bluethunder

Amazing stuff. Good Luck!!

Very Interesting Stuff.

I can see the evaporative cooling happening in HN itself over the last year or so.

Also, puts in perspective the correlation between the success of Yahoo Answers and their reputation system.

I think this could be one of the 2 things:

1. There is something else which is pre-occupying your subconscious mind. Probably something which you are trying to sideline as not a big deal, but subconsciously it is a big deal. Find out what that is and take care of it head-on. This will fix itself after that.

2. You might not see yourself being 'successfull' in this job over a longer term. For example, you want to do a startup and even though you need this job for the money, you still understand that your longer term interests are better served by quitting right now and doing a startup. It could be something else but essentialy what could be happenning is that your subconsious realizes that you doing this work is not getting you any closer to your longer term goals and hence it is revolting.

Do not seek to change yourself or your circumstances right now. Only seek to understand yourself - once you have done that these things will go away by themselves.

I am essentially questioning the fact that 'transparency, tolerance and a fair court system' might not really be democratic ideals, or rather cannot consistently be associated with democracy. It is definitely possibly to acheive all of them in a communist system of governance.

India is a democracy, but the state is hardly transparent, tolerance has given way to appeasement for vote politics and the court/legal system does not work anymore.

Again, I only referred to a communist form of governance, not the market. I understand China to have a communist form of governance (single party) and a capitalist market.

India is definitely a lot more socialist than China and even the US. My guess is also that US is more socialist than China now, but this was not the case 20years ago - this also is indicative of the strengths of a communist form of governance.

When I said communist, I meant it with an obvious context to China - essentially not meant to say a communist society(as in socialism) but instead a communist single-party government.

Similarly for Singapore. I understand China to be a lot more capitalist than India for example. It is true that Japan and a lot of european countries have done better with democracy, however they typically have a lot homogenous populations - very unlike of bigger countries like the US, China and India and also unlike some smaller countries like Singapore.

Even then there is little reason to believe if a communist form of government would not have done better in these countries also.

The rise of China will most likely prove the communist model to be the best model of governance.

The growth that China has seen over the last 20 years has surpassed anything that any other country has ever achieved - even the US.

And if a country throws up a George Bush for 10 years and then an Obama who doesnt seem to deliver much, democracy has already lost. Similarly with India, democracy simply does not work, and Singapore where communism has done wonders.

Somehow I have always seen an American corporation as having a communist structure and rarely experimented (mostly unsuccessfully) with a democratic one.

This is an amazing post.

Thanks for laying out your version of the story which I feel is definitely more accurate. Why did you not decide to not pursue Wesabe for the long term ?

As I understand, Mind did well in some places like immidiate gratification but was bad in accurately aggregating financial statistics. You could have reworked your UI to provide the immidiate gratification and over time also made a more robust aggregator.

Also, the fact as you state is that Mint/Wesabe both did not really make a dent in the market. Additionally, the fact that Mint has got acquired, most likely they never will. It is extremely unlikely that Mint after being acquired will be able to keep pace with Wesabe. More so the fact that you guys had substantial revenue , you could have cut the fat and dumbed down for a long haul easily.

This is an amazing post. Thanks for laying out your version of the story which I feel is definitely more accurate.

Why did you not decide to not pursue Wesabe for the long term ?

As I understand, Mind did well in some places like immidiate gratification but was bad in accurately aggregating financial statistics. You could have reworked your UI to provide the immidiate gratification and over time also made a more robust aggregator.

Also, the fact as you state is that Mint/Wesabe both did not really make a dent in the market. Additionally, the fact that Mint has got acquired, most likely they never will. It is extremely unlikely that Mint after being acquired will be able to keep pace with Wesabe. More so the fact that you guys had substantial revenue , you could have cut the fat and dumbed down for a long haul easily.

I guess the zonda 'drives' home dhh's 'lifestyle business' philosophy probably more than anything else.

This seems like the right split. Also the founders would have the capacity to issue more shares - so if it takes longer than 4 years then they can issue stocks to whoever sticks around after that.

Couldnt agree more. Also I think 'convincing' anyone to do a startup is amazingly dangerous. Even in the situations that it can be done, it should not be. You cannot, or rather should not convince anyone on doing a startup.

This is one aspect where PG has gone really wrong on his essays, which are otherwise brilliant. As you rightly put it it harms startups more than help.

A related point is that I have never seen equal co-founders in a startup which have succeeded. There is almost always an anchor/leadership which takes a last call.

This is an awesome piece from PG. I have known/felt all of the stuff but was never able to articulate it as well.

Musk is an icon I cannot admire enough.

His ex-wife is a gold-digger blogger I cannot hate enough. The least she could do is to leave him alone with his work.

I think the internet has this culture going of generalizing (making rules) even with little experience.

It really takes a couple of tries, experience and insight to decouple correlation with causation.

Sachin is still too early in the game, I would go with Ben.

"Beware of associates". I cannot stress this enough.

DO NOT EVER WASTE YOUR TIME MEETING WITH ASSOCIATES IF THERE ARE NO PARTNERS PRESENT. They have no freaking clue. By associates I mostly mean MBA's with no startup founding experience.

Infact there are VC partners in India who are more like associates in the US, with absolutely zero founding experience. Stay as far away from them as possible. Do not cold call them and dont take their calls - they are not worth the time and dont know shit.

I think the crucial reason is only that most people in paypal made tons of cash and they generally hired smart people.

Everything else this post mentions is probably reading too much between the lines and is more similar to the over-romanticising commonly associated with fluff journalism pieces.

I would argue that some tweaks to their original plan would have make it work much better, plus some plain old evangelising.

The pricing for one thing was too expensive and should have more slabs (say starting from something like 10$ a month). $120/month is a serious commitment, expecially on something which might not really take of also.

imho the new plan is extremely complex and there is really no reason why i would want a community to 'approve' of my new qna site. Just plain wrong at the roots wrong.