Hacker Cinema
The Social Network
2010 · Film · 121 min
Part of The Social Network Collection
Directed by David Fincher
In 2003, Harvard undergrad and computer programmer Mark Zuckerberg begins work on a new concept that eventually turns into the global social network known as Facebook. Six years later, Mark is one of the youngest billionaires ever, but his unprecedented success leads to both personal and legal complications when he ends up on the receiving end of two lawsuits, one involving his former friend.
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461 comments on Hacker News
If it helps, I regard early Facebook as Version 2.0 of the original Stalk That Girl and an example of asocial media that should have been culled at an early stage.
I can't speak to events depicted in films I haven't watched, so that's The Social Network and An Inconvenient Truth off the board :/
The terminology explains what happened.
The Zuckerberg movie was called The Social Network. At the time we saw the likes of Facebook as networks intended to build 1-1 communications.
Since then, it’s become social Media. It’s now about centralized structures broadcasting messages to subscribers and followers. The only difference from the past is who the broadcasters can be, but it’s no longer about building networks between people.
I suppose if your history started at the Social Network movie that would seem factual
TFA:
> We’ve seen this movie before.
...which one? 1984? The Terminator? The Truman Show? The Matrix? Minority Report? The Social Network?
I think so too, I just thought the social network was a really good movie and I'd rather the OpenAi movie has an ending, you know. Or to be fair you could just get Sorkin to write it and I would lap it up anyway.
The movie version will hopefully be more fun. My experience of the rise of Facebook was dull and depressing. But The Social Network is a great film.
HN was positive on him at one point.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2157445
>I really applaud Zuckerberg for positively embracing all the attention that's been shouldered on him, really. I think stuff like this SNL skit or him taking his core team at Facebook to watch "The Social Network" together at a movie theatre just shows tremendous inner strength and maturity on his part. It's great to see him be able to laugh it off and joke about it.
He's come a long way in his public speaking skills too, he was pretty natural and comedic during his talk at Startup School. I think he's only going to get better from this point on too.
Hold on, doesn’t he think ads aren’t cool, assuming he watched the movie The Social Network years ago?
Sam Altman wants you to believe he doesn’t like ads. Sam Altman wants you to believe ads are a last resort for him. Sam is losing money. Sam reached his last resort option.
(PS - just quoted from https://sfstandard.com/pacific-standard-time/2026/04/15/sam-altman-ronan-farrow-openai-pst-podcast/ in another comment)
So he is allegedly reported to be very dishonest but I wonder if the ad claim is a good example.
The reason you don't see it is because it is a massive privacy violation, and also it was move for move done in the plot of the movie Social Network about young Zuck, not exactly a novel idea.
To me, OP seems like someone who's deliberately trying to become the villain because he's seen the social network movie too much and is fantasizing that he'll gain the same wealth and fame as Zuckerberg by being the villain. Except here, he started crying when the consequences of being the villain caught up to him.
OP needs to realize that we are no longer in 2005 when the Facebook was founded. Nor is he in the US. He's in India which has much different laws and culture. And case law and our understanding of the harms of cyber bullying and harassment has drastically evolved since 2005.
OP should also realize that this is at IIT in India. There's already a huge suicide problem amongst students in India due to competition. Adding cyber harassment to that isn't the best idea.
I don't think he's being disingenuous. OP is transparent they started a campus gossip website inspired by The Social Network.
> I had scraped data for all students at IIT Delhi, and made a profile for all of them.
> anyone could make an anonymous account, and then comment anything on anyone's profile. Each profile also had 4 fields, where you could tag anyone, in the "has dated", "crushing on", "crushed on by" or "haters" category.
I am surprised that OP, having seen that movie and quoting lines from it during his meeting with the administration, didn't see this coming.
> also at one point i literally said the social network dialogue, " I feel like i deserve some recognition from you guys"
"HCF":
"In computer engineering, Halt and Catch Fire, known by the assembly language mnemonic HCF, is an idiom referring to a computer machine code instruction that causes the computer's central processing unit (CPU) to cease meaningful operation, typically requiring a restart of the computer. It originally referred to a fictitious instruction in IBM System/360 computers (introduced in 1964), making a joke about its numerous non-obvious instruction mnemonics." (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing)
The series is a memorable instance of what any self-respecting geek ought to have watched. It's better than "Silicon Valley", although the latter has pulled one scientific stunt regarding scientific advisory that is unique in film.
What other films/series are "must watch" material for geeks?
- War Games
- Silicon Valley
- The Social Network
- The Intern
- Mr. Robot
- Black Mirror
- Hackers
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- ...?
The hint is in the name.
In the early days they were social networks. The idea was to connect people. (The Facebook movie is called the Social Network…)
Now they’re social media. The idea is to push messages to you but this time the message is coming from a person you know so you’re psychologically more inclined to believe it.
That made me think - are there any depictions of Markdown in movies and tv shows? I've seen a fair share of C, Java, HTML, and (in newer works) JavaScript and Python. And Perl in The Social Network.
n.b.: the above quote is from The Matrix.
The Social Network movie?
Reminds me that they're working on a sequel to The Social Network film which will focus on some later parts of Facebook's history which will no doubt touch on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Reckoning
I think the rigid nature of other systems leads to more promising people being eliminated early on. America was always more fluid: the country of Homer Simpson: A guy that got second chance after second chance and with his own way of doing things(which others like Frank Grimes find absurd), managed to make something of himself.
Applying this logic to college, schools used to be more strict yes but there was always leeway for students to chart their own path to success, it never really felt like Asia or Europe's systems where they place you in a bucket early on and thats it you are in there for life.
I graduated with an Engineering degree in the early 2010s and let me tell you, I really did do the bare minimum in a bunch of classes. It led me to tinker with junk computers that the school discarded which led me to dedicated school space in a lab to experiment which led to my first job and general success. Looking back not studying harder led to more trouble later on but the path still worked out because I jumped at some opportunities due to that path. If I were in asia, I would have probably not even be admitted or permanently weeded out after my first academic probation warning instead of being a decently successful software developer.
> Just a core part of youth right now is much more interested in being an influencer, popular, a good athlete, no sorry good athletes are a dime a dozen
Before that people dreamed of becoming a hollywood actor. It was the number one desired career for years. The bar is much lower for trying your luck at being a successful influencer than becoming an actor. The end result will be the same, many will try and flame out and then go do something else.
>Being a bookworm or just studious simply isn't seen as cool, it has no social reward, quite the opposite in fact.
You sound like you are thinking of the 1990s as your context. These days after movies the The Social Network, one of the most desired careers is in software development. This goal requires people to expend much more effort than prior generations pursuing other desired careers and many more kids are doing it! Techies are the boss now.
Around my Uni I have seen people get away with murder when it comes to just about every element of process around money and that if they have a problem then yeah you might have to settle out of court.
A VC told me this about disputes: if your business fails there is nothing to sue over, if it succeeds then you are rich and you can afford to pay…. Look at the movie The Social Network you might be rich and feel angry that you are paying money to people who seem like parasite but you are rich!
Seriously though the model of the TTO is to reject the vast majority of possible inventions, spend $20k on patents with a less than 10% chance of a payout on each one. It's a better business model for them to spend a fraction of that on a lawyer to write you a really scary letter and get a settlement for half of what they think you owe them. They might be happy to get a donation and you get something with your name on it.
https://archive.ph/eKAu6
>Sony Pictures describes the movie, which Sorkin is both writing and directing, as a “companion piece” to 2010’s The Social Network. (David Fincher is not returning.) Jeremy Strong is taking over the role of Mark Zuckerberg from Jesse Eisenberg, but the film will reportedly center on Mikey Madison’s Frances Haugen, the whistleblower whose leaks to The Wall Street Journal drew attention to, among other things, the platform’s lack of regulation around anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, its negative impacts on the youths, and Meta’s quiet dismantling of an internal anti-misinformation initiative, which she argued enabled the attack on the U.S. Capitol — hence the J6 reenactment, which will be just one of several threads but certainly adds to the dramatic stakes
Second part caught my eye
> 2026 will be a big year for tech industry entertainment, with both the sequel to David Fincher’s “The Social Network” and Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI film “Artificial” planned for release.
Geezus, really? hm. Social Network 2 is one thing. OpenAI 2023-drama is a whole other thing. ugh
It is backed by AMD stockholders, whose stock just got diluted.
It's like in that movie "Social network"
Funnily enough, a sequel is in the works:
https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/facebook-movie-social-network-sequel-20394286.php
iPhones weren't ubiquitous for at least a few years after the initial release. Parents of teens and younger weren't the first adopters but it came on relatively quickly. The Social Network movie came out in 2010 which Facebook had already opened up to general public in 2006. Also was 2006 that News Feed was released and introduced the concept of doom scrolling and constantly checking into things. Respectfully, if you did not experience it's popularity until ~2015 I do not think you are representative of the overall trends; they hit a billion users in 2012 and that certainly wasn't just college students.
> An additional reason is frat hazing, for the sake of frat hazing. When easy upper-middle-class money entered the field, it attracted some baggery.
I don't think it was money that caused this, but that many beloved tech giants were intentional built as fraternities by college dropouts and recent college graduates, many of whom did not themselves join a fraternity in college but got soaked in a lot of the atmosphere of them. It's most obvious in the case of Facebook, as publicly documented in things like the movie The Social Network, but it's a foundational DNA strand in Microsoft and Google and nearly any other big tech company that still prefers to call its headquarters/office park a "campus". (It's kind of a through line in the HBO show Silicon Valley too, how much tech companies intentionally copy the "pizza and beer and all-nighters and weird dorm room living" college vibe.)
(The presumption that most of these company executives never were themselves directly involved in college fraternities is that fact that they allow/encourage/build hazing rituals. Fraternities have had somewhat strict anti-hazing education requirements since the 1990s and most Universities have also had strict No Hazing Policies since around then. Since 2024, that education and policy enforcement has spread outside the Greek System to all students at most major Universities that get federal funding directly or indirectly, but before that it is certainly easy to understand how many might have missed the messages and education if they only saw fraternities from the outside.)
for instance if that social network film by david fincher hadnt come out, would we have even heard of this mark guy?
There's a performance plateau with training time and number of parameters and then once you get over "the hump" error rate starts going down again almost linearly. GPT existed before OpenAI but it was theorized that the plateau was a dead end. The sell to VCs in the early gpt3 era was "with enough compute, enough time, and enough parameters... it'll probably just start thinking and then we have AGI". Sometime around the o3 era they realized they'd hit a wall and performance actually started to decrease as they added more parameters and time. But yeah basically at the time they needed money for more compute parameters and time. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in those "AGI" pitches. Don't forget Microsoft's agreement with OpenAI specifically concludes with the invention of AGI. at the time getting over the hump it really did look like we were gonna do AGI in a few months.
I'm really looking forward to "the social network" treatment movie about OpenAI whenever that happens
Or it turns out that people don't change, as explored in the entirely fictitious but very enjoyable film The Social Network. All those steps, even the horny college nerd, were facades, and the real core of his character is naked ambition. He will warp himself into any shape in order to pursue wealth and power. To paraphrase Robert Caro, power does not corrupt, it reveals.
To quote Movie Mark Zuckerberg from The Social Network:
> If Python developers were the inventors of uv - they'd have invented uv
Awesome! After "The Social Network" we get "Artificial". Both movies featuring the "drama" behind important actors in the tech-scene.
Does anyone know if there is a movie about Bitcoin or Blockchain as well?
Oh! Or how about a movie titled "Elephants" about.....well who can guess which other important site of the late 2000 that one would feature? :D
This v2 Sorkin movie is way overdue.
"The Social Network" (2010) seems so innocent now.
The (good) movie Social Network makes a Fair portrait of Zuck and his awful personality traits.
It's really terrible to have somebody like him as the head of a powerful corporation that almost controls our minds.
It's nice to know that despite playing fast and loose with the facts, the film The Social Network does capture something fundamentally true about Zuckerberg's psychology. The pathological need to dominate can be disguised when you're the underdog, but the more power you accrue the more it becomes the sole motivation. To paraphrase Robert Caro, "power does not corrupt, it reveals."
The critical thing here is your shareholder agreement contract. What is in it? What are the rules about founders leaving?
It's kind of pointless for anyone to say anything without knowing what's in your contract.
Do YOU know what is in your shareholders agreement, what to expect legally- have you read it? If you don't then you're likely in a world of problems.
If you do not have a shareholders agreement that clearly sets out how to handle founder breakup situation then you might consider calling a lawyer as your next step and go watch The Social Network movie.
The idealism is the current corporate story - "enabling communication" etc. - but you're right that there was no idealism to start with. Zuckerberg set up The Facebook so undergrads at Harvard could rate how hot girls were, scraping their images from unprotected university servers.
This is a great podcast centred around the film about it - The Social Network - but it delves really interestingly into the story and motivations of the early years: https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/the-great-political-films%3A-the-social-network
The main conclusion is that Zuckerberg is a pure, amoral opportunist, which is why Facebook has been so successful through an era of "ask for forgiveness, not permission".
I've been reflecting over the past year or so about this. And I'm also stuck with the same thoughts. Was I just dumb 15 years ago, or did the industry actually shift? Or a little of both?
imo society also had a different view of these sorts of snake oil salesmen, so it was easier to fall into the collective hallucination. Remember when the movie "the social network" came out, the movie portrayed zucc as kind of an asshole, but also a hero - there was a sort of righteousness, and people loved him. The "very special boy" who cheekily breaks a few rules in order to build something that is wildly popular and disruptive...and this was something to live up to? But now I think, in general, we've seen that most of these very special boys are actually quite shit.
You do realize that many, many movies have been edited in various versions of Final Cut Pro on Macs right? Including several Academy Award winners.
Movies like _Parasite_, _The Social Network_, and _300_, to name just a few.
If that's a toy, I'd love to hear what is industrial strength.
I think the movie The Social Network was responsible for bringing this into the public consciousness, and constructing it to some extent. It kind of framed the discussion about the software industry for at least a decade.
I believe that the best companies–like Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft–are founded by a single person. Heh, otherwise fun article but this is pretty funny. OP, you have some fascinating Wikipedia articles to read, and even a fun movie (The Social Network)! The only one I wasn't sure about was Microsoft, but turns out the cofounder (Paul Allen) was the 44th richest person in the world. Who knew?
Part of the movie's point is that Mark wanted to be accepted and "cool" so badly, that he was willing to do whatever it took in his own way to achieve that. Even at the expense of things most others wouldn't give for it, as you mentioned.
To many others, that social status is achievable in different ways -- athletics, personality, appearance, or is even inherited (name, money, etc.). So many, dare I say most, people joining the Finals Clubs don't have to make the kind of sacrifices Mark did because they just naturally fit in. And as a result, membership of those clubs is less of a "big deal" because they didn't have the mountain to climb to get in it.
In Mark's case, he didn't have any of the above to achieve that. But he found out he did have a really unique and "cool" way to socialize -- the social network. The popularity and notoriety from the things he did contributed to his "cool" status on campus. And as we all know, the money and power he got from it cemented his status as a "cool" kid with status.
Luckily, one of the greatest movies of the 21st century is about this very dynamic. It's called The Social Network. It has very little to do with the real historical personage of Mark Zuckerberg but it totally captures the toxic parasitic relationship between the upwardly mobile regular rich kids and the aristocracy at an institution like Harvard. It doesn't end well for anybody.
Ah, here we go:
A. Background About Aaron Greenspan 1. Defendant Mr. Greenspan is the Chief Executive Officer of Defendant TCC, which operates PlainSite.org, an online repository for legal pleadings from state and federal court lawsuits in the United States.1 Mr. Greenspan is a short seller of Tesla stock and member of the $TSLAQ anti- Tesla group on social media, where Mr. Greenspan goes by the Twitter handle @AaronGreenspan. Mr. Greenspan also posts anti-Tesla messages on social media on behalf of PlainSite.org, using the Twitter handle @PlainSite. 2. Mr. Greenspan has made a career out of threatening and harassing individuals and businesses. His first major target was Facebook. Mr. Greenspan was a Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg’s (“Mr. Zuckerberg”). After Mr. Zuckerberg’s success in founding Facebook, Mr. Greenspan asked Mr. Zuckerberg if Facebook would hire him as Vice President of Engineering. After Mr. Zuckerberg declined, Mr. Greenspan threatened to sue Facebook, claiming that he was Facebook’s true founder. Mr. Greenspan also petitioned the United States Trademark Office to cancel two of Facebook’s registered trademarks for the term “Facebook.” Mr. Greenspan also publicly claimed that Facebook had failed to address various privacy and security issues.2 Mr. Greenspan and Facebook ultimately reached a confidential settlement for a reportedly nominal amount. 3. Mr. Greenspan continued with similar tactics against Random House Publishing and Columbia Pictures. Mr. Greenspan wrote a “memoir” regarding his purported founding of Facebook and asked the Doubleday division of Random House to publish it. Doubleday rejected Mr. Greenspan’s book, and subsequently published a different account of Facebook’s founding by Ben Mezrich titled, The Accidental Billionaires, which later provided the basis for the movie The Social Network. Mr. Greenspan responded by suing Random House, Mezrich and his company, and Columbia Pictures, which had released The Social Network. Mr. Greenspan asserted a variety of claims, including that Mr. Greenspan had been “defamed by omission” because he was not included as a character in The Accidental Billionaires and The Social Network. Mr. Greenspan’s claims were all dismissed with prejudice by the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and the dismissal was unanimously affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Greenspan v. Random House, Inc., 895 F. Supp. 2d 206 (D. Mass. 2012), aff’d, 2012 WL 5188792 (1st Cir. Oct. 16, 2012). 4. Undeterred by his failed lawsuit against Random House, Columbia Pictures, and Mezrich, Mr. Greenspan became a serial litigator, filing more than 60 lawsuits (either directly or through organizations he controlled) against over 100 victims. Among them, Mr. Greenspan’s company, TCC, sued California Governor Jerry Brown, then-Attorney General of California Kamala Harris, and various other state government officials, because Greenspan was forced to shut down a startup of his, FaceCash, due to consumer protection law violations. TCC’s suit was dismissed. Think Computer Corp. v. Venchiarutti, No. 5:11-cv-05496-HRL (N.D. Cal. June 25, 2015), ECF No. 70. 5. Additionally, Mr. Greenspan’s company, TCC, sued much of Silicon Valley, including Stanford University, venture capital firms such as Andreesen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, and Sequoia Capital, and tech companies such as Coinbase, Facebook (again), Square, and Stripe, among many others, alleging that they operated without money transmitter licenses purportedly required by California law and asserting federal false advertising claims and various state law claims. That suit was dismissed as well. Think Computer Corp. v. Dwolla, Inc., 5-13-CV-02054-EJD, 2014 WL 1266213 (N.D. Cal. Mar. 24, 2014).
The social web was blogs. That kind of peaked around 2008 and fizzled out after Google Reader was shut down a few years later. Which would be around the time Twitter and Facebook emerged. Before that you had things like various messengers ICQ, MSN, AOL, etc. that are long forgotten. And before that you had NNTP, which some people might still remember is where all the action used to be in the nineties. Before the web took off, you had things like gopher. But that never really took off and kind of was squeezed in between the early web and the BBSes of the nineteen eighties. Several of those things were popularized in popular culture (movies, etc.). You had War Games in the eighties. You've got Mail in the nineties. The social network. Etc.
