> humans hard wired for status within their social group.

Not always "status". Humans benefit from cooperative behaviour but may have many reasons for joining and adhering or leaving.

Having varied interests means different networks. The important point is to see meaning and value. This is where ostracism and rejection can be most painful.

I took 1.5 years off to work on an open source project (also because I was struggling with health issues), and the hardest thing was describing what you're doing to other people. I thought I was "above" social status, that it wouldn't affect me, but it did. I was essentially unemployed, that's how it felt at least. It's so much easier just saying "I do X for a living, I work at company Y". It means some company thinks you're good enough to pay good money for.

In what book? Searched but can’t find anything that sounds like this.

Hard to take such general advice seriously from someone who apparently doesn’t practice it. In fact, it seems mistaken to do so.

The dude also dumped his long time girlfriend right after coming into a large chunk of money (and thinks she cares enough to read his blog!), and truly thinks he was going to "save our government". Also, the mountain climbing (IYKYK).

He sounds pretty full of himself and seems to struggle making personal connections with people. Being the founder of a startup gave people a reason to care about him, and now that he's lost that along everyone around him. He beat the game and now the characters in the story have nothing left to say to him.

The guy should put down the physics book and go learn to be a person that others enjoy being around. Go get a job waiting tables and hang out with coworkers after work, learn to surf, etc.

100% this! Calling one's colleague an NPC is not only demeaning but also shows a lack of awareness and empathy. Does the author even understand that by his logic, he is a NPC in his colleague's world?

You are misinterpreting. He’s talking about how at big companies, you always have people who don’t seem to bring any actual value. They're in every meeting, but don't say anything, don't set any direction, don't produce any documents or any code, don't exhibit any sense of urgency or even involvement, and don't contribute in any noticeable way. "NPCs." They are completely passive as far as you can tell -- or worse, they actively slow others down when they happen to be on some critical approval path.

I'm sure they are lovely people outside work, and loving parents and good citizens. But when the rest of us are busting our butts to get work done, they're unfortunately useless.

Yes. Thinking of others as NPCs has its own way of turning ones self into an NPC.

cf. Mean Girls

> Probably needs to develop a soul first.

More generally, if you cultivate yourself you will get more pleasure from your activities. If you take time to learn an instrument, or listen to classical, or gardening (you can grow exotic plants for example), learn a new language, or anything else. The more you put into refining your appreciation and knowledge, the more value you can get back from your activities. It's a self cultivation problem.

Calling people NPCs is one of my biggest pet peeves and a dead giveaway that someone is a soulless narcissist. It is dehumanizing in the extreme, the same way Nazis characterized Jews as rats in propaganda. When people say eat the rich… this is who they mean

Yep. I don't understand why the technological community accepts essentially sociopathic tendencies as long as your idea (regardless of what that idea is) is rewarded by the capital system. It's pathetic.

If true, he probably knows this already and now just needs to work out how to fix it.

They slapped the word AI on it and took advantage of temporary market conditions (wfh due to covid and AI hype), nothing more, nothing less. Unless I'm missing something, there is nothing special about this product and probably no one will remember it in ~15 years time.

Meanwhile OP seems to think he should have expected the same sense of fulfillment one might get from an actually meaningful contribution to human society, for some reason.

It catered to the specific niche of screencasts and thus needed a lot of custom software written that doesn't already exist in Zoom/Teams. After development costs there's marketing/CAC costs to be considered. For those that don't "get it" upon seeing the product, you need to spend money on salespeople to convince them they do. After those expenses, their AWS bill surely wasn't cheap.

Finally though, you hope not to raise too many times, so that $200 million needs to last years. Let's say they planned for a round 10 years. that's 20 million a year. say half on developers, that's 10-40 software developers all-in (meaning after HR and health care for them and everything). 10-40 people isn't all that many, though clearly enough to build the product.

Since the author of the blog post walked away with $60 million, it's possible they could have developed the product for less, but it's hard to argue with the results he got. Spending less money would have been penny-wise, pound foolish.

No, only people who define their lives by their job. Most people have a life outside of work.