Comment by larrys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by larrys | Hacker News Reader

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The reason that Dave Goldberg can get home at 5:30pm is most likely because of this which comes at the beginning:

"SurveyMonkey is an atypical technology company. They’ve been profitable from almost day one."

If you've got a company that clicks from the beginning there are many things that you can do that won't follow a typical path. Most companies aren't profitable from day one. They need every advantage they can get. And you do need to work long hours. (Noting where Mark Cuban didn't take a vacation for 7 years and guess what I didn't take one for about 6 years iirc.) This isn't to say that you can't carve out time for family (you may be able to and it may give you better results it's possibl) but the reason you are successful has to do with many things that are beyond your control.

Goldberg could build Survey Monkey differently because he was on to something that clicked and, apparently that was highly profitable as well. A rising tide floats all boats.

Yes, but some of that is also about how speculative your ambitions are. Lots of small companies start with relatively conservative models that are designed to "click" almost immediately. That's not a fashionable model among SOMA startups, though.

Which is to say that there are some impediments to feeling much sympathy about the unfairness of it all when people in the SOMA startup orbit talk about how they don't have the luxury to get home for dinner with their kids, because they're metaphorically trying to keep both feet on the gas pedal. Well, they chose to do that; not only that, but statistically, they're probably going to fail like the rest of new businesses. There's no valid imperative that demands that they make that choice.

Mark Cuban's BROADCAST.COM seems like a great example of the "speculatively ambitious" model.

From context I can guess SOMA but what is it more precisely please?

SOMA (South of Market Area of San Francisco -- the South/East of Market Street, formerly a lot of warehouses) underwent a lot of renovation over the last 5 years as many of the new social/mobile tech companies moved in from Silicon Valley proper, in order to attract younger professionals who wanted a more urban setting for their work/personal lives.

It's something that was enabled by the current generation of software/internet/mobile startups that don't require much capital equipment or on premise IT infrastructure. It's difficult to do this running a chip startup, since you need all sorts of prototyping/testing equipment even if you are fabless.

The South of Market area in San Francisco.

Oh ! I was thinking Sell Off, Merger, Acquisition or some other "up or out" ancronym

Thanks

Having been at two SoMa companies (Splunk and PagerDuty), I think you're generalizing a bit here.

That's the risk of using geography as a stand-in for demography. Let's just acknowledge that it's a very leaky equivalence between two classes of companies that both exist.

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