http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...
It's just that the feels like work part of his job only lasts 15 minutes, signing cheques, etc. He just doesn't do the "I work 8 hours 5 days a week thing", if the site is fucked up he is there til it's fixed. If everything is on track, he might be there an hour or two.
I'd love a reason to stop disparaging my father's mega-millions dreams and the dozens of people that frequent my local 7-11 for countless scratch-offs everyday.
I have a gut feeling that a study of the odds/payout ratio of being apart of any given startup acquisition is better than what you'd get from any given lottery/scratch off... though I'm not taking into account the associated costs. How many tickets/scratch-offs is an 80 hour week for a full stack engineer worth?
So, here's me hoping you weren't being facetious.
This is the study I'm interested in performing.
> So, here's me hoping you weren't being facetious.
Not at all! I'd rather buy X lottery tickets on the most advantageous schedule, enjoy working 32-35 hours a week, and spend the rest of my time with family, on hobbies, or traveling.
I'm not going to fault someone for working 80-100 hours a week if that's what they enjoy doing, but if they're doing it to get rich, let's see if the data supports those odds.
When you consider reward/(risk*effort) rather than just risk/reward it wouldn't surprise me if lotteries came out on top.
But... the thing you don't get from a lottery is a statement like this: my life-partner and I met through PoF almost ten years ago, and I will be forever grateful to Marcus for building the site that made that possible.
We had both been on other sites previously, and we had actually seen each other's profiles on other sites in the year or two before we met while we were both in a post-divorce dating phase, but PoF had the right mix of features that it happened to be where we actually connected with each other.
As I recall, I saved her profile for later consideration at one point, and the site (unbeknownst to me) notified users when that happened, so she looked at my profile and contacted me with something along the lines of, "Don't hesitate, I won't be here long!" I didn't, and she wasn't.
Now, I agree that accolades from strangers doesn't necessarily balance off time not spent with your family, but it is another factor in the overall equation, knowing you've made the world a better place for a lot of people.
Do what you enjoy, ensure someone is getting value out of it, but don't spend too much of your life on any one thing. Everything in moderation.
We really need to drop the facade that working a startup will always be beneficial to you, or lead you to wealth and/or success. Sometimes, its going to tear your soul from you and you may not come back from it for a long time.
Then again, I'm not much of a gambler in general.
It's time we started charging them for those options.
A successful startup is not an accident, and a failed startup is not just a lack of luck. Make good business choices, product choices, and infrastructure choices and you can make the startup a success. On the other hand make poor product choices, and poor business choices and your startup will fail.
On the other hand there is very little strategy or way to improve your odds of success when gambling.
Think of it as a really large poker game where you didn't have to put any money in the pot and can play a random hand for $2 and win the entire pot. Personally, once it's in the 100M+ range I'll grab a ticket while getting gas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw
Kazemi is more of an programmer-artist or -comedian, but he releases dozens of side projects a year, all relatively low effort. He uses himself as a test case and also examines KickStarters and how unpredictable their success is.
When he does engage in conversation, Frind can be disarmingly frank, delivering vitriolic quips with a self-assured cheerfulness that feels almost mean. Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), he says, is "a complete joke," Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is "a cult," and Match is "dying." ...
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sci.math/AZD_CalO7as
I am not an expert, but it seems he wrote some highly optimized code to do it:
> The search was conducted over 10 days on a AMD 1800XP and checked > about 20,667,931,547 Potential AP 22's per Second.
Since RAM follows Moore's law you could always keep the users in RAM if you wrote effective queries because user growth didn't outpace Moore's law. All you had to do was build a server big enough.
C# definitely helped vs ruby, the real kicker was stored procs, everything was a highly tuned stored proc. The huge insights I got was latency, by keeping everything close together you could run some really abysmal synchronous code with out cratering everything.
Also, he really cared about the ant hill more than the ants. He would do horrible things to the ants that would encourage them to build a bigger ant hill. (Ants are users, employees were treated very well)
As a fictional example, lets say the site was skewing too heavily male by 20%, just add a line in the stored proc that gave a male user a 20% chance of their registration not being written to disk. Voila, site has the proper mix, onto the next problem. He was the most brutally effective person I've ever worked with.
But seriously, go to a club... same thing...
The architecture post on high scalability is truly inspirational.