It's a good essay. The only problem is that it's Peter Thiel behind it.
The problem isn't just that "we got 140 characters." The problem is that Peter Thiel asked for it by investing in and therefore promulgating Mark Zuckerberg's vision of ubiquitous irrelevance. I think he's right that VC is destroying itself by investing in what I have often referred to as trivial nonsense, but he and his firm are part of the problem, not the solution. Just look at the portfolio companies: Winster? Quid? Slide? Path? GoWalla? And of course, Facebook? None of these companies improve my life or the lives of anyone I care about. Founders Fund has 22 consumer internet companies in its portfolio and one or two in the other categories listed on the web site.
Furthermore Thiel has stated that he wouldn't bother doing PayPal again if he knew what he knows about the payments industry today. This is of course the space that I'm working in. Bold words, Peter. If only there were more VCs willing to run and hide.
Frankly I'm sick of venture capital firms writing self-serving slogans, or in this case, entire essays. Actions speak louder than words. I'm doing serious work and my company has been rejected by sixty (that's six-zero) VC firms in the past five years. It's going to take more than a manifesto to convince me that any investor is serious about the future.
> I'm doing serious work and my company has been rejected by sixty (that's six-zero) VC firms in the past five years.
I just want to burn some HN points here to tell you that you're not alone, and that there are a lot of other people out there that are terribly frustrated by this.
Investors are primarily in it to make money. They're optimizing for returns. When you have a choice between a company that will spend relatively little capital and has a chance to make a lot of money, $5 at a time, from millions of people, in a short period of time, and then get sold to some other megacorporation at a valuation that's detached from reality, versus a company with higher capital needs and a 20-year roadmap to becoming an industry heavyweight ... well, you choose the first one.
The horde of "business consultants" (coaches, advisors, what-have-you) aren't much better. I went through a period of intense naivete that involved trying those people out. I would try anything that might have a chance at accelerating my business. I have never before been charged so much to receive so little truly useful advice, from so many people so hell-bent on violating the very first rule of problem solving ("understand the problem"), and so inclined to insult me or my goals. They're all just doing the same thing as the VCs, but at smaller, pitiable scales: they're focusing first-and-foremost on making a buck.
Sometimes the situation leaves me feeling bitter. As a hopeless idealist and an obsessive problem-solver, I can't help but to habitually look at the world around me and see in its place the potential for the future that so many people with resources claim to be interested in while being interested first and foremost in making a quick profit.
my company has been rejected by sixty (that's six-zero) VC firms in the past five years
Dude, you're just getting warmed up to pitching if you've only been rejected by 60 VC firms.
Google got rejected by 55. Pandora by close to 300. Adam Rifkin's first startup was doing AJAX in 2000, and he got rejected by 176 before raising $8M from Kleiner Perkins.
HR's job is to screen through job applicants and throw away resumes so they only show a precious few to hiring managers. A VC's job is to say "no" and to come forward with 2 or 3 proposals to their partners. Only rarely do they say, "Yes".
But, remember there's roughly 400 VC firms in Silicon Valley. There's still a ton more for you to pitch. You're just getting started.
Raising money is the process of pitching your idea to 150 investors, maybe 10 of them will say, "yes".
And, I agree you are doing serious work with FaceCash. I'm a fan. I like the product, and I think it has legs. Selling VC's on the idea is going to be the first of many hard sells that you're going to have going forward. Hang in there, Dude. You'll make it.
Facebook sure has improved the communication for me, and my circle. If it doesn't improve your life or anyone you care about, there are people who feel it does.
Frankly, your subjective, continuous attacks on Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook makes it hard to see the objective side of your argument.
Since you brought it up, I'm gonna say it: Facecash is a bad idea, poorly executed. None of the 4+ apps that you are offering are compelling. The basic POS thing is never going to work. It's not obviously better but involves set up by both the buyer and seller. And it's kinds of weird ("Sign with your face"??). But then there's a loyalty scheme layered on top. But without any traction on either side, that's not going to work. With money transfers, you should at least copy PayPal to address the chicken and egg problem: let people transfer to an email address or phone number so that the service only requires the sender to be signed up and enabled. Splitting checks is either a small or just bad idea. That's just not a big problem for most people and not one that most would pay to "solve".
Finally, we get it, the government sucks when it comes to making laws like those that make starting up a money transmitter company harder. But other entrepreneurs seem to have addressed it. There are a variety of ways to approach it. For one, use a partner for the transmission part and focus on what you think your added-value is. It would be quite easy to layer a face/barcode scheme on top of PayPal, for example. If you can prove it out, then you're in a better position to handle the money transmission yourself. And might be able to interest investors.
