> “Becoming one of these iconic, impactful companies is akin to winning a gold medal in the Olympics. In fact, probably more challenging,” Shafi wrote in the memo, which was full of similarly outlandish analogies. “Like the Olympics, we know most people don’t want to be Olympians. In the same way, not everyone will want to walk the path we are walking. But for those that want to push their limits and find out what they are capable of, this culture is for you.”
With every day that passes I become more convinced that Silicon Valley was a documentary.
Its really unclear to me why a startup would expect their employees to be game for this in 2023. Once upon a time, the equity grants could be worth something. For an average exit, an early employee could easily see a life changing amount of money - for a late employee, they'd still get a down payment or something meaningful.
If I'm at a company that capped the upside of my equity, that created an equity pool which is only meaningful on surprise upside, that is not doing well... why would I suddenly be game for increasing my workload by 20-30%?
I can see why it works, though. There are people who are motivated by the belief that they're more hardworking/better/etc than other people, and if you offer them a metric that could make them feel "better" than someone else, they'll try to meet it even if its to their own detriment. Hustle culture depends on these types existing.
They did have some successful exits though right?
I’ll just leave this here.
Although it's going to be a very interesting shift with AI developing so fast.
Will face to face be the only true way to verify you're talking to a human soon?
I suspect the short answer is yes, and part of me wonders if this will actually be a good thing in the long run. It seems we’ve gotten pretty far from our social origins, arguably with some ill effects.
I’m more worried that this will usher in an era of draconian online verification out of apparent necessity.
Some scifi imagines a world with a useless internet that is avoided in favor of local intranets or in person only
But also with AI running their own businesses, shout out to Delamain!
The human AI distinction wont be that important, but also in person favored.
