Anyone here worked with well known techies?

eBay
power Sell

Go to company page eBay

power Sell
Mar 4 5 Comments

Curious to know if anybody here has worked with popular tech engineers/founders?

Came across this youtuber David Byttow.
https://www.youtube.com/c/DavidByttow

He speaks about his personal interaction with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey when Square(Block) was still a very small company. Jack told him how one day Square will be bigger than Twitter. Even with the recent drop, Block is almost 3 times Twitter in market cap.

He also shares the time when he got an offer to be one of the first engineers from founders of Epic Games. They went over and above and even bought him a guitar from a famous musician in order to get him to work at Epic. He instead chose an offer from Google.

TC: 500k
#facebook #tesla #square #faang #google

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  • TomTom International / Mgmt
    cricketzz

    Go to company page TomTom International Mgmt

    PRE
    Apple
     cricketzz
    I lead our 60 person intern team at my job and before that, I was pretty ingrained in the tech scene Web 2.0 social groups in 2005-2010 SF and I sometimes tell my interns about various tech stories. Many of the names they don’t know like Tantek, Ariel Waldman, Scott Beale, Tom Conrad, Matt Mullenwag, Om Malik, Leah Culver, Jack and EV and Blaine, John Adams and how he saved Twitter (and the fail whale), Pete Cashmore’s origin story and hanging out with him as he built Mashable..Bouldering with Rebecca Reeves and her boyfriend, now husband Cal Henderson. Authoring a book with one of the co-creators of Twitter and Jack writing our forward. I like the stories more about the people who never got famous but were there and pivotal in some of the great success stories. My friend Ryan who was on the Facebook Ads team in 2007-2010 and how he doesn’t get any credit for the billions FB made off of his tech. I can go on and on..oh there was that time I sat next to Mark & his wife Priscilla at the TechCrunch Crunchies 2 years in a row which was pretty neat. He was super awkward back then before he was coached and they brought in Sheryl to sort of get things in order. Oh and that time Kevin Rose was seriously hitting on my girlfriend at the time and she and I thought it was hilarious and just let it play out. He was a great guy but the old Valleywag stories about Kevin “plowing through Silicon Valley” were pretty true. I was also there when a lowly community manager at Justin.TV pushed hard that they support live streaming video games and originally, she was dismissed for it then..4 years later, Twitch becomes the biggest thing at Justin.TV. She had left by then and didn’t make any money from pushing hard for the video game community.

    Anyway seriously. On and on these old tech stories just because I was there.

    I should try to clean up all of these stories but being in SF in that early Web 2.0 era was wild and I learned something really important. I learned exactly what a founder is like….there are a LOT of founders that went nowhere but looking back, I can now see the ones who made it and why they made it and why they’re billionaires now. They were just different and so now when i meet and mentor young SWEs in my internship program, I can tell you with pretty good confidence who is going to do something special in their careers and I try to nurture them to take chances and join an early stage firm and fight through their imposter syndrome and give them confidence to believe in their natural talents. In a good team, they’ll do wonderful things and I know that because I saw exactly what that kind of person is like when you’re in their presence before they were internet famous and successful business people.

    Oh and Steve Jobs opened a door for me not once, but twice. I’ll never forget that. He insisted I go before him. He didn’t know who I was but that meant a lot to see how courteous he was with a stranger.

    PS: Jack was having tea with my friend and whipped out his first prototype of the square reader. He had been famously shit-canned from Twitter and showed us the first reader. Charged my Visa a dollar but said it’d be worth it to see Square in action. That was 2009 and I was impressed but didn’t see just how big it would be.

    TC 130K, 20 YOE
    Mar 4 2
    • eBay
      power Sell

      Go to company page eBay

      power Sell
      OP
      Thanks for sharing.

      Were most of them workaholics in addition to obviously being intelligent?

      You should probably write a blog or something. Good, first hand accounts are hard to find.
      Mar 4
    • TomTom International / Mgmt
      cricketzz

      Go to company page TomTom International Mgmt

      PRE
      Apple
       cricketzz
      Thanks for reading. I’m sorry it was so long. There were a few other anecdotes that came to mind when I was putting this all out and just decided it was getting too long.

      A blog post seems lazy because there are some real meaty stories I’d love to tell..I’m not talking scandalous just super interesting ones and they’d come from one side. I did focus on investigative journalism at a younger age and I know I wouldn’t do these stories justice unless I gathered accounts and quotes from the other parties who were there. Thanks to my FourSquare location dump, I know who was at these events thanks to shared check-ins at Justin.TV offices or the old twitter offices in South Park but man..we’re talking 15 year old stories at this point. Anyway, I feel incredibly privileged to have been friends with some of these folks and if I had advice for young SWEs / Entrepreneurs in the Bay Area, it’s to really relish and appreciate the decade your’e in right now because you’ll have met and worked with some truly exceptional people who really do change the world. TC and Blind Drama are fun and entertaining in the moment but I still think of tech as this magical thing we’re all a part of and every single one of us is inventing the future and that shouldn’t be discounted no matter how much money you make.

      ——

      To your question Workaholics versus Intelligence. I took up the former role and worked my ass off and unsuccessfully founded 3 companies that went nowhere and left SF in 2011 with a lot of debt and completely burned out. Sarah Lacy’s book “once you’re lucky, twice you’re good” is an appropriate summary here. Kevin Rose as a famous example then. Digg was a lot of luck. They started a bunch of things after, Revision3, Milk and more and Kevin never quite stuck lightning again and I think ended up as an angel / VC. I’d say in Digg’s case, he was lucky. Then you look at Cal Henderson, Flickr & Slack. He’s good. Same for Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Mike Matas and Leah Culver. These are true visionaries. Hell, even Jason Calacanis who gets a lot of shit for his personality he has had a very successful career and has been right about a LOT of things like Tesla (I rode in his v1 Roadster 13 years ago) and his views on Crypto over a decade ago. These weren’t necessarily all workaholics but damn were they out of this world smart and intellectual and could see the future. I once went back and watched a decade of Bill Gates’ CES keynotes from like 1999-2010 and that dude got a LOT of stuff right. It wasn’t always Microsoft that did it but his forward looking view such as “computers everywhere and miniaturized and on our bodies” played out perfectly.

      I spent some time with MG Siegler back in the early days of ReadWriteWeb then TechCrunch. Having him show me “BRBN” (before it was Instagram) at a party and he was head over heals telling me that this was the future. Dude called Instagram as a huge success 5 years before it was. Any tech archivist can just read MG’s TechCrunch articles from 2009 and on and you’ll see why he’s at GV Ventures. He has a real knack for assessing billion dollar ideas and deserves every bit of success he’s had.

      I’m sorry. I wish I was going somewhere with this…I’ve been drinking quite a bit tonight but maybe a blog post is a good idea? You have my nostalgia going tonight :) Thanks for kicking off this unusual stream of consciousness. I appreciate it.
      Mar 4
  • Google / Eng
    6F6Inch

    Go to company page Google Eng

     6F6Inch
    Most of these guys aren’t on Blind as they have no interest in the rat race like others here. They’ve already made it big and enjoying life.
    Mar 4 0
  • Amazon
    oooooooooh

    Go to company page Amazon

    oooooooooh
    I always thought it was cool that Sky Dayton knew my name. (#earthlink)
    Mar 4 0