companies, given the many conflicts of interest. That's not to say an investor can't have a sector bias. But even companies close to one another are unlikely to benefit from each other.
"The point of University professors is to take graduate students and create new professors."
Great barn storming Ted performance, highly recommend just taking 15 mins or so for it.
http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_...
"Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks."
"If I remember correctly, the most popular kids don't persecute nerds; they don't need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes."
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
There are also studies showing that bullies experience protective effects against some psychological issues, such as social anxiety and loneliness.
Also, both bystanders rate bullies as the most popular people, and they also list them as the most desirable people (victims do too, which is very unintuitive).
Also very interesting: bullying behaves like a social position, with people moving in and out as bully one year, but not the next, whereas victimhood is more stable, like an identity, and may persist from school to school and to online social contexts.
Here's what I'd like to know. Since I haven't read a shred of literature on adult workplace bullying, I'm curious to see if bystanders still behave the same way. Because if they do, that means backstabbing, mudslinging, and office politicking are still vibrant strategies, because it's bystanders who bring the rewards of bullying. The people emote to the tyrant emperor their whims regarding an office gladiator.
Hotshots that are mid career have a bimodal distribution - there's some incredibly nice ones, and there are some sharks that enjoy pushing their students to the brink of exhaustion to crank out another paper so they can feel bigger than the person with the office next door.
The meanest people tend to be mean not out of malice or spite, but out of insecurity and a constant need to prove themselves.
I'm glad he did, I felt that his "Mean people fail" essay to be one of his weaker essays, and judging by the comments it got when it was released so did pretty much everyone else on hacker news:)
I tend to agree with him that good people get further along in life. In my industry, finance, I tend to see that the good people do much better than the assholes, contrary to what hollywood would have you believe:)
I think the reason for this is similar to what pg pointed out, finance is a very information and relationship driven business, the better caliber of friendship you cultivate the more people there are who will give you the first call, or preferential treatment on new issues.
[2] Y Combinator in particular, because it aggregates data from so many startups, has a pretty comprehensive view of investor behavior.
Why can't YC, of all firms, publish this scatterplot? Wouldn't it hold people accountable in a way that nothing else would?
I don't have enough experience to tell you which side is higher than the other, though the fact that we do not live in some kind of absolute hellhole suggests that the curve is tipped toward the right (benevolence). Yet I do get the impression that it's one extreme or another.
The sociopaths do tend to burn themselves out eventually though. There seems to be some kind of what's effectively karma, which probably comes from peoples' lies eventually catching up with them. It's overall better to be benevolent.
Illustrative example: hooligans riding loud motorbikes stopping at red lights.
I agree on in-group/out-group (and, eg, monomanical movie villains, abusing their blindly obedient minions, are unrealistic). I'm claiming the benefits of civil cooperation are so enormous that these in/out-group clashes will occur on an increasingly higher base of mutually beneficial cooperation. Because an in-group too separated is too weak.
I would say it (up to a point) is right. Donating/helping early in your life has a low impact, so the main reason I think it's reasonable to argue that way is that not everyone will donate at the end of their lives. So by gaining leverage early on (not contributing to philanthropy, not helping, etc) you will compensate for those who wouldn't donate and help make the world a better place once they got rich.
If you look a the billionaires out there quite a few will sit on their growing pile of cash until they die.
True sociopath's don't care about your feelings, either positively or negatively, they just care about advancing their own agenda.
If the best way to advance their own agenda is by being nice to people, then that's what they'll do. That's what vegabook got mercilessly downvoted for saying.
And as PG said, lies are really expensive, so smart sociopaths won't use them.
So maybe Ron Conway is a sociopath. But who cares why he's doing so much good? What matters are the results, not the inner reasons.
What does 'nice' actually mean? It's famous for being a low-entropy word.
In fact not everyone agrees that Conway is 'nice', or that everything he does and says is good:
http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/09/eruption-over-sf-housing-an...
