foolishdream's comments

That is the common link between this specific time you feel this way and all the other past times? You've exhausted all the potential external sources, so maybe it's time to look within. This may sound like voodoo, but there might be some internal source that is causing you to feel this very real sense of anxiety and stress. Before you go do something brash like quitting what seems like a dream gig, dedicate several months to check in with multiple psychologists to see if that doesn't help improve your malady first.

You're reframing. "Tough but fair" is how you treat coworkers, employees, investors, and others who you interact with regularly. But it doesn't give you an edge in becoming relentlessly effective.

What do you do when your competitor is willing to break rules that you are not? Tread moral and legal grey areas that you do not? Take advantage of Facebook API's to spam users? How about spamming Craigslist? Submitting thousands of fake car requests to bog down your service and drivers?

Do you avoid all this low hanging fruit? Or do you take advantage of these growth opportunities and hope that you're so successful these shady tactics become afterthoughts?

Have less scruples than the next guy. Being free of moral bindings allows you greater range to maneuver.

Understand social proof and signaling. Practice dropping positive signals and social proof in all your stories; have a rehearsed story showing vulnerability to have when you need to make yourself appear more personable. Practice mirroring as people like those similar to themselves. If you're an well educated white male, you're already halfway there.

I'm not sure, since this was learned through a series of hard lessons that no one ever taught me or explicitly mentioned. Just keep in mind that many people are not like you, and their value systems can be very different, allowing them to do totally crazy things and backwards rationalize them (see German population during WW2, Steve Jobs, Groupon's Lefkofsky). Eventually you're going to run into low functioning psychopaths. Just try to minimize your losses when it happens.

The other thing to learn with game theory is aligning self interests. When your interests align with other people, your sails are going with the wind, and everything just gets a lot easier. If they aren't, everything is very tough. Try to observe this from an objective viewpoint, if your interactions and results from this person are getting easier or tougher.

I'll need to think on this some more and maybe make a full post about this later.

What has come out of contacts you initially met at meetups and hackathons? How long have you been going to them? How long have you been a developer? How many jobs have you had?

How does that compare to your network from coworkers, old bosses, friends, acquaintances that were not initially from tech focused meet ups?

My advice is: Don't join a startup*

*until you're experienced enough. You must be able to distinguish short term and long term greedy behavior, be able to act selfishly most of the time without appearing selfish, understand and practice game theory. Until this point, you're just going to be taken advantage of until you're either sucked dry, or you've learned all the right lessons.

Every non-exec employee that joins post cofounder up until a year before IPO or 8-9 digit acquisition gets below market compensation. There are hundreds of startups and probably tens of thousands of people that get chewed up in between.

Don't join a startup in this trough of sorrow, unless you're ok with getting less money. Hopefully you're getting better status, experience, position, power, leverage, or something tangible out of the deal. Money-wise you're much better off being a quant or Goo-ama-twit-book. Arguably it's psychologically healthier too.

The biggest problem in startups is the prevalence of low functioning psychopaths. You assume you both are long term greedy, but turns out they're just ruthless social climbers looking to take advantage of whoever is inexperienced enough to get exploited.

Take SnapChat Evan Spiegel for instance. Regardless of Spiegel's excuse to cut out Reggie Brown (whether it's lack of contract, lack of tech skills, lack of ability), Spiegel flat out denied that Reggie Brown made any sort of attribution. How ridiculous is it that he’s a potential billionaire and he's trying to stick it to his former friend and frat brother by denying that he had any involvement at all?

Evan is not the only low functioning psychopath by far. Once you get burned a couple times, you'll start to recognize them and their behavior patterns.

High functioning psychopaths are a different animal. They are usually long term greedy, and are great to work with as they have internalized game theory. As long as you both can mutually benefit, working with them is great. They are ruthlessly effective. They get deals done, manage people well, focus on the right things, and treat you very well. All you need to do is stay useful.

I'd steer clear of meetups, hackathons, etc. Most of them are polluted with low signal/noise. I've found them to be a total waste of time but it's a great way to get that initial job if you don't have one already. You need things that are curated by cost, signal, or strong mutual acquaintance. Meetups usually don't have high enough obstacles to avoid pretend programmers.

The best way is engaging smart coworkers. These are the people that are going to vouch for you, shortcut the hiring process, help carve out good opportunities for you.

Other things I've done with varying success is randomly contact people off forums that I might be in a position to immediately help; inform existing contacts and ask them if they know people that I should meet out there; develop parallel hobbies like soccer, rock climbing, etc that can segue into deeper friendships. Engaging quality coworkers and these other activities tend to compound over time.

Do you already have sales / customers? It's usually a terrible idea to outsource customer development early because you don't get that critical feedback for your product until you figure out the real reasons why customers aren't buying / renewing / using.

It might be too early to hire an intern or sales rep, but definitely read up on Jason Lemkin's sales stuff. It'll give you good benchmarks and rules of thumb that will save tons of time figuring out on your own. http://saastr.com/2013/01/11/when-you-hire-your-first-sales-...

Start calling yourself one. Then work on a prominent enough project that people start believing you. If this doesn't work, write / speak / comment / manage your way to credibility and higher visibility. If a great programmer programs by himself in the forest and no one notices, then no one cares.

I saw a user testimony prominently featured on mbesto’s startup homepage. Turns out the testimony is quoting himself on how great his startup is.

Take that for what it’s worth.