In short, the social web has been around for decades in various forms. Mastodon has yet to make any impact in popular culture. I wouldn't necessarily call Mastodon very modern. It lacks basic security features (like content signatures or end to end encryption) and it's based on a random thing that W3C standardized some decades ago that never really took off otherwise. It wouldn't be too hard make it a bit more modern. But there's an odd resistance against doing sane things like that in the mastodon community. It's a very conservative community looking backwards at the past and not the future.
I have a handful of "regulars" that I watch repeatedly. Most of them are at the point now that I've seen them so many times that they can work as "background noise" when I'm coding or doing something else. IOW, I can turn the volume down fairly low and it serves a purpose, but I'm so familiar with the story already that I'm not likely to get drawn into actually paying attention to the movie (as opposed to whatever I'm working on) unless I'm at a point where I need a break anyway.
Some of the ones that are on that list for me:
The Matrix
The Matrix Resurrections
The Social Network
Inception
Sneakers
Hackers
Antitrust
Rad
Tron: Legacy
Vision Quest
Rocky (really the entire Rocky franchise)
The Karate Kid
Kickboxer
Bloodsport
Hard To Kill
Above The Law
Sure, everything is ephemeral, but these works have impacts on people's lives and ambitions. How many folks are named after movie or TV characters? How many people got into software after watching The Social Network?
I follow a couple of small communities of amateur VHS archivists. Through this I randomly watched the marketing material of an 80s/90s era MLM, which finally put into context a similar MLM that my mom had fallen for when our family was at a financial low point. This random bit of preservation helped me to better understand a part of my family and upbringing; far better than I could reading a Wikipedia article about the company in question.
I've been in that situation but luckily even having spent only 50 hours on the project we had something written down on day one, basically a '50:50' agreement, signed on paper. Get something written from your future(?) cofounder, especially if he's given up. A couple of years in the future you might have success and he can come back and claim part of it. Like in the movie 'the social network'. Justified or not that would cause trouble and costs regardless the outcome.
Can you purchase his share for a small sum? $100 USD is worth it as long as the other party agrees and gives something in return. And such an offer certainly gets the discussion about ownership and time-spending started.
I’ve noticed that the larger the scale and budget a movies get, the more vacate the film is. A small scale film like The Social Network is much bigger to me than Dune 2 which I recently saw through a friend working in the film industry. Dune 2 is one of the largest scale films ever made but its thoughts and ideas are equally small in the other direction. It’s valid to be mesmerized by the technical feat and the sheer scale of it but it’s empty calories.
> I'm an American in my 40s. I've never seen "glorification of scams" in any mainstream culture
Some very popular movies that come to mind (Some of these may not be intended to be glorifying scams, but to many unsophisticated viewers, they absolutely are):
- The Social Network
- The Wolf of Wall Street
- Uncut Gems
- The Godfather
- Scarface
- Ocean's Eleven (and Twelve and Thirteen)
- Emily the Criminal
- I Care a Lot
- Nine Queens
- Punch-Drunk Love
> I've also never seen any sort of "hyper-masculization" shown in a positive light in mainstream culture
More movies!
- The Godfather (again)
- Pulp Fiction
- Fight Club
- American History X
- Gangster Squad
- Django Unchained
- Expendables
- Every Fast and Furious movie
- (Nearly?) Every Arnold Schwarzenegger movie
> it's common to see masculinity referred to as as "toxic" and equated with negative traits or externalities
I think this is (usually?) a misunderstanding. People refer to toxic masculinity, a set of problematic behaviors some men exhibit as part of attempting to appear "manly" that includes traits such as: homophobia, glorifying unhealthy habits (e.g., drinking like a man, don't cry like a woman, mental health issues depicted as "weakness", etc.) They're not referring to masculinity, itself, as being toxic.
This is in my queue as well. I've watched several of the TechBro movies and enjoyed several of them. Things like The Social Network and Super Pumped, they've all had interesting takes on the situations. The Tetris movie was decent as well. Recently watched one on the history of Google Maps that I was not familiar with the back story, but the name is slipping at the moment.
A couple months after I started studying software engineering in 2017 I made a facial recognition desktop app that was just a few open source projects bundled together. It would just write the name and age of the person that was standing in front of the camera if it recognized the person. It was very unimpressive, but what got one of my professors attention was that I managed to scrape the college intranet web app for pictures(with names, surnames and year of birth) of pretty much everyone who ever attended or is attending the college(including all the professors). I was inspired after watching "The social network" movie where mark scrapes the yearbooks for pictures of students.
When it was finished I showed it to a few colleagues, one of which told the professor. I showed it to him and he got me a interview with a friend of his who was looking for an employee. We went for a coffee and he offered me the job right away which i took. A few weeks later i quit college, and I'm still mostly working for the company that gave me that first job, but I have my own company now.
"The Social Network 2". Well crypto will create more movies in the next few years.
It's very, very common.
Remember when Jack Dorsey was ousted from Twitter and replaced by Evan Williams, who was himself ousted and replaced by Dick Costolo, who was replaced when Dorsey came back? Or the drama around Yishan Wong's sudden resignation as Reddit CEO, to be replaced by Ellen Pao, to be replaced as the founder Steve Huffman came back? The Flexport drama last month where the hired CEO was replaced by the founder? The movie "The Social Network"? Going back a bit, Sandy Lerner and Leonard Bosack's ouster from Cisco, or Diane Green and Mendel Rosenblum's ouster from VMWare?
Build something successful and there will be a lot of infighting about who gets to control it.
The Social Network is a great film that manages to be inspiring and critical of its subject at the same time.
Margin Call is about finance, not entrepreneurship, but it’s one of my favorite films.
It only lasted a season or two, but How to Make it in America was pretty inspiring as well.
It will always be a fascinating piece of historical trivia that Zuckerberg was represented as an iconoclastic hacker in The Social Network, when he had already turned into a turgid adtech executive by the time the movie came out.
This reminds me of my favourite scene from the social network when movie Zuck gets the idea for facemash:
Billy Olson’s sitting here and had the idea of putting some of these next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on who’s hotter. Yea, it’s on. I’m not gonna do the farm animals but I like the idea of comparing two people together. It gives the whole thing a very “Turing” feel since people’s ratings of the pictures will be more implicit than, say, choosing a number to represent each person’s hotness like they do on hotornot.com. The first thing we’re going to need is a lot of pictures.
Nope started by Dustin Moskovitz who was even in the "social network" movie
[2016]
Amusingly enough, Zuckerberg's character in the 2010 film The Social Network uses Iceweasel on KDE.
I think it's further back than 5 years, beginning prior to even The Social Network movie. I would argue that Apple probably made tech cool for normies, despite not being a modern-day Apple user.
The iPod happened. Smartphones went mainstream, gaming stopped being just for kids and men in basements. A lot changed with the adoption of tech.
The Social Network movie was indicative of a big shift in how the public felt about nerds in tech. It might not have shown Zuck in a particularly positive light, but the fascination was there. Same goes for the passing of Steve Jobs.
Felt like everybody had an idea for an app about 12 years ago, even though most of them were bad or already done! Also seemed like a lot of teens were going to college to "learn to develop apps".
The seeming accessibility of consumer technology brought down the perceived barrier of admission to doing things with tech.
The Social Network is a brilliant film, but it is in no way realistic. For example, he started dating Priscilla Chan in 2003, before Facebook even started, and married her in 2012. The way the movie presents him is some nerd who made Facebook to get laid, to some degree, even if that wasn't his prime motivation at all.
The soundtrack, though, is a banger.
It just goes to show that these kinds of movies should be taken with a heavy, heavy grain of salt, as nothing in them requires that they be truthful.
I like these shows/movies that chase something like:
* Jobs (2013)
* social network
* halt and catch fire
* silicon valley
* the internship
there's more can't think of right now
I'm looking forward to seeing this when it streams
"The Aviator" [1] about Howard Hughes? Love to also talk about real startups movies without failure as a main theme. For example, "The Social Network" (includes Winklevoss and Eduardo Saverin "failures"). We have other non-fictional ones such as "The Founder" [2] about McDonalds. Classic: "Pirates of Silicon Valley". Ford v Ferrari (amazing if you have not seen it) [3].
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338751/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Founder
[3] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_v_Ferrari
The story of Reddit would make a good TV show, kind of "The Social Network" crossed with "The Crown". So many ups and downs, and many cross overs to other things happing in tech and the wider world. You could easily fill three or four seasons.
"The front page of the Internet"
Star Trek's nonsense economy and nonsense technobabble are both symptoms of its small-c conservative roots as screen entertainment. For a series they want to introduce a gimmick one time (all you need for time travel is a special starship maneuver!) and then have everyone forget about it until the next time they wanted a time travel plot. But the real world isn't like that. You can't introduce the atomic bomb as a one-time gimmick to end World War II without it influencing the nature of war and diplomacy for all generations to come.
If you add up all the technologies demonstrated in the original Star Trek and The Next Generation, and let them play out in the imagination, you end up with something baffling, dazzling, and unrelatable to any sort of 20th century society. The problem with letting fictional technologies play out to their logical limits is that it limits the audience. The sort of people who read Greg Egan and Hannu Rajaniemi might eat it up, but those eleven people [1] aren't enough to sustain a successful media franchise. So they just introduce one bit of technological set dressing after another, not caring how it should or would influence the other bits that are already there, or the economy, or society. Because they want to maintain a sort of stasis where they are telling stories about the present with pseudo-futuristic decor.
I have said before that David Fincher's The Social Network, had it been released in 1950 instead of 2010, would have been the most prophetic science fiction movie of all time. And yet it probably would have bombed as a science fiction movie back then because it was culturally alien to 1950 and it wouldn't have slotted into the "adventure with creatures and/or gadgets" template that was popular at the time. (Well, it kind of is a story about adventures with gadgets, but it's no Destination Moon.)
[1] And I am one of the eleven!
Musk reminds me of two quotes from movies I like. Patch Adams and The Social Network. I’ll try to paraphrase here:
“…you think you have to be a prick to get things done and that you actually think that’s a new idea.”
“You are not an asshole. You’re just trying so hard to be”
Reminds me of the scene in Social Network movie where Eduardo Saverin says "I thought you were my lawyers".
HR is not on the employee's side and not even on the employer's side. They are on HR's side.
This reminds me of a dialogue in the movie "The Social Network" where Mark Zuckerberg decides to reduce Eduardo Saverin's Facebook equity from 30% to 0.3% using some loophole. Mark Zuckerberg tells the lawyer who is tasked with pulling this off "Make it less painful". If that actually happened, then this strategy of making bad news "less painful" could be a possibility too.
kinda seems like a straw man's argument.
Zuck was never seen as a Steve jobs. even his movie the social network showed this.
also in reality there are very few original ideas
regardless I would still say their work in VR and BCI are pretty innovative even if they're not the first
> “What it gives you is kind of like an Aaron Sorkin movie,” he said. Mr. Sorkin wrote “The Social Network,” a movie often criticized for stretching the truth about the origin of Facebook. “Parts of it will be true, and parts will not be true.”
Bingo, the confidence of an Aaron Sorkin monologue, regardless of the truth of the underlying facts. If it were better at expressing uncertainty, it would be much more useful.
I believe it is more "give the people what they want." This story is getting clicks because the numbers are so big it has everybody daydreaming about having lived through this from the inside. People want details to fill in the cracks of their fantasies.
This is like Nightcrawler, and the press is satisfying the bloodlust of its readers who like The Social Network like drama and Big Shortesque scandals.
We arent living in the right reality if Adam McKay/Charles Randolph/Michael Lewis and Aaron Sorkin/David Fincher/Ben Mezrich dont have dueling FTX movies coming out on opposite streaming services the same week. (Probably Apple and Disney, who then happen to announce a merger, because of course thats how the world works now.)
> seems like nothing more than a nerd's dream
Interesting description as that's similar to the perception of Facebook when it was first widely launched. It was even popularized in films like The Social Network with the insinuation it was designed by nerds make their lives less isolated.
Look at where we are 10 years later...
Facebook's ire seems to always be focused on Zuckerberg. It was always that way, especially after the Social Network movie.
And despite about a decade of similar whining on HN about deleting Facebook they are still the most popular social network around.
2010 was truly a phenomenal year to be a film soundtrack enjoyer. It's hard to believe that we got Ross and Reznor on Social Network, John Powell on How To Train Your Dragon, Zimmer on Inception, and Daft Punk on Tron: Legacy. All 4 of those scores are amazing and it blows my mind that they all released in the same year.
Mark Zuckerberg on the creators of The Social Network:
"They [the film's creators] just can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things". [1]
This led to an interesting exchange where, iirc, Aaron Sorkin replied that this is in fact exactly what Hollywood people do: make things up just for the sake of it.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/oct/20/mark-zuckerberg-the-social-network
Fun fact, Trent and Atticus are still scoring films, most recently Pixar's Soul! It's a great soundtrack[0] that has a number of jazz tracks contributed by Jon Batiste as well as Reznor and Ross's synth pieces. Fair warning, it's a very different vibe compared to Social Network, much more relaxed and atmospheric. I particularly recommend the track Falling, which plays during the opening credits sequence after the main character dies (if you haven't watched Soul, this isn't the spoiler you think it is lol. You should watch Soul, it's great)
[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_keoZPbaxTzFnlAJVB2OJprX6ELEANOSNc
I think they mean when Jesse Eisenberg told Andrew Garfield Facebook would never sell ads, which is what Justin Timberlake told him, setting up the essential personal conflict between Jesse and Andrew in the movie The Social Network.
> Why not build a social network...?
Because social networks have this chicken-egg problem in which you need to bring a given critical mass of users, and you can't predict their number, but it must have enough gravity to attract more users and keep growth.
I failed my own business-focused SN for that reason, even after attracting companies such as Sherwin-Williams and some taxi cab companies. That was a few years before The Social Network movie, before people started caring about privacy and ads. It was easy back then.
Since we're talking movies, I'll throw in a handful of movie titles that I find inspirational and /or uplifting as well:
Rocky, Rocky II, Rocky III, Rocky IV, Rocky Balboa
Vision Quest
Tin Cup
The Pursuit of Happyness
The Social Network
Rad
Hackers
Wargames
Iron Man
The Man Who Knew Infinity - based on the book of the same name, which I also recommend.
The Social Network may be reasonably accurate but it doesn’t portray a culture. It’s the story of a handful of people scrambling to make money from an unexpected success, and a single-minded antisocial programmer who falls backwards into vast wealth and power. The personality traits depicted and maybe exaggerated in the movie may be common but they don’t form a culture — rather they are formed by a culture of predatory capitalism and legal maneuvering. American Psycho is the same story as satire, with more knives and less PHP.
The most knowledgeable hackers were consulted for 'The Matrix' (0-day SSHv1 CRC32 scene), 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' (a surprising homage to the actual PWN Phone, some micro details only a hacker would know, etc).
But these are more of side devices. No movie captures the culture as such — neither the original meaning, nor the illegal, nor the current business.
'The Social Network' attempted to take on a particular narrow aspect of it, and while the results are mixed, it did capture some of the real vibe.
TV — of course 'Silicon Valley', since it was already mentioned. The 'jerking off' algorithm was researched by a real team, and some of the members are here.
Any soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (The Social Network, Book of Eli, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, etc) is pretty powerful for me.
Half of them, I’ve played the soundtrack numerous times before ever watching it’s movie, which gives a strange sense of familiarity.
Owning shares in a pre-ipo company comes with it's own risks. And not wanting to be diluted from future investments is a valid reason to selling your shares.
It's possible for the company to dilute your shares turning them worthless, and then generates new shares. I'm sure there's lots of examples you can find of dilution, but that was what FB did to the former CFO as shown in the movie "The Social Network".
People keep talking about working for soulless companies when deciding to work for startups, but I can't think of a more soulless way to screw over your employees.
I was interviewing for a job recently, and I got asked what got me into coding. It’s not the first time I got asked that same question, and it’s one of my favorites. I love to see the person’s reaction who asks me the question when I tell them the answer.
For me there wasn't one single "thing" that got me interested in coding, but there's no doubt that the book The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder played a key role.
It’s the movie Hackers from 1995! I’m not joking. That’s the movie that made me fall in love with computers, coding, and hacking. Many people consider it cheesy, but I don’t care. I watched it probably twenty times, if not more. I watch it any time I find myself feeling down and unmotivated. It reminds me of those first days, that initial spark. Just like you would reminisce about a beautiful beginning of a past love affair when you feel lonely and unloved.
Yes, "Hackers" is cheesy as hell, but it's simultaneously a great movie in a certain sense. Like the author of TFA, I consider it one of my "comfort movies". I've probably watched it 20+ times, and can always default to watching that when I'm feeling down, strung-out, overwhelmed, etc. Doing so always puts me in a better mood. A few other movies that fall into the same category for me include "Antitrust", "The Matrix", "The Social Network", "War Games", "Tron: Legacy", "Rad", and maybe one or two others.
It depends on what I'm doing. If I'm reading/studying and trying to mostly absorb material, I usually listen to either synthwave (and related: darkwave, horrowave, retrowave, whatever you want to call it), or classical.
If I'm writing code or doing something active like that, the above applies, but add heavy metal to the list of things I might be listening to. But if I'm listening to metal it's almost always only bands and songs that I'm extremely familiar with (eg, have listened to a given song hundreds or thousands of times in my life) as those are less likely to be distracting to me, as opposed to something new where I feel obligated to really pay attention to the music.
One other option is I will sometimes put on a movie that I've watched many, many, many times (eg, The Matrix, Hackers, Antitrust, Tron:Legacy, The Social Network, Rad, Vision Quest, etc) minimize the viewer window and just have the audio in my headphones.
Very rarely I might go with some sort of basically "white noise" track like
"Howling snowstorm and crackling fire" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=volQGswo3dg
"Cyberpunk city sounds" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5zX1eRKEDM&
"Twin Peaks Double R Diner" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npVellnR6D8
"Coffee shop" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMAPTo7RVCo (unless I'm actually sitting in a real-life coffee shop, which I quite often am)
etc.
Great suggestions here, many that I've either never heard of or never considered - I look forward to checking them out and please keep them coming, I'm hopeful this can turn into a masterthread to keep coming back and discovering motivational media.
Should maybe have done this earlier but adding a few of the ones I've already watched.
Technical Motivation:
- Silicon Valley (TV show, 2014-2019) - The Social Network (2010) - The Imitation Game (2014) - Halt & Catch Fire (TV show, 2014-2017) - Iron Man (2008) - Primer (2004) - The Martian (2015) - Hidden Figures (2016) - Flight of the Phoenix (1965 original or 2004 remake)
"Sales" Motivation:
- The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) - Door to Door (2002) - Underrated straight-to-TV film about a man with cerebral palsy who wants to become a door-to-door salesman - Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) - Pure sales, persistence and Pacino - Salesman (1969 documentary) (As above, but instead of Pacino it's real door-to-door bible salesmen and what they go through)
Honorable Mentions:
- Mr Robot (2015-2019): probably the most thrilling and technically accurate depiction of technology and hacking ever put to a screen, but as someone else said it's also very dystopian and depressing, and not too motivational except in the brief bursts that they show Elliot setting up a hack. Either way no VisualBasic GUIs here.
