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Comment by devindotcom | Hacker News Reader

Having given some parts a good read and skipped over others, I am not confident the story was worth telling. Every drop in the ocean has its own story, sure, but why do I want to hear about these guys? It's not really aspirational, it's not really original, it's not really thrilling. I feel like it adds false dramatic weight to a bunch of dudes in one of the richest places in the world, trying to strike it richer. Their worst case scenario is many people's best case. I know that's a fallacy along the lines of "someone always has it worse than you" but I don't really understand why this particular story was told. Maybe I'm just not the target audience. But who is?

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The point is that it's not aspirational, it's not original. It's intentionally mundane. His point is that the life of an average start-up founder is kind of crappy with no sexy outcome ("no-exit"), working as a deluded serf on behalf of VC aristocracy (attending miley cyrus parties in vegas).

It reminds me of stories about the American middle class - not tragic, not great, a lot of hard work without much payoff. I think that's his intention.

Exactly. A classic "We were promised gold streets, but we got suburbia" kind of story. A few points are definitely exaggerated, but as the author admits, he had fallen for their story, and wanted them to succeed.

Certainly there is a great body of literature that occurs within mundane circumstances. But in this case I felt like the story itself was mundane - banal, really. Well - there's no disputing taste.

If the story were glamorous or exciting, it would be missing the point. Wouldn't it?

I'm still in the middle of reading, but I think many people (especially outside of the Bay area) have a certain perception on what the life of a startup founder is like. And the point of the story is to presumably give a real-life view of things that may be different from the popular perception. In other words, maybe you were not really the intended audience.

There's an incredibly important climax:

"[T]he real disillusionment isn’t the discovery that you’re unlikely to become a billionaire; it’s the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design."

The story is a sober, measured portrait of the purpose of the SF millstone. It's told through the weight of the exhausted angst in two entrepreneurs, but its a message to the masses dreaming of a glamor that masks the new face of corporate R&D. While not novel, the important lessons and insights need to be told more than once, and this is a well-written telling.

Once again, I'm struck by the sheer weight of cynicism here. Having worked at companies big and small, startups and behemoths, and now having founded my own startup, the feeling of autonomy, owning your own destiny, is very very real. That is not to say that many startups don't go down in flames and cause pain to founders and employees. But the implication that all founders are naive fools being somehow scammed into this lifestyle is patently false (and offensive to me, but I don't expect anybody to care about that part)

The article's audience, I would contend, is not founders or 1st engineers but is the collection of folks that idealize the start-up industry without understanding the economies of it.

That you feel insulted by the thesis suggests you're squarely in the former set.

Agree--This story needs a TLDR;

{insert here}

No Exit is a Sartre play. I'm only halfway through the article so I can't speak authoritatively to why the title was chosen. My money says this is a pun, combining the the notion of the "exit" of a startup while implying that they feel stuck in a very specific manner similar to the characters of the play. FYI this is a very facile reading of the play, and Sartre is my least favorite existentialist.

I'm not an expert on him but if you want to chat about his main squeeze and intellectual better, de Beauvoir, I'll have more to say.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Exit

Definitely Sartre reference, These guys going through the misery of start up life has a 'myth of Sisyphus' feel to it, especially when Martino suggests that the best thing that could happen is that they miss their round of funding and are able to quit.

An interesting hypothesis. Thank you. Near the end they discuss how "its easy to get enough money to get in over your head, but its hard to get enough money to keep afloat". That would seem in-line with the broader reading of some kind of existential limbo-land as being (at least one of) the themes. The narrative seems oddly intractable, otherwise. Perhaps 'no exit: the new normal' is more the spirit of the piece.

Probably also a reference to American Psycho, where "No Exit" is the last part of the novel - itself a reference to Satre. Psycho, of course, was a critique of the money culture of 80s New York.

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