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For programmers, I had a vision—partly because I had been teaching programmers at MIT—that I didn't like the way that programmer careers turned out. Now that I fly airplanes, I realize that the average programmer is really much less happy in his/her job than the average airplane mechanic, which is pretty sad when you consider that becoming an airplane mechanic is an 18-month trade school education. For $30,000 and a year and a half, you can become an airplane mechanic (even less if you want to work as an apprentice for 3 years and get your FAA certification). You work in a small group, you meet the customer directly. You don't have the alienation from the customer that Karl Marx talked about as being a bad thing about factory work versus craftsmanship—that you never find out if your work really connects with people because you're in a factory and the customer is at the other end of a railroad line.
Airplane mechanics have a direct interaction with the customer. A lot of the jobs require two to three people, so it's kind of social, and I noticed that they're just really happy. Programmers are isolated. They sit in their cubicle; they don't think about the larger picture. To my mind, a programmer is not an engineer, because an engineer is somebody who starts with a social problem that an organization or a society has and says, "OK, here's this problem that we have—how can we solve it?" The engineer comes up with a clever, cost-effective solution to address that problem, builds it, tests it to make sure it solves the problem. That's engineering. If you look at civil engineers, architects, they're all dealing directly with the customer and going through the whole process.
a marx reference in this book ... wow
I wanted them to have a real professional résumé. In the end, the project was a failure because the industry trends moved away from that. People don't want programmers to be professionals; they want programmers to be cheap. They want them to be using inefficient tools like C and Java. They just want to get them in India and pay as little as possible. But I think part of the hostility of industrial managers toward programmers comes from the fact that programmers never had been professionals.
wish he could be more specific about who 'they' is
So it was falling apart very quickly financially; I could tell that. The board meetings got more acrimonious. They actually precipitated the ultimate fight. They said, "Look, we're going to kick you off the board and sue you for injuring our self-esteem. You better talk to a lawyer."
Livingston: Didn't you also insult them by describing publicly what it was like to have VCs run your company?
Greenspun: Only after they sued me. I said it was like watching a kindergarten class get into a Boeing 747 and flip all the switches and try to figure out why it won't take off. That was before I got my pilot's license. Now I know how apt it was.
lol
Kaufer: Chapter one is starting up the company, getting anyone interested in what we do. Chapter two was hitting that profitability mark so we could break even. Chapter three is growing, and if it so happens, as it did with us, a great liquidity event. Chapter four is, "OK, are you done with the business? Do you already have a commanding number one market share and no competitors?" Well, that's pretty rare. Certainly it isn't true for us. We may be ahead of our competitors, or tied with our competitors, but how close am I to being the number one travel site in the world? Well, I'm pretty far away from that. I have some sister companies that have that spot. But I look at it and say, "Why wouldn't everyone want to start on TripAdvisor when planning a trip?" So if I have 20 million uniques a month now, why don't I have 50 million? My definition of chapter four is being the most popular travel site in the world.
im sorry but this is kinda sad
Livingston: Why was HOT or NOT instantly so popular?
Hong: Looking at hot chicks is fun. It's voyeurism. The concept at the time was so new and edgy. No one had ever seen it before or thought about it. It was just so funny—and painful too. Like voting for people who were so ugly that you wondered why they were voluntarily doing it.
Livingston: Did you ever catch any shit from your technology friends?
Hong: Why would I catch shit? What would they be mad at me about?
Livingston: That you were squandering your education and talent on creating a site for ranking people's attractiveness?
Hong: Most techies would dream of that, are you kidding? People in Silicon Valley are entrepreneurs, they're not the risk-averse types that would think I was wasting my education. I was the first among my MBA classmates that made it into the Wall Street Journal.
lol
Hong: I think entrepreneurs want to make money. It's not that they do it for the money, but they want to make money. Because money is the measuring stick; it's how they know if they've won or not. And I think a lot of what drives entrepreneurs is the kind of legacy they are going to leave. They want to make a mark in the world and feel like their life mattered. Entrepreneurs are the kind of people who love ideas and want to build things, and add value to the world.
true
Livingston: Now that you're out of the maze, do you get asked out on a lot dates through HOT or NOT?
Hong: Yeah. I actually stopped using my dating service a long time ago as a way to find my own dates, because everyone on there knows who Jim and I are, and many of the ones who seek us out are crazy. I would often get random emails from women sending me naked pictures and all sorts of weird stuff. A lot of them want to date us because they have low self-esteem and they think dating us will suddenly make them hot and cool. Crazy, psycho girls can be fun to date for a while, but I'm a little older now and I'm looking for something a little more serious.
The ironic thing is that from running HOT or NOT, I care less about looks now. When I was a dork, I never really dated anyone who was hot. The models—they weren't going to date me. So you always aspire to it, they're like the untouchables. All of a sudden, HOT or NOT happened, and I was starting to date all these attractive women. I got a taste of it and I realized that looks don't make up for a good personality. Many of these girls were annoying. They were fun to hang out with, but I couldn't have a conversation with them. I'm sure there are smart and hot girls, but if you look at the hot ones first, it's harder to figure out if they are smart too. That takes time.
oh boy
One of the things that I think is dogma within venture capital is that you don't want to manage what they call the "living dead." I don't know what the numbers are now, but back when I was working with venture capitalists, their rules of thumb were: typically one out of ten companies is a really big hit; roughly three out of ten go belly up pretty quickly, and you get rid of them. The other five to six are what they call the "living dead." They grow nicely, organically, but don't generate spectacular returns, and they take management time and energy. Those are the kinds of companies they prefer not to deal with, because it simply doesn't make sense. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their limited partners to generate a significant return, so they want to deal with firms that will tend to do that.
After the best book, the most beautiful woman, or the finest desert you've ever seen, you tell yourself this is where the rest of your life begins.
In fact, something else happens: another book, another woman, another desert. And the rest of your life becomes life itself. It was merely the illusion of the end.
The only solution to the drugs problem is to make drugs a universal medium of exchange, the new general equivalent. That way, they would no longer be consumed. Shifting from use-value to exchange-value, they would become as abstract as gold or paper. You could store several thousand tons of drugs as international reserve funds, the way they do with gold at Fort Knox. For Gold Exchange Standard, read: Narcotic Exchange Standard.
lmao