The “It” Crowd Doesn’t Like Me and I Finally Don’t Care

http://juliefredrickson.tumblr.com/post/43321974630/the-it-crowd-doesnt-like-me-and-i-finally-dont-care

by brianvan5155 • 13 years ago

128 106 13 years ago

juliefredrickson.tumblr.com

Redoubtable16• 13 years ago

I will upvote my own ramble!

jpdoctor• 13 years ago

And did it serve its purpose?

Redoubtable16• 13 years ago

Unburden myself from otherwise useless and unproductive emo feelings? I sure hope so.

tptacek• 13 years ago

You can curse us all you want. I curse things at random all the time. But then get back to work. The challenge you've briefly engaged with isn't a problem; it's a market opportunity. While the "it" crowd is repeatedly failing to achieve any lasting success with their completely pointless photo-sharing applications running on their 4th successive new storage backend (was mysql, then mongo, then homebrew, now postgres; really, was database-of-the-week really the social scene you wanted an entry pass into?), pick out offerings specifically based on what the "it" crowd would find unfashionable.

See if they're not begging you for jobs a few years from now.

The valley clique isn't a privilege for 20-something men; it's a trap for them. It eats their time, and, at least where it intersects with Hacker News, serves to out people you'll know never to work with professionally.

Redoubtable16• 13 years ago

Could not agree with you more. Part of the reason I wrote this was so I could mentally reset myself to get back to work. Frankly I'm embarrassed I got caught in the trap and spent valuable emotional energy on it caring about it in the first place. - Julie

thesagan• 13 years ago

Frankly, I needed to read your blog post for a "situation" I'm currently in, so your embarrassment is not in vain :)

michaelwww• 13 years ago

It might help to think of the Hollywood model. The pretty young men they put out front are the actors and you are the writer. It's been noted before many times that writers don't get much respect, but they are the geniuses who come up with the narrative, the dialog, and the ideas that make up a successful production. Writers usually don't show off well to investors or at parties. That's where the pretty faces come in. I'm usually dismissive of the next young genius on the cover, because I'm more interested in the real brains behind the outfit, who may or may not be marginally social-able introvert living in an eco-bunker somewhere who definitely does not want the attention.

marquis• 13 years ago

Try travelling and telling people what you do - you'll blow their minds. I take my laptop anywhere from New Zealand to Dubai to Argentina, and working On The Internet is still a novelty that you'll gain hearts and minds from the wonder of it all. Get some perpective on how awesome your life and work is!

larrys3• 13 years ago

"I got caught in the trap and spent valuable emotional energy"

Of course as a result of hitting that tipping point many more people know who you are now which isn't a bad thing and could have some future benefits.

doctorpangloss• 13 years ago

We make money. In the reality markets people pay us. And they pay us more for the product than it costs to create it.

I understand you were venting here, but in this paragraph it sounds like you still care deeply about how the It crowd perceives you.

javajosh• 13 years ago

>it's a market opportunity.

Yes, but not the one you describe, I think. The opportunity is for someone to present a coherent mental model for what's going on in tech that will fit so well that, even as it undresses VCs and startups in all their pointless glory, they will thank you for the insight. Someone who gets most of the large-scale points right is Carlota Perez. I think that her ideas can and should be applied to the "attention economy", ubiquitous computing, and human psychology, particularly with a certain moral bent that admits, for example, that moving someone's attention from what is more valuable to that person to what is less valuable for them (but more valuable to you), is wrong.

P.S. Homebrew is a package manager for osx, not a storage backend. </pedant>

barrkel• 13 years ago

I believe by homebrew he meant roll-your-own.

biscarch3• 13 years ago

I seem to have fallen into a version of this trap.

MongoDB has made me a nice chunk of change as a consultant. These days when I mention MongoDB people don't even hide the crazy looks. The interview/meeting might as well be over then and there.

Since mentioning mongo sets the conversation back, I've instead choosing to focus my energies delving deeper into ecosystems like Riak-Core/Erlang which many developers still don't have a firm grasp on and are considered "serious" databases.

It seems to be working, but we'll see where I am a few years from now.

mrchess• 13 years ago

Is MongoDB certainly declared "bad" now or something? I still thought Mongo is a viable option? Why would they give you crazy looks?

nswanberg2• 13 years ago

Bringing up photo sharing apps was perhaps only a setup for bagging on over-excited storage technology enthusiasts, and I think I agree with your larger point of ignoring the somewhat arbitrary values of in groups, but with that said...

