It's relevant because the beach controversy shows that the future that Kohsla wants to create is inimicable to the future that I want to see. He sees a big-L libertarian future, where the strong eat the weak, wealth is the sole source of power, and the wealthy act with a large degree of impunity.
So at best, I would watch with that in mind and have to critique everything he says to pick apart when he is trying to advance that view, vs observations and ideas that are not tied to it. In this case, I haven't bothered. There are others I can listen to for insight.
To sum up: a person whose goals are solely money by any and all means is therefore a criminal: antisocial and unconcerned with others.
In the Philippines and Hawaii, beaches that are restricted due to indigenous sovereignty or private ownership don't have the litter and degraded reefs of their public beaches. Unfortunately there has been a tragedy of the commons with public access.
(I work at Khosla Ventures and have raised money from Khosla in the past)
The Supreme Court refused to take up Khosla's most recent appeal, leaving in place the requirement that he leave the gate open to the access road to Martin's Beach.
It will be interesting to see what Khosla does now, given that he has exhausted his appeals in the court system.
It is fair to criticize Khosla on beach access, but his investment record is self explanatory for his opinions on tech to be worthy of an audience.
If you believe otherwise, you may also believe boycotting [YC, HN] to be valid and fair, for giving Khosla a platform, and accepting funding for post-seed rounds. This would be wrong. What we need in the valley echo-chamber is a way to disagree without carrying grudges. Diversity of thought is just as valuable as diversity of the labor force.
Most importantly, Khosla's funding, though self-serving, creates jobs and helps companies - that's something we can all get behind unequivocally
And we all have the freedom and luxury to decide how we want to react to that revelation.
- they did it exactly once
- we know from studies that these people are nondeterministicly getting rich[1]
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610395/if-youre-so-smart-...
For the average person buying a “How I Made My First Billion” book, it’s just that they’re unaware of anything, but the myth. Since the myth is being propagated by very smart and successful people, it’s that much more convincing to them. In turn the myth makes getting investment and ‘airtime’ easier, which feeds back into success. The mistake people make is thinking that Fake It Till You Make It ends at success, truthfully it only ramps up then.
Edit: This isn’t to say that the likes of Altman, Gates and others are not genuinely intelligent and capable, just that the magnitude of their success isn’t something you can reliably copy, or that beyond their core competence, they have any special insight. Yet the myth tends to extend far beyond that, and I think unjustifiably, although understandably so.
I’m reminded of the coin toss example in one of my college classes. Everyone in the class stood up and flipped a coin. If it was tails you lose and sit down. Flip again and again until there was only one person standing. Then the prof “interviewed” him to ask him how he became such a good heads-flipper and what advice he had for other aspiring heads-flippers.
Listening only to people who struck it rich in business is like getting lottery advice from only lottery winners.
>If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.
Someone in the industry, someone with considerable influence, someone active on this very forum, once told me when asked what their secret was "I worry it's been more luck than skill".
At the time my immediate thought was "bullshit, you had to have busted your ass but your background also had to have had great influence but hey fine, don't tell me". But as time has passed, much reflection, looking at their peers I now fully believe it. It was largely luck. While the individual had an interesting idea which started their journey towards success, they've had fortunate event/connection after fortunate event/connection that have allowed them to get where they are today. That has allowed them to be doing what they want to do, pursuing what they want to be pursuing, working towards a goal that they want more than anything else.
I'd say 10% idea, 20% work ethic, 70% luck.
Wish I had some luck (and maybe the ability to pass some hindsight of my personal life back to a much younger me so I'd have gotten a degree, avoided my personal bankruptcy and thus been in a much better position to actually get opportunities but alas).
Let me give you examples.
Elon Musk in Windows (I disagree with him, even in 2000, Linux kernel version 2.2.12-20, RedHat version 6.1 --old versioning--)
"In the year of 2000, Windows is considered much better than good old Unix platform. Musk wanted to move all technologies from UNIX to Windows platform. But, Unix zealots like Max Levchian (Co-founder of Confinity[1]) and his team disagreed with Elon. A holy war started, and Elon Musk lost the battle. The board fired Elon in October 2000, and appointed Peter Thiel as new CEO. Elon officially left the company's day to day operations by 2001, though he stayed on in an advisory role and as the largest shareholder."
