> I asked John how his product was doing, and he said that he’s looking to hire a CEO with more product experience...when I talked to him further, he said he was still looking to launch his MVP...So after 1.5 years, John basically spent $10,000+ attending financial conferences, collected no revenue, and hasn’t even launched a working website
Laughing at how real this is. This is exactly the situation with me and a friend. We both had an idea for different businesses 2 years ago.
He prints business cards, incorporates a business, talks about partnerships, a launch party, worries about getting too big....and has no users.
I quit my job to code away in the morning, reply to user feedback in the afternoon and emulate my competitor's marketing at night. I did this every day....and just passed 100,000 users. Hardly anybody knows what I do.
The difference between us: he works for a big tech company where everyone talks about their app idea™ over lunch and lives in a city where splashing $1000 on bottle service is seen as smart instead of foolish. I don't. Instead I grind for two simple reasons: to be free of a boss and to make something people find valuable.
I love my friend and I'm not knocking his approach, nor saying mine is better. But printing business cards before gaining users is a bizarre way to order one's priorities.
Not saying I'm successful in the web area, but one thing I try to do is to have some working code before buying a domain name.
Like business cards, buying a domain name makes it seem like you're doing something, but you're really not. You haven't even started; you're just throwing a small amount of money down the drain and dreaming of some future moneymaker.
I'm sure there are many people who have domain names for 1+ years but haven't worked on the product the whole time. I did that once and then learned my lesson!
If it helps, think of buying (and choosing) the domain name as the reward for making something work :)
----
EDIT: "playing house" is the term that Paul Graham uses for people who go through the motions of starting a business without understanding what they're doing.
I'm pretty sure thoroughness and self-discipline is what actually matters. Going to a site and actually buying the darn name is actually work some dreamers are too lazy to even start. You have to be pretty convicted that this is the name you're going to plaster all over the place for a while.
You also have to be pretty darn sure your name might go very soon if you don't stake it asap.
I bought my domain name (my user name) relatively early (before I had even learned Node) because as Chinese names often go, vtang was already taken and many easy alternatives as well. I ended up with an "e" at the end for "engineer" but as we all know there is probably a Vincent Tang out there in the world who is also an engineer. Checked all social media and hammered things in asap.
i like your naecdote but wanted to add another perspective on the business cards.
there are different paths to success. one path is through sales, in which a good prototype/demo and pitch can get you early, paying customers.
you print up business cards and product sheets--even before you have a company set up--and hand them out during sales meetings to bring a little bit of legitimacy to your venture, and that's worth the $15-20 (plus design time) it takes.
Yeah. For some markets the business cards, registered company name and client specific conferences and illusion of prestige actually earns you the users to pay you up front to write the code, or are more important than the code period.
(funnily enough, I walked out on a fledgling fintech startup with a guy from a similar background to John from the article whose prestige obsession was the opposite: paying for people to write serious amounts of software to create a more mostly-cosmetically modern bespoke internal document management system he was convinced he needed to get the partners he needed to take his ideas for disrupting other aspects of their mostly customer marketing & relationship driven business model seriously. Frustrating when he had connections to potential needed partners anyway and they were more worried about leadgen than anything else, something he knew a fair bit about about and could have focused on instead, but something that might have resulted in falling at the first hurdle...
tbf he paid for it, stuck at it and his business is showing some signs of life these days)
Yes, I don't mean to dismiss business cards. They matter. But for the type of biz (customer facing Saas) and the amount of progress made (zero) they didn't matter as much as almost everything else.
Bad grammar made that sentence more confusing than it should have been so I fixed it.
What I mean is I spend 1/3 of my day looking at how my competitors got to where they are and try to replicate it. Did they get featured in Lifehacker, are they trying any shady stuff like purchasing positive app store reviews, are their primary channels email or search - this kind of stuff. I try copy their secret sauce and add my own.
To seek prestige runs far deeper in our minds than one would think. It comes from a place of uncertainty and fear.
There is an interesting theory called "social comparison" [1], which states that one way to define ourselves is to compare us with our peers, either upward or downward. It's pretty on point in my personal opinion, because I do it as well. And when I have mentioned this theory while chatting with friends, they confirmed that they do it, too.
We humans are brittle creatures that pretend to be very strong and independent in order to survive and not be vulnerable.
Exactly, and it's because we, as all animals that live in groups, have a strong sense of hierarchy inside the group and our place within it. Position inside the group is a primary unit of one's perceived "value".
I'm glad this is brought up. ever since I left Google my parents no longer have much to brag about when taking to relatives about me. I got to spend a year doing stuff I was passionate about without having to defend my decisions to anybody and it was so liberating. Life is much more fun when you are not in the spot light, you can pretty much do whatever you want.
In my time off, I built a few profitable projects and gave away CEO title to my friends. I write blog posts anonymously so my name is never associated with anything. It was a pretty big mindset shift, but it's been pretty good so far
I would love to hear more about your experience doing this. Would you be willing to share links to your blog (perhaps privately, since your name is in your profile)?
> In fact, I don’t think I’ve cared about prestige since 2010
Yeah, right. We're all wired to seek prestige. If we don't get it we wither and sulk. He just figured out that he's unlikely to get it via traditional means, and decided to seek it via an alternative route. Perhaps there are extremely rare mentally atypical people who really don't care about prestige, but it almost certainly isn't you or me or the blogger. Be careful about the lies you tell yourself.
I respect financial samurai a great deal and his posts give me a lot to think about, especially when I respectfully disagree with some of his points.
Some thoughts:
1)Life is hard and humans respond to that in a variety of ways, like desire for prestige. However prestige is one thing that can be given and received freely as well. Compliments are a great way to build a culture of cost-free prestige. It’s not always about climbing the stack rank.