The intro video on your website made Chrome warn me of an insecure script. Just thought you should know, since security warnings arn't the best thing to show on a payments website.
What happened to HTML? If this were formatted with web standards, I could resize the fonts, scroll with my browser's built-in preferred scrolling mechanisms that aren't chunky, laggy, and painful, and I could actually read it. I'm not the only one to comment on this, but apparently whoever did this page is dense enough about web standards that the point needs to be repeated. How do you run a VC and not get this? My opinion of Founders Fund has gone down.
Click link, see blank page, unblock Flash applet, struggle through reading a single paragraph with eye-gougingly atrocious font and mouse-crushingly stupid scroll functionality... then my head simply explodes from the irony of what I am experiencing and what I am reading. Close window.
No kidding! The best part is, it's all so unnecessary! When I saw the blank page, I decided to have a peek at the source, an lo and behold, there's the essay! Copy it to a text editor, turn on dynamic word wrap, and... enjoy?
When you're traveling at 60km/hr and going faster, it's thrilling. You imagine what will come next.
When you're traveling at 260km/hr and going faster, it's horrifying. You think of how you can hold on.
If you go to Disneyland's Tomorrowland you'll see that we ended dreaming about the future in the 60's and 70's. It was polished metal; a stone's throw from what we had, but within dreaming limits.
Now we don't know where we're going, but we know we've never been there before. It makes no sense to dream about "today plus twenty years". It won't be that and we're aware now that it won't. The innovation will happen with or without us as individuals. And it will keep going, hurtling faster into an oblivion which we can only guess at.
> Not all technology is created equal: there is a difference between Pong and the Concorde
Yes, Pong was simply a clever design making use of existing technology that made shirtloads of money for a bunch of people and spawned entire industries. Whereas Concorde - a "real technological development" - was a giant money pit fed from government slush funds for decades, punctuated only by occasional lethal consequences for its passengers and bystanders. (Not to mention that it was a technological cul-de-sac.)
Remind me, which one was it they want to be investing in? Because it sure sounds like they're saying Concorde. Am I misinterpreting?
A Continental Airlines DC-10 departing for Newark, New Jersey, lost a titanium alloy strip, 435 millimetres (17.1 in) long and about 29 millimetres (1.1 in) to 34 millimetres (1.3 in) wide, during takeoff from the same runway.
During the Concorde's subsequent take-off run, this piece of debris, still lying on the runway, cut a tyre causing rupture and tyre debris to be hurled by centrifugal force. A large chunk of this debris (4.5 kilograms or 9.9 pounds) struck the underside of the aircraft's wing structure at an estimated speed of 500 kilometres per hour (310 mph). Although it did not directly puncture any of the fuel tanks, it sent out a pressure shockwave that eventually ruptured the number five fuel tank at the weakest point, just above the landing gear.
Now wait a minute here. How old are you? America had an SST too. It was killed due to environmental concerns and the Concorde was only allowed to fly into certain USA terminals. That's why the Concorde was a "money pit." Had we been able to let airlines go to SSTs, competition would have driven prices down.
One important aspect of these problems is that they aren't going to be solved by people who know only how to code. These are opportunities for mechanical engineers, biologists, statisticians, materials scientists, physicists ...
For many of them the research would have to be so speculative that it would be hard to imagine them occurring outside of an academic research lab. For a startup to tackle one of these, the bones of the technology would have to already be there.
It's clear whoever put this together put a lot of effort into making the page fancy and there are some nice effects there, but it ultimately harms the message.
Here is some concrete feedback:
- WebKit lets you make custom scrollbars if that's important to you: http://www.webkit.org/blog/363/styling-scrollbars/ . Using a real scrollbar means that shortcuts I'm familiar with (e.g. shift-space to page up -- wow, I had no idea how frequently I used this until this page broke it) won't break.
- Whitespace is nice, but the double-spaced-feeling line-height combined with the "back to founders fund" heading at the top combine to make it feel uncomfortably cramped vertically -- not enough information density per page.
- Similarly, the lines are so wide they are uncomfortable to read. (I actually use a user stylesheet that limits lines to 50em, which makes many sites including HN more readable.)
I'm sorry I don't have any feedback on the content, I was too distracted to start reading it yet.
That actually dates to the 1950s and is based on concepts up to a century older than that. Break-bulk has been recognized as a bottleneck in freight transport for ages.
It's evolved and become dominant with standardization of container sizes and fittings (by 1970) and with the deregulation of the US shipping industry and introduction of double-stack rail transports (both in 1984).
