from Hacker News

It’s a fucking startup. Why are you here?

by yoseph on 4/21/14, 2:28 AM with 26 comments

  • by ardit33 on 4/21/14, 3:21 AM

    Lame. 2011 called and wants its entrepreneurial war stories back. Stories with "suffering" and "struggle" where all in the employees are "all in", but not sharing the profits of course, oh and you can be cut or fired anytime, while your out of touch CEO/founder is having the time of his life.

    I think I have grown an internal immunity from this bs. (Or maybe I am just older and more mature now).

    What does fab do this days anyway?

  • by slm_HN on 4/21/14, 3:09 AM

    I take this as a positive sign that Hacker News is working.

    I suffered through reading this post which contains such gems as: "Have you ever been clinging onto a rocket ship, then cut the engines at full speed, and then tried to fly again?" because it was on the front page of Hacker News. When I refreshed the site a couple minutes later it was mercifully off the front page.

    I'm curious how it got front page to begin with but I'm glad it didn't last long.

  • by hrktb on 4/21/14, 3:11 AM

    My initial reaction was that he is qualifying his company with a swear word. Everyone is free to interpret how it was meant, but still.

    Then this quote

    > I want to build a company that touches millions and millions of people in a positive way and is known as one of the great companies of our time.

    This made me think about Steve Job talking to Apple employees at his return. Throwing the Michael Dell quotes at the employees, and telling them that they shouldn't stay for the salaries, and from there it will be as tough as it can be grow back.

    Apple is considered a great company, and it touches millions of people in a positive way, my household is full of Apple products. But Steve Jobs was a douchebag, there was the no poach thing going on, there seems to have been a lot of verbal and psychological abuse to reach their level of perfection, and I don't think everyone (the server side guys working on iCloud for instance) were very happy of their jobs.

    Some people are attracted by this kind of culture, and I don't deny it can have wonderful results. But is it something to be proud of, and acknowledge as a sane or needed state?

  • by greenyoda on 4/21/14, 3:19 AM

    I'm curious: at what point do we stop calling a company a "startup"? A company that has 750 employees (as Fab had before their restructuring) and has existed for three years sounds like a somewhat mature medium-sized company that has accumulated a substantial amount of inertia and bureaucracy (a horde of middle managers, an HR department, etc.). When I think of startups, I think of at most a few dozen employees struggling to get their first product to profitability.

  • by ZenPro on 4/21/14, 11:30 AM

    Making employees justify why they are there?

    How about why did you convince 750 people to put their faith in you then fumble the ball so badly you had to sack 400 of them...

    The post comes across too much like a dad-trying-to-be-cool moment.

    "We are a start-up, I need 18 hour days from everybody. Now that we have lost sight of our objectives we need to redouble our efforts!"

  • by dyadic on 4/21/14, 4:04 AM

    Call me jaded, but when a company that hit 750 staff and then loses 2/3 of them says "it's a fucking startup" I don't read that as genuine or motivational.

  • by james1071 on 4/21/14, 9:35 AM

    Translation:he wants everyone to work hard, to pay them little and fire them when he needs to cut costs some more.

  • by r0h1t4sh on 4/22/14, 12:39 PM

  • by flylib on 4/21/14, 4:25 AM

    he is trying too hard to sound like Ben Horowitz who he has admitted is his mentor, there is nothing original with this blog post

  • by martinjones on 4/21/14, 3:05 AM

    I started reading this expecting not to like it, because a lot of blog posts with gratuitous F bombs in the title are by morons. Totally not the case here. Plenty of honesty and inspiration. +1