- Flash of Genius (2008): about the inventor of the modern windshield wiper who had it stolen from Ford and sued them. The premise is motivational, but I personally found it more of a cautionary tale on what you can lose for your principles when you go up against the giants.
I also found Imitation Game, Molly’s Game and Queens Gambit galvanizing. It’s interesting that those movies elicit that kind of response despite their ostensible message being the human cost of pursuing goals at the expense of everything else. In a similar vein a Beautiful Mind and The Social network also were motivating for me.
I’m not sure if I’m just taking away the wrong message (like the people who read Liar’s Dice and wanted to go into banking) or if the writer’s own subconscious admiration of these people permeated into the medium (or maybe they made it intentionally ambiguous). There is probably some deeper insight into how we all struggle with reconciling society’s veneration of individual success (monetary and/or reputational) with the social expectation that we conform to the norms of society (being social, not abusing drugs, placing social cohesion above everything else)
Pretty much any space-related documentaries. Rosetta probe's trajectory alone is one heck of a motivation.
However it's also beneficial to have a dollop of reality on top of Iron Man fantasies. I think that docs like Indie Game and Startup.com must be on the first year CS cirriculum and a required viewing after Social Network. For many, it would help setting expectations a bit more straight.
"Peter Thiel" in the 2010 film The Social Network
Weren't the first Facebook users female student profiles stolen from hacked student societies databases?
(I assumed the movie "social network" was somehow telling some truth.)
google suggest its from a social network movie
> There was a good documentary about this topic called The Social Network.
Are you talking about the movie about Mark Zuckerberg? Because this movie is not bad, but it's definitely not a documentary.
> All the people I know with real technological addiction > problems (whether to smartphones, social media, scams, online radicalization or anything else) are like 45+.
Exactly. No one is safe. Everyone I know in my age group (15-26) can not exist without opening up their smartphone every 5 seconds to check social media or watch YouTube.
There was a good documentary about this topic called The Social Network. You may have heard of it. I think it is a good starting point to this way of thinking.
>"The social network" does not make Mark Zuckerberg look bad
It depicts that he did steal the idea from the Winklevoss brothers. It also painted a picture that he directly conspired with his investors to screw Eduardo Saverin.
I suspect that's all at least partially true, but perhaps not as clear cut as the film shows.
>floats the idea of defaming and slandering Matt Damon under the guise of fictionalization. She makes an excellent point-- Matt wouldn't put up with that.
But it seems like Matt Damon would have to put up with it. What could Matt realistically do? Filing a lawsuit would probably go nowhere. See the informal "small penis" rule by fiction writers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_penis_rule
The 2010 film "The Social Network" didn't even bother with fictionalized names and made Mark Zuckerberg look bad but he didn't sue. One legal opinion thinks MZ didn't have an easy case of defamation which would make the lawsuit a waste of time: https://www.litigationandtrial.com/2010/07/articles/the-law/for-non-lawyers/why-mark-zuckerberg-wont-sue-for-defamation-over-the-facebook-movie/
Patents foster innovation.
Without patents people who are technically skilled but socially inadequate would not ever try to build stuff.
Same goes for those who can promote themselves but just love the technical challenge much more and want to focus on that.
These are among the most productive demographics and without patents they'd be sitting idle because they would be too scared of working thousands of hours in vain, just setting the stage for the socially competent people to rip them off and cut them out of the enjoyment of the monetary and social rewards for the thing they have built.
At least with patents there is some sort of protection or I should say an illusion.
Say you have an idea and then one of the big guys with deep pockets and a huge marketing and PR department steals it from you or executes in a way which becomes world class, with a patent you have grounds to sue and you can also go to lawyers and convince them to work pro-bono because they'll get so much media exposure.
You can also go to a bank and ask for loans to promote your story and you can get a favorable interest rate due to the fact that you have the optionality to settle for cash.
A patent gives you options. It's also a concept which unlike so many corporate jargon terms is easily understood by the general population, and that is an advantage when you are a small startup or individual inventor going up against a behemoth...it enables you to convey social hatred against the giant company
A much more complicated instrument such as NDA/NCA gave the Winklevoss bros the ability to sue Zuck and to put themselves on the map with the movie "The Social Network", a patent as I said is much more clear and easy to understand, both for the courts and the court of public opinion
> 1. Publically degraded Erica Albright on her breast size publiccally--because little Marky got his ego bruised.
I can't find any mention of this; in fact, it seems this person (Erica) only exists in the "the social network" movie. There seems to be a "real" Erica, but I found nothing about snide comment from his side.
> 4. Publicly stating his customers were stupid in trusting him with personal information.
I'm pretty sure he did so privately; that's not better, though.
> 5. Printing up "I'm CEO bitch!" while he was swimming in money.
That's a bit childish maybe, but if he enjoys that.
> 9. Does the usual wealthy boy 501c3 tax dodge.
I have yet to meet someone who likes to pay more taxes. Most of the people reading this are part of the most wealthy people of the world right now and yet they minimize their taxes as well. I can't blame anyone for using the system to their advantage; it's the system that is faulty.
But anyway. All of these don't picture him in a good light, sure, but overall none of these are absolute "killing blows". We have politicians with a criminal record that makes Zuckerberg look like a poster child.
As I said in my original comment: I don't think he is a particularly good guy and I don't want to defend him. But when you compare him to the overall political elite, that small smear is really not the end of the world.
It is probably because competition is so commonly attributed to physical athletics. Physical strength or stamina exhibited on the playing field is competition.
Spelling bee competitors are seen positively, but also almost as a joke compared to quarterbacks. Mathlete? A joke in popular culture.
There is some evidence that this is changing, but there is also a lot of bad art. The Social Network, and Steve Jobs the film portray fierce nerds that basically no one wants to know.
The actual people?
Zuck and Dorsey just got through extracting maximum advertising value from the heart of US democracy.
Bezos hasn't done fierce nerds any favors with his squeezing of the lowest paid people in his organization.
Bill Gates' reputation is headed downhill right now faster than ever before.
Tim Cook has real potential. But the jury is still out. We do not know the calculus involved in compromising privacy values in China.
It is going to take a lot more well-known, rich, fierce nerds that also manage to round out their personality before we see mainstream positive portrayal and following of competitiveness in intellectual exercises.
I would count the Social Network as well. Still lots of suggestions I wouldn't agree with below my comment. The problem is many are conflating great movies that involve software/computer concepts rather than movies based on software/computer concepts.
The Social Network would be on the list for me. I remember grinning from ear to ear in the theater seeing Perl and wget on the big screen during the Harvard scenes. Great movie.
The Culture is unobtainium-grade post-scarcity. The Minds and lesser AIs make computing and intelligence abundant beyond want. It also has effectively unlimited freedom of voice, freedom of exit, freedom of association, freedom to roam, and unlimited supplies of energy, matter, and manufactured goods. The only limits it can't overcome are logical contradictions.
It has basically the same fictional technologies as Star Trek: powerful AI, FTL communication, FTL travel, replicators, transporters, and ridiculously abundant energy. But it is a far more wild and unrestrained What-If than Star Trek, which is probably why it has never been adapted to the screen. (An adaptation of Consider Phlebas was apparently a project for Amazon Prime for a while, but that was dropped.)
Consider for example transporter accidents/paradoxes/quirks. In Star Trek the question of identity and continuity going through the transporter is mostly shoved to the side, sometimes addressed in oblique character remarks, and occasionally rises to the forefront in an episode where somebody is duplicated or trapped in a transporter. Then the possibility of personal storage or duplication is set aside until the next rare occasion where it rises to Plot level.
In the Culture, having a molecular pattern backup of your body stored is routine, even among ordinary citizens. Not retaining a backup is unusual. Most Special Circumstances agents killed in the line of duty will be restored from backup, minus a few hours or days of memories. Only in wide scale conflicts, where backup data cannot be replicated outside the danger zone fast enough, are people in danger of involuntary permadeath. Star Trek has basically the same in-universe technology to make violent death reversible, but chooses not to pursue it, probably to avoid making things seem too weird to audiences.
But the future seen from the past is weird even when it includes only actually-realizable technologies. If you had a time machine and could show an audience of SF enthusiasts from 1940 a vision of things to come from technological change, 2010's film The Social Network would be about the best you could do. It might also be baffling and off-putting to the sorts of people who liked SF stories of the time. Most people who enjoy SF prefer adventure stories with relatable characters and some plot-enabling or plot-driving tech gizmos. Visions of everything transfigured and rendered strange by technology or sheer cultural drift over time are less popular.
The format for production screenplays evolved according to the needs of the people needing the physical pages on set, e.g. dialogue has a lot of whitespace so that director and actors can keep notes there. Also, scene headings need to convey a lot of information in one line: on which set the scene in shot, whether it exists as a continuation of the previous scene, whether it's shot on location, and what lighting equipment will be needed.
It's a storytelling format that also needs to function as a reference document. It's very efficient for its requirements.
There's also the idea that one page = one minute of screen-time, but this is a bit of a red herring. Rather it's that overall a 100-page screenplay, if it contains a conventional balance of action and dialogue, with conventional length of scenes, shot at a conventional pacing, will likely result in a 100-minute film once edited. ALL IS LOST is 32 pages and 105 min film, THE SOCIAL NETWORK is 164 pages, 120 min film.
Extended pool of engineers, as the field has grown, has diluted the quality of software.
Post "Social Network" (the movie), and the economic downturn of 2008-2012 there is a new generation of engineers that started programming/entered the field because that's where the money is....
There is also proliferation of the code-academies, who often encourage trainees to create a 'github portfolio', often with low quality libraries.
2001 tech bust acted like a great filter. During the 2001-2012, a lot of people that remained in the field were there because general passion towards it, and had the skills to be employed after the bust.
People that couldn't cut it, did leave the field. Hence, the software was often more of a work of passion, or craft. A lot of the open source libraries that we use today, were created during this times (and the 90s, for the databases, and Linux), also a lot of the culture of startups (good and bad), was cemented during this time.
I think the field massively expanded after 2012, and people started doing engineering because that's where the money was/became trendy. Hence you will naturally have a dilution of overall quality.
Kind of ancillary to the story, but can someone explain to me why "Hollywood" would even need any specific individual to be on board with a movie about this? It seems you could compose a character from many of the generic aspects without any specific viewpoint, and the entire point of this phenom was there wasn't a specific individual. I'm no screen writer but why couldn't you create the next "social network" or "big short" just from all the feedstock material?
> The real Satoshi (assuming they're one individual as CSW is essentially implying) took care to maintain their anonymity, and is almost certainly aware that they would be the target of intelligence agencies around the world, in addition to your more run-of-the-mill "let's kidnap this guy and force him to transfer his enormous wealth to us" criminals. So releasing his identity publicly would be just painting a massive target on his back.
This would be the Hollywood interpretation of his motivation to remain anonymous. Personally, I think it’s because he really wanted the work to speak for itself, and not have the entire project tied to one particular individual with thousands of newspapers trying to figure out what motivated him.
Remember The Social Network movie? When they tried to make it look like Facebook was created just so Zuckerberg could get back at his ex-girlfriend? It’s stuff like that he was trying to avoid.
Why should you say anything except "no"?
You own that equity even if you are not employed there.
Hang onto it ..... there's no reason you should be bullied out of it.
I've seen this situation come up a number of times. It's just bullying.... there's no legal reason for you to give up your stake.
Go watch "The Social Network" movie.
I guess no one paid attention during The Social Network because they spelled it out clearly in that movie.
They do not. They get a lot of small details right but he is nothing like he is portrayed. I was at Facebook from 2009-2013, and while I didn’t know him personally or interact with him frequently, I was around him and saw him speak often enough to say the above with confidence.
One of the biggest errors in the movie is its portrayal of his motivation—by my understanding, he was already dating his wife (Priscilla Chan) before he wrote the first line of code for thefacebook.com.
I take no position here on his beliefs, morality, etc. I don’t actually know the man. And there’s no doubt he has some uncanny mannerisms. But the brooding antisocial fast-talking nerd is Jessie Eisenberg, not Mark Zuckerberg. Watch The Social Network and Zombieland back to back and you’ll see.
The Aviator - I don't know why I was so obsessed with this guy eg. Howard Hughes his tragic/surreal life having so much money and descent into madness. The passage of time makes me sad as well, you see the peak/height of the day...
The Master - this is emotional the churning water scenes in particular with the music great sound track
Her - mostly I enjoy the intro, I don't know maybe it's a part of being alone a lot up to where he meets the OS for the first time, something like this is interesting
Lost in Translation - somehow I found this movie and the social aspect is nice
Iron Man movies - for motivation
Blade Runner - I was obsessed with this movie in high school 10 years ago quoting it ha "I've seen things..."
2001 Space Odyssey - probably my most favorite humbling scene the bone becoming a space craft [1] it's just so emotional "exiting the system". It felt freeing briefly to think you can leave everything that exists and go to nothing, it was an idea of escape for me at the time. It makes me want to strive for that, but it's not a 1-man job and it takes a while eg. probably not in our life time... the whole 4 years to nearest star at light speed thing. And what is there anyway.
Jobs - probably get hate for this but there was something profound the idea of the chips becoming state/data on a screen.
Social Network - sorry to be basic but I used to watch that to get pumped trying to come up with something big(lol). It's funny when I first watched that movie I was not into software/web dev and later on I understood more and more of the basic stuff he was doing to make the girl comparison app and also mentioning Apache to host the initial The Facebook like "Ooh I know what that is".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZoSYsNADtY
The president didn't post a video making cupcakes. He explicitly reused a racist phrase to suggest the black protesters should be shot down. Anyone else making this comment would have been flagged but not the president.
Zuckerberg is not the kid in the social network movie who's "not an asshole, you're just trying really hard to be one." No one has ever said a single good thing about him, or his partner Sandberg, in a long time. By all measures they seem to be selfish people who have nothing else in their minds other than keeping and growing the power they have now. The only other thing they are now famous for is how they manipulate good founders of great products with false promises and then kick them out to consolidate even more power. At least that's all you can tell from what little we know of these billionaire oligarchs lives.
In the end, I'm going to hypothesize that America became a great country because for a while some of its leaders and rich people at least tried to do _some_ good things to its people and try to be the better person now and then. Given the degree to which every single rich person and politician in power seems self-obsessed if not overtly corrupt, it doesn't bode too well for the life of the common man in America or anywhere else for the matter.
I'm not particularly worried about WW3 though, because I don't see any good country left behind to fight every totalitarian nation that's getting created now.
I tried to find a The Social Network movie overlay with the words "Dumb fucks" on Giphy - though it doesn't seem to have it; https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/oct/20/mark-zuckerberg-the-social-network
I guess you already know some common strategies such as breaking the challenges ahead into small, manageable tasks and making sure you're laziness is not fatigue which may come from a bad diet or lack of exercise (especially the latter).
I don't think you're going to find a helpful answer here because in the end, even asking that question on HN might be a form of procrastination.
What I recommend is thinking hard about yourself: What are your goals? What motivates you? What are you afraid of? What thinks make you enter "the flow" and bring you in the right mood to be productive (e.g. change of scenery)?
Finally, a very personal suggestion which usually receives many downvotes: At least for me, there is a certain kind of movie which really makes me want to get things done. These movies are mostly documentaries and they usually show how other people get things done and actively do stuff. Such movies might include "The Social Network" or "The Brink" (no matter what you think of Steve Bannon - you actually see him being active in the movie).
Ben Mezrich, author of the Accidental Billionaires which was later adapted into the Social Network, has a differing opinion: like Liars Poker and Wall Street, the movie made Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg more well known and popular than before.
I have also noticed a general trend of less hackers lately. I think there was a temporary surge because the social network movie and all these tech companies IPOing and making everyone rich that finally died down recently. I think the application rate to Y Combinator itself also flatlined or decreased in the last couple batches
> rogue former employee somehow acquiring IP rights over our core IP
"Rogue ex-co-founder comes out of the woodwork X years later and claims they own half of your thing" is a horror story in startup land; see Facebook for an example of this. (The Social Network movie is a fictionalized depiction, but the real-world drama was sufficiently troublesome for Facebook that they initially weren't planning on engaging with the movie. Last minute they decided to rent a theater to take the whole company to see it, and Jesse Eisenberg started helping Mark Zuckerberg with his public speaking.)
2013 and 2014 are NOT the "early days of Facebook". Hell, The Social Network movie had come out four years prior...
Thought the same when a film about Facebook was announced
> “I think there will be a Bitcoin Billionaires movie,” Mezrich said to close the panel after hinting at it multiple times. “Hopefully Armie [Hammer] will come back and play these guys.” (the Winklevii)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hanktucker/2019/07/10/author-who-inspired-the-social-network-changes-mind-on-winklevoss-twins-expects-movie-sequel
Reminds me of this dialog from the Social Network movie:
Relationship Status, Interested In. This is what drives life at college. Are you having sex or aren’t you. It’s why people take certain classes, and sit where they sit, and do what they do, and at its, um, center, you know, that’s what the Facebook is gonna be about. People are gonna log on because after all the cake and watermelon there’s a chance they’re actually gonna, (get laid), meet a girl. Yes.
I have had similar thoughts. There is a lot to say about the information age, but I have mostly changed my perspective. I don't think it is a technological revolution, or more correctly because of the technological revolution, these things are happening. We probably overestimate how fast things change, and overlay what is an economic revolution onto recent technological development.
Shenzhen is sort of a good example since isn't actually that high tech. There is for sure innovation but it is mostly existing, and sometime even old, technology. It is both culturally and matter of fact disconnected from the West. Much more so than other centers in the region. It is economic factors that make manufacturing there possible more so than technological ones. You might even argue that USSR were more cutting edge, but of course US companies manufacturing there would have been mostly unthinkable.
The power outside of centers mostly weren't taken away by technology, but by trade, mergers and mortgages. Of course technology has a role, but I am not so sure much of it couldn't have happened by fax. I really think the movie wallstreet is more of an answer to what is happening than the social network is.
I guess because most new cool companies are startups and who was the guy over 40 in the movie "The Social Network" other than probably the investor/lawyer.
Most companies homepage is filled with younger folks and also why would anyone 40+ is going to listen to a 20 something CEO?
There are a lot of recreational cocaine users, and they are doing it right under our (or their) noses. They range from billionaires to your local college grad.
See The Social Network Movie, Wolf of Wall Street, etc. The drug use was not as dramatized as you might think.
> I don't know to what extent the movie "Social Network" is based on facts, but if it is a true picture of Mark Zuckerberg, then that's what is happening is not a surprise.
If your only information to support your post is a fictionalised movie, then maybe it's appropriate to wait to make your post until you can gather more information.
y, the social network is a great movie. Even if it isn't 100% accurate it's an amazing story and fun to watch.
