sriramk

Marc himself just commented on this https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1481095915427577856?s=21

And

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1481098552658956290?s=21

OP here. This is part of a new in-depth interview series with founders. Would love any thoughts/feedback.

Thanks for the post. I run The Observer Effect, would love any feedback or questions!

Interviewer here. Thanks for the post. It was a lot of fun to ask Marc about his productivity routine, how he spends time, how he makes decision and his "build" essay.

[OP - I posted the tweet]

If you liked this, you might like my collection of business memos here. https://sriramk.com/memos

I remember this particular memo very well as I was at Microsoft at the time and it felt so unfair to see the reaction to what you expect any good CEO to do.

I came here to ask the same thing!

I just noticed who the OP is. Kind of cool to see Ray active on HN!

Absolutely do. Ex-MSFTer. This exactly fits with the kind of behavior you see from him internally.

I can testify to this. I'm 6'6, turned 30 recently and developed chronic back pain which made walking/standing for over 15-20 minutes painful. I got frustrated and started going to the gym again and doing very basic deadlifts/leg presses/lunges a few times a week. It's been a couple of months and my back is about 70-80% better.

FWIW, I think Nathan will make a fascinating commencement speaker. He gets a lot of flak (rightfully) for Intellectual Ventures but he has a lot of success in multiple unrelated fields (cooking! archaeology! Microsoft).

You mean when Netflix streaming started - they've been around for a long time doing DVDs :).

I was about to come say this. That sentence is provably false - Foursquare took great pains to launch Swarm first and launched the other app months later. They also did extensive communication at each step of the way.

That's not corporate speak - that's very precise language in different domains. For example, anyone in sales knows exactly what that means.

I think Uber is being unfairly maligned here - too long for a comment, long piece at https://medium.com/@sriramk/in-defense-of-uber-in-india-f81c....

tldr: Uber just can't do the same checks it does in the US in other parts of the world which don't have records. And even though it did actually get the right certificate from the cops in this case, they should have thought of doing more.

That's fair but I was trying to come up with a list that wouldn't require too much tech knowhow. I'd worry much more about deleting all copies from the cloud than someone retrieving data of an old HDD/SSD. Fair point though.

I once got to meet a bunch of M&A/corp dev people from Google/FB and other companies together and asked them "What would you do if you were a founder and wanted to streamline an acquisition?". Across the board, the top response was "Have all your paperwork in order from day 1 - employment agreements, IP assignments, every single thing you can think of"

I should point out that Lumoid is a YC S13 company :). Earlier YC blog post on Lumoid here -> http://blog.ycombinator.com/lumoid-yc-s13-wants-to-rent-you-...

[Disclaimer: I'm married to the founder]

If I remember ngen is very architecture/platform specific - that is why it has to be done on the target machine. This sounds like it is done ahead of time with support for a variety of architectures.

I suspect a lot of industries build up a corporate mythology around how it is 'special' to motivate intelligent people to get to do their best work for them. I don't see the CIA as very different from every startup entrepreneur with a pitch on how they're changing the world.

Carried a MSFT blue badge for six years.

On the employee number - if security needs it, they can flip the badge around. I needed it once in six years, when I needed to type it into some internal tool.

On the employee status, that is done with badge color. Blue badges are FTE only.

Why not prohibit this outright for the YC partners ( instead of the 3 week/500k numbers).

I work at Facebook on the mobile app ads team.

Like a lot of other commenters here, I think the OP didn't run an mobile app install ad which is meant exactly for this scenario - which would show up only on mobile inside newsfeed.

OP - would love to help out and dig in further. Can you email me (I'm sriramk@fb.com)?

I suspect he thinks he should have figured out a way to do both and not make it into an explicit trade-off. In fact, I think the entire post is about how "having+eating the cake" is possible if you put some effort into it.

Sounds like some data cleanup issue. Definitely an outlier that should probably be ignored.

I came here expecting something stupid but this doc isn't completely unreasonable. From the perspective of warning newbies or my mother (say) about investing in bitcoin, it does a fair job. Or rather, it could have been far, far worse.

When I was at Microsoft, I actually remember Bill talking about how he's a hard person to buy gifts for. I think he said (I could be misremembering this) that he doesn't watch certain TV shows he really enjoys because he wants to be gifted the DVDs. He specifically mentioned 24.

I know he also really enjoys DVDs from the Teaching Company and has a pretty extensive collection.

Agreed - this is pragmatic advice. It definitely works on an individual level. But if this is something acceptable to go work on yourself, from the other side of the table, does it automatically become ok to judge people on?

There's a logical inconsistency between saying a) Don't judge people on their accents, listen to the message and b) Fix your accent.

To pg's credit I think he frames this purely on efficacy of communication ( it's similar to typing out better phrased emails) but that ignores the other reasons people with accents get judged.

I think some of the folks here are casting aspersions on the folks arguing with PG - there are some reasonable arguments in there.

PG's stance (my interpretation) is - (1) Founders need to sell to be effective and (2) Having a strong accent makes it hard to communicate effectively and in turn, sell.

I get that (I have an accent myself).

People are objecting to the underlying assumption that this causation is something we deem acceptable. Here's a counter example. (1) Founders need to sell (2) Part of selling is to make the audience identify with you, so founders who look/act like their audience do better. This suddenly becomes a slippery slope, even if that's a perfectly logical argument.

tldr: (Correlation or causation) != acceptable.

As someone who spent five years working at MSFT under Steve as CEO, my first reaction is sadness. Steve spent over three decades working there, it is an end of an exceptional career, regardless of how his run as CEO might have been.

Go Lumoid - so happy to see them finally out in the open! Disclosure - I'm married to one of the founders :).