Jeff Bezos Mandate, internal APIs (I agree with him 80% of his points, not because he is billionaire but because his argument is reasonable for the size of company he was running at the time)
" 1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. "
And so on. After working with many millionaires and billionaires I just realised that it does not matter what they say without a good argument, I have seen CEOs fired just like Elon Musk over decisions similar to move the company stack to Windows and I also have seen CEOs listening to staff and making an intelligent decision that moved the company forward. I definitely like to listen to people with reasonable arguments, especially if the things they are suggesting works.
“Khosla, Gatekeeper”
Shame on Vinod, and shame on YC/Sam.
edit: fixed the link
More to the point, everything Vinod said was fairly reasonable, some of it even contrarian (i.e. 'most VC's don't add value) which is useful given that most VC's wouldn't even dare say such a thing ... it allows for a conversation wherein one would not normally be possible.
Sam, for all of his influence and insight, doesn't yet have the clout/standing/safety to make such public statements about his own industry without severely risking his neck (and YC reputation as well). Very few people do, in any industry. I always like to hear someone taking 'their own' to task.
He was promising he could beat gasoline at $1.80/gallon by misstating the yield of ethanol per ton of wood chips.
From the Fortune article I posted:
> The Securities and Exchange Commission has been examining whether the company made false statements, including on a critical point: the yield of its biofuel (the amount that can be made per ton of wood chips). Two KiOR executives and Khosla himself are also facing a class action suit alleging that company executives misled investors about production volumes and yield.
...
> During investor calls in 2012, CEO Cannon said KiOR expected to achieve 72 gallons at a larger commercial production facility in the future and would aim to reach 92.
> The problem was that the company wasn’t regularly producing anything close to 67, much less 92. In the summer of 2011, after the company’s IPO, its new chief operating officer, Bill Coates, told management that it appeared that the company had grossly overstated its yields, according to a KiOR consultant who spoke with him and was quoted in the state’s court papers.
Repeatedly pointing out, hmm, their 'flaws', just detracts from the actual subject matter. And btw, I did enjoy this talk and likewise most of Stephen's blog posts/writings. [Only exception when such a comment would be warranted is when Stephen talks about humility ;)]
Even if what he says sounds legitimate, should we not question whether there are motives and ethics unmentioned that we might not have noticed, given his past behavior?
Should we mention it to viewers who may not be aware of who the man is, so they can ask those same questions as they watch?
If a man runs for office, and it turns out he used to be a member of the Klan, should that not weigh on the rest of his speeches, since presumably you can determine who he is not from what he has said, but from what he has done?
He has a demonstrated long history of selfishness and standing against common good. Should we be taking ideas from him? Well, if he was talking about some technical topic, I can understand your point. But "how to build a future" ....? Do we really want to learn "how to build a future" from such a selfish person?
Here we are, a community that often cares about the rest of the world; we provide shit-tons of free labor to the world at large; most hackers I know have a good heart; many of us give away products that we could really be charging for; etc. etc.
And this guy has absolutely no decency to share and be a good citizen! He's been suing anybody who disagrees with him, throwing his money at lawyers and just dragging the process along. He has benefited from the labors of others over the years (SunOS was based on BSD, for instance). But he continues to be a jerk.
BTW: this is not his first rodeo. 20+ years ago (memory is fuzzy, so apologies in advance) there was drought in the Bay Area. There were water use restrictions, and watering your lawns was forbidden/aggressively discouraged. But who in the Valley was the #1 consumer of water, using millions of gallons to water his precious lawns? Vinod Fucking Khosla.
Stay safe! The site operators of HN are off the chain, and hate discourse on this genre of topic. Probably has something to do with YCombinator also being a VC.
Edit: http://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si-muove
I don't see anything awful in here. There are absolutely people in the bay area who wish to silence other opinions. I'm a pretty liberal person and this place is ridiculous.
If Altman feels comfortable in China it is only because he is divorced from the context there.
It seems highly likely to me that the reason so many of the first employees started their own companies later is because they got a great exit and didn't need a regular job after that. In addition the experience of being an early employee at a unicorn startup probably teaches you a lot about how to build something similar again.
