That last paragraph seems far more damning of the author than of Mason -- they're so disappointed that he doesn't have any obvious status symbols and he's riding off on a moped.
Good for him, and shame on them, for equating consumption with success.
I was writing a long post about how we think we're really good at detecting "important signals" like if someone's lying, but that we're actually terrible at it. But the new yorker article that was frontpaging yesterday should pretty much explain it, even though Jonah Lehrer is a bit smug for my tastes ;)
TL;DR- the OP sounds like a very shallow-thinking VC who's blissfully unaware of his own biases. It might work out ok for him -- these biases usually work most of the time, and that's why we have them -- but it will probably fail in some very crucial instances where a more thorough, data-driven approach might have worked better. In fact, that may be precisely how the great VC's are differentiated from the merely ok, but that's a different story...
No problem :) I think you're catching enough flak for your over-50 comments below, so I didn't mention that one ;)
BTW, shallow thought wasn't meant as a derogative. It's what we monkeys do best, after all. It'll result in a different profile of swings, hits, & misses than other approaches, that's all.
(also, the irony that the new yorker article also suggests how we're really good at seeing the faults in others thought processes but not in our own is hi-larious)
There is a sense of sustained confidence, of inevitability, of capability, that investors must look for in their founders. A person like this is bound to have a history of success, large and small. They can't help it. And none of these qualities are correlated to personality type or financial status. Such people are simply incessant creators. They cannot stop creating. You might try to stop them creating, and they would still find a way to thwart you and create anyway.
My sense is that most wannabe entrepreneurs do not have these qualities. And without these qualities, it will be difficult to succeed even with a world-class idea, or with all the money in the world, or even with great intelligence and capability.
The helpful words from you, then, would be the ones that change the would-be entrepreneur into an incessant creator.
Let us assume that such words exist, and that the supplicant (and I use that word advisedly) implements them. I reckon it would take a year (or possibly less) to demonstrate that a sustained change has occurred, thanks to those words.
The question arises, of course: do such words exist, and if so, what are they?
Note that if you discover these words, then they will be worth, literally, many billions of dollars.
Personally, I'd go more Zen. We are talking about inspiring deep, abiding, personal change after all.
More often than not we get in our own way. This is not something that you can consciously change, even if you are aware of it. There are several kinds of beliefs, and some of them are ingrained deep-down inside of you. We often make the mistake of thinking that our minds are like machines, which can be constructed in different ways - but minds are more like life - growing, changing, in lots of ways.
So the words must be seeds. It is easy to describe the outcome that you want, but very hard to construct a seed that will get the person there. So difficult, in fact, that it may not exist, or if it does it may take years to grow.
Learn to meditate. Learn to accept reality for what it is, learn to stop fighting reality. Learn to accept yourself and love and laugh and work with a vigor that you've only barely tapped.
This is dead on. It's a mistake to read this and take away some homey homily about how "every customer is a snowflake!" -- the point is that you should correctly value the passionate customer. Your marketing and outreach and customer service departments should understand the relative values of "bought it, loved it!" and "bought it, so?" Those relative values will vary from product to product/industry to industry
The comment below at this time ('survivorship bias') is also correct, but only if it's interpreted as a touching anecdote rather than as crucial customer-behavior information for his market segment. Understanding the dynamics of how your customers make their purchasing decisions seems like a better lesson to take from this.
(Not the same for every product, either! E.g., my being passionate about Cheerios does nothing for General Mills, really...)
ya know, I just don't agree with anyone who posts here and uses the word "customer." Yea, Bob was a customer but he is also a human being. Less we forget this and remember we are working with other people then you don't need to worry about "snowflakes" or whether you're customers are happy or not. Just treat everyone you come in contact with with respect & regardless of how you met (business or otherwise) and this world would just be a much better place.
You're completely right. Too funny -- i had written a comment about how there was probably some bullshit MBA phrase for the process of "correctly valuing passionate customers", but deleted it as overly cynical and offensive to the up and coming masters-of-the-universe on HN. Can't win! :)
I think it's still worthwhile to think about systems of people in terms of their aggregate actions as well as in terms of each being an individual.
I'm all about the "Don't kiss others' booties on the off chance that it will come back to you" because if you're doing it for that reason, you're doing it wrong.
Just treat people well, take everything one step at a time, and look at it from their vantage point. These things in mind and everyone will walk away from the table happy the majority of the time.