Only in the last five or so years have large groups of people been carrying around high-quality usable digital cameras with permanent internet connectivity, and even in those years the picture quality, usability, and connectivity have been getting better, and the number of devices out their keeps growing.

World wide web search has been thought to have been solved several times until Google came along, and even now, fortunately, folks have not given up on solving the problem of people searching for things.

So in five years how can a bunch of male 20-something storage fetishists in SV have solved all of the problems of photo sharing for everyone? Surely there are problems to solve remaining for them, or for anyone else who do not share their particular needs and want to take a crack.

And there are quite a few more problems to be solved in people sharing pictures of things.

jakejake• 13 years ago

I think you are right, but it probably won't be a company that's essentially copying whatever every current "cool" startup is doing but putting an "r" on the end of their company name. It'll be people who truly innovate.

radio4fan3• 13 years ago

What is this mysterious drivel?

Who is brianvan5155 and why hasn't he made any comments?

How has this made it to the front page?

What can it all mean?

Redoubtable16• 13 years ago

Apparently it is my mysterious drivel! I have no idea how it got to the front page and this is Brian Van: http://brianvan.tumblr.com/

brianvan51553• 13 years ago

I'm a web producer and developer. I'm an early commenter from Slashdot, Ars Technica, and Gawker. I've been using online communities for 22 years, longer than some people around here have been alive. I've read quite a few threads on HN and respect this as a news source, and I haven't felt fit to contribute until now.

I've been talking with Julie about her experiences as a like-minded professional and I also remain baffled why her extremely sensible business plan continues to //receive tepid interest// (EDIT: originally wrote "go unfunded" here but I'm speaking inaccurately and out-of-line) despite an aggressive half-year VC campaign while the most harebrained ideas in the world (founded by prep school dudes) seem to effortlessly accumulate resources provided by others... including free press from many of the news sources that get shared here frequently. I believe business leaders in our industry play favorites and manipulate us into believing their partners are somehow better and more deserving than the rest of us... and that it fattens their bottom line and increases their domination of the culture of this industry. I think more of us need to take a stand against this... if not just on principle, but because it's good business and certainly a better plan than the lengthy boom/bust cycles this VC ruling class keeps leading the rest of us through like lemmings, leading to capital shortages and employment drop-offs that starve families and stifle innovation.

So, let's use this as a forum to discuss what may or may not be wrong about this view of things.

rdouble5• 13 years ago

remain baffled why her extremely sensible business plan continues to go unfunded despite an aggressive half-year VC campaign while the most harebrained ideas in the world

Maybe cuz it's an API for social games. No Silicon Valley VC will fund anything that has to do with games these days. Untried harebrained ideas at least don't have dismal track records yet.

RyanZAG2• 13 years ago

If you believe that the current VC crowd is playing favorites and passing over highly profitable investments, it would be heavily in your best interests to become a small-time VC and help fund these projects. There is a lot of money in backing the winner.

And there is always Kickstarter.

radio4fan3• 13 years ago

Well this makes sense to me in a way that the post didn't. I didn't identify 'tech' as meaning 'VC ruling class'. I guess I'm just obtuse.

homosaur• 13 years ago

Chasing VC money is becoming an increasingly stupid thing to do with your business. The sooner everyone realizes this and start to build businesses that actually reflect need, the better off we'll be.

I cannot imagine how many people's 20's have been wasted in the last decade chasing some mythical social web 2.0 dollar. We need to understand that most of the Instagrams of the world got lucky simply because of the bubble and the confusion over what's a viable business on the Internet not because they've actually created billions in value.

They won a damn lottery, they aren't creating models for new business.

erikpukinskis• 13 years ago

Who are these women and brown people interrupting the sanctity of our hacker space!?

reinhardt• 13 years ago

Lame attempt to derail a civilized discussion to yet another (imaginary) minority exploitation brouhaha is lame.

radio4fan3• 13 years ago

That's amazing! I snipe at link to a post which happens to be written by a woman, and you conclude that I'm sexist and a racist to boot.

