There's also probably a bunch of people from rural areas in your downtown office who think you're crazy. The foreigners probably think the same thing.
I have found this to be true. Two disparate groups reject the narratives that dominate North American media: Male foreigners from arab and poorer countries, and whites from rural North America. The whites don't voice their opinions, because they get viciously attacked; the Arabs and immigrants from poorer areas just laugh at us.
And as you drill down and enumerate more and more distinct narratives you have enough stuff that basically everyone disagrees with something but nobody says anything because the penalty for disagreeing is too high.
OK so your post boils down to "VCs want to see growth or prestige". It's actually that they want to see customers and revenue, not necessarily growth. And so the sentence "VCs want to see revenue and customers or prestige" is completely reasonable.
Look, if you're a VC who goes to those "clubs", and you trust the people there and are comfortable giving them your money, _great_. Why should they be handing it out to you, with your no-revenue company and no prior associations?
> [...] the sentence "VCs want to see revenue and customers or prestige" is completely reasonable.
It's reasonable when prestige is earned through individual achievements. But most of the time it's earned through affiliation. Complete outsiders can succeed, certainly - but the bar is much higher for them.
What's your point? Others can raise money more easily than you can, due to some ambiguous idea that investors prefer these other people from Stanford? No one that is going to build a successful company should care about that. Because you're 10x better than the competition. The lack of an inherited advantage isn't going to make the difference between success and failure for you.
In Silicon Valley, affiliation to established institutions - schools, conglomerates, social circles - correlates with access to early-stage capital much more strongly than it correlates with actual performance as an entrepreneur.
This is bad for two reasons:
1) Silicon Valley investors, as a group, are wasting capital by investing too much in low-performing insiders, and not enough in high-performing outsiders.
2) Silicon Valley entrepreneurship amplifies social inequalities instead of reducing them, because a disproportionate share of entrepreneurial opportunities are reserved for insiders.
I don't know about successful - Docker still has to prove that it can build a large sustainable business. Obviously I am bullish on the opportunity :)
I definitely was a complete outsider when I moved to Silicon Valley: first generation immigrant, with no affiliations or credentials whatsoever, no traction, and a lot of personal debt. If YC hadn't taken a chance on us and written that $17,000 check, we probably would have never made it this far. And I had it easy compared to other outsiders: I had US citizenship, my english doesn't betray I'm a foreigner, and of course I'm a white male.
Why not base it on the actual product and skills/experience of the founders, like they claim they do?
Palmer Luckey would have trouble getting funded with his VR headset in his hands, based on his background. VCs would sooner fund anyone that went to the same school they did.
Most everything with CSS Grid is broken on Edge 15, which is what most Edge users are running. Thus Grid is not something you should be putting in production.
The same site says virtually nobody, aprox 2-3% is using edge.
You either have to go all the way back to supporting IE11 and ignore everything not supported by 2013 microsoft to capture another shrinking single digit percentage of possible users until they progressively die of old age or ignore Microsoft stuff.
Alternatively start providing a slightly degraded interface with fewer features and a banner. Our website works best with a modern browser with links to up to date edge, firefox, and chrome at top of page. Preferably with a notice regarding dropping support for internet exploder sometime next year.
It also doesn't work in the Firefox fork I use. But that's probably an even smaller market share.
I noticed this when Mozilla recently resigned their add-ons site and starting using CSS Grid support sniffing to determine weather to show the real site or the gimped mobile site. As it is all browsers without CSS Grid are forced to use the mobile site.
Its a lot of people but how many of them are your customers? How much additional developer time are you going to spend to support them. Are you building a less interesting experience for 98% of your customers in order to support the 2%?
For one party maybe the actual user percentage is 0.2% maybe for another its 20%.
You're making the error of assuming that all web applications in production have the same user base and constraints as yours. For example, I work on an application that is a companion app to some larger domain applications that themselves only work on newer versions of Chrome and Firefox. I defacto don't have to support IE, as none of my users can use it. Additionally if you make a developer focused tool like bug reporting, APM, or log aggregation, you can probably ignore IE, if you don't target Windows devs.
They are not struggling. This Yahoo article is fear mongering. I just listened to the whole earnings call and everything sounded terrific: They pulled their best engineers to Gigafactory to mitigate a supplier misleading them about one of their battery production lines, and so they dropped production of S and X. Apparently as a result of the supplier f* up, they rewrote "20 man years of software in 4 weeks". Which is absolutely incredible.
Don't listen to this fear mongering BS. Tesla is the only one in the electric car game. Who else has the charging network, the half-million pre-orders, the 3.5 billion in cash and easy ability to raise more, the Elon shine?
> they rewrote "20 man years of software in 4 weeks". Which is absolutely incredible
... if accurate, if bug-free (for varying reasonable values of same). Otherwise the mythical man-month seems to creep in.
That's a project that's complicated enough to require 240 developers (12 months x 20 years, fitted into 1 month), yet somehow was reliably chunked up, retrofitted into their supplier screw up, tested and deployed in 4 weeks??
Sounds a bit like doing the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs?
Seriously though, you can probably redo a typical 20 Man Year project in 2, given how much of the development process is usually taken up by missed requirements and re-work, IF you have a bombproof specification and a well-drilled team of stars.