The recording failed sign ins to harvest the journalist's passwords always intrigued me. It does make you think when you see they are recently logging passwords.
I don't know to what extent the movie "Social Network" is based on facts, but if it is a true picture of Mark Zuckerberg, then that's what is happening is not a surprise. He cheated guys who employed him (to create social network), then he cheated his best friend (from what that remember they all sued him and he had to pay them undisclosed amount of money).
What can we expect from someone who looks like someone very greedy without any sense of morals? We should be rather happy he didn't become mass murderer or politician.
What? I don’t buy that. Apple is criticised for being a walled garden, I don’t think I’ve ever seen strong criticism toward Facebook for that; I assume you’re conflating them somehow.
Facebook was criticised for a few things; constantly changing the UI, selling personal data (although this was mostly opaque and treated as a rumour that wouldn’t harm _you_ really) and being a monopoly.
Now it’s criticised for aggressive targetted advertising, which may have had a hand in polarising people and even allowing some companies to highten fear and aggression to the point where it subverted democracy in some nations.
It’s also criticised for stifling free speech and siding with governments de jour in heavily censored countries like Iran.
I mean. I was an adult using Facebook before “the social network” movie came out; but maybe I misremember?
It does seem like one could make a plausible case that Office Space has had the biggest impact on real world life of any movie of all time. Just skimming down the list, it doesn't look like there's anything on the AFI or BFI top 100 even comes close. Maybe 12 angry men has had a real influence on juries in some unseen way, or maybe The Social Network has also had a big influence on what careers people choose, but there's nothing that immediately seems super obvious as surpassing it.
Watch Zuck testifying in Capital Hill and contrast it with "The Social Network", he really acts the same way everywhere.
The movie is correct potryal of his character.
>How Zuck doesn't seem smart? Have you seen " the social network "
Because watching Zuckerberg played by someone else in a dramatized Hollywood film is a great way to tell if he is smart.
I had trouble making friends untill i came across a movie called "The Social Network".
Before, i was like Zuck (fb founder, the one who blogged about his girlfriend) from the movie, very annoying but always spewing ultimate truth regardless of whether it hurts people or not.
Now i act like Sean Parker (Napster founder, the one who brought Peter Theil on board as an investor) from the movie, either people ignore me or become my friend.
Those of you who go blank at new people. I suggest you pick a character and play it with all honesty, if nothing atleast it will be entertaining.
Are there other movies which teach you how to make friends?
I find it hits a bit close to home, so much so as to ruin the comedy sometimes... it’d be funny if it weren’t so true, which is depressing.
Still watch it, and love it though. And super impressed that a Hollywood production finally understood Northern California. That never happens (see: The Social Network, Hackers, every Steve Jobs movie, etc.)
The movie The Social Network might be half fictionalized, but it portrayed a way someone like Zuckerberg or Sanders could be out of touch with reality by not responding to normal social cues or morals, and then getting used to getting away with things.
The platform has so much volume they refuse to actually hire enough people to monitor it, they've adapted to this level of profitability and won't change without being forced to (it's the same issue with Youtube, if it can't be automated, the platform would have to change) - it's like how in the USA and even the UK farmers with significant manual labour requirements won't raise wages, they'll try to get migrant farm workers to do it.
> Startup culture was at its peak in the PG days today it's closer to a nadir.
Yes, totally. I became interested in startups in 2009. I was a CS major and there was a tiny group of other students who shared my interests - we had a weekly "internet entrepreneur society" meetup where we'd discuss Paul Graham, Eric Ries, "Getting Real" (37Signal's book), and so on, along with the various projects we were working on and ideas we had.
By the time I graduated in 2012 the field was already starting to change. In the first two years out of university I worked with 3 different co-founders on various ideas, none of which went anywhere (frustratingly). Two of those co-founders had no genuine interest in technology or innovation -- I believe that they only became interested in startups after they became the hot thing to do. They wanted prestige and they wanted to raise funding for the sake of it. They weren't excited by the potential of the new platforms that had just appeared.
(After that I ended up working for a medium-sized tech startup for a while, got disillusioned and burnt out, took some time off, and then spent the last 3 years building myself back up. I still want to take a real shot at starting a startup, but the industry has changed so much now. The fun and excitement has gone).
I think there were several factors that changed startup culture:
1. The technology of the web matured. We are now in the Gartner cycle "plateau of productivity". Once upon a time you could upload some PHP scripts and a little bit of AJAX and have an interactive app that was admittedly crappy, but also genuinely novel and interesting. Now you need to know a complex backend framework, the modern JS ecosystem, automation/build tools, etc, just to compete. That's fine for a 10-man dev team, for 2 founders out of college it's a daunting amount of work.
2. Startups became a much more popular and prestigious career path. "The Social Network" movie (2011) made startups much more glamorous. Tons of articles were boosting "disruptive innovation". By the time I graduated, suddenly all the kids who'd been polishing their IB/consulting applications decided they wanted to be entrepreneurs, maybe after 2 years at Goldman/Bain/etc. Some of these guys were genuinely talented and cool. Many were arrogant and douchey, had a shallow understanding of tech, and treated their technical cofounders as code monkeys (yes, I had a few bad experiences).
Many interesting startup ideas (Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google) came from young technologists working on ideas they thought were cool, yet were niche and weird at the time. Once the IB kids started entering tech en masse the culture shifted. (Granted the Winklevoss twins tried to recruit Zuckerberg back in 2004. So this is not completely new. But I think the techie/suit ratio changed dramatically in the early 10s).
3. Lots of cheap capital. This meant more ideas funded, ideas that got funded raising more money, and more market saturation in web, mobile, everywhere. In some ways this helped entrepreneurs, but it also made fundraising more necessary.
4. A controversial one: all the "sexism in tech" controversies that kicked off a few years ago. I paid close attention and I remember that this exploded in 2013. You had things like a Github founder being ousted (along with Github apologising for their "meritocracy" carpet), people being fired for tweets, etc. Sexism is wrong and there were probably many invisible barriers to female founders. However the big social justice activists (Shanley Kane, etc) were not concerned with technology, they were motivated by ideology, and they created a very hostile atmosphere. Make an edgy joke on a blog post intended for about 100 friends to read? Suddenly 50,000 people on Twitter have read it and are calling for your head. PG made a poorly-worded comment during a long interview -- suddenly every media outlet quotes it out of context, takes it as proof of his sexism, and it becomes untenable for him to remain in charge of YC. (I know this wasn't the only reason he stepped down, but it was a factor).
5. Regulation. GDPR is the biggest one, though there are others. It is not a startup killer, startups can still operate, but it makes it much harder. The idea of putting a prototype online, getting some early users, and rapidly iterating based on feedback is now much more dangerous. You need to invest heavily upfront to become compliant (even then your legal status will be unclear), and if you pivot, or make drastic changes, you bear the risk of becoming non-compliant. The EU legislators assume that everyone is a big company with a stable business model, not a 3-man team experimenting with various ideas. These regulatory changes went hand-in-hand with increasing political hostility to tech entrepreneurs. Say you manage to succeed despite all the obstacles put in the place of tech entrepreneurs in 2018, and become the next Mark Zuckerberg -- you can expect to be treated like the current Mark Zuckerberg, that is, have everyone hate you and try to get you fired.
The movie "The Social Network" came out in 2010 for goodness sake. It was already mainstream knowledge among non-tech people in 2010, let alone successful tech billionaires in 2014, that Facebook was an organization run by sociopaths.
Also helps never to mix company and private email (separate email accounts) and code (two computers). If the side-project becomes any serious, e.g. you want to register a trademark or you have to change your tax status because it brings in extra money, try to get approval in writing, can be as simple as an email.
If the company tries to claim "yes, it' in the contract, but we don't enforce it" you could point to the Facebook movie (The Social Network), where lack of clarity/paper-trail has cost somebody 10s of millions.
:) reminds me of the movie "The Social Network" when Zuckerberg was told "Drop the 'the' from 'The Facebook'" :P
I'm afraid without the word "app" it would sound as generic as "rename files" ... also I needed an available domain name.
Coincidentally https://videohub.app/ was also free :)
And she sold 100% to Nordstrom prior to them selling it to Liz. You have to wonder if this is something of a "Victoria's Secret" situation. (1)
As the label took over America, he lost it all, having sold Victoria's Secret before it reached its peak.
For would-be entrepreneurs in the US, Mr Raymond’s tale is a cautionary one. He is referred to in the hit film The Social Network as a symbol of the dangers of failing to understand the potential of an idea.
(1) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2173576/Tragedy-Victorias-Secret-invasion-Britain-Why-man-500m-lingerie-empire-jumped-Golden-Gate-Bridge.html
I'm nitpicking a bit, but unless you know that was actually written by JT, I think you should attribute it to The Social Network movie, not to JT.
Sometimes I listen to metal (my default favorite genre) and sometimes I prefer various forms of electronic music: techno, house, trance, EDM, etc. Other times I go with classical: Dvorak, Wagner, Bach, Fauré, Handel, Vivaldi, Philip Glass, Carl Orff, etc.
But a lot of times what I actually prefer is to put on a movie, one that I've seen like 100 times, so that I know it so well that I don't really get drawn into the story and lose focus. I'll turn the volume down moderately low, enough to be audible but not overly distracting, and play The Matrix, Hackers, Antitrust, Sneakers, War Games, Tron:Legacy, Rad, The Social Network, Inception, or something like that and let that serve as my background noise.
I'd try to get something in writing, even a text message from him saying it's all yours.
Watch the facebook movie "the social network". Nobody will mind if your business just drags along. If it becomes successful though even the commit in the repo will cast doubt. And investors or acquirers (if that's your goal) want certainty who owns all parts.
I was in a similar situation once, but we had a contract, a self-written one-pager laying out proposed ownership, who will put in what initial investment (domain name, etc, only a couple of hundred USD) and business goal (creating a limited). In the end business partner didn't deliver project specs, his full-time job commitment caught up, and we abandoned the project. Anyway, creating the one-pager took less than an hour, it's worth it.
Which only makes The Social Network an even better film.
What if "all we know", "all we thought we knew" is the problem ?
There is a really telling and truthful scene in the Social Network movie about that, when Saverin wants to introduce ads and sponsoring opportunities way too early and Zuck refuses.
Former-employees-turned-critics like the author of the "Chaos Monkeys" book also agree with that : I'm paraphrasing but he says 2 important things : 1) that the ads sales organization within FB often felt neglected because Zuck initially really, really didn't care or understand this industry. Sheryl basically ran that, and still does to some extent 2) They were really serious about "make the world more open and connected" mantra internally. It's a genuinely mission driven company (and I'm sure recent controversies must have made huge waves)
I'm a former Facebook engineer. For sure, and especially since the IPO, it's definitely become an ads company, no point denying that. But it's also very fair to say it wasn't built to be one.
Same goes for Google really : who believes Larry & Sergei were thinking "let's build an advertising behemoth !" when they came up with PageRank in a Stanford dorm ?
Most ideas that became big weren't built from the get go with money as the end goal. That's just what follows after success.
Brazilian here. I miss Orkut a lot, enjoyed much more than FB. I had the sense that Orkut lost a lot of users in Brazil right after "The Social Network" hit the brazilian movie theathers. Everyone jumped in the hype then.
And that's what happens when noprocrast interacts with the lack of preview and time-limited editing. This is what I meant:
2007/01 m.facebook.com launched 2007/05 Facebook Platform launched 2007/11 Facebook removes "is" from status updates 2008/06 Facebook settled with the Winklevii 2008/11 Facebook Credits launched 2009/02 The like button is added [1] 2009/09 Facebook announces they are cash flow positive 2009/09 Facebook launches @-tagging friends 2010/06 Comments now have like buttons 2010/10 Fincher's movie The Social Network is released
Ahem.
Very interesting. For those curious, this covers the period where Facebook grew from ~50m to ~500m monthly users (depending on what months are included). Some selected events from Facebook's history in this era:
2007/01 m.facebook.com launched 2007/05 Facebook Platform launched 2007/11 Facebook removes "is" from status updates 2008/06 Facebook settled with the Winklevii 2008/11 Facebook Credits launched 2009/02 The like button is added [1] 2009/09 Facebook announces they are cash flow positive 2009/09 Facebook launches @-tagging friends 2010/06 Comments now have like buttons 2010/10 Fincher's movie The Social Network is released
[1] I honestly had forgotten that this wasn't always part of Facebook, but it's apparently true: https://techcrunch.com/2009/02/09/facebook-activates-like-button-friendfeed-tires-of-sincere-flattery/
I imagine in the early years and as soon as board member's / investor's profit margins started being a topic of discussion it was always known that that model was only the "free trial period" to gain traction, spread awareness, test certain extreme or ambitious features / ideas, and basically do a dry test run of the greater idea: capture as many data points of as many people as possible. I don't think it really would have fit the bill until it was able to capture the internet in the same way that LinkedIn was able to, eventually. But we all know this.
Now the early University members of FB are in a position to become paying customers (in a buying of advertising sense) but the real payday was always in the swath of personal information and data that would come along with true saturation of population enrolled into the FB ecosystem.
It would've been nice if it could have been made into something more altruistic but it only takes one less-than-intent watching of The Social Network to know that the idea was never altruism.
I don't want to go in depth about what I think the masses ignoring what the movie said about Facebook as a whole / the movie's message about Facebook and it's founders considering it was all said in plain dialog as blatantly as possible but that fact surprises me most. That it was stated so plainly and it's taken THIS LONG for the non-tech folks to really start scratching their heads and asking, "Is this is all okay or not?"
Capturing the magic is soooo long gone. Now it's about trying to figure out how to keep the devil / criminal activity, not the lightning, in the bottle for as long as possible. Well, from my POV at least.
Did we even see the same movie? We're talking about the social network, right? The movie lauded nearly universally, winning and nominated for all sorts of awards (including best picture!) by every organization in every category? The movie regularly voted as one of the best films of the last 18 years?
I don't recognize a single one of your bullet points as being about my experience of the movie. The whole conceit was that a brilliant technical expert's unexpected success pushes him into a world he is not emotionally or socially prepared to handle, and ultimately his arrogance and hubris leaves him alone and unhappy as he pushes away the people in his life one by one, ending SPOILER ALERT
beautifully with him quietly desperately refreshing his ex's facebook page alone, starting to recognize how much he regrets everything that he has lost in his pursuit for wealth and power...
Most of the movie isn't about college, or sex, or booze. If you had to could you have broken a site from that era in 2 hours? I'd be shocked if you couldn't. Lots of these sites would die when they get a little too much traffic. Some sites still do today. Security was an afterthought back then. Zuck had a girlfriend, and his friends do just fine. The lawyers are dealing with so much wealth and power in the hands of people who are so young and emotionally immature and they handle it exactly how I'd expect them to.
Zuck in the movie is driven by a lust for wealth and power, which is a universal theme in basically every story in human history.
>Studios will rename characters in biopics if they can't secure rights to the person the character was based on.
What circumstances would require a film production to ask permission of a real person before an actor could portray him? E.g. The film "The Social Network" didn't ask Mark Z for permission to portray him in an unflattering way:
https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/2108/how-can-a-studio-make-a-biographic-film-like-the-social-network
The only one I can think of is casting a part in a movie. You wouldn't cast Sean Connery to play the part of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, for example. But I believe there is already exceptions in the law for things like films.
And churches typically hire a younger person to be a youth minister, as the kids could relate to them better. Again, not sure about the legality of this though.
I think the standard recommendation is _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ by Thomas Kuhn
For something a little more current, the movie _The Social Network_ was also pretty good at discussing technological changes. But the focus has to be on how the movie portray social interactions prior to Facebook (LiveJournal, IRL) and the change it has afterwards.
The impression I got from the documentary film "The Social Network" was that they were already pretty well off even before the fb settlement.
Yes, I really think that the Winklevoss twins deserve a prequel and sequel of The Social Network movie and also directed by David Fincher. There are two rare events. I assume the Winklevoss twins were exposed to less risky ventures in their life but they chose the risky ones.
Wow, admittedly my perception of these guys was totally skewed after seeing the movie The Social Network. When I read about their original investment in 2013 I totally wrote it off as being a hairbrained move. Clearly succumbed to my own biases in passing that unfair judgment. Good for them for being so savvy.
Congrats. You worked with the person before and that's a lot better than cofounders who just met. Ideally you know how the other person reacts under stress for example.
First of all make sure as much as possible of the arrangement is in writing. Not being willing to write items down is a red flag. Jokingly point to 'The social network' movie (early days of Facebook) where a paper trail was missing.
Will you have equal access to the company bank account (to see expenses and gauge how good the company is doing)? Will you be a director (able to sign or co-sign contracts)? Do you have the same class of shares as the other founders and proportional share of votes? Things like this matter once another shareholder gets added (and angel investors and VC are shareholders usually). Who will own the created intellectual property (ideally the company) and who transfers what to the company now (e.g. existing domain name).
Are you allowed to work on other projects? If not then the tax office might question your sole trader/freelancer status.
There's no perfect answers, just write down those arrangements.
Go through this scenario: At some point in the future one person might be sick, on a long holiday or simply demotivated (not to say depressed) and maybe can't put in the same hours. How would you handle that? What can you do now (write down) to prepare for that scenario?
Reminds me of a scene in "The Social Network" movie (2010):
Lawyer: What are you doing? Mark Zuckerberg: Checking in to see how it's going in Bosnia. Lawyer: Bosnia? The don't have roads. But they do have Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg: [stops typing and looks up from his notebook]
Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI-r39_QkAs
I'm gonna say no, they wouldn't, nor would they base their knowledge about Facebook on The Social Network, and to support this claim I cite the first 5 words: "Not sure how accurate it is."
I guess you're saying "don't trust movies" and/or "Facebook would never exploit human psychology, that's a made-up fiction." Har har, good one.
Regardless, "fiction inspired by a true story" would presumably have some true elements and some not-true elements. If they were all not-true elements, it would be completely made-up, literally 100% fiction (not based on or inspired by a true story), and anyway I don't think there's any such thing as 100% fiction, no matter how hard people try. Every fiction owes something to the reality it was concocted in.
Therefore the problem becomes knowing which elements are true (facts) and which are not-true (fiction).
Not anymore it isn't; this goes 100X for women.
Women being paid less means they are forced to live in the crappier parts of towns: the squalor, the commute and the danger are significantly more.
When that movie "the Social Network" came out is about when I noticed it changed. It became literally overrun with sleazy easy-money landlords, big corporate entities buying up the apartments, jacking the rents, etc.
There are thousands of better cities than any one in SF bay area. Technology works anywhere, you can work anywhere. My quality of life improved 1000 percent when I left California.
[edit]
I'm not quite sure why it's so hard for readers to fathom that women being paid significantly less than their male peers would be a key factor affecting what is "affordable" to them, and thus their ability to live safely in the Bay area.
The question I was responding to was: "Is it worth it?" and my advice is that it is not. It is especially not worth it for women. Why would it be worth putting yourself in danger where all you can afford is the worst apartment in the worst neighborhood, 70-125 minutes away (each direction) from your workplace?
