11 Comments

For all arguments about Kalanick's startup, the level of interest in his second startup is very high both from prospective employees and investors. The difference between hard conditions, which are very common in startups, and illegal conditions, re discrimination, needs to be spelt out in these articles. The articles play fast and loose with this distinction and make it sound like it's somehow a horrible place to be.

I feel for these things Travis' idea of running on less transparency, running it essentially w/o much publicity, is the correct strategy here. You can't run a business by committee or through the lens of public opinion!

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I really enjoyed Skunk Works, that book was just in my sweet spot of cool engineering and cool plane anecdotes. Have you read 'Boyd' about John Boyd? Not quite the same, but they make a good pair.

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Interesting read on the web article. But the author is off base. If you want to make a static website with some text and images, as he mentions, you can still do that without all the fancy tooling and ideas he mentions. The code he used in 1998 will still work today.

The reason tooling has changed is because modern web users demand much more from web applications. Gone are the days of "ooo I can type in this little box and see it over here and that's all I want!"

His complaint is like building a horse carriage in your barn in 1900 and then saying 15 years later "Wow building a car requires you to do a lot of fancy stuff"

In the era he's romanticizing, clients and browsers were not powerful and sophisticated enough to handle heavy computation. They are now. A "front end engineer" used to be an HTML translator and stylist -- more lightly technical graphic designer than CS wizard.

Nowadays an engineer on the front end is reading books on functional programming and monads and state management and design systems and all the rest. Front end has difficult problems of architecture and optimization and used to be the purview of the back end server wizards. No more.

But then again, this is coming from a guy who rebuilt Windows 95 in the browser (https://zach.dev)

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Could you elaborate on this paragraph, or write more about it in the future? Specifically on the correlation between founding and investing skills, and maybe a study on where initial employees ended up. Thx!

"This is a very interesting point! If there's such a strong power law distribution for company returns, why don't we see more cofounders, employee-#1s, and ultra-early angels on the lists? We do see some, but not many. One possible reason is that founding and investing skills correlate—two of Google's earliest investors did not get rich investing in Google, but got rich by co-founding Sun Microsystems and Amazon, respectively."

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