You can curse us all you want. I curse things at random all the time. But then get back to work. The challenge you've briefly engaged with isn't a problem; it's a market opportunity. While the "it" crowd is repeatedly failing to achieve any lasting success with their completely pointless photo-sharing applications running on their 4th successive new storage backend (was mysql, then mongo, then homebrew, now postgres; really, was database-of-the-week really the social scene you wanted an entry pass into?), pick out offerings specifically based on what the "it" crowd would find unfashionable.
See if they're not begging you for jobs a few years from now.
The valley clique isn't a privilege for 20-something men; it's a trap for them. It eats their time, and, at least where it intersects with Hacker News, serves to out people you'll know never to work with professionally.
Could not agree with you more. Part of the reason I wrote this was so I could mentally reset myself to get back to work. Frankly I'm embarrassed I got caught in the trap and spent valuable emotional energy on it caring about it in the first place. - Julie
It might help to think of the Hollywood model. The pretty young men they put out front are the actors and you are the writer. It's been noted before many times that writers don't get much respect, but they are the geniuses who come up with the narrative, the dialog, and the ideas that make up a successful production. Writers usually don't show off well to investors or at parties. That's where the pretty faces come in. I'm usually dismissive of the next young genius on the cover, because I'm more interested in the real brains behind the outfit, who may or may not be marginally social-able introvert living in an eco-bunker somewhere who definitely does not want the attention.
Michael Lewis' book, The New New Thing, probably offers a good insight to this. Jim Clark is probably the character that all the choreographers of pretty faces seek to emulate.
Try travelling and telling people what you do - you'll blow their minds. I take my laptop anywhere from New Zealand to Dubai to Argentina, and working On The Internet is still a novelty that you'll gain hearts and minds from the wonder of it all. Get some perpective on how awesome your life and work is!
People are downvoting you for advocacy of "big fish in small pond" psychology, but your comment does make me wonder: Why hasn't teleconferencing disrupted the economics of public speaking yet? Why, and is there an opportunity?
I'm sure I do or I wouldn't have felt the need to exorcise it in public. But I do definitely care that my business makes money and that what it costs us to make our product is less than what what we get paid for it. That is just running a business and answering to the market.
I seem to have fallen into a version of this trap.
MongoDB has made me a nice chunk of change as a consultant. These days when I mention MongoDB people don't even hide the crazy looks. The interview/meeting might as well be over then and there.
Since mentioning mongo sets the conversation back, I've instead choosing to focus my energies delving deeper into ecosystems like Riak-Core/Erlang which many developers still don't have a firm grasp on and are considered "serious" databases.
It seems to be working, but we'll see where I am a few years from now.
danielweber is probably right. It's fashionable to hate on MongoDB now. There have been many, many articles detailing people having issues with it. Anything from losing data due to not keeping the set in RAM to "unsafe" defaults.
Typically the hate comes from people being unprepared and not researching their database options enough before making choices. IMO the fact that it's so easy to get up and running with Mongo actually works against it because it seems like the database "just works" until you start needing something from it.
Ex[1]: Foursquare took their Mongo instances to bare metal recently, keeping everything else on EC2. Most people starting with Mongo aren't thinking "at some point I'll migrate my database servers to our new datacenter to run on bare metal".
That said, the recent MongoSV didn't instill much confidence in the platform. You could overhear the frustration of 10Gen's event sponsors all day. Personally, I'm trying to move to distributed, masterless systems so Riak fits in very nicely. Yokozuna is also promising as a riak-solr type deal[2] and Riak Core can be used as a framework for creating distributed systems.
That's news to me, I'm seeing exactly the opposite: NoSQL, and especially MongoDB, seems to be the rage in my environment. I'm not as up to date as the average inhabitant of Hacker News, so I guess I'm just out of touch.
More likely than you being out of touch is that you're in a different environment than I am.
Personally I don't believe people have to pick sides. It's not a war, more options are a good thing for people who have to pick databases.
I think it's more just a matter of most people coming to the realization (after several years, for those who didn't realize it right away) that relational databases are what they want, and what they need.
There are very, very few situations where NoSQL databases are truly of any use. For practically all other cases, any time or effort savings promised when using a NoSQL database don't materialize in reality.
