“[Michael Arrington is] trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to work insane hours, sleep under your desk, and give up your one and only youth, and if you don’t do that, you’re a pussy. He’s using my words to try and back up that thesis. I hate this, because it’s not true, and it’s disingenuous. What is true is that for a VC’s business model to work, it’s necessary for you to give up your life in order for him to become richer…He’s telling you the story of, “If you bust your ass and don’t sleep, you’ll get rich” because the only way that people in his line of work get richer is if young, poorly-socialized, naive geniuses believe that story! Without those coat-tails to ride, VCs might have to work for a living. Once that kid burns out, they’ll just slot a new one in.
Watch a VC use my name to sell a con. | jwz
Jamie Zawinski’s response to Michael Arrington’s disingenuous appropriation of his words to perpetuate startup workaholic mythology is so close to the response I had been planning to write (you can even see a bit of it in some of my tweets on the subject last night) that it practically makes me giddy. As if I didn’t love him enough already.
As someone who has been through the wringer a number of times now (at big companies, as an independent developer, and with several startups of various stages) I am strongly of the opinion that there is a huge difference between good old fashioned, productive hard work and focus and the kind of pathological, counterproductive death march lifestyle that people like Arrington glibly fetishize. In my experience the former tends to come naturally to well run teams where people feel trusted and empowered, while the latter is almost invariably a symptom of deep organizational dysfunction.