Or even:
http://www.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2014/12/09/ron-conway-twee...
So it matters whether or not Conway or anyone is a sociopath, because IMO the only useful definition of 'nice' is an inclusive one. The more inclusive, the better.
Being a charming marketer while benefiting yourself, your network, and primarily yourself and your network, doesn't make you nice, it makes you an exemplary professional.
There is a difference, and it's not a trivial one.
But seriously, I am all for challenging the notion that anyone who defends torture is "nice." However, if that is an example of Ron Conway angry, he really is one of the nicest dudes I've ever seen. They are discussing a topic that matters, and where ideas matter. Regardless of who is right, it is much more "not nice" to allow flawed thinking to propagate in matters of public policy, and shouting from the back of the room may be the "nicest" thing a person could do. An asshole would just snicker to himself and count his money.
Brooke Allen got a bit of attention on HN recently with a post he wrote (incidentally called "How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire"), but that's not the one I mean to point to here. Instead I mean to point to an earlier one in which he touches on the fickleness of "nice". < http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-... >
Time also changes people for better in many cases.
Want to add that something that I have noticed is that people may start out one way (assholes or very self centered) and then move toward "extremely benevolent" when money, fame or power is already "in the bag" and as they age. At that point they will become more generous and it's quite possible that people that they didn't treat nice are no longer around or visible to tell the story. Not taking a jab at Ronco here but do we really know what he was like in his 20's on the way up? (It's only a question for discussion so everyone keep calm..)
I can think of at least one person in the valley who is very well respected now and more or less a father figure that was viewed as quite the asshole back in the 90's when he actually was still working hard to make his mark on the world. (This isn't the only example actually the others were more or less meat and potatoes business people who wouldn't give anyone the time of day if there wasn't any benefit to them).
In pricing, if you have features in common with other vendors then those features are commodities and basically valueless. But the features you have that no one else has - those make you priceless.
For example, S3's uptime record makes it a different product than e.g., DreamObjects, even though they are API compatible.
Similarly, while VCs are all providing the ultimate commodity product (dumb money), its the features which no one else has that make investors like Ron Conway priceless. There's plenty of other VCs, but they are not substitute products for Ronco.
Finally, the way to find these unique, priceless features is to look for extremes:
And as a consumer, these are the companies you want to do business with: the Rackspaces, the Ron Conways, and the Stripes of this world.[1] If you read one business book this year, make it The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing. If you don't think a book on pricing can change your life, you haven't read this book. Protip: get an older edition and save a ton of dough.
http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics-Pricing-Growing-Profi...
But honestly any edition is great - its sold as a textbook[1], so they seem to make periodic, cursory updates, but the substance remains unchanged. I suspect the 1994 edition is fantastic as well, and perhaps available in your local library.
I hope you like it, and get as much out of it as I have! And thank you for taking my recommendation, that made my day. :)
[1] That its a textbook is perhaps my favorite meta-lesson of the book itself. How do you charge $100 for a book? Call it a text book!
TSATOP is different because teaches you to actually quantify the value delivered to the customers. i.e., how much, in real dollars, is 100% uptime going to save us over 99.99%?
It seems like a small difference, but its not: 100% uptime unlocks new business models that don't work with "only" 99.99% uptime (e.g., banking software or API companies). That's what TSATOP really explains - how to quantify the seemingly minute differences in your offering, and how to communicate that value to the customer so that you can charge accordingly.
To use an example actually from the book, how much money will a DNA testing kit that requires 10% less sample material be worth to a customer?
Well, first that depends on who the customer is - its a lot more valuable to a pharma company than a university, for example. But how much more? The book would do something like calculate the number of new drugs the pharma company can release each year based on having this better DNA testing kit, and calculate how that affects the customer's bottom line. Eventually this would result in something like: every time you use our product instead of our closest competitor, it puts $50 in your pocket.