Take the claim that not having a schema is a benefit. This claim quickly falls apart when a huge amount of time and effort is needed to track data format/type/availability/constraints/etc. in an ad hoc fashion throughout all applications accessing the database. This is a huge amount of effort, and often duplicated code, in anything but the simplest scenarios. It's much more effective just to use a relational database and its support for defining a schema.
We see the same when it comes to querying using JavaScript. Maybe it works for simple queries, but those often aren't what we encounter in practice. SQL is by far the best we've got today when it comes to writing complex queries, and relational databases offer the best support for it.
Then there's ACIDity. "Eventual consistency" just doesn't cut it in the real world. Relational databases make it far easier, more practical and much safer to work with data in a transactional manner.
Many of the supposed strong points of NoSQL databases, like their sharding support, becomes irrelevant when using the replication support offered by so many relational databases.
It's not that NoSQL databases have been declared "bad", but instead it's just people realizing that the relational databases being used all along are really the best choice in all but a handful of cases.
Sorry if this comes out as a little irrelevant, but I'm so glad there is someone else out there who thinks like you. I' ve already given up on proselitizing about the advantages of good ol' relational databases at my office. We DO have a schema (which has been consistent from the start, i.e., we haven't used our database in a flexible way), even if it's not explicit, and enforcing it actively in our code is just going to result in more errors than letting any mature relational database do it. And, yes, we've had a few of those errors (of varying severity) that wouldn't have happened with a relational database.
Non-relational databases are good when the data is really mutable enough that each row may have fields of its own, or lack them. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see it as that common, and it certainly isn't our case.
Thanks for the post. I was about to start a project with CouchDB but was unsure why I was going to use it. I know relational databases/SQL better so I think I will stick with that.
Do you think there is benefit in using stuff like SQLAlchemy or should I write just SQL files/queries?
| Do you think there is benefit in using stuff like
| SQLAlchemy or should I write just SQL files/queries?
If you're just in it for the learning, then maybe drop SQLAlchemy to get your hands dirty and learn; otherwise just use SQLAlchemy. If you're getting into really complex queries and optimizations you're going to have to resort to SQL anyways, even with SQLAlchemy. An ORM just allows you to abstract away most of the mundane SQL tasks.
Thanks. I know SQL and use it in work. I am starting a personal project that I plan on taking a long time so I don't want to have to go back to the start to change stuff. For what it's worth I am using Python with Flask.
Bringing up photo sharing apps was perhaps only a setup for bagging on over-excited storage technology enthusiasts, and I think I agree with your larger point of ignoring the somewhat arbitrary values of in groups, but with that said...
Only in the last five or so years have large groups of people been carrying around high-quality usable digital cameras with permanent internet connectivity, and even in those years the picture quality, usability, and connectivity have been getting better, and the number of devices out their keeps growing.
World wide web search has been thought to have been solved several times until Google came along, and even now, fortunately, folks have not given up on solving the problem of people searching for things.
So in five years how can a bunch of male 20-something storage fetishists in SV have solved all of the problems of photo sharing for everyone? Surely there are problems to solve remaining for them, or for anyone else who do not share their particular needs and want to take a crack.
And there are quite a few more problems to be solved in people sharing pictures of things.
I think you are right, but it probably won't be a company that's essentially copying whatever every current "cool" startup is doing but putting an "r" on the end of their company name. It'll be people who truly innovate.
Yes, but not the one you describe, I think. The opportunity is for someone to present a coherent mental model for what's going on in tech that will fit so well that, even as it undresses VCs and startups in all their pointless glory, they will thank you for the insight. Someone who gets most of the large-scale points right is Carlota Perez. I think that her ideas can and should be applied to the "attention economy", ubiquitous computing, and human psychology, particularly with a certain moral bent that admits, for example, that moving someone's attention from what is more valuable to that person to what is less valuable for them (but more valuable to you), is wrong.
P.S. Homebrew is a package manager for osx, not a storage backend. </pedant>
Generally, being profitable precludes a company from getting "silly [high] valuations" & buzz in Silicon Valley. Unless they're really, really profitable.
