From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Wed Feb 02 2000 - 04:03:13 MST
On Tue, Feb 01, 2000 at 10:12:56PM -0800, john grigg wrote:
> We are a company that embraces extropian/transhumanist principles, and Max
> More is currently assisting us in the development of what will be the
> leading business strategy hub on the Internet,
:
> Wow! I hear people say the people in this list are talkers and not doers in
> the classic silicon valley success story way but this proves them wrong!
> Huzzah to Max for being part of such an impressive project! I hope he will
> get stock options if he hasn't already. I'm sure being rich would help
> further his extropian goals! :)
Hollow laughter ...
Congrats to Max -- and good luck coping with the bad food, long hours
spent at the desk, gut-gnawing anxiety, unreliable pay-cheques, sudden-
death panics over how to manage exponential growth, and all the other
fun that comes from working for a start-up _before_ you get to the stage
of IPO's and stock options!
I'm now working for the third start-up I've been employed by. Start-ups
are burn-out city: I'm 35 and I don't think I've got the energy to go
through this sort of experience again, at least without some serious smart
drugs. It's the first I've been in that's actually made it to market;
we should be going public in the UK next month, and unless the guys with
the money are lying to us, we should have stock options enough to make
it worth the pain. Despite the WIRED hagiography, start-ups aren't an
automatic ticket to having a fun time in the office and getting rich
in the process: they can be a fast-track road to Not Having A Life,
fucking yourself over, and generally rendering yourself miserable and
penniless when they collapse under you.
Max is a big boy -- I've seen him on this list since, um, 1991 or 1992 --
so I figure he probably knows what he's getting into.
Good luck. You're going to need it.
-- Charlie Stross
(Who, twenty-nine months after joining DataCash as contractor #1, three
weeks before the company was registered, is now looking back in
bafflement and wondering how two programmer dudes in an office in
Edinburgh and one slick-willie money man in a shared office in London
somehow turned into a corporation: and who is slightly rueful about
having insisted on coming in as a contractor for the first six months,
rather than an employee/shareholder, because he figured the probability
of failure was about 80%.)
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