The golden era of opportunity in Silicon Valley has passed. The real estate factor is now baked too deeply into every facet of life there. And as long as the AirBnb model ensures that only the landlords thrive, the problem will always be bigger than the solution.
There is massive problem in the culture about value of sleep. The culture implicitly defines mentality where working hard without much sleep is somewhat heroic. Therefore according to the culture (again implicitly) those who sleep a lot are lazy.
Hard working heroes who sacrifice sleep from time to time displayed in popular films. Take for example three films Micro Men [1] and The Martian [2] and The Social Network [3].
In first two films, hard working heroes don't "waste" time on "useless/unproductive" sleep and instead drink lots caffeine.
In corporate culture it's often the same. Since 2006 till 2008 I worked as a technical support engineer and I often had to work at night. Sometimes, I took two hours of sleep (in an office's couch) from 4 AM till 6 AM. After these two hours of sleep I would be energized and work really productive till 9 AM. But the company decided to impose strict ban on sleeping in office and instead put coffee machine. As I expected my performance fell significantly no matter how much coffee I took. So the company put stupid discipline over actual performance.
In 2014, I had insomnia so I couldn't perform well at work (again no matter how much coffee I took). I went to corporate doctor (a doctor assigned by company). She looked at me and said that I don't have bruises under my eyes, so I'm totally fine. More than that she actually didn't take any my complaints seriously and instead assumed that I'm lazy.
Nowadays, I mostly sleep well and I almost don't drink caffeine. Sometimes, my insomnia came back. Since I participate in algorithm contests and I know very well that no matter how hard I try to work hard without enough sleep I do not perform well in algorithm contests.
The mentality that working hard is opposite to good sleep is most irrational, harmful and widespread yet very implicit thing in the culture.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(film)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Network
Things got out of control with the advent of the social network movie. All of a sudden the general population thought coders were snorting cocaine off strippers in Palo Alto while wiping their bums with hundred dollar bills. Now everybody wants to join the party.
I think there's an important conflation of what a side project is to many people. If I mention to any of my non technical friends that I'm building an app their minds go to the movie "The Social Network" or to Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. They become excited and interested - up until the point where they realize it has nothing to do with Facebook or Tinder or Instagram.
I have no doubt that this effects the side projects developers choose, or how they present them. Places like HN will always to a certain extent push people to "launch" and monetize their projects.
I hate this because it suspends my suspension of disbelief. I can only think of three instances of tv shows and films that get it right: the US version of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (at least she uses a terminal emulator and ssh); The Social Network; and Mr. Robot. It's so commonly botched that I get really excited when someone gets it right. It doesn't even have to be perfect; just not laughably ridiculous.
The Social Network (2010) movie was superb. Yes Fincher as director and Sorkin as screenplay writer would be phenomenal. It would take a good book about Uber internals though. Unfortunately the former head of Sony Pictures in L.A. screwed the dream team over the Steve Jobs movie.
It varies. Sometimes I listen to my "stock" music - hard rock and heavy metal of all varieties, with a special focus on 80's era glam metal, speed metal, and thrash metal.
Other times it's various forms of electronic music. House, trance, europop, Hi-NRG, synthwave/darkwave, etc.
And then sometimes I go with classical music. Bach, Vivaldi, Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, Orff, etc.
As far as specifics go, here's some stuff I've listened to lately:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8OELzmpgZo&list=PL7F37BB1A67E0238D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9oTQzwXYXk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hd8Or1RrYs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4oZZhpMXP4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyfL9LC1DC4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajF2NOuYkjk
https://youtu.be/-7Q61fH-03E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGMJ2b-3eCk
One other thing I'll sometimes do is put on a movie in the background, with the volume turned down fairly low... just enough that I hear some babble and noise, but not enough that I get caught up in what's going on. This only works if I use a movie I've seen / heard many times, so I already know what's happening and won't get drawn into the story. So, something like The Matrix, Antitrust, Tron:Legacy, Hackers, Sneakers, The Social Network, etc.
I'm not concerned about any arbitrary depiction in a movie (The Social Network?), I take issue with the move fast and break things attitude taken by the platform he created regarding news distribution, privacy, individual liberties, and mental health.
Upvoted. That's exactly the problem, and the way to solve it.
Example: two months before the movie "The Social Network" got released to theaters in 2010 Facebook decided to add a robots.txt to Facebook.com. Immediately Archive.org deleted/disabled access to the archive how Facebook startpage looked in 2004-2010.
BTW. the correct way would be to activate archive access to Facebook.com for the 2004-2010 time-frame again. The "The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook" book and the "The Social Network" film based on that book used of course partly Archive.org and various other research methods to get the facts.
Adapt? Really? It doesn't seem so. They are in their own world, and don't care.
But no wonder when you read about the crazy head of Sony Pictures, the woman that got kicked because of the scandals that got made public (emails leaked). For example we can "thank" her for that the Steve Jobs movie lost the The Social Network director and is now such a boring piece of movie.
We don't need hundreds of super hero movies, such a mass is stupid. Where are the funny movies, the action movies, the adventure movies? We want less CGI and more real action, or CGI looking like real action.
We want movies not boring hour long series, we have no time to waste hours for a stretched story arc.
The Accountant, (second half of) Bourne 2016, Jack Reacher 2, Mission Impossible Rogue Nation ... were good movies. But it gets harder and harder to find a few movies per year that are watchable. The last two X-Men movies were so bad, so many CGI effects, so dark, so little content that made the previous X-Men movies great. Were are the Die Hard 1-2, Air Force One, first three Tom Clancy movies of this decade - right, directors and script writers forgot how to pace a movie, as constant action is just wrong, you need intense action then calm situations and then action again and a bit humour does't hurt (something almost completely forgotten). I just saw a 1968 action movie and it was so much better (Steven Spielberg mentioned it's his favourite movie he sees up to), this decades Hollywood is in a sad state.
I really enjoyed the frustration of the article's author in trying to attribute Ted Chiang's writing to his personal life or history.
We as humans seem to have this unceasing tendency to essentialize -- to believe that everything we do comes from deep-seated psychological needs. We project every action onto some event from years past with a parent, a lover, a friend.
I feel like this is borne out of a desire to believe that behavior is deterministic. That if only we too had undergone the experiences of the person who we're reading about, we too would be that acclaimed sci-fi writer, or famous entrepreneur, or asshole president. It excuses, to some extent, the fact that we are not that person.
But sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes we just build shit for fun. It doesn't all have to be us coming to terms with our distant father.
Zuckerberg, of all people, once had a quote vis-a-vis The Social Network (can't seem to find it) that basically amounted to the idea that they had to make the entirety of Facebook be about his rejection by a girl because the idea of people building something cool for its own sake doesn't make a good movie.
What's interesting for me is I feel like this armchair psychologizing we all do is getting worse. I don't have any evidence to back this up, just a feeling -- as we're exposed to more people's behaviors, we fall back to essentialist attributions of that behavior more and more.
The social network is nothIng for hackers. Most of the facts and characters are in reality not as portrayed. And itS one of the weakest movies of Fincher.
Exactly this mass of comic super hero movies is so boring. And reboot after reboot with broken confusing story-line, with the reboot worse than the original. No wonder when idiots like the woman who was in charge at Sony Movie Pictures run such companies. The Steve Jobs move bombed big time. Instead of another superb movie in the style of Social Network we got the most boring movie ever.
Please focus on movies instead of hundreds of TV series - no one has time to watch that many series anyway - or do you want to create many niches with little viewers that ay little (Netflix, etc). How about full productions (not outsourced to Canada or Australia) without overusing CGI and spend some money on good scripts. Oh, and we don't need drama and slow spacing all the time. We need more humour and action, and often less story is better. Look at Kevin alone at home 1+2, Indiana Jones 1+3, Die Hard 1+2, Airforce One, the first two Tom Clancy movies, etc. fast pacing with slow elements, a short but good story, no fuss, very good music.
Dope. This is the article mentioned in the social network movie, during the lunch scene.
> could form the basis of a Social Network style movie
Are there any other good movies like this?
"We know Zuckerberg ...has a bit of an ego issue. Have you seen The Social Network? "
Sorry but i stopped reading when this article cited a fictional movie as evidence.
After reading [0] today, I feel happy that someone decided to write this up.
Over the last year, I've seen a dozen colleagues who have created startups just to fleece money from VCs (if you can call them that) who have lots of money and no clue about tech in general (the ones who have seen shows like Silicon Valley, movies like The Social Network and Uber's evaluation and want to make a quick buck this time around).
I don't believe there's a bubble, but if this continues, we'll soon have one real quick.
[0] - https://www.saastr.com/22-reasons-i-wont-fund-you/
Loved The Social Network movie. But the movie's soundtrack (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) has had the greatest effect on my coding. Still listen to it while working almost every day. Maybe matched only by Sigur Ros's Takk as my favorite Getting Shit Done soundtrack.
I don't have any insider knowledge, but here's a good account : http://www.businessinsider.com.au/how-mark-zuckerberg-booted-his-co-founder-out-of-the-company-2012-5
In a nutshell: when Zuck & friends moved to Palo Alto for the summer to work on Facebook, Saverin decided to take an internship at Lehman Brothers in NYC instead. It became increasingly hard to get his attention, even as his approval was required for a crucial funding step. Worse still, Saverin then ran unauthorized ads on the platform for a side project of his. He kept asking about parties in Palo Alto. That's when Zuck decided that enough was enough and started to cut him off.
So it's fair to say, at the very least, that the culture fit wasn't there and that the Social Network movie didn't paint the whole picture.
I think it's also fair to say that Saverin brought all this upon himself by repeatedly failing to show commitment in the company, and that he still got a sweet deal in the end because Facebook wouldn't have been anywhere near as valuable had he remained involved.
The real Eduardo Saverin story is not the one depicted in the "Social Network" movie.
I think this, what you have stated, is the appeal of that scene in the Social Network where Mark Zuckerberg is building Facesmash:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSKoVsHs_Ko
Most people probably don't understand what Emacs, Apache configuration or "wget magic" is but they don't have to. Sorkin's screenplay makes, what might otherwise be a boring evening to a external observer, seem really exciting while communicating the high level ideas.
In other words: people who saw the movie partook in the excitement of watching a programmer build something cool, fairly quickly, that elicited strong feedback and reaction, which is rewarding to any programmer and they did not have to get bogged down in the details. As well, this scene also doesn't embellish in the details of hacking with absurd looking command lines nor GUIs like "Hackers" (the movie) does and, therefore, does not elicit an obligatory 'eyeroll' from the programmer/hacker community.
that's incredibly simple, I thought some NLP and web crawling was involved.
The bigger challenge are fake news generating disinformation and fake comments on various social media platforms.
This is especially true in reddit where sockpuppetry and vote manipulation as well as band wagoning is rampant. Anonymity in social network seems to serve the voice of those who exploit it's weakness as well as the general naivety and indifference from it's audiences.
For example, in various cryptocoin subreddits I'm seeing a lot of said activities, even where it is blatantly obvious, the moderators seem to turn the other cheeck as it generates long debates.
As I recall, Zuckerberg did the same shit in the early days according the movie The social network where he would jump in discussion and generate long debates. Except, now the very technique is being used for political and manipulations in un-regulated "crypto-anarchist-code-is-law" market exchanges.
It's a matter of time before more tools that help the user cut through the bullshit appears. There will be tit for tats on both sides but in the long run it's to make fake information expensive to be disseminated.
I haven't seen this yet, but for anyone that's interested: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (Nine Inch Nails, Social Network, Gone Girl, Girl w/ the Dragon Tattoo, and more) provide the score for this film.
That's another good point. I couldn't be sure if it was fiction or accurate but The Social Network movie kept referencing the exclusivity of the clubs that everyone wanted. He was moving that experience online. So, being the cool thing plus your list being exclusive and in your control could definitely be a driver. Each of these are individually motivating for users.
He has always seemed inauthentic to me (though quite smart in handling things). Even before "The Social Network" movie came to be, many people saw him as shrewd, ruthless, arrogant and uncaring. Whatever Facebook has done, with all its missteps on privacy and the still-flourishing-but-ridiculous "authentic names" policy that puts people at a disadvantage, will always be tied as blotches to his name and legacy (not that he needs many).
I thought there were some smaller positive changes in him after his daughter was born. Time will tell what kind of a world he wants his daughter (and future children) to live in and what he would like to be known for.
It depends what you consider the end, in the movie "social network" they managed to make an awesome movie with a young facebook.
As a user I've got an objection to DRM: it restricts me from using products that were already legally bought-and-paid-for. I bought a Blu-Ray drive for my media computer. My friend brought over a Blu-Ray copy of "The Social Network". It turned out that we could not play the film in the drive without paying an additional fee for a proprietary, DRM-enabled Blu-Ray video player application.
This is particularly bullshit because I paid for the hardware. They could have just built the appropriate crypto keys into there. Hell, they could have built a whole update-and-revocation scheme into the drive's firmware, something that much smaller and weaker devices than Blu-Ray drives can still afford in their electronics and firmware.
They could have built it all so that buying the hardware would enable me to play the media, no further questions asked. They did not need to sell me a piece of hardware that is outright unusable for its intended purpose without further payment for proprietary software whose primary job is just to license the appropriate crypto keys.
I used to put The Social Network on in the background as well. Pi is another, but I also like Million Dollar Traders [1]. It's a great documentary, but it also provides a good office / working ambience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6ciY8u04Kk
I don't watch anything specific in response to being "stuck", but a lot of times when I'm coding and want something in the background for stimulation and to occupy idle moments, I'll put a movie on with the sound turned down real low. I like to use something I know so well that I can practically recite the dialogue, so I am not going to actually get interested in what's going on, since I already know it so well. So usually, that turns out to be The Matrix. Occasionally it's The Social Network, Tron:Legacy, Hackers, or Inception. Something about having those going seems to help inspire me on some level.
Funny you should mention demographics and House of Cards - it was literally created because Netflix's data suggested that many subscribers enjoyed the Social Network (Fincher), Kevin Spacey movies and the British version of House of Cards.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/business/media/for-house-of-cards-using-big-data-to-guarantee-its-popularity.html?_r=0
It's not demographics in the traditional sense, but make no mistake - Netflix and the like do not create unique pieces of art just because they feel like it. They are also making a show to fit a market, just with better data.
> it's an echo chamber for older, more conservative folk.
I'm not so sure about that. One of the best shows I saw last year, Mr. Robot, was made by the USA Network, of all people.
Yeah, exactly, lies as always. Coupled with the comment below about having to login.
Another corporate bs from that guy, moving right along.
Though I do recommend watching 'The Social Network' (2010) movie, probably the best thing he has to do with (even though indirectly).
I could barely restrain my excitement when I first saw the Social Network. I think that movie did a particularly good job of showing real-world hacking.
Another interesting look at the subject is the movie THE SOCIAL NETWORK, which is rather explicit about the topic. The film starts with Zuckerberg being called an asshole and ends with the line "You're not an asshole, Mark. You're just trying so hard to be."
Pretty much the entire film is about how asshole-ism works in our social networks.
The Social Network movie shows some classic screwings in this case.
The modern Tony Stark is literally based on Elon Musk. Interest in Computer Science programs jumped after the Social Network movie came out. I think there's more truth in roymurdocks' comment then you give it credit for.
For some reason I just don't buy Michael Fassbender as Jobs... Unlike the portrayal of lesser known Mark Zuckerbeg in "The Social Network", we have all been exposed to Jobs, his unique look and mannerisms. I will reserve any further criticism until after viewing the movie, as I do enjoy Sorkin’s work.
I'm speaking out of my ass here:
1. What is the lesson to be learned?
I believe that the lesson to be learned isn't that drug use makes you better or worse. It's that people of all walks of life abuse drugs. Even people who are very successful. Despite the immense power of drugs. It is still the person, not the drug that determiness a person's life. Aaron Sorkin is a crack head. He's starring in that new Steve Jobs film, but has also worked on such successes as West Wing and The Social Network. Does crack make you successful? No.
2. All I've seen in drug users is wreckage and death. Maybe I haven't seen the whole picture.
Drug use is rampant in the United States. It's just hidden or is not considered drug use because a prescription is involved. Remember how out in the open alcoholism used to be? (Think Mad Men. Or talk to a grandparent about how things used to be.) Alcoholism didn't just go away. People just started keeping it to themselves.
3. Is there an upside to drug use? If there was a safe performance pill maybe I would try it.
Amephatimes, Speed, Aderall. All the same drug. All abused across the country by college kids. I really don't know what the long term dangers of amphetamines are. Not only college kids are abusing them, that's just where it's most obvious. People use them as smart pills. They apparently allow you to focus on working and studying for hours.
In closing, I think being smart and talented can also come with sadness and other mental issues. Sometimes drug use is a way for talented people to self-medicate. The talent and potential is still there. It's comes down to the individual whether drug use will inhibit them from their goals.
It's been a long time since Aaron Sorkin did something that didn't feel like a recent film school grad doing a bad impression of Aaron Sorkin. See The Social Network for a great example.
He's become a weird cliche parody of himself, where every character has the exact same diction and incredible grammar and rapid fire wit. It's like dozens of different actors channeling the ghost of Josh Lyman.
Forgot about accuracy, treat it as a work of fiction and be surprised if it just doesn't suck as a film.
Really? I feel the consensus around the time was that it coincided with the release of The Social Network movie and that Zuckerberg was basically trying to buy some good press to offset how he was portrayed in the movie.
So five people work on a project with the goal of earning money from it and incorporating in the future.
The others might be your best friends but my advise is to setup a contract first outlining exactly who owns what in that project. Even if you verbally agreed on 20% each there will come a situation where you argue that one person spent more on postage and the other spent more on legal fees or yet somebody else put twice the hours in as the next. Or you worked from somebody's living room (kind of an expense). At that point you will argue about percentages again so better to have it in writing as soon as possible. Source: been there, done that.
A contract also helps establishing that work created for the project belongs to the full team. E.g. nobody can go out and sell/reuse the domain or logo without the other people's permission.
To break the ice maybe just point to the movie 'the social network' (the one about the Facebook where the Winklevoss twins didn't set a contract).
When I was a kid: Hackers (watched it around 30-40 times when I was a kid), War Games, Matrix, Sneakers pushed me into being developer, but the most impact on my current life had American Beauty as it made me thinking about working less. Another movie that I can think of is Social Network - It motivated me to on my side projects harder.
Who wants to be Jobs or Gates or Zuckerberg anyway?
Of course we all do, but that's pure ego. Each one of them was brilliant, there is no discounting that, but you also can't ignore the role that luck played. You can't just be brilliant and you can't just be lucky, you really have to be both to have the kind of success they did. It's not surprising that they are anomalies, hoping to recreate their success is like hoping to find a winning lottery ticket.
We shouldn't put any of them on a pedestal anyway. The empires of each of them was built on locking people into their closed systems at any cost. Jobs did some remarkable things, Zuck seems like he's going to do positive things with his fortune, and Gates might eliminate the world of a lot of disease, but you only have to look at past cutthroat titans like Andrew Carnegie to know that redemptive actions like that leave behind at best an ambiguous legacy.