Big valuations usually stem from not knowing how much a company will make once they start charging for stuff. So the "it" crowd works itself into a frenzy and VCs take a big gamble.
But once you make a dollar, all the mystery is gone. You're judged & valued pretty much on your revenue alone. Which is usually low (startups are hard) and unsexy (so not a ton of buzz).
Interesting. So "Lets not risk growth my premature monetization, like ads, which could repel early adopters." is often just an excuse to avoid income and thereby improve valuations?
I've never had much regard for Silicon Valley business types. I am convinced that the only thing that truly matters to succeed in tech is to create something that people want but don't necessarily know it yet. Everything else is just fluff.
Nice post. I'll take revenue and profitability over media hype and "it" status any day of the week. It's kind of shocking how many early stage companies have absolutely no plan for revenue/profit, and point to outliers like Facebook and Twitter as their playbook for success. There are meaningless debates about 10 millions users being the new 1 million (http://www.businessinsider.com/10-million-users-is-not-the-n...). To me, it is just indicative of a pervasive sickness in early stage tech. Remember, it doesn't matter how many users you have unless you can monetize them.
"I'll take revenue and profitability over media hype and "it" status any day of the week."
All that is fine of course and true. But there are side benefits to "it" status. For one thing it can help you attract talent and get the type of attention that can lead to success.
Let me give you an example. I've helped both high profile people and people who are nobodies with advice. In general the nobodies are much more thankful for the advice (and have even sent me gifts as thank you's). The high profile people say "thank you".
"Name dropping". But the fact that I do the work for high profile people, well, I use that in my marketing to attract paid customers that actually put money in my pocket. And it works.
If name dropping high profile people is an important part of your businesses marketing strategy, then it seems reasonable to pursue that <i>if it leads to more revenue/profit</i>
I think OP's issue relates to the weird, self-referential culture of Silicon Valley, where success is measured in buzz and money raised. It goes something like:
Build free software product -> ? -> profit
where ? = Get lots of buzz/hype, grow userbase quickly, raise VC money
You would think I would take that too but apparently I'm an idiot and got caught up in useless crap. We make marketing software for big brands so all our "users" are monetized because well ummm that is our business model. Enterprise is great that way! No one gets the product for free!
Well now that I've just managed to out myself to the entire world (well the world here, wasn't expecting that). We probably will!
No VC we've talked to has ever wanted to hear we make marketing software for brands. But if I'm not caring anymore then yeah how we speak to our clients will be how we speak to everyone now. How very liberating.
This interview with Girl Talk [1] posted on the thread about Wanz [2] shows, to an outsider, a lot of parallels between the music and startup scenes.
This is likely to have been raised before, but the two are similar in many ways: vast and fragmented with many paths to and definitions of success, prone to fads, full of both hard workers and poseurs, controlled near the top by gatekeepers who pride themselves, correctly or not, on evaluating potential success, jealousy of success, rules that apply to the majority of aspirants and smaller players but not the minority of the very successful, people who look with disdain at others' choices, seeing those choices as more important than they really are, etc.
So it is good to realize that, just as in music, success is context-dependent, and one's popularity with the current stars and hangers-on is a weak indicator of success, and it's good to act on that realization in a useful way, including planting a stake in the ground saying "I'm done with that."
That said, once one's self-confidence and happiness are restored it's also good to not completely reject all aspects of whatever and whoever are popular. Unless someone is a close competitor (in which case they must be crushed or scared off to other pastures ;) ), why not wish for their success and celebrate it? Similarly, conferences are a great way to learn, to teach, and to meet those with the same interests, and so long as attending the conference is not only about being seen by others as attending a conference (or, say, being invited to a panel), and going does not interfere with work, why shouldn't one go?
I live in both worlds and it's funny, bar the obvious differences in technical skills, there are far more similarities, especially with regard to your second paragraph.
Lost it at "Liked by the kind of men that determine who is or is not “one of us” in tech.". Silicon valley culture is almost, but not quite, entirely irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of "techs". The number of people active in that scene represent a rounding error compared to the rest of the people working in industry in technical roles outside of the valley. Get out of the echo chamber.
