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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

That whole first paragraph elicited a nearly irreversible eyeroll.

Have we learned nothing of mythologizing these tech people? That sentence, structured to make this executive seem super human, is a lot of what is wrong about SV. Putting consulting/finance showmen (and women) above true innovators.

She’s was a PhD candidate in theoretical physics and is working at a startup directly building mobility robotics prototypes. How is she a consulting/finance showman? Because she was at McKinsey at one point?

Maybe if she quit immediately after losing the Google X prestige you might be able to infer something about her motivations, but she’s clearly passionate about the deep engineering project she’s working on and still at it even in the startup environment, so your comment seems to completely miss the mark.

To me, it raises red flags of status-seeking behavior (ie, extrinsic motivation). I read the OP as saying the person was looking to check resume boxes rather than achieve something great. There's almost a template of what the stereotypical SV entrepreneur's resume "should" look like, and it's part of that myth. Sometimes, I think people get too concerned with looking the part rather than being the part. (I can't speak specifically in this situation because it's behind a paywall).

It's not that people can't achieve great things by extrinsic motivation, but if I were a betting person (and that's essentially what VC is), I'd prefer to put my money on someone with more intrinsic motivation because it tends to wane less when things get tough or the tides of what's trendy change.

I think this is mixing somewhat the portrait of that person with who that person might. The portrait might be somewhat stereotypical but the person might not be.

Of course that’s possible, but unless we know them personally, there only information we have is from their portrait. That’s also why I said they are “red flags” and not definitive conclusions.

> she’s clearly passionate about the deep engineering project

There is nothing there saying that she is passionate about anything. The kind of thing she's doing is only a job. Just because you're doing something related to startups doesn't mean you love startups, most of the time it is just a job you need to do to get from point A to point B.

Meh, this assumes that there are no other ways for innovators to build businesses than running google x. In fact, most innovations do not come from here. OTOH, a lot of innovators fail to make businesses, so, I think you can't draw much conclusion from a single sentence in an article.

As to what is wrong with SV - it's really what's wrong with the market in general. After years of no interest rates and dumb ideas like Juicero, reality is setting in as the cost of capital is not zero, and so equity holders have plenty of alternative returns that are acceptable and don't require moonshots.

The mountain climbing is also amusing since, in my experience, running moonshots needs someone who is inherently lazy. Driven, yes, but also lazy. You don't want someone who climbs mountains as a hobby. You want someone who figures out how to get a helicopter to take them to the top of the mountain. You need to de-risk every single thing possible, even if others say you can't do that, by taking the laziest and least risky approach. Then concentrate on the areas you can't de-risk. Then once you get it running you iterate and optimize the lazy bits.

edit: Actually de-risk and not simply lie about de-risking. Eventually you need to publicly test the prototype and the lies will fall apart.

(I'm going to assume you're serious). Only in the tech bubble could a hobby which is challenging and probably gruesome at certain points, be held against you. In any normal conversation a person who climbs literal mountains would be looked at in a positive light. Not saying it's the one defining quality you'd need to successfully run a company, but you somehow managed to place it at the completely wrong side of the proverbial scale. Of course, it's probably completely insignificant and uncorrelated, but I wouldn't be surprised to read that someone who plays a piano is also incompetent to run a company because ...I don't know, I guess I'll have to wait to read that one here soon.

Something can be good for X overall but be bad for subsets of X. The fact that you find it so offensive for me to even make that statement says more about the mono culture you view the world through than the one I view the world through.

edit: Of course Google, the king of the tech bubble, saw this as a positive so your statement about this being a tech bubble thing is also really amusing. If anything the tech bubble would likely agree with you so you're part of the tech bubble mindset on this one.

I think it depends what exactly you're doing.

Me, I think "moonshot" is a very buzzy buzzword, not a concrete thing, despite what it's named after. I've listened to both Chris Hadfield's "An Astronauts Guide to Life on Earth" and Richard Wiseman's "Shoot for the Moon", and it was extremely clear how little there was in common between the perspective of the professional psychologist and the guy who actually went into space.

> Only in the tech bubble could a hobby which is challenging and probably gruesome at certain points, be held against you.

Did you mean to say something completely different? What if your hobby is making crush videos?

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Man-heads-t...

> “In any normal conversation a person who climbs literal mountains would be looked at in a positive light.”

It’s irrelevant to most conversations. Someone who regularly brings up their mountain climbing unprompted doesn’t necessarily appear in a positive light.

The point he’s making is one person cares about doing the task as efficiently as possible in a new way and the other cares about performative behavior done in a performative way.

He has a point. The point is inventors don’t care about repeating performative tasks like climbing a mountain everyone has already climbed before in the same way everyone else has.

They care about doing new things in better ways.

It’s a subtle but important distinction.

Unless you mean by "lazy" someone against all ways of exerting effort (why build something then anyway), then someone can be "lazy" as well as climb mountains. No contradiction there: Hate that something takes so much effort and find a "lazy" way to solve that while enjoying mountaineering is fully compatible.

Laziness has been valued before [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#Cl...

> in my experience, running moonshots needs someone who is inherently lazy

What is your experience with moonshots?

I'm afraid that means you don't understand climbing very well.

For almost all climbers, climbing and mountaineering entails a lot of managing risk. It's a constant partner in anything you do, and one thing you learn from climbing is to put in place processes to manage risk, and then trust in them in situations that are scary.

That's how you run a large corporation. Not a successful startup or moonshot project.

It is perfectly valid to ignore a risk and then assume you'll figure something out if it comes to pass. Few things happen quickly so you'll have time to talk to other founders and investors and so on. Or maybe you'll fail and then start a new venture in six month. Trying to plan for mitigations ahead of time will mean you spend all your time on mitigating risk versus growing the business. A climber that does that is a corpse.

Sure. I'm not trying to say they're the same thing. But the vast majority of climbers have a _conscious_ approach to risk. Some risks are worth taking. Some aren't. The key is that you have to be aware of them and be proactive about them, even though some times, the decision is, "yeah, the weather forecast is uncertain, but this is our best window for trying to summit, let's go."

Being conscious about your risks _is_ very compatible with running a startup or moonshot.

Astro's "kill it early" philosophy is a good example of this. There's a lot of risk in running for a long time with an idea that doesn't actually have legs. The "process" you use to mitigate it is to try to kill it as fast as possible. That's not process in the sense of filling out a lot of forms, but it's a process nonetheless, and a healthy one in a startup environment.

Completely agree. The thing about running marathons and climbing mountains is part of the myth in Wall Street and SV that the person needs to be a super human and work 24 hours a day to be really successful. It is 100% BS, but people will cultivate this kind of fallacy to get ahead.

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