There was a great piece on Grantland this week talking about Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, and Microserfs. It had this bit which I thought was really interesting:
"The moment reads two ways. Either it’s about Zuckerberg, for all his billions, being Just Like Us — a slave to the same digital toy to which we’ve subcontracted management of our memories, our personal interactions, and our sense of self-worth — or it’s about how Facebook, born of Zuckerberg’s sense of exclusion, has made us just like him. The notion that the tech visionaries whose inventions colonize our daily lives are actually uploading the virus of their personalities to the global unconscious is an idea that floats through The Social Network; it’s the engine that powers Alex Gibney’s forthcoming documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, which stops just short of postulating that every iPhone includes a fragment of poor angry uncharitable emotionally stunted Steve’s immortal soul, like a sliver of wormwood from Mordor."
http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-halt-catch-fire-microserfs-douglas-coupland/
If you want to be like Zuck, what is it about you that you are going to infect the world with?
"Pirates of Silicon Valley" is such a great film. It's even funny and the true story is told in a nice way.
Cringely's "The Triumph of the Nerds" documentary is great too (which lead to the "Pirates of Silicon Valley" film).
The only other awesome documentary style film about the computer age (that I know of) is David Fincher's "The Social Network". Sony Pictures tried get David Fincher to direct a new "Steve Jobs" movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2080374/) based on a screenplay written by Aaron Sorkin (same team as "The Social Network") but then something went terrible wrong (http://variety.com/2014/film/news/leaked-sony-emails-reveal-nasty-exchanges-and-insults-1201375511/). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_(film)
Wow... really? It's absolutely viewed as low prestige in my experience. I mean our culture has an ingrained stereotype of the socially awkward, maladjusted engineer, that's definitely out there. The jocks, "cool kids," extroverts, your typical fraternity member etc. are supposed to be in finance or striving to be an executive or something.
I think it's generational to some extend. IMO the baby boomers are particularly bad w/ regards to the stereotype. My parent's friends ask about my work as a programmer, and I suggest that their son or daughter who hasn't figured out what they want to do consider taking it up (code bootcamps make it easy, great market now, etc.), and I just get such cringe reactions from them.
But... younger generations are better, given how startups are now viewed as "trendy," and I do think movies/TV like the Social Network had a big impact.
> Or why couldn't a sociologist
My wife's Ph.D. was in (mathematical -- statistical) sociology. Sociology is the study of groups of people. So, the role of sociology in the rise of the Internet now would be to apply some of their scientific methods to understanding, say, social computing, and the social network, yes, including the subject of that movie, Facebook. Also social are SnapChat, PInterest, the social graph, Fred Wilson's "large groups of engaged users", people and social cases of network effects, etc.
Or, just what the heck makes a successful social application? Then how to apply that understanding to create more successful such applications?
Likely there is something significantly social about the success of Apple -- just what is it?
For UX, that would be closer to parts of psychology.
If The Social Network is a movie then I don't see why the story of Id Software couldn't be a movie.
This is the problem I am facing. Their recommendations are not even remotely related with Social Network movie and that is just one example. If they recommended Steve jobs movie or Black hat or Sword fish then it is understandable.
Thanks for your comment though.
You don't need to rate movies or even have a Netflix account to get this data. For this particular example, go here (found by googling 'the social network netflix'):
http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-Social-Network/70132721
You'll see they suggest {Beyond the Sea, Into the Wild, The Blind Side, Good Will Hunting, and Prefontaine}.
I am looking for recommendations something like if I like Social Network movie then what are other similar movies that I can watch?
Not sure if there is a site that does this already
Of course:
(1) Crib.
There is a recent study indicating that already in the crib girls are paying attention mostly to people and boys, to things. I wish I'd kept the reference.
(2) From the crib on, girls are much better with people, and socially more generally, than boys.
So, net, in K-12 and college, the girls are much better than the boys at the social aspects, e.g., wanting to please the teachers, sensing what the teachers want, especially in humanities subjects, and giving it to the teachers, in K-12 usually women.
And there are other differences: In K-12 girls are much better behaved in class, have much better verbal aptitude, and have better manual dexterity, e.g., much better handwriting.
There's still more, much more, on the differences between boys and girls, in K-12, college, etc. And over those years, the nature of the differences change, markedly. There's more in
D. Tannen, 'You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation'.
E.g., she shows a really neat experiment at age 5: Each student is asked to go into the hall and pin a tail on a donkey or some such. Well, there's no donkey or it has no place for a tail, or some such. So, right, it's a psychology experiment where the subjects have been lied to -- set that aside for here and now.
Well, the purpose of the experiment is to show the difference between the boys and girls: Typically a girl returns to the room and meekly tells the teacher that there is no donkey. The teacher says, "That's fine," and asks the girl to take her seat and she does so. All very courteous.
Typically a boy returns to the room, goes to the teacher's desk, stands with his feet apart, puts his hands on the front of the desk wide apart, leans toward the teacher, and with anger and outrage asserts to the teacher that there is no donkey. Again the teacher tells the subject "That's fine. Take your seat.".
That's already at age 5. Net, boys and girls are different, not the same -- not saying that in total one or the other is inferior, but they are just very different. Dogs and cats are different; so are boys and girls.
In general, though, it appears from my experience that can expect that throughout life the boys are more interested in things and the girls, in people. Yes, a dog can, with difficulty, walk on just its hind legs, and from all I can see with difficulty a girl can get as interested in things as a boy -- commonly with difficulty.
Just what the nature of the difficulty is, social pressure, self-image as a girl, desire to avoid competing with boys and desire to let the boys feel superior in something, say, changing a flat tire, desire to appear to need to be cared for (important if she is to be a mommy, which will be important as long as there are humans), native ability, just more interest in other thins, ..., for a huge list. But, net, in a word, they are different.
Now, supposedly the French Revolution got Western Civilization to fear that any recognition of any difference would be a threat of unfair treatment. I'm not trying to justify unfair treatment. Indeed, I would suggest we assume, human males and females deserve equal respect as persons.
> they're simply being treated better by teachers
Sure: In K-12, nearly all the teachers are females and, thus, find it easier to appreciate the girls.
This stuff is very well known and is readily accepted by movie audiences, e.g., as in the Disney children's movie Bridge to Terabithia. E.g., one girl in the class is nasty, but several boys are. The class goody-goody, star student, is a very confident, diligent girl. The lead girl is creative in story telling, and the lead boy is creative in art. "Boys' handwriting sucks. No offense" -- she was correct, but in time the bad handwriting improves.
At one point, the teacher goes ecstatic in praise of the role of adjectives in "any writing". Hmm ... Well, maybe for writing in fictional literature! Alas, definitely not for most writing in the STEM subjects! Sorry lady! So, he teacher is pushing fictional literature, and the girls are better at that, i.e., story telling.
Did I mention, they're different?
One reason girls are doing better in college: They are going for one of the two traditional fields, K-12 teaching or nursing. And girls have found that they can do well in law. Girls have long generally been better in the humanities, especially fictional literature. And psychology and sociology are now popular majors for girls. The STEM fields -- not so much.
The movie The Social Network has some of the differences clear: Zuck is totally wrapped up in computing, e.g., understands the various bits involved in virtual memory paging and, thus, finds his operating systems course beneath him. The girl he wants to impress is very sensitive and astute socially, while Zuck is very clumsy socially. The girl insults Zuck's interest in computing and his Web site The Facebook as playing with "video games".
Yes, maybe Aaron Sorkin's writing was not true to Zuck, but it was likely true to what movie audiences were quite prepared to accept from norms, experience, thinking, or just old social stereotypes. I.w., movie audiences are willing to accept such differences between boys and girls.
Sometimes I feel like half of my HN comments are about this guy, but Aaron Sorkin (writer/creator of A Few Good Men, The West Wing, The Social Network, and recently The Newsroom) wrote this line in a not-very-successful TV show 15 years ago called Sports Night, which is the same phrase but slightly nicer, and has stuck with me.
Dan is a TV host who did a Variety Fair interview in which he was semi-pro drug legalisation.
> Dan: The validity of your read on what most of the country thinks notwithstanding, Stanley.... Actions are immoral. Opinions are not. And I won't apologize for mine. Discussion is good, and for those of us fortunate enough to be the subject of magazine articles, it may be our responsibility from time to time to try and raise the level of debate.
SEEKING WORK: Remote (preferably), SF Bay Area - 1/2 meetings a week is OK
I’m an IOS developer looking for full or part time work. I can also do some Python scripting.
Recent work: http://itunes.apple.com/app/id843971211
Learn Chinese - a travel phrasebook app. I did all the design, ux, and coding myself.
Old side project: http://www.shirtfighter.com
Vote for the funniest shirt. It’s like Facemash in the “Social Network” movie, but for t-shirts. Tech stack used: Rails, Heroku, AWS, HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery
Contact: dev@ninthpath.com
SEEKING WORK: Remote (preferably), SF Bay Area - 1/2 meetings a week is OK
I’m an IOS developer looking for full or part time work. I can also do some Python scripting.
Recent work:
http://itunes.apple.com/app/id843971211
Learn Chinese - a travel phrasebook app. I did all the design, ux, and coding myself.
Old side project:
http://www.shirtfighter.com
Vote for the funniest shirt. It’s like Facemash in the “Social Network” movie, but for t-shirts. Tech stack used: Rails, Heroku, AWS, HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery
Contact: dev@ninthpath.com
That's a silly statement. If it didn't break suspension of disbelief then it's because you didn't even realize it was CG! If you go to movies at all then I can all but guarantee you there are CG shots that you had no idea were CG.
Here's some super impressive CG from the first Captain America movie back in 2011. Crazy insane stuff they're doing it. And that's for a very, very extreme case. You better believe they are doing slick stuff in non-extreme cases! http://www.fxguide.com/featured/case-study-how-to-make-a-captain-america-wimp/
For Iron Man it's not quite the same because it's a suit but it's just as impressive. Since Iron Man 2 there is no full suit worn by an actor. There are no legs and at this point there are barely even arms. There's a chest piece and open mask face piece and that's about it. http://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/2198/how-are-the-iron-man-suit-scenes-filmed
In The Social Network there are a lot of scenes with the Winklevoss twins. Spoiler: They didn't use twin actors. They used two actors and CG'd the face of one onto the other body. No way in hell did you call this out on first viewing. (number 3) http://www.totalfilm.com/features/50-cgi-scenes-you-didn-t-notice/the-social-network-2010
I attended in 2010, the year that Zuckerberg answered a few questions about "The Social Network" movie.
The talks are more inspirational than informative, but seeing them live was a great experience. What really made it great for me was the chance to be around hundreds of like-minded individuals and have a few conversations about startups that I'd not have gotten in my home city (I live outside SV). There are also pre and post parties to attend and meet more people. There's just an atmosphere there that can't be created easily.
If airfare wasn't an issue, I'd not hesitate to go again. I am assuming it is still free. It was well worth the day I invested.
I deleted the comment you've replied to because of the rapid downvotes... but screw it... I'm putting it back here. Who needs karma anyway...
To the rest of the public, we probably look like complaining oil or Walmart execs. While the rest of the general public is dealing with insane commutes and thankless/soul-crushing jobs, we got things like "The Social Network" movie, San Francisco gentrification issues, fancy catered parties and Google Glass. I can't even explain this to the rest of my family. They're like "Why are the people in your field complaining? Aren't they partying like it's 1999?" And seriously, my life is basically a dream compared to the rest of my family and past classmates not in tech. I make more money than I ever thought possible, I have no commute because BART is so close, I can WorkFromHome just about anytime I want, I work in San Franciso with lost of food options and my job is something I'd be doing on my free time anyway. I have the flexibility to be at my standing-desk on HN debating with people online while drinking my fancy glass bottle VOSS water from Norway. And the icing on the cake is probably the minimum 2 recruiter LinkedIn emails I get a week offering even more money. Also, I never negotiate salary. I just take the first offer so I assume I'm in the lower-range compared to most of HN.
Seriously, go try and explain this to the average lower/middle-class American outside of tech. This must look ridiculous. I'm right in the heart of this tech scene and I'm not even convinced we should be complaining.
Also The Net, Antitrust and David Fincher's Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo have very realistic computer sequences.
Antitrust and Social Network also show real source code that compiles (C, Java, Perl, Bash, HTML), Antitrust even explains "Open Source" to the audience. The camera work (especially showing relevant parts of the computer monitors and pan around to keep it engaging for a longer time) on all four movies is really fantastic.
* The Net (1995) - filmed one year before the World Wide Web got traction with the first fully graphical Mosaic web browser: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/
* Antitrust (2001) - famous for highlighting the open source movement, features a "CEO" that resembles a mixture of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in one person as evil character, shows Linux desktop and command shell, and shows real Linux developer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
* Social Network (2010) - very realistic, based on real detailed technical blog posts from 2004 on LiveJournal from Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin's memory: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/
* The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) - nmap tool, etc.: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568346/
---
* Jurassic Park (1993) - real 3D file manager application on Unix desktop, first use of OpenGL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/ , see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ and http://fsv.sourceforge.net/
* movies (like The Matrix reloaded) that use the nmap tool: http://nmap.org/movies/
When you start you tend to take a (reasonable) free domain name. Later (when successful & have money) tend to get/buy a better one
It is portrayed wrongly in the movie "The Social Network": "drop the "the""
Are you looking for a movie like 'the social network'?
The huge success of Facebook and Twitter, the Social Network movie (October 2010) and the introduction of Apple’s iTunes Ping (September 2010) probably added a lot to this momentum.
SEEKING WORK: Remote only (SF Bay Area based)
I’m an IOS developer looking for full or part time work. I can also do some Python scripting.
Recent work:
http://itunes.apple.com/app/id843971211
Learn Chinese - a travel phrasebook app. I did all the design, ux, and coding myself. I have a few more versions queued up. The Spanish version should be released in a month or so.
Old side project:
http://www.shirtfighter.com
Vote for the funniest shirt. It’s like Facemash in the “Social Network” movie, but for t-shirts. Tech stack used: Rails, Heroku, AWS, HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery
Contact: dev@ninthpath.com
There has been a cultural shift lately from "Ha! Those people are nerds!" to "Man, those guys are going to make so much money.". I would argue it has a lot to do with this movie:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Network
Also, as a student at the University of Washington, I would like to note that, anecdotally, the quality of CS students has dropped through the floor. I'm a mechanical engineering major, but I often find myself helping my roommate with his CS homework, even though he's probably in the top five percent of CS students here. These people don't even understand basic things like what bytecode is.
the social network was a movie.
This is why Steve Jobs used to say "everyone can throw money at a problem and fail to change anything", but people chose to see it as the excuse of a greedy businessman (who actually did donate to a number of projects privately).
Throwing money at a problem and forgetting about it almost never works. It just breeds corruption. Case in point.
Well, in a way the money wasn't wasted. Mark really needed the positive PR back then what with The Social Network movie and all the privacy vulnerabilities and abuses of Facebook. He got his PR. Facebook surviving was worth $100 million to him, so good job. Facebook survived. So he stopped donating.
In the Social Network DVD commentary extras you can see the monitors with a green screen. All computer scenes have been edited in post production.
You can check the Full HD version, frame by frame and read real perl code and shell commands like wget. The screenplay even is based 1:1 on the real blog posts of Zuckerberg (except the girls name).
I wonder if they were able to reuse Facebook website design by using archive.org. Shortly after the movie was released Facebook changed the robots.txt to disallow and prevent archive.org.
But there are some minor errors. Like later in the movie somehow Zuckerbergs PC runs Windows XP instead of Linux. And in one short scene the Windows XP screen is not completely visible, the right side is cut of (like the clock of the taskbar).
The level of realism in The Social Network is uneven. See this analysis of the scene in the operating systems class (about 20 minutes into the movie):
http://chomaloma.blogspot.com/2011/02/social-network-inaccuracies-regarding.html
This is silly. The realism of code in "Social Network" is secondary and irrelevant.
What really matters is that the movie's characters, plot and dialog are inconsistent and formulaic cliches.
I wrote a post about it before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2134065
This entire story underlies to me the need to bootstrap into something that is already working and has numbers before talking to anyone about taking money.
I enjoyed the piece - the writing, the story. It's meant to have a melancholy, no-end-to-the-story tone. That's the entire point of it.
What people have to realise is that most of the rest of the world sees silicon valley entrepreneurs based on what they saw in The Social Network. Ziplines into the pool and young girls hitting bongs while nerds with headphones bashed out code nearby, oblivious. So something like this would serve as a strong counter-current to the prevailing narrative, that it's just a case of hopping the bus and pitching your ideas and becoming rich and famous while still young.
Realistically many career paths have low probability, high reward exit points, and that continues to attract youth. The movie or music businesses are really no different. It could easily have been a story about LA and a bunch of wannabe actors waiting tables and going to auditions - some will luck into roles, others will burn out and take normal jobs, a lucky few will walk into top roles because of connections, family or supreme talent.
This reads as how to run a company poorly and how to build a terrible company culture.
Some gems:
> they all finished work each day at 5:30. I remember watching “The Social Network” and admiring the passion and intelligence of the group of young engineers.
Yep, a fictional movie about the founders of a social network is definitely a good benchmark for how much your engineers should be working—not standard professional hours.
> We’ve been through three [lead designers].
Yes, blame the designers for ridiculously high turnover, where you have 3 people in the same position within a year.
> a deficiency that I’m sure they sometimes exploit
Right. Not trusting your technical employees and assuming they are trying to exploit you is a fantastic way to inspire passion and trust. In fairness, since she seems to be a pretty big fan of exploiting others, it's natural that she'd expect the same.
> they worked day and night
That is not a desirable thing, it should be considered a mistake in planning which must be avoided in the future.
All in all, it sounds like she's building a terrible company to work for. Not surprising that she's (according to Crunchbase) only raised $500k.
She sounds horrible and I hope she fails.
First, there's her focus on hours.
Our team didn’t seem driven; they all finished work each day at 5:30. I remember watching “The Social Network” and admiring the passion and intelligence of the group of young engineers. My team didn’t look like that.
She wasn't unhappy because of the bugs. She was unhappy because her team didn't look like a star team. (How many stars would put up with her attitude?) What a fucking narcissist.
Second and related, there's her use of The Social Network to get a sense of what programmers are supposed to "look" like. That's offensive on so many damn levels I can't keep track of 'em all. The kicker, though, is this:
Because I’m a non-techie boss, my engineers know that I don’t understand how much time they will need to complete a task, __a deficiency that I’m sure they sometimes exploit__ (emphasis mine) and that I find incredibly frustrating.
What. A. Fucking. Bitch.
New York is swarming with non-technical douchebags whose connections get them some seed capital and possibly enough resources and client contacts to get started, and maybe even hire a few talented but clueless engineers who'll throw long hours after a bad idea. Avoid those types. They're horrible. They aren't successes in their own sphere (if they were good in the business game, they'd be in finance or consulting) and they aren't technical either, so you can't learn fuck-all from them. A great business partner, you could learn from. The sad fact, though, is that the rock stars of the business world have zero interest in the VC-funded startup world. Tech 8+ like me can't find our equals in the VC-funded world (Damaso Effect) because Biz 8s are CEOs' proteges and portfolio managers at hedge funds.