Seth Godin's writing is awesome for motivation and to get your brain moving, but this book really drills down on the nuts and bolts of pricing, and provides templates and worksheets for performing your own Economic Value Estimation of your product. Both are really useful, but this one is more like a textbook, whereas Seth's is more like a (very) motivational speech.
This book probably isn't an excellent fit for freemium pricing models. Its more about pricing B2B products, instead of consumer products. But you should still read the book anyway, because it teaches you to understand your customers' problems (and the value of solving those problems) at such a deep level that you would never be willing to part with that much value again for free.
Furthermore, and this is the big takeaway from the book, you're[1] looking at the problem backwards. The question is not, "can I find someone to whom my product is worth at least X" - that's flawed from the start.
The correct process is this:
1) Find a customer with a problem
2) Figure out how much its worth to the customer to have that problem solved ($X)
3) See if you can design and a product for less than $X
For example:
1) The local cab company wants to grow its business
2) It is currently making $300,000 per year. A 50% increase would be worth $150,000 (naively)
3) Could you create a white label Uber that would increase ridership by 50% for less than $150,000?
Thinking about it that way, there's no room for freemium. If you're thinking about freemium, you should find a new customer base or a new problem to solve.
(BTW, I love talking about pricing. Please shoot me an email any time if you'd like to talk more. I have a new SaaS that I would love feedback on, and I would be happy to offer my feedback on yours as well.)
[1] the proverbial you're (including me!)
http://smile.amazon.com/Principles-Pricing-Analytical-Rakesh...
The class sounds great as well, and I hope you enjoy it. If you find yourself compelled to share anything in particular, I'd be very interested to hear it. Maybe you could do a blog post?
> If you can't tell who to be nice to, you have to be nice to everyone. And probably the only people who can manage that are the people who are genuinely good.
No, being nice to everyone is not being nice. It's being a liar. Nobody likes everyone (though there are many kind souls - few in positions of power - who try hard). The only people who are (superficially) nice to everyone are the ones who are in it for themselves. And that's not nice.
Incidentally, one of the interesting takeaways from the book is that if you look at plot of people mapped to career success, you'll find that benevolent givers dominate -both- ends of the distribution. The theory goes that those who are in the left tail got there by being too preoccupied with others' needs, to the exclusion of their own success. Conversely those in the right tail got to where they are both by helping others and by consistently asking others to help them. In the latter scenario these folks have harnessed benevolence as a strategy for career growth, and the collective goodwill "out there in the ether" nets out to measurable success over the long-run.
The first chapter is conveniently available as a free PDF from the book's site.
It seems like something for those people who are grinding away, doing good work at a great value for their investor/employer/client/customer, but remain underpaid and undervalued; a sort of self-defeating benevolence.
Sometimes when I hear stories of mean people getting ahead I wonder how accurate the sentiment could be. Its good to see a case where doing good over time results in success.
My experience so far( early 30's) has been exactly the opposite, most people/bosses I've meet that were successful in business were complete assholes, with several nice people working for them exclusively for the money.
That has in fact made part of my life very miserable because I really don't expect anything from anybody anymore. If been tricked/robbed/scammed so many times by people I trusted that my trust is mostly gone for now, and I only expect bad things from people when I depend on them for something. (If something good happens it's awesome, but I don't count on it)
Maybe I trust people more than I should have done, maybe it's the place I live... I don't know.
Out of curiosity - where do you live, and what industry are you in?
My experience has been that when someone "only expects bad things from people when they depnd on them" it means one of 3 things.
1. They have a hard time accepting responsibility and taking ownership of their own problems.
2. They are running with a really bad crowd, and need to go to the library to make some new friends.
3. They project an image that lets people walk all over them.
Everyone has problems that come up in their life, but if you haven't experienced nice people as being the norm... there is a better that 66% chance its something YOU ALONE CAN AND MUST CHANGE.
In that case, I would offer this same advice... ask yourself if you are projecting an image that leads everybody to sexually assault you.