I'm a web producer and developer. I'm an early commenter from Slashdot, Ars Technica, and Gawker. I've been using online communities for 22 years, longer than some people around here have been alive. I've read quite a few threads on HN and respect this as a news source, and I haven't felt fit to contribute until now.
I've been talking with Julie about her experiences as a like-minded professional and I also remain baffled why her extremely sensible business plan continues to //receive tepid interest// (EDIT: originally wrote "go unfunded" here but I'm speaking inaccurately and out-of-line) despite an aggressive half-year VC campaign while the most harebrained ideas in the world (founded by prep school dudes) seem to effortlessly accumulate resources provided by others... including free press from many of the news sources that get shared here frequently. I believe business leaders in our industry play favorites and manipulate us into believing their partners are somehow better and more deserving than the rest of us... and that it fattens their bottom line and increases their domination of the culture of this industry. I think more of us need to take a stand against this... if not just on principle, but because it's good business and certainly a better plan than the lengthy boom/bust cycles this VC ruling class keeps leading the rest of us through like lemmings, leading to capital shortages and employment drop-offs that starve families and stifle innovation.
So, let's use this as a forum to discuss what may or may not be wrong about this view of things.
Chasing VC money is becoming an increasingly stupid thing to do with your business. The sooner everyone realizes this and start to build businesses that actually reflect need, the better off we'll be.
I cannot imagine how many people's 20's have been wasted in the last decade chasing some mythical social web 2.0 dollar. We need to understand that most of the Instagrams of the world got lucky simply because of the bubble and the confusion over what's a viable business on the Internet not because they've actually created billions in value.
They won a damn lottery, they aren't creating models for new business.
remain baffled why her extremely sensible business plan continues to go unfunded despite an aggressive half-year VC campaign while the most harebrained ideas in the world
Maybe cuz it's an API for social games. No Silicon Valley VC will fund anything that has to do with games these days. Untried harebrained ideas at least don't have dismal track records yet.
Heh I'm stoked someone called us an API for social games. Usually people call us wildly less accurate things. YAY!
We are technically a suite of tools (which you know depending on your executional ability is an API, or a set of SDKs, or us hand holding you through using them) for brand managers and marketers to build applications and games with their own data. Layer up content + actions and out pops your very own custom THING.
We have found that there is a huge demand for brand creative, as digital marketing requires more marketing, not less, with newer storylines & media format being demanded w/ever more frequent turns.The advertising agencies are struggling to deliver quality, timely results, and brand managers struggle to afford the associated cost of traditional, all original (or custom) marketing.
We believe that if brands could rapidly create compelling new campaign media by leveraging a standing (and hopefully ever improving) body of component elements with their own brand data and concepts this is a powerful
Obviously this approach is well accepted today in software creation and the good news in we have worked with host of brands to try this theory out in practice- aka in client paid efforts.
Essentially what we're seeing, is if the tools allow quality brand marketing results, that reflect the brand’s story telling objective, then the brand manager is satisfied.
If the creative cost & delivery are both materially lower, this is a winning path—and the birth of a potentially formidable new cloud based SaaS business
I'm in the industry so I get what you're saying here - but I'm pretty sure most VCs and your customers are going to be mighty confused. You should try and simplify a 'what we do' message that is easier to understand.
The first 30 seconds of introduction to your concept is the most important - make sure people can understand it!
I read this and still have no clue what this business is. You may want to consider the possibility that Silicon Valley isn't massively broken and you simply don't have a good elevator pitch.
I understood but only because I work very near the world of PR, which is the language in which the parent post was written.
The background is that big companies like Coke or Nike need creative content to post on Facebook and Twitter. They pay PR agencies huge dollars to come up with that content.
My plain English translation would be something like: this company helps PR agencies make custom online games for their clients. The agencies will look good because lots of people will play the games. (Maybe the games also collect consumer preference data--not clear.) Agencies with developers on staff can self-service; agencies without developers can pay extra to get help.
Indeed it is what says! Which is kind of the lost point I should make in all of this in that we've in the past positioned the company to appeal to certain things we thought the industry would find appealing not necessarily our customers.
