Yes, the management class (or officer class) is for the pedigreed elite. You're trying to join the manager class and they have a line out the door of people with pedigree. What school did you go to? Yeah, so why would they pick you...they're themselves incompetent so why would they use competence as the criteria? VCs invest almost exclusively invest in this class and so the cycle continues.
The technical class (or soldier class) does all the actual work and so they have to be competent. This is almost entirely meritocratic in Silicon Valley. Anyone even moderately competent can get well paying some job, even if it's not at one of the big adtech companies like Google/Facebook that can afford to mostly require pedigree from even their soldiers.
What's neat about Silicon Valley is that anyone of the technical class can simply promote themselves to the manager class given sufficient effort and luck. This alone is what makes it so special. It's very rare but it does happen.
I never mocked this deal. I always thought this was a small price to pay for insurance that Instagram wouldn't subsume Facebook. It was only 1% of Facebook.
But I still think $19 billion was about $17 billion too much for WhatsApp. It's a messaging product that doesn't directly threaten Facebook the way Instagram does. They could have created 10x $1 billion teams to compete and easily done better than what they have with WhatsApp. It seems like a cowardly use of $19 billion. Oculus cost them $2 billion and there are many other breakthroughs that are equally underpriced.
WhatsApp already replaced FB chat in various regions. And FB is already kind of a ghost town, beside elder 50+ new-comers who got their first smartphone just recently - in various regions. If you live in a filter bubble, where FB is still very on-vouch, great, but it depends on your friends and geographic. Many have the FB or messanger app still installed but rarely open it (because you can't even remove it from eg Samsung phones, only a few know that it's possible to deactivate it). That said, WhatsApp (the app) feels very cumbersome to use, compared to competitors from other countries.
So Instagram and WhatsApp are what keeps Facebook ahead. FB itself (the social network site) is probably past its peak (in various regions).
If this is true, and it seems true, no founder in Silicon Valley should do business or in any way support Anil Dash in anything.
I would chastise Joel Spolsky and that other guy too, but it seems unnecessary given the destruction they're inflicting on their own business by letting him run it. Hah.
Yeah HN has anonymous accounts so people can speak more freely. I have a day job and I bet this guy knows the CEO at my company and could probably get me fired. I just want to state my position, not create an escalating personal war with the guy. But if I was wealthy I would call him out in my own name as loudly as possible. In my opinion there are few worse things you can do then try to blackball someone from an industry. I think it's grounds for your own excommunication.
"He flat out said that he wants his startup to be funded and wasn't sure if it'd be possible after all of his, and I replied that it realistically wasn't going to happen without the say-so of someone like me, and I wasn't inclined to give some VC the nod on this. On reflection, I'll be explicit: If you're a venture capitalist, and you invest in Pax's startup without a profound, meaningful and years-long demonstration of responsibility from Pax beforehand, you're complicit in extending the tech industry's awful track record of exclusion, and it's unacceptable."
This is clearly a threat that Anil Dash will make trouble for any VC that funds him. This truly sounds so unethical that it might be criminal extortion.
I have no history or relationship with him. I just came across someone publicly trying to use his power against a fellow founder and I wanted to publicly (and anonymously) despise him for it.
Oh my. I almost wish you hadn't posted that link, or that I hadn't clicked it. But I guess I'm grateful.
> I hope that Pax's friends in the pick up artist community take a few moments away from writing date rape manuals and sending me death threats to reflect on the fact that their new hero has at least some tiny bit of respect for the wife he's been married to for 15 years. How crushed they will be.
> Pax showed up about 10 minutes late, having been busy with the latest stop on his press tour, and as I had agreed, I called him an asshole to his face and paid for his coffee. We talked for about 20 minutes. He offered up a pretty boringly conventional defense of male privilege, and when I described the role of actual satire and comedy in punching up instead of punching down, he revealed that he sees attacking feminists and equality activists as punching up. There was some pointless bickering from me about the inanity of that perspective, but overall things were fairly civil; I've met guys like this before and I didn't have any illusion that I was going to dissuade him from a perspective which his social group rewards with attention and the perverse impression that acting like an asshole is somehow being brave.
This is the new CEO of Fog Creek? In all fairness, he did say he was "fighting off a brutal chest cold". But WTF? I've had chest colds too, so has everyone. They never provoked me to being this nasty, whatever the reason.
I am sad. I thought Joel had some interesting insights, and Fog Creek was involved in some truly interesting and useful products like Stack Overflow and Trello.
But if someone like that is now running the show, it doesn't give me much hope for their future products.
> More broadly, I am trying to live a life where I am as unreasonably kind as I can be.
Yeah, sounds exactly like the guy he is. I mean what else could someone be that thinks people who don't share his world-view are "supremacist assholes", that blacklisting others (or trying to blacklist them, whatever) is completely okay be than "trying to live a life where I am as unreasonably kind as I can be".
Yes, the management class (or officer class) is for the pedigreed elite. You're trying to join the manager class and they have a line out the door of people with pedigree. What school did you go to? Yeah, so why would they pick you...they're themselves incompetent so why would they use competence as the criteria? VCs invest almost exclusively invest in this class and so the cycle continues.
The technical class (or soldier class) does all the actual work and so they have to be competent. This is almost entirely meritocratic in Silicon Valley. Anyone even moderately competent can get well paying some job, even if it's not at one of the big adtech companies like Google/Facebook that can afford to mostly require pedigree from even their soldiers.
What's neat about Silicon Valley is that anyone of the technical class can simply promote themselves to the manager class given sufficient effort and luck. This alone is what makes it so special. It's very rare but it does happen.