If your customer service reps are trained, mature and willing then there's no difference between the experience with them and you.
Sometimes I wonder what it's like to pretend that you aren't affected by the mannerisms and maturity of all living human beings. To believe that there's a good rationalization to finding a short cutoff of helping people.
This article's true evil is this: He puts helping the guy with a technical problem as a favor, not as a simple kind duty.
We don't want to spend everyday as tech support, that's reasonable. But if people were better educated instead of taken care of, perhaps they wouldn't need as much.
The "duty as favor" part of your comment was very insightful. This is a recurring theme in all actions that ultimately cost the person performing them without foreseeable payback. This is, in my experience, displayed by people with shaky moral fundament and questionable values. There's always speak of how e.g. "white lists", the inclusion in which is awarded to persons or companies that act correctly, is detrimental - because they should not be handling incorrectly in the first place, and being normal should not be incentivized.
However, when you're running a business, especially during its infancy, your values need to be questionable and questioned in order for your approach to adapt to the environment. Following questionable values in this case is not only admissible but even required, and you'll need to reinvent yourself quite often. There is no "normal" when you're trying to break the mould.
The thing is though, he went well beyond 'respect', and really went out of his way to help the guy. That's very nice, but doing that for everyone, all the time simply may not be feasible.
It's a question of economics: you simply can't bend over backwards for all customers, in all lines of business, without going bust. Silly example: if I walk into a hardware store and buy a nail, and then proceed to waste an hour of the salesperson's time, that's a loss to them. Perhaps they'll make it back if I come back again and again and buy other things, but it's something that each business has to determine.
Funny, when I was a student and worked at a hardware store that was almost the exact example they gave as encouragement. You want the customer to trust you and the store and so most of the time their projects start with a box of nails. Do they need the tinpenny, concrete, roofing, anchor nails, or tacks? Most people who know what nails they need don't bother you. But the guy/girl starting on their first renovation or garden are practically begging you to take their money. Personally, when I step foot into a hardware store it's a given that I'm leaving with $100 worth of stuff.
Now a better example would be consumer electronics. It's expensive, most people don't know what they really want they read some review in engadget, and the margins on the name brand stuff is extremely low ($5-10, on Sony TVs for example).
yikes. These are impressive (and terrifying). I particularly like the "see if you use my return value and dynamically change my behavior" trick, I bet debugging a library that used that would be fuuuun.
This library is for receiving email, new email that you get, is put in your inbox. Email that you are sending goes in your outbox before it is sent. So I think it is named correctly. :)
MoGo is not 5d KGS -- there are some bots that are 4d/5d KGS, using the approach given in the article. The two best (that I am aware of) are Zen19 -- closed source -- and pachi -- available here: http://pachi.or.cz/
The author of Pachi has a paper detailing the major algorithm advancement beyond Monte-Carlo game simulations, which is sharing information across simulations in a way that is totally nonintuitive to me.
For me, a 3d/4d KGS go player, this is all very interesting stuff!
is that it? I thought it was about thinking you were going to build something Awesome and World Changing, and ending up ...being a bolted on web-layer on legacy Access databases, and not really liking that.
I totally agree. He even admits as such that this is the purpose of the question:
"Instead the question ... taps something deeper and more
closely held. ... If I know what matters to them, I can
right away tell if the same things matter to ...
the organization at large."
In other words: "expose something tender and honest, so that we can exploit it as directly as possible."
I really don't see how this is manipulative, who exactly are they trying to fool? The "tapping into something deeper" isn't some tricksy ploy to reveal more than you want, it just means the question is crafted to address several layers of discussion about what you're looking for, all at once.
Unless you're trying to dig into their compensation priorities so you can lowball them in the right areas, this is just a question aimed at seeing how well they'd fit in to the company in terms of their own career/strategic goals, working environment, QA/testing standards, etc. I'd rather get those things out there in the interview and find out "Oh, yeah we have source control, and staging/dev servers, but I'd say our devs push about half their code changes straight to production via scp right off of their workstations. Saves time that way.", rather than on my second week when I've made X number of changes and commitments in my lifestyle & career for this job.
That last paragraph seems far more damning of the author than of Mason -- they're so disappointed that he doesn't have any obvious status symbols and he's riding off on a moped.
Good for him, and shame on them, for equating consumption with success.
(he should really wear a helmet, though!)