Most start-up work is 'hauling shit uphill' (horribly paraphrasing a quote about acting that Sean Connery said in his acceptance for some lifetime award).
And i remember that it was even mentioned in the movie August, [ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470679/ ]! The employees of the startup portrayed are being caught by the founder slacking off there, while the company is sinking as the dot com downhill commences. A rather good film, despite its 5,4 rating on IMDB...
This is honestly quite a trip to read (I'm the Benjamin Pollack in the movie). I did want to make two small corrections, though:
In one scene, she’s being interviewed on her birthday. Nobody remembered,
so she had to buy herself a birthday hat. While she’s explaining this to the
camera, one of her co-workers shushes her for making too much noise. On her
birthday!
No, this coworker right here was starting to say "shit fuck shit dammit" on camera as he discovered that a stale precompiled header was getting picked up on the build box and then realized Lerone was rolling, so you're hearing me halt myself before saying a pile of profanity on film. In retrospect, Liz talking about her birthday and me suddenly cussing like a drunk sailor would've been a much better take. I regret the error.
[Benjamin Pollack] seems to have never caught the startup bug, mainly working
at larger, more established companies.
I worked at Fog Creek (max ~60 employees during my tenure, usually more like 40) from 2005 to 2014, Khan Academy (~120 if you count contractors) from 2015 to 2017, Spreedly (~40) from 2017 to 2018, and Bakpax (there were a dozen of us) from 2018 to 2021 (we got acquired, I wanted to stay at startups, so I didn't stay once we were bought), and another small startup briefly after that before settling at The Knot Worldwide. Yes, I'm currently at a very large company (~6500), but I'm a bit confused at how you'd come up with that summary of my career.
I honestly really enjoyed the article, though, and neither of these are exactly big errors; just some extra color I wanted to provide.
[Edit: I'm also happy to answer any questions anyone has about the movie or about that time at Fog Creek.]
Resolution 6 - I will not pretend that my startup is Glengarry Glenn Ross. While I should Always Be Closing, the rest of that movie is a mockery of the deal-closing process.
Interesting movie, I actually just blogged about what I got from the movie. I guess entrepreneurship didn't cross my mind, but a more generic term, "commitment."
"Startups tend to be fairly binary, with you making either a very large amount off of them or nothing at all."
Like a lot of thing in life: The most popular movie/book sells 10 times more than the #2.
MS Word vs WordPerfect.
Harrison Ford vs Mark Hamill...
People like stars.
The part that really hit home for me was the whole Winkelvoss plot-line. I got sucked into web development because of a deep desire to create something that will take off and become a hit - it's the best place to be if you're a modern entrepreneur, and I wanted to be a part of it. It's become an addiction for me, one that I fund by doing contracting work on the side. I don't have the money to pay someone else to do it, and even if I did I'd still build it myself.
I've met and been approached by countless Winkelvosses since I've started doing this, and I've always had the same question in my mind: if you want to create something for the web, why the hell don't you figure out how to create it yourself? I started out with ZERO development experience and figured out how to do it - pretty quickly too, in fact. I don't understand how you could stand not being able to act on your ideas yourself if you were truly excited about the prospect of building them out - especially when the barrier of entry to entrepreneurialism has never been lower in the history of business.
That the twins believed they should be compensated for having supposedly given Mark the idea for Facebook cuts right at the heart of what bothers me. The Twins were busy training to be Olympic rowers, besides being gorgeous Harvard supermen and screwing God-only-knows-how-many gorgeous women in the process. Mark was busy coding Facebook. Every waking hour. Obsessively. It's true the Twins had great insight about Facebook's (or ConnectU's) potential. But so did I back in 2002. So did every internet generation college-aged computer geek who'd seen Friendster and MySpace and hotornot.com.
The point, that I know has (rightfully) been beaten to death on HN, is that it's not about the idea. It's about the blood, sweat, and execution of the idea. If you're only coming up with ideas, you're not throwing your hat into the ring as far as I'm concerned. You're playing with monopoly money.
By far the best line in the movie was "If you were the inventors of Facebook, you've had invented Facebook." It was a fist pumping moment for me.
This is a article semi in jest. I have mad respect for all the founders out there trying to build something but wanted to just highlight the tropes I've seen emerge over the years.
"We startup wannabes were not entrepreneurs. We were suckers for the shovel merchants"
Now for a little experiment: everyone reading this, go immediately to the mirror, look at yourself, and explain the business model of the company you work for. Can you do it? Doesn't it make you want to throw up?
This was one of my least favorite movies of all time until I read your take on it. Didn't think of comparing it to the startup life.
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