Not everyone who isn't technical sucks, for sure. However, the business world sends its rejects to manage nerds and nowhere is that more apparent than when one reads articles like this. There are great Harvard and Stanford MBAs, but they don't seem to end up as "business co-founders". They go into private equity, hedge funds, and CEO-protege type roles in business and stay there.
Finally, if you're going to found a tech company, learn technology. Learn to code well enough to understand why software engineering is hard (so you don't become that douchebag who thinks he could do the programmers' jobs with a year of training), learn how to deal with 140+ IQ people, learn how to identify useful problems, and learn enough about software culture that you're not using a fucking movie for pointers.
I think The Social Network is a bad example. I don't know what happened in real life, but in the movie the guy was never there. I wouldn't want an absentee co-founder to have 30% of my company (or even 5% for that matter) either if I was working on it full time.
Make sure you've seen 'Startup.com' (documentary) and 'The Social Network' (useful for the archetypes even with the fictions). If you do wind up as an early founder out, try to be more like the guy in Startup.com, or Jawed Karim (YouTube), rather than Ron Wayne (Apple).
This is the history of Technology Industry in movie form.
Pirates of Sillicon Valley... a direct to TV movie that is becoming a classict tells the early history of Microsoft and Apple. my personal favorite.
-----------< I would like to have a movie about the Dot.com bubble... but don't know of anyone representative >
Then the Social Network... to see the founding of Facebook
JOBS... the new movie about Steve Jobs is my least favorite, but gives an idea of the departure of Jobs and his return.
This is the kind of "science journalism" that I strongly dislike (and is promulgated by both sides in politically tinged debates like this one). Basically the author has a point of view, and sees in the study some numbers that support said point of view.
That aside, I think the biggest problem is not understanding where (the obvious) disparity in tech comes from. It's not discrimination, and least conscious discrimination. And I don't even think it's unconscious discrimination or side effects of so called "privilege".
It's simply that when tech startups are small, for various reasons (I'll get to this), they have a lot more males than females.* If the startup does well, early hires rise in rank by virtue of being there longer. If/when the reach the size where they are recognized by name, it's too late, most of the top roles (both engineering and management) are filled by males. Even if there was zero discrimination (or feelings of isolation), you would get the topsy turvy industry we see now.
Most studies focus on income but the far bigger disparity is wealth (both in this case and generally). The earlier employees in successful startups are phenomenally more wealthy than latecomers. These people are the ones who go on to start and fund more startups, and the cycle continues.
This is why PG's now infamous remarks about there being few female hackers (as opposed to CS students/engineers) are really insightful. Having Sheryl Sandberg or Marissa Mayer as visible leaders in large companies won't really change much (or anything when it comes to tiny startups). When these large companies hire, it's quite likely they do so scrupulously fairly. But even though the disparity is much better when it comes to new hires, the females amongst them (just as the males) start at the bottom.
Having more female founders is a start, perhaps, but it doesn't really solve the problem of too few female hackers. What you need are more female technical founders. I'm not saying that the non-technical founder role is less important (in fact it can often be a lot more important). But the technical founders are responsible for building the technical team from the ground up. Males tend to have more male friends, just as women tend to have more female friends. And the first people you try to hire are friends.
But even more than just technical founders, if you want to reduce the disparity at the source, there need to be more female "Mark Zuckerbergs" who come up with the idea and hack version 0 when everyone else is out partying (and, importantly, before fundraising is even a thought). This is when a founder has most leverage: when he/she has built the kernel of something that people want and everybody else wants in. Think of the scene from The Social Network (admittedly a hollywood movie) where Zuckerberg assigns roles and equity to his co-founders and basically brushes of the girls' offers to help.
This is a very difficult problem to have, if you want to increase the presence of women in this industry. It's difficult because there's nothing you can do to future "Mark Zuckerbergs" to force him to pick a more diverse set of co-founders. There can be no law, because this is almost like choosing your friends or significant others. A not insignificant percentage of startups with female founders in fact have their significant others as co-founders. This could be great for the startup (I know many great teams like this, obviously pg/jessica being one), but it again points to how difficult it is for females to find co-founders the way males do.
The only thing that would really work is for "these girls" to have been hacking since they were children and think that this is the coolest thing they could be doing. And there needs to be a critical mass of them so they can make friends with each other, because if you think that telling adult male developers to "play nice" is hard, try forcing 10 year old boys to invite 10 year old girls into their crew, (cooties and all).
* It would be cool if there was data to track the ratio of male engineers to female engineers as a successful startup grows. My hunch is the ratio improves steadily along with company size.
> Wake up, guys. People have had tech giants invade their life way too much and they've all seen in The Social Network what kind of person a poster boy like Mark Zuckerberg really is.
The Social Network is heavily dramatized, and not really realistic. You shouldn't take a Hollywood movie as reference for real-life. IMHO, the way they depicted MZ in the movie is completely off (spoiled arrogant ass-hole), that's not what he is like in real life.
We should just be happy HN has moved beyond Flappy Bird. Now we're back to watching The Social Network movie again, and talking about how pathetic $400K is over $18 lattes.
When I moved to Silicon Valley in 2006, I had just lived through the events that were eventually twisted into the movie The Social Network. My conclusion having witnessed Mark's behavior firsthand was that he was the least trustworthy individual I had ever met and that he was likely to harm others.
At the risk of sounding like Chicken Little ("the sky is falling!") I wrote a great deal voicing my point of view, including my very first post on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24742), in which I called Mark a fraud. For expressing my grave and sincere concern, I was met with what could only be described as considerable hostility.
Aware that very few wanted to hear what I had to say, I did everything I could to move onto more interesting and useful work. I don't spend my time worrying about Facebook, so I haven't looked into their ad technology in any depth. Nonetheless, everything in the above video strikes me as spot on, which would also mean that I was exactly right. Facebook's entire valuation appears to be based on little more than false advertising and click farming. As the CEO of a publicly-traded corporation with a supposed market capitalization of $162.61 billion, Mark would still appear to be, as I described here (http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=80), the greatest con of all time.
I hope that based on these findings Facebook finds itself the target of civil actions filed by multiple Attorneys-General and the DOJ, but I doubt very much that our justice system would render a fair outcome even then.
The Wanklevoss twins in The Social Network movie were played by non twins. And the face of one (Armie Hammer) was added to the body of the other to make them look like twins.
On what planet do you live on?
You make it sound like the midwest is riding around in buggy whips and without electricity. You really think people haven't seen The Social Network? That entire movie was about the arrogance of Zuckerberg and what a special little snowflake he was.
Well, there's a more accurate movie about Jobs being planned, for which Woz is a consultant: http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/01/13/briefly-aaron-sorkin-reportedly-finishes-script-for-steve-jobs-biopic
Screenwriter is Aaron Sorkin - he also wrote the screenplay for The Social Network.
Nothing new, we had similar articles and discussion on HN:
https://www.google.com/#q=site:news.ycombinator.com+movie+code
Movie director David Fincher uses computer monitors with a green/blue Screen, the computer graphic is added in post production. Check out the behind the scene footage of "Social Network" (2 disc DVD ed)!
This is really interesting, especially from my perspective. I'm a senior in High School, planning on traveling after graduation. These tech hubs are clear attractions to young technologists, but posts like this cause me to reconsider.
Now, not knowing much about The Valley's history (other than the obvious), I'm wondering if these problems you speak of were caused by an influx of techies who feel entitled in the area. The glory of movies like "The Social Network" encourage ambitious young hackers like myself to move westward because of Hollywood-crafted fantasies, rather than necessity or convenience. Consequently, meritocracy is diluted.
Thoughts? These ideas are more from my intuition than anywhere else; I've lived in Boston from birth.
Startup.com (2001)
Bit gold (blog post, 2005)
The Social Network (2010)
The Cryptocurrency (2014) ... it staggers the mind at what the plotlines could be and the characters incolved. Some rags to riches to rags story meets its opposite. Maybe a 2015 release would yield more possiblities... the greater awakening of cryptocurrency is about putting money into perspective, and finding some equality in it all: it's not about replacing one paper elite with another (who could end up the same people anyway.) I think this was SM's intention to begin with: new technical structures, creating new economic structures, creating new social stuctures... the characters that realize this earn or retain their money (or fame) in the film.
You can also build it in, like, your home town.
I don't get this obsession with moving to a startup hub before there's even most remote proof of your startup's viability. To me, it always raises the suspicion that one's less interested in actually building the business and more interested in living inside the movie The Social Network.
Mark was talking about how he always envisioned a way to connect people. And he was citing examples of early hacks he made in college. Of course, his most notorious one was the "FaceMash" hack, the one the movie, "The Social Network," put a lot of emphasis on. Hence, Mark was venting a little frustration that his other notable achievements went largely unnoticed by the public.
This won't be first or last movie that wrongly depicts history :)
Braveheart is one example: the section "Historical inaccuracy" takes good 1/3 of the whole Wikipedia article. Amadeus by Miloš Forman is another example. The Social Network...
It is rather sleazy that they tried to portray Assange as a self-obsessed, egomaniacal cult leader of some kind. Claiming he was in a cult and bleaches his hair, etc. Quite an ad hominem (even if the movie is not intended to be a documentary or a polemic). People are going to watch the movie, see that, and go "oh, what a nut job" even though it's completely fictional.
Really leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Also the claims that Assange is responsible for the harm or death of Americans, or that they later leaked unredacted documents.
The Social Network's dramatization of Zuckerberg wasn't nearly that acrid, in comparison.
I believe that it truly is a problem - specifically with respect to scalable marketing and especially if the founders are engineers with a great dislike of anything marketing related (yours truly included).
We like to believe that once we launch and get a handful of users, the viral effect will take place and bada-bing bada-boom we will have a million users. Movies like social network make it look like Facebook reached its first million users drinking and coding 24/7 (I still love that movie) - but the truth is that you have to put the effort in building relationships with your users and there is no scalable way to do that.
I think the Social Network, for example, is quite accurate about the most important things (the zeitgeist of how a startup like Facebook comes about .. the energy, the betrayals (both perceived and real), the craziness, the attitude of great founders etc).
This is a movie and not a documentary .. for my money I expect the Director to put his creative efforts into making something enjoyable to watch. As long as it's not a blatant fabrication, fact for fact historical accuracy isn't why I'm going to watch this movie.
Aaron Sorkin viewed Zuck & co as a vehicle to tell a larger (and more important) story about modern culture .. if The Fifth Estate accomplishes the same, it will be a great movie.
>I don't think it's reasonable to expect a movie about Wikileaks to be any more accurate than, say, a movie about Facebook.
That's why I have a problem with movies like The Social Network and Zero Dark Thirty. It's fine to composite, or eliminate less significant details, or even play some details up for their metaphorical significance. My problem is with movies containing counterfactual plot points that change the entire moral calculus of the events being depicted, often in favor of the status quo.
It's as of you made a movie about the Iraq War, and based a key scene around how they find a bunch of WMD in the desert. Or depict Martin Luther King on the phone to his handlers in the USSR, or delivering "I Have a Dream" at a rally against racial quotas in hiring.
These movies become history.
What a brilliant (if unintended) publicity stunt for the movie ;) More seriously, I think Assange is acting a bit like Zuckerberg vis a vis The Social Network. All in all, Zuckerberg was the hero of the movie .. he was portrayed as a brilliant hacker and visionary (if flawed) businessman. My feeling is that Assange will be similarly portrayed (except of course replacing "businessman" with "journalist").
If a movie were ever to be made about me, it would feel insulting to be portrayed as flawless. There are no great characters without flaws.
I saw pirates of silicon valley a few years ago. I'd say that was the only movie to really get me excited about being in tech/silicon valley. The Social Network didn't even have close to the same effect for me.
But a movie isn't just a movie. Every movie has a narrative that makes a point, and that makes it valuable.
If what we are hoping to learn from 'Jobs' or The Social Network is "How did this guy do it? What personal qualities can I emulate, what situations can I apply the same approach in", then it is only valuable if it is accurate.
After all, if the narrative is something the writer more or less made up (i.e. he's missed out the bit where Jobs goes into the wilderness and comes back another person), then what the movie teaches us is coming from the writers head. The writer didn't build a leading company, so I am not really interested in what he thinks about how to do it.
Was this movie meant to be a documentary? I was under the impression it was supposed to be more like The Social Network. Some facts but mainly just entertainment.
The Social Network may not be factually accurate but I enjoyed it and watched it again. I'm guessing this will be similar.
The trailer for the social network was amazing and people were anticipating the movie.
I don't think anyone wanted to watch Jobs after seeing the trailer.
There is a very good chance it will be better, but Sorkin had to take considerable liberties to make The Social Network work as a movie. I really liked it because it captured and conveyed the spirit of things people find hard to understand. But you can't do that and be a historically accurate document. And despite Sorkin being a genius, I know several people who thought sitting through The Social Network was torture.
For what it's worth, The Social Network as a movie was very well-received by critics [1]. Jobs, not so much [2].
[1] http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the-social-network/
[2] http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/jobs/
People had similar things to say about The Social Network. It was wrong about history, but it was also a good movie on its own. We will see if "Jobs", as a movie, can stand on its own.
The Social Network isn't a grandiose documentary. If you just look at it as an entertaining story based loosely on people you know written by a talented guy (Aaron Sorkin), it's pretty enjoyable. You might actually like it. And the tech angle must be somewhat attractive if you're drawn to HN.
There's a surprise. A grandiose documentary about some capitalist's life. Who cares. I refuse to watch it much like I did with the social network.
Unless you can sell their stories in the time proven 127 minute, 2 peaks setup and market them to a major studio, I doubt it will get any traction.
The only other option would be that the people who care about it fund it, but even though that pool might seem large inside of the tech microcosmos, it's comparitively small, and you'll have a low budget movie that has trouble being shown in theaters.
Engelbart could actually make a movie character, given his obsession with improving the human intellect through computers. It's questionable though whether you can work his life into a movie script that has popular apeal whilst respecting the work he has done.
Borlaugs work could be worked into a movie as well, but it suffers from the same problems that making a movie about Engelbart has. It's tough creating an accurate portrayal of his life whilst having a dramatic story arch in there.
That's part of the reason why the Social Network has such strange set of priorities. I doubt that the court case and the unrequited love story were integral parts in Facebook becomming Facebook, but they fit the story, and the love story likely beat the film over the 2 demographics line.
So in any case, we're the best you can do is either a small film that represents their life accurately (with all the nitpicking that will come with it), or a huge film that twists their lives into 127 minutes screentime and will likely irritate the very people that asked for it. Because if Universal went out and made a biopic about Dennis Richie, there'd be a 1809 Comment thread discussing how they didn't put enough focus on his work in kernel design.
Were better off without a big movie about any of them, however much that may hurt.
What really confuses me is why there isn't a major movie about Richard Feynman. His life is a movie script. Worked on nuclear missles, had his wife, and longtime love interest die of tuberculosis (granted, there is a movie about that part), and so much other stuff that would just fit perfectly. But I digress.
The analogy at the top of this needs a little work. Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) wasn't in the Social Network (Jesse Eisenberg)
Both great movies though :)
Funny that the background music is the same as the recent Microsoft Outlook TV commercial.
It doesn't seem as exciting as The Social Network movie.
Could someone explain what program Mark used in The Social Network movie when he was viewing the traffic for facemash.com? I've never seen that kind of clean logging before - at least not for php/apache. http://i0.wp.com/wenshanren.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/wpid-mark-uses-emacs-from-quora.png
When my business partner and I were starting our first business we would unwind at night by watching motivating movies like these. Some of the ones we watched included: Boiler Room, Wallstreet, and Glengarry Glen Ross. Two more recent movies that I would add to the list are Margin Call and the Social Network. My list of motivational books would be much longer.
Varies, but a common favourite is:
Time: Nighttime, preferably after midnight.
Location: In bed, with my laptop propped on my knees and waist, and my head up against some pillows.
Temp: Thermostat set on about 65.
Light: Just the glow of the laptop screen, maybe a lamp sometimes.
Beverge: A pot of strong coffee on in the kitchen. Usually a Sumatra or Columbian of some sort.
Music: Queensryche, Motley Crue, Def Leppard, Savatage, Dokken, In Flames, Children of Bodom, Iron Maiden, Testament, Godsmack, Vains of Jenna, Emperor, Nocturnal Rites, Blind Guardian, Iced Earth, Crashdiet, Bon Jovi, Borknagar, Bonfire, KISS, Kix, Journey, Lacuna Coil, Lizzy Borden, AC/DC, Annihilator, Agnostic Front, Armored Saint, Alice Cooper, Cinderella, Twisted Sister, Morbid Angel, Deicide, Death, Van Halen, Voi Vod, Vader, Warlock, W.A.S.P., Whitesnake, Five Finger Death Punch, Exodus, Overkill, Sepultura, System of a Down, etc.
As an alternative:
Place: Barnes & Noble cafe or Starbucks or similar
Time: Saturday, from about noon, until ...
Temp: Whatever
Light: Whatever. I usually sit near the windows, and if there's a lot of sunlight glare on my screen, I roll down the blinds to nix that.
Beverage: a bottle of Fiji water and a venti sugarfree mocha w/ whole milk, sugar-free caramel flavour and no whip.
Music: Same as above
In either case, I may sometimes switch up the music for trance / electronic music of some sort, preferably with no lyrics, or classical music.
If I'm home in bed, I'll occasionally forgo the music and put a movie that I've already seen 100 times (The Matrix, The Social Network, Sneakers, Hackers, etc.) on the big monitor across from the foot of the bed, and turn the volume down fairly low. I basically ignore it, but when I need a break from looking at the screen, I can look up and focus on that for a minute or two.
I don't know the history, but the social network movie highlighted the spamming of his college network through email.
I'm somewhat bemused that The Social Network isn't on there somehow, despite the movie's misgivings.
As others have said - this isn't being censorious or moralistic about drugs - but step 1 is stop smoking the pot. Your mind WILL clear up after a week or two being off it and after a month or so you'll really notice the difference.
Contrary to movies like The Social Network, getting drunk and stoned all the time doesn't fit with the stresses of running a startup I'm afraid.
Burnout is an under-talked-about problem with startups. You are far from unemployable coming out of a startup. You just need a break and some time off to get your head clear. Depressive tendencies are not unusual for the kind of person drawn to entrepreneurialism.
If you can then take a break from your startup. Tell your co-founder that you need a couple of weeks off or you're gonna burn out. If they can't make that work then you don't want to be in a startup with them anyway, as there'll be more ups and downs and you need to have each others' backs during the tough times.
If this startup isn't working for you and you have no other option, getting out is not as drastic as it seems. The company will survive. You will survive. Things will not be as dire as you think. It just feels that way now and the combination of pressure and anxiety makes it hard to get a better perspective.
Being stuck in something because you feel financially bound to it is not a good thing - you'd be surprised the options that are available to you but it's hard to see them when you're in the frame of mind you are. That's not critical :-) ...it's a good thing - it means that when your mind starts to clear up you'll see many more options.