I suspect more significant recent advancements have been in inventory and logistics management (though bar-coding of rail cars was already happening in the 1980s) and overnight air and other rapid freight. Not quite as visible as containers, but vital to keeping the boats, trains, and trucks moving, and with JIT delivery probably accounts for much of the success of big box stores, and now Internet-based retail and shipping.
- Support normal scroll behaviour (swiping my trackpad scrolls but only very slowly; I can't press spacebar to page down; clicking underneath the scroller should advance a single page, not jump ahead to another part of the document)
- Show diagrams by default (no reason to require a click)
the human race will get the flying car and the fusion when it is ready for it ( technologically these innovations, at the level of successful prototypes have existed for last 50 years). What would we do with such technology if it was in widespread use today? Flying car - sprawl development even further. Fusion - com'n, are we ready for a wide availability of a high flux high energy neutron generating devices? We are still can't control ourselves when it comes to the dynamite and the similar levels of energy, and it becomes hysterical paroxysm when the fission levels of energy come into play.
The primitive steam based engine was discovered by ancient Greeks and technologically they could improve upon it further. Their slave based society wasn't ready for it.
Like Greeks and steam power, today we have the primitive access to space - and surprise!, instead of actively working upon improving it, pouring all our resources into it, we're still discussing whether it has economical reasons, and like in case of Greeks, we can't find much of such economical reasons for it.
'If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.' - Charles Fort, Lo!
What happened to the future: Advertising as a primary revenue source and Financial Markets trying to be a place unto themselves with rules and customs that actually don't make much long term sence. In the US, throw in a generation that really didn't seem to care to make a better place for the next generation and you got a lot of problems. The now killed the later.
Agreed. I'm not a big fan of Twitter, but flying cars don't exist for a reason. Now self-driving cars, those are interesting. Guess who's working on them? Google.
Is the use of the "presentation enhancer" to deter people from actually reading it? Because that's it did to me. The font is illegible, scrolling must be done via the bar (otherwise it crawls at ~1px/sec), and turns my cpu fan way up. Is it really still "cool" to misuse technology nowadays?
People knock Webvan around but the founder (Mick Mountz), 10 years after that debacle, founded http://www.kivasystems.com/ where instead of conveyor belts (Webvan) they use robots for managing a warehouse. Seriously cool robotics. Check out the videos on their site.
I had heard of Founder Fund before, but I can't say I had any strong conviction as to what made them a special VC, or if they were.
Their manifesto makes me question if my current project is thinking big enough (I think it is).
I think the problem entrepreneurs who would apply to Founders Fund might have is how to present their idea as being big and bold. Often the big and bold are not understood in common terms, so we dumb them down to something that is achievable in the short term, and seems realistic, while having a long-term goal which only makes sense if the shorter term goals can be accomplished.
Facebook would be a perfect example here. They couldn't be discussed as 'world changing' in the early days as they were just another social network. Nothing seemed insurmountable, nothing seemed challenging, even the idea of this 'social graph' probably wouldn't have made much sense until tens of millions of people were using it.
PDF button for the article doesn't work and I couldn't find a link in the source or the JS. Annoying. Anyone stumble across the PDF version? Printing the page to PDF from the browser works to no avail either.
Nicely written essay. I would say future is hard to predict. People in 1960s predicted about space travel but did not predict mobile devices like iphones that have so much compute power with so many apps with location, touch, social, communication features.
140 characters may not have great technology but can be attributed to bring social revolution in so many places.
Ultimately, need is mother of most of innovations. Need leads to demand, which leads to building new solutions.
[+] [-] thinkcomp|14 years ago|reply
The problem isn't just that "we got 140 characters." The problem is that Peter Thiel asked for it by investing in and therefore promulgating Mark Zuckerberg's vision of ubiquitous irrelevance. I think he's right that VC is destroying itself by investing in what I have often referred to as trivial nonsense, but he and his firm are part of the problem, not the solution. Just look at the portfolio companies: Winster? Quid? Slide? Path? GoWalla? And of course, Facebook? None of these companies improve my life or the lives of anyone I care about. Founders Fund has 22 consumer internet companies in its portfolio and one or two in the other categories listed on the web site.
Furthermore Thiel has stated that he wouldn't bother doing PayPal again if he knew what he knows about the payments industry today. This is of course the space that I'm working in. Bold words, Peter. If only there were more VCs willing to run and hide.
Frankly I'm sick of venture capital firms writing self-serving slogans, or in this case, entire essays. Actions speak louder than words. I'm doing serious work and my company has been rejected by sixty (that's six-zero) VC firms in the past five years. It's going to take more than a manifesto to convince me that any investor is serious about the future.