2)
Consumption as prestige is a trap created by marketing, but at the same time a signal that works well in some cultures. Signaling you desire more let’s leaders know you are hungry to grow. You can think of this as unfortunate, but it’s very real.
3)
Sometimes it is just nice to have nice things.
I find the desire for external prestige dies when your internal sense of prestige grows. You see many wealthy people become unconcerned with showing off after achieving real goals in the world. That being said they still live in mansions and drive exotic vehicles.
> Signaling you desire more let’s leaders know you are hungry to grow.
Is that really how it works? If I look at Chinese materialism as prestige, I don't see anybody signaling that they are hungry. I only see people signaling that they have stuff and that somehow having stuff equates happiness and "something good".
One interpretation of this is leaders viewing a young, "hungry" employee who likes to spend money as being more reliant on a salary than someone who's identity isn't so tied to spending money. If the hungry one needs a steady salary to maintain their lifestyle, they're more likely to be loyal to the company because they can't afford to leave. Of course that depends on the employee being someone the company actually wants to keep around and and whether the company can afford to pay them above market value.
American Corp culture still sees a hungry young worker with good taste as “one of them”. Knowing what car to take to the track, sailing knowledge, or what Hermès scarf to buy as a gift for their partner as comforting conversation fodder that makes them more comfortable with you.
"Always prioritize the substance of what you're doing. Don't get caught up in the status, the prestige games. They're endlessly dazzling, and they're always endlessly disappointing.” -Peter Thiel
I like the quote, and in fact, the whole source article is well worth reading. But it's hard to take statements like this from billionaires who already won the status / prestige games at 100% face value.
Yes, because prestige runs behind what is actually valuable. Prestige is what other people think is valuable.
If everyone thinks it's valuable, then there's insane competition, and you're unlikely to get meaningfully ahead (unless you're simply smarter and work harder than everyone else).
PG wrote several paragraphs about prestige here which still ring true to me:
It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
(Corrolary: it was best to join YC when it wasn't prestigious, e.g. when Reddit or Dropbox did. Now that it's prestigious, it's probably less valuable. Although it could still be valuable compared to the alternatives.)
When looking at something like joining yc, wouldn't the prestige make it more valuable, because of the extended network and the increased reverence shown to it by outsiders?
I'm sure the network is valuable compared to alternatives, but it's probably diluted now, compared to joining when YC had no prestige. Your peers then would have been the current leaders of YC.
Customers don't give you money because you joined a good accelerator, so in that sense the "reverence" is useless. It's also a double-edged sword, because you'll attract people who are looking to ride your coattails, as opposed to doing useful work.
Apparently this phenomenon is common enough that PG has a word for it: "playing house". People join YC and play house rather than start companies.
Seems to me that prestige usually follows from from things that signal wealth or at least potential for future wealth. Better than prestige is actually being wealthy / financially independent. He sort of implies this in the article w/o stating it directly.
If you are in your 20's the take away might be to focus on keeping your costs low and maximizing savings to reach that point of financial independence earlier.
>But is this advice useful or actionable for people in their 20s?
Absolutely. There are countless people struggling to get into the media in LA or NYC who could walk into a good job at an advertising firm in Cleveland or Tulsa. If you're considering founding a startup, you're probably better off organically growing a B2B product aimed at a relatively obscure market sector than going for the B2C unicorn. If you're looking to buy a house, you can find some real bargains that have ugly exteriors or are in unfashionable suburbs. Vacations in well-known resorts tend to be overpriced and overrated.
I really liked the parts where they talk about how new luxury items are often based on some technical aspect that makes the new product much better than what was there before.
I remember one point about how the old luxury was based on rarity. People with a nice watch didn't want to see others wearing the same watch. But with high end mountain bikes it is actually very cool to see others on the trail with the same gear.
Glad to see this blog pop up here. The author has great insights about investing, FIRE and careers, even though his worldview is skewed towards the SF bubble heavily.
> If we can figure out how to rid ourselves of the desire for prestige, we will become much happier in the process!
Why not just take this to the limit and become a Buddhist then?
I'll answer that question: because our desires are possibly adaptive and are what keep us alive. The problem is not prestige, it's holding the wrong things to be prestigious.
korea has the highest suicide rate in the oecd, not really fair to say that antidepressant use is correlated with depression rate. similarly antidepressants are not widely available in japan (not even included in his chart) and japan's suicide rate is also very high.
Prestige is just a variant of respect, but motivated by appearance rather than substance. It's basically envy. Like fame, it's shallow and derivative, and it works only when no one gets to look behind the curtain.
An article about unhealthy desire for prestige has surfaced on HN, a subsidiary of a very prestigious VC firm, a site with clever upvotes and, most importantly, karma system. It strikes me as ironic.
I also think that John was a metaphorical figure. I can name a few startups that got financed early and are now attending conferences, hiring and spending a lot of money, without actually doing anything for their business.
Laughing at how real this is. This is exactly the situation with me and a friend. We both had an idea for different businesses 2 years ago.
He prints business cards, incorporates a business, talks about partnerships, a launch party, worries about getting too big....and has no users.
I quit my job to code away in the morning, reply to user feedback in the afternoon and emulate my competitor's marketing at night. I did this every day....and just passed 100,000 users. Hardly anybody knows what I do.
The difference between us: he works for a big tech company where everyone talks about their app idea™ over lunch and lives in a city where splashing $1000 on bottle service is seen as smart instead of foolish. I don't. Instead I grind for two simple reasons: to be free of a boss and to make something people find valuable.
I love my friend and I'm not knocking his approach, nor saying mine is better. But printing business cards before gaining users is a bizarre way to order one's priorities.