The Silicon Valley Founder Meat Grinder

Persistence > Intelligence , and being able to code isn't some sort of superiority thing, it's just one skill of many

Edit: being able to take risks, and doing so, does lead to higher variance outcomes, so that is something I have also come to appreciate and look for in people. It may look reckless, and attracts weirder people almost by definition, but that is what startups are ultimately about, betting you can do better than the regular path!

The Bay Area is a weird place. There are countless companies staffed by smart people doing amazing things. There are also countless people cosplaying as smart people and founders who are going through all of the motions, but producing little value.

In my experience (which is as limited as any other one person's experience) the environments at the companies doing the amazing things are on the boring side. Nobody wants to hear about those because it's uninteresting. So instead all of the public stories are about crazy parties, quick wins, huge exits, and the glamorous stuff.

People go there seeking it out. Some get lucky with some early wins, like Jim from this story. But when the time comes to do work, they flounder and get pushed out, also like Jim. It's a big place, though, and there's always some connection willing to hook you up with another referral if you press hard enough. That's the step where the performative, partying people start getting grouped up with other performative, partying people, and it snowballs from there.

Meanwhile the real companies are off quietly doing boring work and getting things done, pushing the Jims out if they accidentally get hired or acquired into the fold. It's a weird place.

It’s easy to be consumed by “I’m the wealthy San Francisco founder guy” and doing everything that lifestyle requires, including things that may not be good for you.

Home brewing is one of the cheaper hobbies available (though like all hobbies you can spend as much as you want). The only real requirements are a bucket and a pot.

In other words, there are a lot of people "playing startup" in the valley - some of the VC money flows too easily and there is always going to be an ecosystem of people to try to put it to work.

If you do that, you're almost guaranteed to stay in the top 2% globally for the rest of your life. You've made it in life, at least financially.

The approach of not taking advantage of the lucky and privileged situation exposes you to a huge risk that your NW will go down to zero and you never get a second chance.

Is having a couple of pets and a ridiculous table lifestyle creep. Maybe. I think of lifestyle creep more in terms of you are not saving any money at all.

I think that comment is more telling of what is expected of founders and engineers. At least from authors point of view.

No life allowed. Definitely don't reproduce. You work, and work so you can work more.

> He approached me because he was really into startups and wanted to become a tech entrepreneur, and make the big bucks

It's a shame that so much of tech culture has become about money. Money was always a part of it, but living in the Bay in 2010, there was more of a focus on building things. But once people started getting rich, especially off bitcoin, it brought in a whole host of people whose primary passion seemed to be money. We moved out in 2018. Still bums me out, SF was my favorite city, and I hoped to live there for a long time, but the values weren't my values anymore.

> The establishment scions pouring into tech take on the trappings of subversion, while remaining fundamentally conformist. Meanwhile, rampant success inevitably causes the former tech counterculture to morph into posturing “Prada revolutionaries,”

Unfortunately the article ends on praising crypto and surveillance, so this has been going on for a while

One example of this is the current AI companies. Irrespective of how much marketing / hype that exists today, the long term question remains the same. Can they build a sustainable business ?

some opportunities allow people reveal parts of themselves or things they always wanted

There are lots of earnest, sincere, and interesting founders. There are also lots who probably would've been happier on Wall Street.

In so many European countries, unless you happen to have bootstrapped your way into success, you'll be written off as a bozo if you don't have all the correct credentials.

Someone like Jim (read: No formal relevant education, no industry experience, only hopes and dreams) would in the very, very, VERY best case get a €100k funding - and that is only if they had other more attractive looking co-founders with them.

I mean, it is something everyone knows - but the sheer risk averseness you often see here in Europe is really something.

This blog misses quite a few red flags that are obvious to the reader from the very beginning. Jim is an aimless party boy and got a rich gal to sustain his mediocre life. Blew his first success on thrills, cheated on his fiance and was a terrible human being. He then became worse because everyone around him enabled him, and that's just the character he is. He's not the Steve Jobs charisma that people like the blogger think he is. No. Instead, he's a sleazeball sales guy who is a master grifter and conman. Think more Elizabeth Holmes.

This isn't at all the typical SV founder meat grinder. There are plenty of boring, hard working, regular family folk who show up 9-5 and pursue their passion projects that got funded. This is how we're all on this site. We like to see these projects succeed and we want to see cool stuff that helps us nerd out. Because that's ultimately what being in this industry is: Making a chunk of metal do some really cool stuff and solve problems that are worth solving.

Along the way, it attracted some really unsavory people like Jim who looked at the tech money and wanted a quick piece of the action. It's the same problem we're having with young CS graduates. They have no drive, no passion for this stuff, no obsessive nerding out over the tech. They were told by everyone around them that it was a guaranteed job market and paid well, buy a house, great life. Even without AI coding, I would bet the vast majority of these graduates would have a very difficult time finding a job.

Ultimately what we have to realize is that this world is full of people like Jim who get away with stuff because of privilege and great grifting skills. Think about how many actually sustainable ideas you or people you know have come up with and even prototyped. But could never find the funding to make it work. That's how nearly everything got started. Somewhere along the way, we stopped caring about joy and nerdery of it and started chasing the $ :(

This is a bigger problem in Silicon Valley right now than anyone seems ready to acknowledge.

Drug fueled founder parties? Orgies? I've clearly been doing silicon valley wrong. Or right, depending on your perspective... but not this? I've seen board game fueled parties where maybe one or two people do drugs, but it remains very nerdy? And no sex parties. Mostly sausage parties?

... so yeah. Do people really know Jims? Because I just read posts about them.

Author has discovered that his 'working hard' to be at the bottom of the in-between layer pales in comparison to the invites others receive for simply showing up.

That's how it goes.

The real bitch is when you get to spend some time with the hot folks or the nepo babies and realize there's no substance - all they have is a mastery of surface level pleasantries and an incredibly thin skin.

This seems like a pretty dubious conclusion to make from the outside. There are a lot of reasons somebody would get fired after an acquisition. Hell, even if he was coasting, an acquisition followed by a rapid change in environment and culture can cause somebody to lose motivation for a wide range of reasons. Blaming this on "lifetstyle creep" is rather premature and, frankly, pretty judgemental or moralistic.

This is downstream of a pretty frustrating belief I've seen repeatedly in the tech industry: that whether a person is "motivated" or "hard working" is some kind of inherent quasi-moral characteristic of the person, rather than something substantially affected by environment. But hey, it's much easier to blame individuals and lean on the perf review process than it is to change organizational culture or leadership!

- would this have been possible if Jim was not charismatic like the way the author described including being white, tall and being part of that fraternity.