I am not justifying the behavior of walking over people (or assaulting people...)
I am simply offering a strategy to improve your lot if people are screwing you constantly.
There is a definite correlation between the image you project, how you are perceived and ultimately how you are treated.
Ignoring that reality is just being naive.
We are also talking about someone who is constantly being screwed, not someone who was assaulted once.
Robert Ringer, in his book "Winning Through Intimidation" postulates that the result you get from a negotiation is inversely proportionate to how intimidated you are."
just think about the last time you had to talk to a big VC or someone you were initimidated by, and consider whether you stood up for yourself or whether you were too scared to stand your ground.
Branding and image building is all about exactly this. Creating a deliberate impression on people before they need your product.
#3 - There is a ton you can do to foster and project and image the leads to more positive results. I would recommend reading up on human perception and branding to better understand how to project the right image. Robert Ringers, "Winning Through Intimidation" is a good anecdotal strategy... Dan Kennedy's takeaway selling is another..As is Jay Abrahams Law of Preeminence.
The basic idea is to not care that much about the end result. When you raise VC money when you don't need it, you are in a much stronger position to negotiate. So too with Image, create the impression that you don't need the opportunity, deal, or whatever you are getting screwed out of and you will be in a position to demand the protections you need.
If someone is running with a bad crowd, then (as you point out) #2 is the problem. If they aren't, then #3 shouldn't be a concern anyways.
Ultimately, if having to choose between feeding my family or feeding yours, the choose is obvious even to nice guys.
Especially when you consider that sometimes being nice to one person is being cruel to another.
The key is to protect yourself...when dealing with bad people you know where you stand, so you have strong motivation to demand contracts, etc...
When dealing with genuinely nice people, whom you would never dream could possibly screw you, thats were you are most vulnerable, because you are less likely to demand the contract and protections you need, and when it comes to them vs. you, they will often choose themselves...
Semi Related - I read a quote from Warren Buffet that really resonated with me, "Honesty is an expensive gift. Don't expect it from cheap people."
"I've got my family to feed" - Latrell Sprewell
I hate when people make it like its a feed my family choice like they live in a hut somewhere. Above a certain level of income the "feed my family" excuse is simply that. An excuse for otherwise inexcusable behavior.
Just be nice to people, its not that hard. The world especially the tech world isn't a zero sum game.
He made promises to me when times were good that he couldn't keep when times were tough.
He cared about me, and yet, for a long time I thought he screwed me when he went back on a deal he made with me.
Lots of people are nice, but back them into a corner (even only in their own minds) and their survival instincts will kick in.
It is simply naive to think otherwise.
Protect Yourself, especially with Nice people who you trust.
Then I guess the "good guy" in your world is only a seemingly good guy (as PG may state it) in my world, since it would be at the core of my definition of a good guy to be fair even in a "you vs. them" situation.
> Ultimately, if having to choose between feeding my family or feeding yours, the choose is obvious even to nice guys.
It is rarely as easy as that. How about feeding your family involving you screwing me over vs feeding my family involving nobody screwing anyone?
Even the nicest guys when backed into a corner will kick into survival mode.
Like I said, sometimes being nice to one person is being cruel to another.
Employing this kind of (misleading) imagery is an unworthy tactic. Don't do it.
I am not talking about opportunistic jerks waiting to screw you...I am talking about good people in bad circumstances... It is a very rare breed that can maintain perspective when their home is in foreclosure, etc...
† https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8920187
‡ http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/maintain
Even really nice and good people might act in their own self interest when faced with a conflict. The perception of the magnitude of that conflict is relative, and a nice and good guys self-interest mode might be different than a jerks, but...
I still believe it's naive to think that when someone truly FEELS like they are backed into a corner, they will rationalize acting in their own self-interest, even if from someone elses perspective they are screwing them over.
We all have priorities, where we draw the line might be based on how good or bad we are... but everyone has a breaking point.
