2,755 karma · joined May 27, 2009
I recently discovered that there is a pretty active market in people buying/selling smaller businesses and websites like this.
Whether you like what the buyer does with it is a different issue…
If he doesn’t want to, that is also best. Whatever he wants is best because he is the biggest shareholder.
Why did you leave?
It’s not actually really possible to hoard money. A dollar is meaningless until you use it to convince someone to give you something.
If you just accumulated $1T in cash and hid it under your mattress, all those people wouldn’t just do $1T less stuff. They would just do a little more for $1 than they would’ve before. That adjustment might take a little while so the fed might (did) print $1T to speed things along.
Also, when some one like Jeff or Elon is worth $300b - it doesn’t mean he has $300b. It just means that other people are willing to purchase their shares in eg Amazon such that if were to sell all of them at that price, it would add up to $300b.
But that money didn’t change hands, it’s just indicative. And of course if Jeff were to say “I’m selling all my shares right now who wants em” the price would change dramatically because nobody actually wants to buy all that. So really he would get about half of the money or something.
Yes. And it’s a good one. Even from the point of view of job satisfaction. The more $ you are paid, the more expensive it is for the company to waste your time.
Also, it means you are working with other high-paid people, which means they are results-oriented - not there for some childish, naive crusade to change the world.
IMHO, making money IS providing something positive to the world. A lot of people are employed, and those people get to buy art or cookies or college for their kids or whatever.
A lot of customers are served, and presumably got something they wanted.
US government tells Elon to do this.
Elon says no, I won’t build actual weapons.
US government nationalises SpaceX.
Now SpaceX is as effective as the US government (ie not at all) and can no longer produce anything useful.
China wins. The end.
Their hiring model is theoretically a bell curve but when you cut off the top percentiles it severely affects the resulting performance (ie you failed to hire the 20% of ppl who were going to do 80% of the good work)
In my case it’s someone I know well but we would be located in different cities. Would love to talk to anyone who has experience with this.
1. Maybe steady-state “feeling happiness” isn’t a good goal? Like, so what if you “feel happy?” If that’s all you want, opiates are widely available.
Maybe a better set of goals would be “peak satisfaction” combined with tangible external outcomes that you consider worthwhile.
2. The accomplishments you have listed are mostly about yourself. They feel empty now because you have basically got yourself under control. What can you improve in the world outside yourself? Can you improve the company where you work? Or your family in some tangible way?
I’ll give you one small example:
My cousin and his wife had failed two expensive rounds of IVF already, and they are comfortable but not in high paying jobs. They were struggling to afford another round. They had asked the family for help with a go fund me but didn’t come close to what was needed.
I had just gotten a bonus, and the total amount needed (several $K) was an amount I could well afford so I just sent it to them. I didn’t make it a big deal, and made sure they understood they owe me nothing.
To this day, I get a warm glow of satisfaction when I see my niece or they send pictures.
Way more than what I get from checking my bank account or reflecting on other “self” accomplishments.
Hey, thank you for crystallising such a fundamental and valuable piece of wisdom so neatly.
As far as I can tell (not a psychiatrist), this individual is suffering from mental illness and could benefit greatly from cognitive behavioural therapy.
I hope he gets better soon.
Well that’s where we (you and I, but also us collectively as a country, it seems) disagree.
I don’t care that it’s hateful, and I think it should have a place on the internet, and so long as we allow monopolies on the internet, then it needs to have a place on whatever monopoly platform there is.
Anyone who thinks they should be deciding what is “hateful and has no place on the internet” is EXACTLY who should NOT be deciding such things.
So when the government is bad people who have guns, it might be tempting to think “There is no mitigation for this because they have guns! They can just exert infinite leverage at any point to squelch any mitigation to their corruption!”
But reality is there are only so many bad guys with guns and they can’t be everywhere all the time. Every additional tool people have to circumvent corruption helps.
Can they access the internet and read content from free countries? Educate themselves? It helps. Even if it invites persecution, it helps.
Can they access some way of storing value their corrupt leaders can’t just steal or print away? It helps. Sure someone can come to the door with a gun and demand your wallet key, but until then, it helps.
However, I agree with you that it is also possible for a bunch of high performing individuals to have toxic personalities and to form a totally dysfunctional team.
It isn’t necessarily, like if you are about to be employee #1. But even then you want to hear that the person (presumably cofounder) you’re talking to has considered it and will move useless ppl on.
It’s not black and white. You would be looking for a better answer from a more established team.
Consider Netflix famous presentation where it states right in there what they will do, because “it’s a sports team not a family” and they understand the massive collateral damage a single bad performer can have.
> Are they trying to figure out if they can game the system?
Yes it’s possible but a senior person at a company that does in fact have high-performing management probably won’t think that, especially if you ask it tactfully and with context. (“I have had some previous experiences where a single poor performer really dragged down the performance and morale of the whole team, how would you handle something like that here?”)
Then you can decide if you like the answers. For me personally, an answer like “performance is evaluated on (X objective criteria). Poor performers are given 3 months to demonstrate improvement on said criteria and then managed out” is good.
A refusal to answer, or waffling about how much we believe in our people, how our process ensures we don’t hire bad performers, how we develop people, etc. is bad.
This leads to a highly-agreeable, low-performance team.
One group wants to delete the tests because they think the test is racist.
The other group wants to delete it because they are actually racist.
I found the irony of it amusing.
I apologise. It’s not what I meant, in two different ways:
1. You’re not JUST a company.
2. The adult realisation isn’t that you’re a company - it’s that you’re responsible, and your decisions have Real Consequences.
I wish I could write more clearly. I made an edit to try to address this.
Thanks.