Patrick McKenzie

And the Wall Street Journal thesis was not simply that the size of the pie would decrease in the wake of the dot-com bust, which I don't think they even got as far as articulating that, although it's been 25 years, but was more like, oh, you know, companies will maximize for cost of labor, et cetera, and therefore ship out all the jobs.

So interestingly, I was the marketing engineer earlier in my career and really thought that that was important.

And in terms of like high level advice I would give a founder, I would probably tell them a little bit about marketing engineering, but wouldn't spend 95% of my time talking about that unless that was explicitly what they brought me in on.

But founders spend too much time on playing house and chasing status are both two sort of like well-known pitfalls where you can get addicted, which is not quite the right word,

your incentives will draw you into playing the role of the CEO of a successful company before your actions have earned the company its level of success.

The fundamental nature of early stage businesses is that investment in you is not a vindication of what you have achieved.

It's an advance on your future accomplishments.

And you need to rigorously pursue actually making those future accomplishments.

And there's many ways to rigorously pursue it.

Talk to more users, write more software, make something excellent, get more people to use it, get better at selling it, etc., etc.

That's an important strain of Silicon Valley culture.

I'm glad we have it.

I'm glad we are popularizing it to as many places in the world, including to me in central Japan.

And yet, you know, there are always other games that are going on, and those other games are less important, but they are very, very attractive games.

Not video games here, but why don't you go to a conference?

Why don't you meet more interesting people?

Why don't you show up at the best parties, etc., etc.

?

Showing up at the best parties does not, at most margins, increase the number of users you talk to.

It doesn't write functioning code.