As of this writing, there are three responses to the comment of yours that I first replied to, each of them posted near-simultaneously with respect to each other. It's important to point out that all of them are calling you out on the same thing here.
(You downplay the issue when you throw out the "ah, semantics!" style resignation. This kind of comment is almost designed to frame it as if you were engaged in a debate over something and I caught you on a minor technicality that doesn't have any real importance to the actual topic at hand.)
Look, I'm not interested in "winning", or points-scoring, or something juvenile like that. What I am interested in is seeing the feeding-my-family "move" eliminated from honest discussion among reasonable people. This is precisely because the "I have to feed my family" refrain is dishonest and–as I said before–an unworthy tactic.
I don't know how to make you to understand this if you don't by now.
I feel the same frustration as you :)
> This is precisely because the "I have to feed my family" refrain is dishonest and–as I said before–an unworthy tactic.
One last time I will try to explain my point. I agree, This argument might be dishonest, and should be eliminated...
but... That doesn't change the reality on the ground that many people, when feeling like they are about to lose something important will view it as a You vs. Them Scenario.
I mean Bosses and people that I've done business with on a you pay me level. In those cases there was almost nothing I could do besides filling a lawsuit and spending large amounts of money, time and sanity. I settled with the understanding that they had the upper hand and I was a fool for trusting my money/time to them.
One case:
Owner "Shit you are leaving??? Who is going to do XXX? Can't you stay at least until xxx so we can deliver xxx and save our asses? That is our only client right now."
Me "Hum... I really need to start next week, but I will do my best"
I stayed for one month more that I needed in contract, my new employer was pissed but agreed with it. In the end the Owner didn't pay me my leave that was due and was agreed to be paid and delayed the pay of that last month for 15 days. I had to threaten them with a lawsuit to get that last month payment.
For me that is about people being scumbags.
But valid points nonetheless.
Sounds like #3 is your primary concern. While some situations are beyond your control, you should put some effort into understanding perception and how you can manufacture the perception that you have the upper hand, not them.
The simplest example of this is Dan Kennedy's takeaway selling technique..Basically you make it seem like you are unavailable to work with them, and because people want what they can't have, they stop thinking about whether they want you but rather how to get you. This puts you in the drivers seat.
In my case it was years ago, and since then my situation has improved dramatically. The things that seemed to help were:
1) Identifying the kinds of people I worked well with in the past and pitching those kinds of people on projects (I did some of this by learning the Meyers-Briggs function stack, which unfortunately doesn't have an axis of evil but is otherwise helpful in finding new clients who are somewhat similar to clients I liked in the past; ENFPs are a perennial favorite)
2) Identifying non-profits and other less rip-offy types of clients and showing them how I could help them
3) Saving enough money that I didn't have to work with any given client
4) Establishing firm policies like "You will pay 100% down if X and Y conditions are not met or do not apply, or if the total is below $N; otherwise 50% down and 50% prior to delivery"
5) Doing background-checking on all new clients, especially if they have fired one of my kind before (I usually call up the fired guy).
#4 really rides on your reputation, so you may wish to have references on hand to give to potential clients.
I'm celebrating my ninth year as a solo freelancer in rural California and things couldn't get much better, so I hope this helps you somehow.
Those that remain are exclusively run by people who are willing to break any rules and any laws as it suits them and are intelligent enough to do so when they can get away with it. I feel very jaded by this experience. Is this what people really mean when they talk about 'hustle'? Is it not possible for an honest person to run a business?
In another context you would call these people sociopaths. They are happy to screw employees - and the conditions are currently just right for them to do that.
Good people who have skills or personal interest in that industry now have to work for that kind of person. They have no realistic choice.
You alone can and must change - we can agree - but your three options are not true to life.
4. You've been burned badly/recently enough by your interactions with a minority of jerks, and your perception is biased.
