There's a shitty book called The Myth of the Garage whose principle asset is that it's short. You would think that it would talk a bit about how the visionaries of the tech industry didn't labor alone, had massive support, were often rich as fuck to begin with, etc. Nope. It's about how they all struggled alone, penniless, full of virtue, FOR A LONG TIME so if you wanna break through you just need to buck up little camper and work three times as hard like Jeff Bezos did! But if you dig into it with so much as a caviar spoon you discover that it's rich fucks all the way down. "Hey look! A couple college kids came up with a 'browser' in their spare time - nobody could ever do that! They must be geniuses! Especially since they're hanging out with Jim Clark, let's buy that shit for four billion." This is Ben Horowitz. Yes, of "Andreessen Horowitz." I want you to go look up his book. It's called "the hard thing about hard things." I want you to read a sample. I want you to go through the frontispiece, the table of contents, and just make it to the first page. You only need a paragraph or so. He goes on. For a long time. I read the whole thing. But that one little paragraph is all you need. I want you to recognize that when you're partnered with Ben Horowitz, you are always the self-aware one. Which results in exercises in "no it's the children who are wrong" misadventures such as this. picture is from hereThe lack of self-awareness is leaving such a vacuum behind I'm worried a black hole might appear.
I'll do you one worse: ...I think I ended up jumping through the book? Considering I had completely forgotten ever reading it I can't be sure of that though. One of the things I like about the podcast How I Built This, is that it always ends by asking the person who built a company what degree of success they attribute to luck versus to their skill. It forces haughty CEOs to address the fact that they usually just stumbled into succes, that they got where they are by the help of other people('s money). Either that, or they end the episode by looking like, well, a Ben Horowitz. There was a time when I ate the entrepreneurial, Tim Ferriss/Peter Thiel/Sam Altman narratives up. You can be anything you want! Go change the world! I'm glad I now know it's just throwing darts. After all, what is ambition but lust on a longer timescale.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on. Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work. Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it. I have a friend who came up to visit from Portland fifteen, twenty years ago. In another life we're married. In this one she has cats. She was talking about her friends who, much like my friends, tend to get into all sorts of scrapes. I kept using the phrase "unlucky" and at some point she said "there's unlucky and there's sucking at life. You miss one interview that's unlucky. You miss four? It's no longer luck." I have been reflecting on the lives I haven't lead, the traps I avoided, the preposterous number of things that had to go right for me to be here. If I'd lived the way my sister does I'd have been dead by 19. So I don't think it's just throwing darts. But right now? A lot of Hollywood is being written by my friends, by my colleagues, by the "screenwriting gurus" that were hustling for a little Amazon side money while also grading papers for the University of Phoenix or making sandwiches for Panera. Success is being in the right place at the right time and the longer you can stay in the right place, the more likely it is to be the right time and fuckkn' hell I pretty much gave up on that shit in 2009 and they're getting credits now? I made more in a day mixing internals for Apple than SyFy pays their screenwriters for feature films. Ben Horowitz is illustrative. He never got the support or buy-in necessary to become Eminem. He clearly regrets that. He has to be a venture capitalist instead. There's another finance guy who talks more about his club DJ sessions than any particular positions he's opened or closed. By and large, we do what we're supported to do. Tim Draper is a venture capitalist, just like his father and grandfather before him, and so are his children.Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Rich kids can afford many throws.