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At Burning Man While Your Startup Burns (techcrunch.com)
There's a difference between clearing your head, and ditching your dying startup to do drugs in the desert. From a report: Whether you're going to Burning Man, Ibiza, SXSW, or some big international tech conference, the message you send is the same. If your startup isn't succeeding, you're skipping out on the dirty work while hoping some miracle revelation or networking connection will save you. And it probably won't. For those less familiar, Burning Man is when 70,000 people build a temporary city of tents and RVs in the Nevada desert where no money is exchanged, and instead everyone seeks to gift strangers with giant art installations, workshops, food, drinks, and celebrations. But I get a sinking feeling when I notice or hear about the leaders of a struggling startup trying to dance or dose away their troubles. Being out of a contact for several days to a week since there's no reliable cellular connection and a stigma against phone use creates a decision-making bottleneck that can slow down your company. Ex-Oculus founder Palmer Luckey here points out how juice presser startup Juicero's founder Doug Evans took off to Burning Man for week. That's despite the company recently admitting it needed to lower prices after Bloomberg reporters revealed you could simply squeeze Juicero juice packs by hand without the $400 machine. In the middle of that week Evans was at Burning Man, Juicero announced it would suspend sales of its juicer and juice packs as it desperately tries to find an acquirer. While Evans handed over the CEO title to former Coca-Cola exec Jeff Dunn late last year, the company told TechCrunch "Evans is Juicero's full time Founder and Chairman of the Board and very active within the company."
Shouldn't people be allowed to take vacations? I have no problem with this.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
"success is 10% sweat, 30% connection, and 60% luck."
That attitude explains why a lot of people fail and then bemoan failing but won't take ownership of their own failure.
My success is 80% sweat, 1% connection and 19% luck.
Luck comes in two varieties: good and bad. You need to be prepared to take advantage of the good luck and resilient enough to keep pushing through the bad luck.
Stop thinking that other people are succeeding because of their connections and luck. Your attitude is just excuse making. Start putting in the sweat to make things happen and stick with it. Good things take a lot of time and work.
Dude, it's Burning Man! You are paying someone to sit in the desert, discard your gadgets, and feel good about yourself! Not since Tom Sawyer tricked half his town into white-washing his fence for him has there been a bigger scam than Burning Man 2017!
A fundamental rule about businesses is: you should never have anyone who is actually indispensable. If that person gets hit by a bus, the business is toast -- so a company with one of more indispensable people in it is a company in a weak or precarious position.
If the company really can't do without an exec for a week or so, I take that as a big red flag that the company is, at best, teetering. So let them have their vacation, it's probably not making anything worse.
I'm a startup founder, I've never been to Burning Man, or any similar events, and probably never will be. I agree that those are not actually networking events, but I don't think it's ok to dictate the type of vacation someone should take. If raving in the desert is what someone needs to clear their head and make better decisions, they should do it. Not everyone gets the same thing from meditation and solitary introspection. Sometimes you just need something different. There are times I need to go take a peaceful hike by myself to reflect, and there are times I need to go to Vegas with an old friend to make bad decisions on purpose.
For a startup founder, your company is ALWAYS in crisis. Every week you're burning cash to keep things going. If you wait for the perfect time to take a vacation, you'll be waiting for a very long time. Whether you can bear to leave your co-workers working while you go is highly personal and unique to every situation... it's impossible to generalize.
Now, I've seen people who do take way too much time off, and do expect to come up with a miracle on the fly to replace the work they should have put in. But that's a different thing.
My success is 80% sweat, 1% connection and 19% luck.
While I agree with this, I'd like to make two observations:
First, the difference between someone who succeeds and someone who fails is that the one who succeeds doesn't give up after each failure. I've known quite a lot of very successful people, but I've never met a single one who hasn't left a string of failures behind them on the way.
Second, what people call "luck" isn't. One thing that stands out to me about people who are "lucky" is that they have a skill that can be somewhat subtle. All of us are surrounded by opportunities of all sorts, every day. We don't notice or recognize the majority of them (and, truthfully, most of them aren't of interest to us).
People who are "lucky" are people who are better at noticing these opportunities and taking advantage of them.
He has a ... net worth of a couple of million
HE'S WON BABY!
With a $2 million dollars of stocks you can have an income of (around and averaged to) $200,000/year from stock market gains alone. You can live anywhere in the world and that money still comes in. You don't have to put in a single hour of work. It just happens.
Considering the typical person in the world lives on ~$10,000/year and you'd be making 20x that, for doing nothing other than breathing, I think you've got a VERY strange definition of "paltry". Hell, even in first-world top-dog USA where everyone is rich and the median income is $51,939, you'd still be doing REAL fine just living on the gains from your stocks.
Let me make this abundantly clear: Most people still have to work for a living because they cannot simply choose to get out of the SanFran housing clusterfuck and retire with a big-ass pile of a "paltry" $2,000,000. If I were handed even $1 mil, I'd stop working for someone else and start making the things I WANT to make (or fuck around all day like the unmotivated slob I am, but regardless). If you think having a net worth of $2 mil makes this guy a loser, then you need to go travel the world a little. The parts which don't have a cabana boy with mimosas on hand. You need some perspective. It'll do you good.