Its amusing when we play the moralism card in business. I'm fairly personable and I'm sure would be considered nice, but if tomorrow I opened the worst sweatshop in Vietnam and turned $10,000 into $1m I would be praised. pg or my investors wouldn't care about the social issues of the young people working in my sweatshop, or if they cared, it wouldn't be enough to deem me a villain. They get to meet a fairly nice guy who can turn a little money into a lot. I'd brand myself a fashion entrepreneur, write some pretentious blog postings careful to never address labor concerns, and be done with it. The nitty gritty isn't on a level where investors and other money-men care about. They care about my workers as much as they care about the electrons in my CPU that powers my website. Its works, right? It makes money? Fine. You're "nice." No, I am absolutely not. I own an abusive sweatshop.
This is one of the problems of judging people by their forward facing personality. Its easy to be personable and charismatic when you have money or social capital. I have people below me who have to be mean. I don't need to be. The same way Putin kisses babies and tells jokes on TV while his troops murder civilians and annex land in Ukraine with impunity.
There's a meta narrative here that's concerning as well. Programmers tend to be INTJ males. We have bad social skills and are often naïve. What does this say about charisma and those who can use it effectively? Are we easy to game? I think so. pg's essays are usually top notch except when they're about soft social skills. These last two are questionable, at least to me. I feel the niceness question is a bit more complex than pg suggests, and often it fits not only into a hard game-theory framework but also a soft social skill framework that encompasses everything from salesmanship to how we talk to power or act when we are the ones with power.
And we are being conditioned to think of niceness in the personal level, and even worse judge with superficial BS like nice clothes, clean appereance, etc.
A well behaved rich person will immediately strike as "nicer" (with the meaning of "good" too) than a poor guy on the street or a homeless person, even if the latter has a heart of gold and the first is a huge negative for society. If the rich person is also famous, it's as if people lose their mind to its "aura".
This is probably because as a species we were "evolved" to look for immediate personal threat (attack etc), which looks more probable with a homeless person than with a well dressed oil baron or ruthless businessman. But the glitch is that we use that to also judge for "goodness" and morality.
We're also selfish, "good" is subjective. A homeless person can be as kind as they want but how much can they do for you? A rich person can benefit you in many ways and it may not cost them very much.
Yeah. It's an idea of protestant origins (initially: wealth is a kind of reward for the fair from God), and one that, as someone from a non-protestant country, abhor.
>A homeless person can be as kind as they want but how much can they do for you? A rich person can benefit you in many ways and it may not cost them very much.
People are more often screwed in the large by rich persons than by homeless persons. For starters, homeless persons don't start many wars, nor do they get trillion dollar bailouts for collapsing the economy...
I think it's rude to accuse people of hypothetical malfeasance. If there's evidence that someone is callous, show us the evidence. If you think you know of scenarios in which they would be callous, then just tell us what evidence led you to that conclusion instead.
I think by the standards of casual internet commentary, my comment is perfectly acceptable and appropriate and using high-profile characters in hypotheticals to make a point is fine. If NVIDIA did something displeasing to the FOSS community and someone wrote, "Oh man, Linus is going to full asshole on them tomorrow," I doubt you would be white knighting him. Lets maybe turn down the pg fandom a bit, eh? He's certainly not above criticism.
It is counter-productive to use a binary evil/not-evil bit switch here. Rather, once you realize we all value our time, and an "I can't be bothered with those details" is an expression of that time preference (albeit in a manner that can be interpreted as malicious), it becomes easier to understand why we see this behavior. This doesn't mean you have to condone it and throw your hands in the air; understanding is the first step in debugging.
The line-crossing and bit flip can happen when someone else performs the dogged time-consuming legwork, assiduously gathers the evidence, and presents it on a silver platter, and the response is still a reflexive "I can't be bothered with those details". When that happens, at the very least Upton Sinclair's pithy observation is at play, and yes, at the very worst the basest of human nature is on full display.