The part I’m not quite getting though is how a battery software issue impacted on wider productivity? Couldn’t they get them in-place and then patch the software after the fact?
Rewriting "20 man years of software in 4 weeks" cannot result in anything else than bug ridden convoluted spaghetti code in my opinion. That is nothing to brag about.
I listened to the whole earnings call that just happened, Elon said they had laid of 2% of their work force which is much low than industry standard for yearly layoffs.
Elon quoted GE which lays of the bottom 10% of their staff every year. It's not that bad.
Lots of comments here about how to be a successful CEO. We should all be looking at Elon Musk as the prime example. Work 120 hour work weeks when the going is tough, 100 hour weeks when the going's good, and if you're just starting out, spend every waking hour on your product/company.
If you do this, people will tell you you're insane, and you'll eventually stop. That's why Elon is different, because he cannot stop. I feel that this alone explains 90% of the CEO question - who can choose to stop and who cannot choose to stop.
So are you saying this is an inherent quality of certain individuals? If so, what can we learn from Musk in that case? I hope there are things he does that I can implement in my life, and that I'm not relegated to wishing I was born more "Muskian".
I think this is why it's far more important to try to find your own path to success than to emulate others' paths.
People are inherently different. In the physical realm this is completely self evident. It's far from controversial to acknowledge that you could train day in day out for years at a sport and never be even remotely comparable to even a middling professional in one of those sports. And whilst we try to ignore it in the mental domains, the same is no doubt true. So ultimately I think the key to success is to find what you personally do well at and leverage that into your own path to success. While keeping with the one constant in advice - the first time you fall, which you will, get up and try again.
Jackie is Chinese. He ought to be pro-China. In the WaPo article you linked, he says the following:
If our own countrymen don’t support our country,
who will support our country? We know our country
has many problems. We [can] talk about it when the
door is closed. To outsiders, [we should say] “our
country is the best.”
and
Seriously, I am always like, when the door is
closed, “Our country is like this and this. Who
and who is not good.” But outside, “Our country
is the best, like so and so, is the best.” You
cannot say our country has problems [when you are
outside], like “Yes, our country is bad.”
Can you fault him for that? Perhaps it is the American standard that is wrong. Perhaps it is wrong to talk poorly of your own state on the global stage. Just because Americans (who own the fruits of 70-odd years of global dominance) are willing to disparage their country to no end, does not mean that it should be a standard for everyone.
Yes; while the attitude is extremely common, and not just when it comes to nations, it's an attitude that serves as a powerful enabler of evil in every context in which it is found, whether national, family, corporate, partisan, religious, or otherwise, and it should emphatically be condemned every time it rears its ugly head.
> Perhaps it is the American standard that is wrong.
You claim that having solidarity with your nation, family, corporation, etc. is an enabler of evil. But what you see as evil probably looks a lot like dominance, control and strength to the rest of the world.
Ultimately, national power is extremely valuable on the global stage. Every single industrial nation on Earth has tens of thousands of business leaders and decision makers working to usurp that power from other nations as their own; this must be known and acknowledged! Whether it be exploitative trade agreements or owning parts of a neighbouring country's industry, to have control and dominance over other nations and their diverse varieties of resources is what wars are fought over.
Thus, if Americans do not seek to solidify their dominance at every moment, their dominance will be taken from them at some point; of this we can be sure. We _must_ have solidarity. It is not an enabler of evil - rather, it protects us from the evils that others might inflict upon us. Because that's how the world works. We fight over resources.
> You claim that having solidarity with your nation, family, corporation, etc. is an enabler of evil.
No, I claim that refusing to ackniwledge and criticize evil by members of your family, nation, corporation, etc. around outsiders is an enabler of evil. Solidarity doesn't require that.
> No, they tend to think that their farts don't smell
Some of them might, plenty of them—like Chan—don't believe anyone should criticize America where outsiders can see (of course, it's hard to tell those attitudes apart in either country, since the outward expression of the latter is also a convenient cover for the former.)
> Just because Americans (who own the fruits of 70-odd years of global dominance) are willing to disparage their country to no end
It's more that Americans do not necessarily consider open criticism of government leaders and policy to be "disparaging our country". Many consider it unpatriotic to not voice such criticism if you honestly believe that something is wrong.
Nothing wrong with being proud of one's nationality or country.
Jackie Chan on the other hand is against free speech, thinks Chinese people can't handle freedom and that they need to be controlled for their own good.
Aren't all those things the particular American idea of what government should be?
Why should the Chinese agree with it?
Because of the white man's burden? Or because some countries think their way (e.g. related to how to govern etc) is the only way? China has millennia old tradition and preference for a confucianism in government, where it's all about cohesion and harmony.
What's with this idea that the country that nurtured you, and the culture that you were raised in, and where you live, is some "accident of birth"?
You can always immigrate.
But even for immigrants, their native country, if they spend their formative years there, is not some mere "accident of birth", anymore than your family is or your kid is (after all what is a kid? Some accident of birth as well, could have made another kid with another person -- not to mention who your spouse is among 8 billion is an "accident of meeting", etc)
Yes, very true. I was responding to the idea that a person should be patriotic, though. Although in Mr. Chan's case, surely that would imply he should be pro-Hong Kong, whatever that means...