Do you also read tea leaves?

michaelochurch2• 13 years ago

Life... dreams... hope... where do they come from? And where do they go? -- Kefka

SatvikBeri• 13 years ago

The continuation of that quote makes this really morbid :).

rosenjon2• 13 years ago

Nice post. I'll take revenue and profitability over media hype and "it" status any day of the week. It's kind of shocking how many early stage companies have absolutely no plan for revenue/profit, and point to outliers like Facebook and Twitter as their playbook for success. There are meaningless debates about 10 millions users being the new 1 million (http://www.businessinsider.com/10-million-users-is-not-the-n...). To me, it is just indicative of a pervasive sickness in early stage tech. Remember, it doesn't matter how many users you have unless you can monetize them.

Redoubtable16• 13 years ago

You would think I would take that too but apparently I'm an idiot and got caught up in useless crap. We make marketing software for big brands so all our "users" are monetized because well ummm that is our business model. Enterprise is great that way! No one gets the product for free!

larrys3• 13 years ago

"We make marketing software for big brands"

You might want to put that front and center in your home page message.

Also your "playapi" logo is totally unreadable in both Firefox as well as Safari (v-latest).

larrys3• 13 years ago

"I'll take revenue and profitability over media hype and "it" status any day of the week."

All that is fine of course and true. But there are side benefits to "it" status. For one thing it can help you attract talent and get the type of attention that can lead to success.

Let me give you an example. I've helped both high profile people and people who are nobodies with advice. In general the nobodies are much more thankful for the advice (and have even sent me gifts as thank you's). The high profile people say "thank you".

"Name dropping". But the fact that I do the work for high profile people, well, I use that in my marketing to attract paid customers that actually put money in my pocket. And it works.

rosenjon2• 13 years ago

If name dropping high profile people is an important part of your businesses marketing strategy, then it seems reasonable to pursue that <i>if it leads to more revenue/profit</i>

I think OP's issue relates to the weird, self-referential culture of Silicon Valley, where success is measured in buzz and money raised. It goes something like:

Build free software product -> ? -> profit

where ? = Get lots of buzz/hype, grow userbase quickly, raise VC money

Or course, this is similar to another business plan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts

Skoofoo• 13 years ago

I've never had much regard for Silicon Valley business types. I am convinced that the only thing that truly matters to succeed in tech is to create something that people want but don't necessarily know it yet. Everything else is just fluff.

niggler2• 13 years ago

Part of the problem is that the more successful businesses in the traditional sense (revenue, etc) are run by people who, as a whole, are more humble. There are plenty of successful business owners here and elsewhere who feel no need to stroke their ego or fight for mindshare in the glamour of silicon valley.

rdouble5• 13 years ago

It's pretty easy to get "liked" by the "it crowd" in silicon valley - you just hire a better PR agent.

niggler2• 13 years ago

Or just explicitly bribe people with free cash, free services, etc.

rdouble5• 13 years ago

That's part of what the PR agent is supposed to be doing.

pud• 13 years ago

Generally, being profitable precludes a company from getting "silly [high] valuations" & buzz in Silicon Valley. Unless they're really, really profitable.

Big valuations usually stem from not knowing how much a company will make once they start charging for stuff. So the "it" crowd works itself into a frenzy and VCs take a big gamble.

But once you make a dollar, all the mystery is gone. You're judged & valued pretty much on your revenue alone. Which is usually low (startups are hard) and unsexy (so not a ton of buzz).

Not saying a agree with it. But that's how it is.

FrojoS• 13 years ago

Interesting. So "Lets not risk growth my premature monetization, like ads, which could repel early adopters." is often just an excuse to avoid income and thereby improve valuations?

pyre2• 13 years ago

Not necessarily. The issue is that usually there is no roadmap beyond:

1. Explosive Growth

2. ???

3. Profit!

ahoyhere3• 13 years ago

If it's totally a fantasy, it can be anything they want. The moment reality barges in, suddenly there's cold hard math to be done.

yesimahuman• 13 years ago

I've been thinking a lot about this as well. Once you start meeting people and seeing the reality behind the media, you realize that "great" outcomes in startups are rarely perfect (acquihire forced by investors, over-dilution, etc.) and that things aren't always going as well as people say.

In reality, being happy seems to be the hardest thing to achieve, but I'm starting to think that is what success really is.

mikecane• 13 years ago

>>>Being cool has never been about begging to be liked.