Who really don't find us through our website but through word of mouth with ad agencies, brand managers and media partners. But nevertheless we say PLATFORMS! SOCIAL GAMES! SHIT WE THINK WILL PLAY WELL BUT OUR CUSTOMER BASE DOESN'T CARE ABOUT REALLY.
And well I suppose this is all true. But also framing.
>We are technically a suite of tools (which you know depending on your executional ability is an API, or a set of SDKs, or us hand holding you through using them) for brand managers and marketers to build applications and games with their own data. Layer up content + actions and out pops your very own custom THING.
I have signed up for a demo. Would like the handholding variety please. I have a brand in truck accessories (http://traxda.com) and one in phone cases (http://sascase.com).
> Heh I'm stoked someone called us an API for social games. Usually people call us wildly less accurate things. YAY!
You're website says:
"playapi IS A PLATFORM FOR CREATING SOCIAL GAMES"
And your name is "playapi." Sounds pretty accurate given the website. :)
Now as a total outsider to your business or it's history, having never heard of it, if this comment is like your pitch, personally, I think it is a little convoluted. HTH!
I'm oversimplifying and muddying things by referring to funding, so let's bring this back to what it's supposed to be about: I believe, from what I know, that this is a company with strong fundamentals. (You can inquire more if you are interested, but I don't feel at liberty to provide specifics for a private firm) But you're right: "No Silicon Valley VC" will support an idea that fails to appeal to their biases. And I question where their biases lie. And I question the effect that their activities have on the stability of the industry.
It's true that I have other friends who have very well-funded companies and who I believe have businesses with strong fundamentals. (One of them: a social gaming company) But I also can't deny that all of the friends who have received significant support in this industry have really similar backgrounds and attributes to them, and that the homogenous nature of the industry - in diversity and in thought - is disturbing. I think it discourages healthy growth of the industry from the sort of people who would disrupt the homogenous nature of the industry. The disruptors hate being disrupted!
I wouldn't say the homogeneity is disturbing. Like attracting like is a common human theme. However, it is a bit disappointing.
That said, it seems like SV isn't really into the media agency industry, either. Even Apple's marketing is done mostly in Los Angeles. Maybe this particular company would be better off in NYC or LA?
If you believe that the current VC crowd is playing favorites and passing over highly profitable investments, it would be heavily in your best interests to become a small-time VC and help fund these projects. There is a lot of money in backing the winner.
Part of the struggle is to make sure that one subculture of businessmen in SV isn't allowed to position themselves as entirely representing the interactive media industry. There is already more than them out there... a lot more. But they are so frequently given credit as the only game in town. And they like it that way, it makes them feel more important. It shouldn't be all about just "them".
Thanks for the blog post and valid point of view. Couple of suggestions on your business:
- I couldn't find your site by googling play api. I think that's a pretty bad situation for prospective investors
- your logo is one of the most unreadable ones I've come across
- your title is very broad and not sure who its targeted at. How about something simpler like "create multiplatform branded games in seconds"
Great article but I'm kinda sad that it missed drawing the bigger point: the dichotomy perceived value vs. actual value goes much beyond products and companies; it's something that permeates our entire lives as social animals.
Stop worrying about what other people think, and focus on making a great product or service. If you make something great, people will want a piece of it no matter if they like you personally or not.
Also, getting all emo and throwing a public temper tantrum railing against the people whose help you might need someday isn't doing you any favors.
Part of the problem is that the more successful businesses in the traditional sense (revenue, etc) are run by people who, as a whole, are more humble. There are plenty of successful business owners here and elsewhere who feel no need to stroke their ego or fight for mindshare in the glamour of silicon valley.
You are right, and thank you for writing this. Our company agreed early on that tech interest wasn't essential for the success of our business. However, I do think it can be useful for finding engineering talent.
I've been thinking a lot about this as well. Once you start meeting people and seeing the reality behind the media, you realize that "great" outcomes in startups are rarely perfect (acquihire forced by investors, over-dilution, etc.) and that things aren't always going as well as people say.
In reality, being happy seems to be the hardest thing to achieve, but I'm starting to think that is what success really is.
> Because as it turns out the market for being an “it” founder and a flavor of the week startup isn’t the reality market. It is the perception market.
