Tech Industry
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What makes so many Southeast Asians have an inferiority complex towards East Asians?
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I used to be considered a liberal, now I am leaning conservative. What happend?
Personal Finance
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Child chose 2nd-most expensive college
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Finally I give up, going back to India.
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Amazon is Sh****t
I remember my younger self as highly imaginative. As a kid, I could spend hours inside building universes, stories, and then transferring them onto Lego brick constructions, drawings, etc, and I got so immersed in it I would neglect my primary needs like eating and drinking. I had so much fun. Even during university times or early years of work I feel like i kept coming up with novel and creative initiatives. Back then I had so many ideas but lacked wits and experience on how to make them come true, not even mentioning having them make money - had some startups that initially gained popularity among users but never picked up as a successful business and ultimately got closed. Now, couple years into corporate career, I feel like I have sufficient coding and leadership skills to materialize anything I could imagine. And here is the problem - there’s nothing I can imagine. I feel like my brain stopped producing ideas. It solves defined problems very well, but it’s been a while since it came up with any creative thought. I feel like all problems in tech industry have been either solved or appropriated by tech giants and there is nowhere for me to squeeze in. All I can do is keep on climbing along corporate ladder. I have become numb and trapped by convenient life. Question for successful software engineer startup founders who left corporate jobs - how did you come up with your ideas and how did you manage to sell them? I know it’s a very general question but just looking for any inspiration TC 250k
I’m not a founder but my observation is that either people obtain enough industry experience and have deep knowledge of a particular problem space and enough connections, or they’re young and inexperienced but have been keeping up with the latest trends and leaning into their naivety (sometimes a good thing). Most of all I think you need to be very curious about a particular problem space and naturally so (reaching out to people, attending industry events, looking at startups) instead of being a 9-5 code monkey (nothing wrong with this, as I am one). If you’re not doing this now your odds of being successful are slim given the sheer learning curve and effort to get things off the ground. 2 cents, and grain of salt, just having been around other entrepreneurs and working at various startups and building out my own side projects.
I come up with thousands of ideas daily, and can also execute and build them, but have no clue how to sell it. The gift and the curse shuffles different with us all. I’m eager to know who has successfully done so as well, following this post.
I feel this to my core, every single word of it. The only thing either of us can do at this point is to hope that we’re in this situation due to the external pressure/responsibility of the corporate job constantly occupying our minds, and that imagination is a skill that could come back in time given the right circumstances. One thing that I notice kills any free form thought is extended screen time. Things just got worse for me after moving to these new gen huge screen phones. Gotta limit that sh*t as much as possible since we stare at screens 9-5 every weekday anyway
I relate so hard. Absolutely hate this way of life.
Same here - then I spend a lot of time lamenting and being pissed off at myself for not making a change. The only cure is action by doing something about it. No one is going to tell you what you should do with life and no one is dropping opportunities on your lap. I’m writing this to also remind myself that.
Leave. Do not fill the empty space. If you are naturally creative and now appropriately skilled, create a vacuum and protect it. Literally anything and everything will try to enter that space, and your job is to curate what goes in. There are many ways to run the curation process — depends on what works best for you. Write it down, leverage AI, no-tech post-it frenzy, talk to serious people, voice notes, sketch, whatever. But the point is: If you are serious about building a business around your own ideas (or 10x improve existing ones), create space and just run the product discovery process. Don’t let anything into the pipeline until it matches the skillset you’ve developed, is naturally motivating, and you can fairly quickly test viability. Your business won’t survive long term if those three criteria aren’t met. That said, don’t think you need a novel idea to succeed. Usually it’s easier to win in existing markets by building a better product than the incumbent for a niche. Get out there, do shit, and keep an eye out for unmet needs you can solve or inefficiencies you can arbitrage. Package that up and you have a value proposition. Rob Walling’s “The SaaS Playbook” is a solid reference for this. You don’t have to build SaaS, but the concept still applies. —— You could also stay in your role and try the same, but it’s much harder. You would be counter-positioning your two wolves. P.S. If you create empty space but X or Blind or other endless low-leverage feeds fill the space, you lose out on everything above.
I love this reply. How do we know this book is legit? I feel like it is advertised as a type of get rich quick guide for software people, but maybe it’s just for marketing purposes.
I mean — I read it 🤷 I found it to be well scoped (to boostrapped B2B SaaS, but still applicable elsewhere), well structured, and directly relevant to the operational questions I had. Rob Walling is well known in the bootstrapped SaaS community (and founded one of its core accelerators, TinySeed), so I figured why not start there. Was not disappointed. —— FWIW… I think AI (and the timing with low-code, API-everything, OSS-everything) has already changed the landscape, but most people are still joking about chatbots in comment sections. Right now, small and scrappy AI-first teams have asymmetric leverage to build and scale products faster than incumbents for a fraction of the cost, and then sell it back to them 😏. With a team of 1-10, you can scale to $1-10M ARR, exit at 2-5x multiple, and keep the change. So if bootstrapped SaaS sounds like the poor man’s startup — well, it used to be. Now it’s a permission-less way to build and (potentially) exit with life changing money in 2-3 years. Def recommend.
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