>>>It turns out I’ve got a startup that happens to be a business. You know what that means? We make money.

That second part. That is what is cool.

Redoubtable16• 13 years ago

Heh. Thanks. Glad someone thinks it is cool!

superflit4• 13 years ago

Someone has PMS...

cududa• 13 years ago

Was that you trying to make an ironically chauvinistic joke, or are you just a sexist ass?

Redoubtable16• 13 years ago

Heh well you know actually I do have PMS! I'm due to start maybe tomorrow or Tuesday. Wow and to think my epiphany was just hormones. Man those things are useful!

superflit4• 13 years ago

Why it cannot be all options, the world is not a binary choice. It is not good or bad..black or white

kintamanimatt• 13 years ago

This is so thoroughly inappropriate. Sexism, like any form of prejudice, has no place in the tech world.

superflit4• 13 years ago

Agreed! If was a man I would said: 'Someone had a bad day' or 'Did not get enough sleep'. I agree that in one 'sexist' MINE I was referring about some biological (true or not) facts and other (man related) I was referencing to situational (sleep?day). And If I say to man: 'Hey someone has its level of testosterone TOO high' there is a great chance he will see that as compliment..

iosnoob2• 13 years ago

Thanks for the blog post and valid point of view. Couple of suggestions on your business: - I couldn't find your site by googling play api. I think that's a pretty bad situation for prospective investors - your logo is one of the most unreadable ones I've come across - your title is very broad and not sure who its targeted at. How about something simpler like "create multiplatform branded games in seconds"

Good luck.

Redoubtable16• 13 years ago

Thanks!

LispIsForLosers• 13 years ago

I've been reading Hacker News since 2007. This is the single most worthless post to ever grace the frontpage.

Everyone here should think long and hard about what can be done to prevent a community from degenerating to the point where it is colonized by trivial attention whoring.

In fact, whoever thinks hardest might just make the next billion dollars.

unimpressive• 13 years ago

What was second?

joelmichael• 13 years ago

You are right, and thank you for writing this. Our company agreed early on that tech interest wasn't essential for the success of our business. However, I do think it can be useful for finding engineering talent.

benzesandbetter• 13 years ago

Stop worrying about what other people think, and focus on making a great product or service. If you make something great, people will want a piece of it no matter if they like you personally or not.

Also, getting all emo and throwing a public temper tantrum railing against the people whose help you might need someday isn't doing you any favors.

Get back to work.

Redoubtable16• 13 years ago

You got it. :-)

Though I admit I wasn't quite expecting a personal Tumblr post to make it to Hacker News.

nswanberg2• 13 years ago

This interview with Girl Talk [1] posted on the thread about Wanz [2] shows, to an outsider, a lot of parallels between the music and startup scenes.

This is likely to have been raised before, but the two are similar in many ways: vast and fragmented with many paths to and definitions of success, prone to fads, full of both hard workers and poseurs, controlled near the top by gatekeepers who pride themselves, correctly or not, on evaluating potential success, jealousy of success, rules that apply to the majority of aspirants and smaller players but not the minority of the very successful, people who look with disdain at others' choices, seeing those choices as more important than they really are, etc.

So it is good to realize that, just as in music, success is context-dependent, and one's popularity with the current stars and hangers-on is a weak indicator of success, and it's good to act on that realization in a useful way, including planting a stake in the ground saying "I'm done with that."

That said, once one's self-confidence and happiness are restored it's also good to not completely reject all aspects of whatever and whoever are popular. Unless someone is a close competitor (in which case they must be crushed or scared off to other pastures ;) ), why not wish for their success and celebrate it? Similarly, conferences are a great way to learn, to teach, and to meet those with the same interests, and so long as attending the conference is not only about being seen by others as attending a conference (or, say, being invited to a panel), and going does not interfere with work, why shouldn't one go?

[1] http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/6415-girl-talk/ [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5235168

te_chris• 13 years ago

I live in both worlds and it's funny, bar the obvious differences in technical skills, there are far more similarities, especially with regard to your second paragraph.

cerebrum• 13 years ago

Great article but I'm kinda sad that it missed drawing the bigger point: the dichotomy perceived value vs. actual value goes much beyond products and companies; it's something that permeates our entire lives as social animals.

dreadsword• 13 years ago

Any second wasted to popularity, either seeking it, or decrying it, is a wasted second. Enough navel gazing, create some lasting value and reap the rewards.

stcredzero2• 13 years ago

> Because as it turns out the market for being an “it” founder and a flavor of the week startup isn’t the reality market. It is the perception market.