Perception Market. Also known as a "reputation bubble."
(Anyone know where the original "reputation bubble" article went? I've been trying fancy tricks with Google, but getting nowhere. The fashion industry and the "it" girl supermodel are prime examples in the article.)
I really wish the author would even once mention _how_ she was warping herself/her company to impress the tech crowd. It's hard for me to understand what she's complaining about without a single example of the type of "how to be popular" advice that people were giving her that she found so poisonous...
Any second wasted to popularity, either seeking it, or decrying it, is a wasted second. Enough navel gazing, create some lasting value and reap the rewards.
VC-istan isn't "technology". It's cutting-edge marketing, and only as technological as it needs to be in order to not look foolish in 2013. It took me a few years to understand that, if only because the disinvestment of our society in R&D, academia, and anything with a focus longer than one quarter has reached such completion as to leave our society too imbecilic to have a square sense of what technology even is.
That doesn't mean a company can't be technological and VC-funded, but the "cool kids" sideshow isn't about true technology. It can't be. The VPs and Product Managers are all imbeciles and the engineers, while smart in an IQ-sense, are too steeped in bad practices to know anything. (The Founders are talented marketers but 80% are sociopaths.)
The VC-istan "It" crowd is not comprised of technologists, but of people who've found it advantageous to incorporate technological fetishism into their vapid marketing. The jokers in the in-crowd don't know anything, and the best technologists only tag along to their projects if they can get something out of it... and those sorts of managerial conditions (hands-off management, high autonomy, interesting projects and self-direction) don't tend to last for long.
Believe it or not, what follows is meant to be a SUPPORTIVE comment.
> I wanted to be one of those founders, you know, the type that gets silly valuations and love from the name brand ventures firms, the type that gets written up by the tech press, the sort that powerful angels vouch for and send around glowing intros for as being “the next big thing,” and the sort that jets around to conferences.
I truly hope you've come away from all this and understood that the problem isn't 'them,' it's you.
Once you focus on identity — worse yet, how others perceive your identity — then it's just a hop, skip and jump to narcissism, when 90% of your effort and emotions is about projecting and protecting your identity at the sacrifice of making things happen, or worse yet, forming relationships.
It SOUNDS like you figured that out.
On the other hand, since you've already found yourself vulnerable to identity focus, you should watch yourself and make sure this "I Don't Care!" thing isn't a new way to form a (fragile) identity in need of propagation and defense.
Focusing on other people, and your work, is the way to avoid this trap.
Thanks for this! The fact that I got wrapped up in constructing the identity of a company (thank god not the actual product or how we related to our clients) to be appealing to someone that wasn't its core client was definitely my problem and not theirs!
While I can't deny that I was responding to a certain kind of risk/reward perception that has a certain value it wasn't right for what we ultimately wanted to build as a company.
And I think this happens in so many areas of life. How we date, how we pick our hobbies, how we choose our education. Because forming a core identity and a core business is actually tremendously hard. Picking up one that is already socially validated seems easier. It just isn't a recipe for long term happiness or success.
I've been reading Hacker News since 2007. This is the single most worthless post to ever grace the frontpage.
Everyone here should think long and hard about what can be done to prevent a community from degenerating to the point where it is colonized by trivial attention whoring.
In fact, whoever thinks hardest might just make the next billion dollars.
Heh well you know actually I do have PMS! I'm due to start maybe tomorrow or Tuesday. Wow and to think my epiphany was just hormones. Man those things are useful!
Nothing to be ashamed, everyone has bad days.
But please DO NOT downplay hormones effect on behaviour.
People with Thyroid or other hormones misbalance will disagree.
Agreed!
If was a man I would said:
'Someone had a bad day' or 'Did not get enough sleep'.
I agree that in one 'sexist' MINE I was referring about some biological (true or not) facts and other (man related) I was referencing to situational (sleep?day).
And If I say to man:
'Hey someone has its level of testosterone TOO high' there is a great chance he will see that as compliment..
See if they're not begging you for jobs a few years from now.
The valley clique isn't a privilege for 20-something men; it's a trap for them. It eats their time, and, at least where it intersects with Hacker News, serves to out people you'll know never to work with professionally.