There are nuances beyond all this of course, but that's a wall of text I shan't inflict upon you.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=i%2C+pencil+criticism&ie=utf...
[3] It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! From I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935), ISBN 0-520-08198-6.
Mine was more like: Owner "Shit you are leaving??? Can't you stay at least until xxx so we can deliver xxx and save our asses?"
Me "Hum... I really need to start next week, but I will do my best"
I stayed for one month more that I needed in contract, my new employer was pissed of but agreed with it. In the end the Owner didn't pay me my leave that was due and was agreed to be paid and delayed the pay of that month for 15 days. I had to threaten them with a lawsuit to get that last month payment.
I've had harsh managers and 2 of them are my friends now. That is nothing related to that is about being a scumbag.
Dude, you gotta learn to say no. I would categorize this as letting people walk over you.
I understand the desire to do a good job and help out others as much as you can but keep in mind that when you help someone the overall net outcome needs to be positive. If your helping someone results in more harm to you than help to the other person, you need to walk away.
The problem was when that guy broke the promise he made to make me stay ( pay my non used leave days )
I got the impression from your post that you made a commitment to your new employer that you're going to start on a particular date. And your old employer wanted you to break that commitment because they had some deadlines of their own to meet.
At this point you if stay longer at your old job, you're inconveniencing two entities: (a) yourself because you're not going to look professional to your new employer if you make a commitment (or even give the impression of a commitment) to join at a particular time and then not deliver, and (b) your new employer because they may have made certain plans based on your availability.
In theory, it's possible that the work you were going to do at your old place is so important that this situation could result in a net positive even if you broke the commitment you made, but I think it's unlikely. And in any case, even if your old employer really really really wanted you around, they need to compensate the new place too, not just you!
The way I would've dealt with this would be to tell my boss something like this: "I can't stay longer because I've made a commitment to the new company and they have made plans based on my availability. However, if you think that having me around is very crucial, let's bring them into the loop as well and we can work out some terms under which you can compensate them and me for being more flexible in my leaving dates."
At this point, my guess is that a scumbag will backpedal because any stunt they pull will now be documented by multiple people.
If your boss says "Before you quit, stay and do X at the usual pay rate", this is probably a boss that doesn't respect your decision to quit in the first place. (Probably you quit because you don't want to continue doing Xs at the usual pay rate). The correct answer is either "No" or "Sure, but it will cost you $TEXAS".
I've been in similar situations to the one you described and I wish I had some of the knowledge and skills I have now. I could have helped the dude out and negotiated for some more money while doing it.
http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Yes-Negotiating-Agreement-With...
I think it's different when the system isn't run on money, but pride.
EDIT: Actually, I am able to think of one. It is of worth to note that he is pretty clever and a natural born talent and was a child prodigy.
... like when smiting everyone who doesn't work in Tech or agree with him in SF by subverting democracy?
This is an example of where PG has a bias and we part ways.
Keep writing essays about software, and I promise I'll try to learn LISP, PG! ;)
Why? Not only is this hypothetical business world a more natural and less expensive place to do business, but another advantage is that un-invited third parties can't easily interfere with your deals.
Some might say that defining terms on paper creates a record that can be used against you.
Shaking hands and trusting in your partners that they will follow through on their word - that type of deal is more difficult for the state to compromise, exploit, or create laws against.
I am not a mean person, when people get to know me I am nice. But I have few friends because I lack social and people skills. I cannot seem to emotionally connect with people and what friends I have are also with a high IQ that I connect to intellectually.
When I worked, I worked with some mean people. They found high functioning coworkers of mine and pretended to be their friend and then stabbed them in the back and forced them to quit because they were competition. They took credit for their work and then decided to target me next. Calling me a nerd and geek, making fun of me, bullying and harassing me even with threats of violence trying to force me to quit. I ended up stressed out and developed a mental illness and was forced on disability.