[+] [-] thaumaturgy|14 years ago|reply
I just want to burn some HN points here to tell you that you're not alone, and that there are a lot of other people out there that are terribly frustrated by this.
Investors are primarily in it to make money. They're optimizing for returns. When you have a choice between a company that will spend relatively little capital and has a chance to make a lot of money, $5 at a time, from millions of people, in a short period of time, and then get sold to some other megacorporation at a valuation that's detached from reality, versus a company with higher capital needs and a 20-year roadmap to becoming an industry heavyweight ... well, you choose the first one.
The horde of "business consultants" (coaches, advisors, what-have-you) aren't much better. I went through a period of intense naivete that involved trying those people out. I would try anything that might have a chance at accelerating my business. I have never before been charged so much to receive so little truly useful advice, from so many people so hell-bent on violating the very first rule of problem solving ("understand the problem"), and so inclined to insult me or my goals. They're all just doing the same thing as the VCs, but at smaller, pitiable scales: they're focusing first-and-foremost on making a buck.
Sometimes the situation leaves me feeling bitter. As a hopeless idealist and an obsessive problem-solver, I can't help but to habitually look at the world around me and see in its place the potential for the future that so many people with resources claim to be interested in while being interested first and foremost in making a quick profit.
[+] [-] iamelgringo|14 years ago|reply
Dude, you're just getting warmed up to pitching if you've only been rejected by 60 VC firms.
Google got rejected by 55. Pandora by close to 300. Adam Rifkin's first startup was doing AJAX in 2000, and he got rejected by 176 before raising $8M from Kleiner Perkins.
HR's job is to screen through job applicants and throw away resumes so they only show a precious few to hiring managers. A VC's job is to say "no" and to come forward with 2 or 3 proposals to their partners. Only rarely do they say, "Yes".
But, remember there's roughly 400 VC firms in Silicon Valley. There's still a ton more for you to pitch. You're just getting started.
Raising money is the process of pitching your idea to 150 investors, maybe 10 of them will say, "yes".
And, I agree you are doing serious work with FaceCash. I'm a fan. I like the product, and I think it has legs. Selling VC's on the idea is going to be the first of many hard sells that you're going to have going forward. Hang in there, Dude. You'll make it.
[+] [-] irahul|14 years ago|reply
Frankly, your subjective, continuous attacks on Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook makes it hard to see the objective side of your argument.
[+] [-] sahillavingia|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbreit|14 years ago|reply
Finally, we get it, the government sucks when it comes to making laws like those that make starting up a money transmitter company harder. But other entrepreneurs seem to have addressed it. There are a variety of ways to approach it. For one, use a partner for the transmission part and focus on what you think your added-value is. It would be quite easy to layer a face/barcode scheme on top of PayPal, for example. If you can prove it out, then you're in a better position to handle the money transmission yourself. And might be able to interest investors.
[+] [-] rdl|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] todayiamme|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikecane|14 years ago|reply
That's very cute, but the fact is most people don't say or do Important Things in their lives. And socialness on the Internet is a reflection of that.
And that cavalier dismissive attitude is what I would expect from Suits, not here.
[+] [-] MrJagil|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zackattack|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] natch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kakuri|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] athom|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ez77|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spyder|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iron_ball|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] david927|14 years ago|reply
When you're traveling at 260km/hr and going faster, it's horrifying. You think of how you can hold on.
If you go to Disneyland's Tomorrowland you'll see that we ended dreaming about the future in the 60's and 70's. It was polished metal; a stone's throw from what we had, but within dreaming limits.
Now we don't know where we're going, but we know we've never been there before. It makes no sense to dream about "today plus twenty years". It won't be that and we're aware now that it won't. The innovation will happen with or without us as individuals. And it will keep going, hurtling faster into an oblivion which we can only guess at.
[+] [-] zb|14 years ago|reply
Yes, Pong was simply a clever design making use of existing technology that made shirtloads of money for a bunch of people and spawned entire industries. Whereas Concorde - a "real technological development" - was a giant money pit fed from government slush funds for decades, punctuated only by occasional lethal consequences for its passengers and bystanders. (Not to mention that it was a technological cul-de-sac.)
Remind me, which one was it they want to be investing in? Because it sure sounds like they're saying Concorde. Am I misinterpreting?
[+] [-] temphn|14 years ago|reply
But looks like the Air France Concorde crash was due to debris on the runway rather than the plane itself. Or were you thinking of something else?
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Air_France_Fl...