Perception Market. Also known as a "reputation bubble."

(Anyone know where the original "reputation bubble" article went? I've been trying fancy tricks with Google, but getting nowhere. The fashion industry and the "it" girl supermodel are prime examples in the article.)

calinet6• 13 years ago

Get out of the hellacious Silicon Valley and move to Boston. You'll like it better.

knieveltech• 13 years ago

Lost it at "Liked by the kind of men that determine who is or is not “one of us” in tech.". Silicon valley culture is almost, but not quite, entirely irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of "techs". The number of people active in that scene represent a rounding error compared to the rest of the people working in industry in technical roles outside of the valley. Get out of the echo chamber.

davemel37• 13 years ago

I found the old maxim to be true, "Chase after honor, and honor runs away from you. Run away from honor, and honor chases after you."

ahoyhere3• 13 years ago

Believe it or not, what follows is meant to be a SUPPORTIVE comment.

> I wanted to be one of those founders, you know, the type that gets silly valuations and love from the name brand ventures firms, the type that gets written up by the tech press, the sort that powerful angels vouch for and send around glowing intros for as being “the next big thing,” and the sort that jets around to conferences.

I truly hope you've come away from all this and understood that the problem isn't 'them,' it's you.

Once you focus on identity — worse yet, how others perceive your identity — then it's just a hop, skip and jump to narcissism, when 90% of your effort and emotions is about projecting and protecting your identity at the sacrifice of making things happen, or worse yet, forming relationships.

It SOUNDS like you figured that out.

On the other hand, since you've already found yourself vulnerable to identity focus, you should watch yourself and make sure this "I Don't Care!" thing isn't a new way to form a (fragile) identity in need of propagation and defense.

Focusing on other people, and your work, is the way to avoid this trap.

Redoubtable16• 13 years ago

Thanks for this! The fact that I got wrapped up in constructing the identity of a company (thank god not the actual product or how we related to our clients) to be appealing to someone that wasn't its core client was definitely my problem and not theirs!

While I can't deny that I was responding to a certain kind of risk/reward perception that has a certain value it wasn't right for what we ultimately wanted to build as a company.

And I think this happens in so many areas of life. How we date, how we pick our hobbies, how we choose our education. Because forming a core identity and a core business is actually tremendously hard. Picking up one that is already socially validated seems easier. It just isn't a recipe for long term happiness or success.

subsystem• 13 years ago

Fiona Apple said it best :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSLwYrPbuts

ahoyhere3• 13 years ago

> Because forming a core identity and a core business is actually tremendously hard. Picking up one that is already socially validated seems easier.

Truth.

michaelochurch2• 13 years ago

VC-istan isn't "technology". It's cutting-edge marketing, and only as technological as it needs to be in order to not look foolish in 2013. It took me a few years to understand that, if only because the disinvestment of our society in R&D, academia, and anything with a focus longer than one quarter has reached such completion as to leave our society too imbecilic to have a square sense of what technology even is.

That doesn't mean a company can't be technological and VC-funded, but the "cool kids" sideshow isn't about true technology. It can't be. The VPs and Product Managers are all imbeciles and the engineers, while smart in an IQ-sense, are too steeped in bad practices to know anything. (The Founders are talented marketers but 80% are sociopaths.)

The VC-istan "It" crowd is not comprised of technologists, but of people who've found it advantageous to incorporate technological fetishism into their vapid marketing. The jokers in the in-crowd don't know anything, and the best technologists only tag along to their projects if they can get something out of it... and those sorts of managerial conditions (hands-off management, high autonomy, interesting projects and self-direction) don't tend to last for long.

justin_vanw• 13 years ago

Apparently she doesn't care about 5000 words.

bluekeybox• 13 years ago

"It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both." -- Machieavelli

coliolio• 13 years ago

I really wish the author would even once mention _how_ she was warping herself/her company to impress the tech crowd. It's hard for me to understand what she's complaining about without a single example of the type of "how to be popular" advice that people were giving her that she found so poisonous...

The “It” Crowd Doesn’t Like Me and I Finally Don’t Care

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