Based on Linkedin those mean people who did all of that still have their jobs. They have social skills and people skills and use it to manipulate people, and then black-stab them and climb the corporate ladder of success. Until they make it to management where they can bully and harass people to do their jobs. All the while keeping their dark side hidden.
If you ever worked for Steve Jobs, you would say he was a jerk, he was abusive to his engineers to get things done just right. He had anger problems too. But he had the social skills and people skills to be well liked. There are a lot of people like Steve Jobs out there.
I'll most likely never work again due to my mental illness, but I am not a mean person, I don't treat people with disrespect, I don't bully and harass them. But due to lacking people and social skills, I'll never have enough friends to become a success.
I had a hard time trying to find work, with a history of being mentally ill on the records and my background. Most people hide it and don't see a doctor and go undiganosed because of the social stigmas of being mentally ill.
I happen to suffer from schizoaffective disorder which is rare less than .05% of the population has it. It is like bipolar and schizophrenia combined.
When I did have a job as soon as they learned I was mentally ill from my communications, I was bullied, harassed, and picked on, and then eventually fired when I had a panic attack from the stress.
I am sure if I found the right company that wouldn't treat me that way or understand mentally ill people and don't let their employees pick on, bully, and harass them.
I used to earn $150K/year as a programmer, but now they say that is too much money to trust to a mentally ill person. In all honesty it was never about the money, I just loved programming and happened to become good at it in Visual BASIC and Active Server Pages, which are 13+ years out of date now. But I still try to keep up and learn.
My wife doesn't want me to relocate, or else I've have worked for Google in 1999, and I might have avoided the stresses I had that made me mentally ill in 2001. So I am sort of stuck in St. Louis MO and what companies there are here to work that don't like mentally ill people working for them. We tend to drive up health care costs for their insurance and when they think of disabled people they think of people in wheelchairs not the mentally ill. They tried to justify firing be by having a software contractor work $100/hr to do my job while I was in a hospital claiming that none of my coworkers could operate at my level of work. This fits the undue hardship clause of the employment law.
I had about three employers do that to me in a row, and my doctor put me on disability because I couldn't get a stable job.
I was usually hired to debug software to get a company to the next level. I optimized ADO recordsets, SQL Server tables and stored procedures, optimized Crystal Reports reports, and fixed broken Visual BASIC code so it wouldn't crash the machine and it runs faster. I also did web development in Active Server Pages using VBScript and HTML and CSS and JavaScript.
But like I said, no company wants to hire me now, and if they did it would only be temporary to use me to get to the next level and then fire me after I got them there. I feel like a third stage rocket booster.
I remember one example of Ranco's unyielding integrity: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/09/24/angelgate-ron-conway-...
This is also true in many aspects in life. Good people are rewarded, not always, but more often than not deserving people are successful and happy.
I can happily not steal money or diamonds all day long, I can always not persuade a founder to sell me his stock for pennies because deep down being dishonest is not how Mrs Brian raised her children.
But not dishonest is different from good. Good is active - not bad is passive. I know people who have righteous anger on their side - they actually find dishonesty offensive, something in need of fixing. Conway sounds like that - someone who goes past not being bad and over to trying to fix a world gone wrong.
Good is a hard balance - you need to know right from wrong, and believe that if you confront wrong, the world has your back.
Scary
Like I said, hard strategy to follow.
In a one player game, it pays to be nasty. It only pays to be nice in an ongoing game.
Ron Conway seems to have been playing the ongoing game long before increased transparency made it fashionable, and has reaped the benefits of it. I have never met him, but he seems to be the one guy people universally acclaim for support, integrity and doing the right things. It's easy to see why he's Call #1 for folks seeking an angel, and he's the call who entrepreneurs take.
An example of Ron Conway being angry at someone (video at the bottom of the article): http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/09/eruption-over-sf-housing-an...
Disclaimer: I don't know enough about the personalities, politics, finances, or economics involved to have a substantive opinion on the matter under discussion.