A Continental Airlines DC-10 departing for Newark, New Jersey, lost a titanium alloy strip, 435 millimetres (17.1 in) long and about 29 millimetres (1.1 in) to 34 millimetres (1.3 in) wide, during takeoff from the same runway.
During the Concorde's subsequent take-off run, this piece of debris, still lying on the runway, cut a tyre causing rupture and tyre debris to be hurled by centrifugal force. A large chunk of this debris (4.5 kilograms or 9.9 pounds) struck the underside of the aircraft's wing structure at an estimated speed of 500 kilometres per hour (310 mph). Although it did not directly puncture any of the fuel tanks, it sent out a pressure shockwave that eventually ruptured the number five fuel tank at the weakest point, just above the landing gear.
[+] [-] mikecane|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moultano|14 years ago|reply
For many of them the research would have to be so speculative that it would be hard to imagine them occurring outside of an academic research lab. For a startup to tackle one of these, the bones of the technology would have to already be there.
[+] [-] evmar|14 years ago|reply
Here is some concrete feedback:
- WebKit lets you make custom scrollbars if that's important to you: http://www.webkit.org/blog/363/styling-scrollbars/ . Using a real scrollbar means that shortcuts I'm familiar with (e.g. shift-space to page up -- wow, I had no idea how frequently I used this until this page broke it) won't break.
- Whitespace is nice, but the double-spaced-feeling line-height combined with the "back to founders fund" heading at the top combine to make it feel uncomfortably cramped vertically -- not enough information density per page.
- Similarly, the lines are so wide they are uncomfortable to read. (I actually use a user stylesheet that limits lines to 50em, which makes many sites including HN more readable.)
I'm sorry I don't have any feedback on the content, I was too distracted to start reading it yet.
[+] [-] argv_empty|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfoutz|14 years ago|reply
I have a 3d printer in my basement.
Poor little VC, go play with your social networks. The grownups a busy making the future.
[+] [-] minikomi|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbr|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|14 years ago|reply
It's evolved and become dominant with standardization of container sizes and fittings (by 1970) and with the deregulation of the US shipping industry and introduction of double-stack rail transports (both in 1984).
I suspect more significant recent advancements have been in inventory and logistics management (though bar-coding of rail cars was already happening in the 1980s) and overnight air and other rapid freight. Not quite as visible as containers, but vital to keeping the boats, trains, and trucks moving, and with JIT delivery probably accounts for much of the success of big box stores, and now Internet-based retail and shipping.
[+] [-] h34t|14 years ago|reply
- Support normal scroll behaviour (swiping my trackpad scrolls but only very slowly; I can't press spacebar to page down; clicking underneath the scroller should advance a single page, not jump ahead to another part of the document)
- Show diagrams by default (no reason to require a click)
- Add a place for comments
- Narrower line length
[+] [-] VladRussian|14 years ago|reply
The primitive steam based engine was discovered by ancient Greeks and technologically they could improve upon it further. Their slave based society wasn't ready for it.
Like Greeks and steam power, today we have the primitive access to space - and surprise!, instead of actively working upon improving it, pouring all our resources into it, we're still discussing whether it has economical reasons, and like in case of Greeks, we can't find much of such economical reasons for it.
[+] [-] fractallyte|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrismealy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] william42|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seats|14 years ago|reply
http://www.terrafugia.com/
[+] [-] anukulrm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Detrus|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fuzzythinker|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jayzee|14 years ago|reply
Kiva Systems has gone from strength to strength and is now used by Zappos, Wallgreens and others (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiva_Systems)
[+] [-] pedalpete|14 years ago|reply
Their manifesto makes me question if my current project is thinking big enough (I think it is).
I think the problem entrepreneurs who would apply to Founders Fund might have is how to present their idea as being big and bold. Often the big and bold are not understood in common terms, so we dumb them down to something that is achievable in the short term, and seems realistic, while having a long-term goal which only makes sense if the shorter term goals can be accomplished.
Facebook would be a perfect example here. They couldn't be discussed as 'world changing' in the early days as they were just another social network. Nothing seemed insurmountable, nothing seemed challenging, even the idea of this 'social graph' probably wouldn't have made much sense until tens of millions of people were using it.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] speby|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cleaver|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btcoal|14 years ago|reply
a. the quality of presentation of content is independent of the quality of the information of content; and
b. text that is harder to read may be easier to remember: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11573666
[+] [-] GeorgeTirebiter|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mitultiwari|14 years ago|reply
140 characters may not have great technology but can be attributed to bring social revolution in so many places.
Ultimately, need is mother of most of innovations. Need leads to demand, which leads to building new solutions.
[+] [-] rbanffy|14 years ago|reply