I've been in Silicon Valley for about 14 years now (really? damn I'm getting old). I've seen, and been through, every up and every down. If you want someone to talk to for a bit of perspective, I'm happy to listen any time. (Add a d in the middle of the two names my username at gmail for my email address). Perspective can help :-)
Either way, don't get too down. It's not as bad as it feels right now I promise.
It's 2010. The Social Network just came out in theaters and you're seeing it for the tenth time, no, eleventh time. Actually, you've lost count. It doesn't matter. You know the movie isn't about Mark Zuckerberg or whatever his name is. It's about you.
Fast forward to the present. You've maxed out your credit cards and convinced your parents to lend you money out of your little sister's college fund for your new startup. It's going to change the entire industry. What industry? You know, the industry. You feel it in your bones. You were born for this job, and you need a shirt to let everyone know you're in charge.
I'm honestly not sure how I feel about this. My profession aside, I thought it looked hilarious because I'm a huge fan of both Owen Wilson, and Vince Vaughn. But on the other hand, as a professional in that general field, I also feel like it's just mocking the tech industry to some degree. I feel like it also "cheapens" the Google brand, or maybe it does the opposite by making them more relatable to non-tech users? None the less, I'm interested to see how this pans out compared to other movies somewhat similar like "The Social Network", and "Jobs".
Also, did anyone else notice that B. J. Novak (Ryan from The Office) was playing some sort of Google recruiter in the clip? Sort of funny because he makes a joke about that in an episode of The Office. Kind of funny, if they did that on purpose.
I honestly wonder how many were influenced by movie The Social Network.
I would be careful with feeding chicken to chickens.
Might get you kicked out of a startup for animal cruelty;
if it is led by a Zuckerberg ;) (at least according to The Social Network film)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf-NRQvu1HY
Article text (there were also about three images):
Hackathons are bad for you.
I love developer communities. I love the spirit, the comradery and energy. But in the last couple of years or so, Hackthons have spread through the community like a plague. There are Hackathons around technologies, ideologies and everything in between. And I feel there is an urgent need to eradicate them.
Here is my main beef with Hackathon. They’re encouraging and spreading a perverse culture of unhealthy lifestyle and unsustainable workflow which has been made popular by sensational media and film.
Here’s a standard recipe for a Hackathon.
Gather a bunch of developers in a location. Supply them copious amounts of junk food, booze and caffeine. Tell them to get cracking for 24hrs. Sounds familiar?
Sleep
There is an almost masochistic take on sleep deprivation in the developer community. (It might be true with other professions, but let’s focus on the devs.) Working late into the night and not sleeping for days is lauded and almost considered a necessity by many these days. Hackthons, many of which last 24hrs, only serve to glorify that.
It is well-known that sleep deprivation has only negative effects on health. Sadly, popular culture in the community has only strengthened the indifference towards health. Y-combinator’s popularized (and prefered?) archetype for founder/developers who eat ramen and code into the night, or the life of Mark Zuckerberg as showcased in the movie The Social Network only make things worse.
And leaving long-term health out of the equation, lack of sleep hasn’t been known to improve your focus or the ability to be logical or creative, all of which are critical skills for developers.
When was the last time you wrote a piece of code while being totally sleep deprived, and looked at it after you woke up to say it was the most beautiful, elegant and awesome piece of code you’ve ever written?
A good nights rest and a fresh mind are critical for a good developer, that’s one thing that Hackathons completely miss.
Food and Drink
Next to sleep, your body needs good fuel to keep going. And NO! I don’t mean coffee. As much as I love my coffee, binging on coffee, red bull or is rarely good for focus. Not to mention alcohol, which makes matters worse.
It’s a short-term vs long-term trade-off. Coffee (and possibly alcohol, although I am skeptical abt it), do help you feel more focused in the short-term. But both caffeine and alcohol are diuretics and only make you lose more water in the long-term. A dehydrated body isn’t much of a help when you need your brain to focus and solve problems. “When was the last time you saw an isotonic drink at a Hackathon?”
Junk food isn’t much of a help to that. I am not even going to touch on long-term effects of eating high carb diets. The usual Hackathon menu of pizza and candy is full of carbohydrates. While sugar highs are great for short-term focus (maybe??) you tend to feel hungry very quickly after a carb heavy meal. That only means you going around for another round of pizza/candy etc. Not really the best way to focus is it?
Sedentary lifestyle
More and more research is showing a link between a sitting lifestyle and health issues. Developers are unfortunate to have a job which is inherently sedentary. Hackthons again make it worse by inciting developers to sit at the same place for 24hrs. “I’m sure your back will thank you at the end of that!”.
And what’s worse is since most Hackathon are held on weekends, the one day you usually get to be active is also spent being sedentary.
Distraction
Hackathons are distraction. There are a ton of things going on. People are talking, discussing ideas, giving talks or just hanging out. All that is competing for your attention while you need to focus. Add caffeine to that mix and that’s one hell of a party on thought in your mind. Noise cancelling headphones help, but then what’s the point?
Solutions?
I’m pretty sure there are better ways to organize hackthons. Having them over 2 days of 12hrs slots would be an idea, to combat sleep deprivation. Supplying and encouraging healthier eating and drinking options would be really useful. Fruits, nuts, and other healthy food are options. Similarly with drink, having access to isotonic drinks and lots of plain water should be a priority. Encouraging participants to do physical activities like calisthenics or just going out for walks on a regular schedule are options to consider.
But in the end, I really feel that Hackathons are beneficial less as a place and time to code out your next big idea, but more of a time to mingle and bond with the community. It’s like a gathering of the tribe. And personally, there is more value in that than actually developing anything.
TL;DR; : Hackthons promote unhealthy lifestyle. If you’re organizing one, urge your participants to hydrate regularly, eat healthy meals and take regular breaks where they do some type of physical activities.
Bold on your part to own up and offer a resignation. (he "higher ups" should have recognized that and not accepted it). From the movie, "Social Network" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bahX2rrT1I
I'm not sure how much credit Id give his answers as he was not at facebook very long and his investments in asia are all sinking (besides Perx which is doing great).
The social network movie put him on the map!
I think I disagree.. The rise of the "brogrammer" is proof that nerd culture is not only on the rise, but actually revered as the new "cool".
Look at television for example.. Asthon Kutcher is the highest paid actor on TV, and he basically stars as himself on Two and a Half men. Ashton is a product evangelist + angel investor. He makes nerds look awesome
Another example from (popular culture/TV) is Big Bang Theory. "Toward the end of its run, Friends was topping out around 20 million viewers, meaning Big Bang is now standing shoulder-to-shoulder with one of network TV's biggest and longest comedy successes."[1]
Movies like The Social Network + jOBS will further push the perceived nerdiness for Google into a good thing, not a negative thing. Our culture is shifting.
[1]- http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2013/01/big-bang-theory-ratings/60625/
> Silicon Valley has been filled in recent years by people who've seen movies like "The Social Network" and read TechCrunch with its myth of the heroic entrepreneur, and have come here thinking this is how it is.
Really? I seem to have met someone like this last year when I first arrived in the Bay Area, but he seemed to be focused on the racier party scenes in "The Social Network." There was one incident where he decided it would be dandy repeatedly to leap up and down from his bunk to the floor, in the process spilling a glass of beer on a woman's Macbook and upending it face-down opened on the floor. He didn't apologize to her or even acknowledge that he did it.
This guy has the gall to mumble editorial comments under his breath while I'm trying to talk business to someone.
He's also the quintessential example I give of shallowness I've encountered in the Bay Area:
"This needs better design." "Really? Do you know what those buttons do?" "...no."
When pressed for what better design constitutes, he recommends a different font and "some gradients."
Silicon Valley has been filled in recent years by people who've seen movies like "The Social Network" and read TechCrunch with its myth of the heroic entrepreneur, and have come here thinking this is how it is.
They are emulating a simulation of a startup that really isn't anything like the real startup. It as if Baudrillard's Simulacrum of a startup has taken over Silicon Valley. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
These folks feel they have to live some mythical startup lifestyle and - a particularly hated phrase in my book - fake it till they make it.
But Aaron Sorkin did write The Social Network. Any evidence to point that he is working on a truer rendition for the Jobs' movie ?
I don't want an accurate portrayal of Jobs. That would probably make for horrible entertainment. This is a movie that is clearly not intended to be accurate so much as entertaining, much like The Social Network. I would have much higher accuracy standards for a documentary.
Zuckerberg found The Social Network to be significantly less than 100% accurate, but perhaps a better movie because of it.
Why would we look forward to Aaron Sorkin's film if we don't want an "inaccurate, sexy, mainstream Hollywood version"? Did we forget The Social Network that easily?
I'm not sure why you draw a distinction between biographies, documentaries and entertainment.
The Social Network was not true. I'm pretty sure we would've been just as entertained by the truth.
The best we can hope for is that we learn something from the truth while simultaneously being entertained by it.
I'm not sure when we decided that we must sacrifice everything but the names, of those involved, at the altar of entertainment
It doesn't really matter. This isn't a biography or a documentary, this is entertainment. Was THE SOCIAL NETWORK true? No, it was entertaining.
The best you can hope for any biopic is that it won't distort positions unrecognizably far from reality, and perhaps it will inspire someone.
In Tron and The Social Network it was very obvious that a real hacker had been involved in designing the terminal scenes. It makes a big difference to how seriously I take the rest of the movie - Kudos to them!
This is one of my favorite kinds of movie. I've never heard a good name for the genre. Psychological thriller? Too broad.
You should add The Thirteenth Floor. A good movie, better than its low budget, that fits squarely in the category.
Glad to see someone suggested The Game. I loved that one. It's a long way down from The Game and Seven to Benjamin Button and The Social Network.
These have all been non-answers. The best advice I can offer is to watch "The Social Network". Its hacking scenes are about as authentic as any movie has ever been.
I absolutely _loved_ The Social Network. Forget that it was totally fictional and made up. But it was the first movie that _raised_ the status of geeks in the eyes of the average joe.
The Social Network portrayed how real world power and influence has shifted from the Winklevoss type to the Hacker-nerd type. Non-nerd friends of mine came away from that movie with a new found respect for geeks.
Yeah. I have to agree with you. It's alright folks in Silicon Valley saying "but it's not true" about the Social Network. To almost everyone else, outside the industry and outside of Silicon Valley this is not only the factual story of Facebook, it's the model for how Silicon Valley works. I really don't look forward to a fictionalized version of Jobs which similarly whiffs on all the key points and paints another false picture, entertaining though it will no doubt be. If he wants to write a fake Silicon Valley movie don't do t featuring real-life people.
Ugh. After The Social Network I can't think of anybody worse to be doing any movie about startups and tech.
Really? Do we really have "entrepreneurs" in bay area who say "engineers are secondary"? I guess thats why investors complain there is more noise rather than signal in the bay area nowadays. I wonder is it because movies like Social Network. I also fear shows like this might excite wrong audiences.
As unfortunate as it is, this is Bravo TV. These people do exist (granted, as a minority), and they are relatively accurately represented IMO. The show seems to be going for the Sean Parker as represented in the movie The Social Network. They're trying to go for the most dramatic and outrageous scenes possible, and they do happen occasionally. Yes, it is missing out on a whole other side of it all and I hope that they at least show the audience a few scenes of the actual culture (if even in a condescending matter).
Jon just nailed the problem in the head: frankly I'm tired of hearing rich kids talking about how easy it is just to leave everything you are doing and make a startup, and to add insult to injury the new buzzword is to say that you don't even need an idea.
Yeah sure you can leave your job or college and just start throwing darts at post-its to come up with an app idea if you have a rich dad who is willing to bankroll your adventure in the Bay Area. You need at least $36k a year just to rent a decent flat in that place, some families, not just people but actual families, live on less than that in this country.
I had friends on highschool who had tremendous hacker potential, but they also had problems, REAL problems like bad health and a poor family. Most of them are quite happy right now working for the evil corporations that pay them those $75k a year salaries that the rich kids laugh at. They depend on company healthcare and can't even dream to let that and their paychecks go just to give startups a try.
And that is just one side of the problem, the other is the facade of equal opportunities in startups, the idea that everyone applying to YC or other incubators is in the same level.
The social network movie made a lot of generic hacker culture statements but it forgot to mention that the zuck had a private programming tutor paid by his parents. Seriously, how many of you here had parents who could afford that? I tried to hire a Java tutor when I was in highschool and it was incredibly expensive, more than hiring several tutors for most of my school subjects.
I have met entrepreneurs with amazing companies that didn't get into YC, yet the guys from diaspora, the same guys who burned through a quarter of a million and did next to nothing, they got in, and with what? a meme app, because that's important, another memegenerator clone.
I'm using a throwaway account because I know this is going to be downvoted to hell, many of these rich kids make an overwhelming clique in HN and other sites, and they don't like when it when someone speaks up and shatters their BS.
The irony here is that this country is fast becoming like the third world hellholes that immigrant entrepreneurs where escaping from. The stories you hear from those places are becoming eerily familiar: a guy from South America told me how over there all entrepreneurs are rich kids, legacies from generations of crony capitalism and favoritism. Practically none are coders or hustlers, they get their parents to bankroll a clone a cookie-cutter startup and take advantage of the wage slave condition of engineers over there, after all what are those poor souls going to do? they can't afford to make a startup and don't have any connections to investors, so what is left for them? get a visa and come here? nice try...
And that is what America is becoming, a place not of opportunity but of class lockdown, social mobility is at an all-time low and everywhere you hear pundits whose idea of equality in America is actually that of Sweden's, which ironically is a socialist country.
But go ahead, keep believing we are all in the same league, by all means try to defeat my point by saying how you help other less fortunate entrepreneurs with your link-bait blog full of empty advice, keep saying that all of us who are not in the same position than you are a bunch of envious and resentful pricks, or that you are where you are right now because you worked for it when actually you are where you are right now because you were half the way ahead to being with.
Hackathons like in the Social Network movie... :) Always fun but schools may not agree to host it on campus...
I know it's a movie and not necessarily based on actual events, but people like this always make me think of the line in the social network: "If you had invented Facebook. You would've invented Facebook."
Silence if I won't get interrupted. Otherwise, I have mix of 80s, 90s and techno. I also like sound tracks to some techie/pseudo techie movies (ie:social network,pirates of SV etc)
...at least the movie industry helps you Americans a bit: remember Zuckerberg's character coding Facebook's ancestor fueled by a couple beers in The Social Network?
Since we're using movie analogies, let's say that app.net has decided not to "end the party early" because there is no party to begin with. (That quote is from "The Social Network.") App.net has a very similar business model to the first online community, the WeLL. The WeLL is still around after 25 years.
From her about me section:
If you think I'm just your average fashion obsessed girly girl, think again. I know my fair share about the interwebs and my favorite movie is The Social Network, in which I may or may not know every line. TechCrunch is one of my daily reads and Jack Dorsey has my heart. Jack - if you're reading this - I love you.
Basically what I'm trying to say here is, I understand your language.
[end quote]
Sigh.
Around 15 years ago, I read a fictional book that taught me about what it may be like to go into the field of computers. It was called Microserfs [1] and I absolutely loved it. I thought that it did a great job of describing the world around software development and what working in Silicon Valley may have been like.
A book that would have been non-fiction on the subject, may not have captured my imagination as much, but this did a wonderful job. This is just one example of an introduction to the business of computers through the use of fiction. I think there's definitely a place for it.
For me, there's absolutely room for more fictional books that capture the startup experience and show what life may be like. This would not only be entertaining, but provide some sort of guidance for those interested in the field beyond the Hollywood'd tech movies [2] that are available for them today.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs
[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Network
In the associated blog post he says:
Methodology: I downloaded ~ 35k thumbnailed-size images (yay wget -- “The Social Network” inspired me to not use curl)
Could some who's seen the film enlighten me on why wget is better than curl?
Thanks.
ebook preview:
What Is This Book About?
This book is about helping people who want to learn how to hack their idea by themselves in order to build the first version of their product. I wrote this eBook to share my experience and failures with wanna-be entrepreneurs, startup entrepreneurs (business guys) on how they can also become a hacker and build their own products by themselves. Note: I might write some words you might not be familiar with, but they all mean the same thing. Words like; Programmer is the same as hacker. Programmers are also called hackers in the startup world. They are people who build stuffs with any programming language. Hustler is the same as idea guy or business guy because those who hustle are people who are passionate about the business part of the startup. Pardon me for this. These words are common in the startup world.
A little story about myself
I’m Samuel Ayodele by name; I’m a 21 year old and a student. I’m passionate about the startup life and I love meeting people who have the entrepreneurial mindset, people who can bring something out of nothing and turn it into something amazing. How I got started…. I explored a series of checkups with myself on what path I wanted to take in this life - The corporate path or the entrepreneurship path? I made up my mind to follow the entrepreneurship path, a pathway where I could make a dent in the lives of many people. I’ve always wanted to create my own company, impact people’s lives and create jobs for people. I never for once cherished the corporate lifestyle. I’m ready to give it all it takes to make my dreams become a reality. My main aim is to build a brick and mortar businesses and also online businesses. (Startups) I want to make an impact in the online and offline world. Before I move into the brick and mortar business niche however, I want to make a dent in online business first.
Getting started…
In order for me to get started, I searched for books on startups, read up on successful startups and entrepreneurship blogs to get an idea on how to build a startup. For example, some of the Blogs I often read are: • Paul Graham Essays • Onstartups • Jason L Baptiste • Jun Loayza • Yukai- Chou • StartupProffessionals • Instigator • Smart Bear • Chris Dixon • Steve blank • Lessons learned
After understanding what I needed in order to get started, I began thinking about ideas that would add value to people’s life - In the startup world you just can’t start a startup for the sake of being called a startup entrepreneur,
A startup needs to be created because it will make an impact in someone’s life.
I’ve always had a bunch of ideas to start with but the problem is that I begin all of those ideas at once, I have to start first on the one with the highest priority. So I began pulling together some of these ideas and finally settled for the top three ideas. I decided to email people, (People I know who can be of help to me) of whom I shared my startup idea with them. After mailing them, the some of the replies I got where: • This has been started before how will yours be different? • The idea has been implemented, try and search for another idea. • How will this be different from your competitors? If you believe you can make it in the niche, go ahead with it. Big thanks to these folks, most especially to the ones who gave me the latter reply. I really learnt from each of their replies. The lesson learned is: It’s 90% sure that your startup idea has been started by someone else. But for you to win big and succeed you must understand the pain you’re trying to solve, Why you’re different from the rest (competitors). Startups don’t kill startups, founders do - If you truly believe in your startup idea, go make it happen. After thinking of what to do next, I decided to stick with the idea I’m truly passionate about. Now, it‘s time for execution, there’s a problem however and the problem is, I don’t know how to code, I’m just an idea guy. So I decided to look at getting a developer to help me. To get a developer who truly believes in my vision, I started reading articles on “how to get a technical cofounder”. After consuming articles on how to get a technical person for my startup, I decided to give what I’ve learned a try. I signed up to technical forums, asked friends if they knew people who can code, signed up to startup matchmaking sites like Founder2be, searched for different keywords like “Get me a technical cofounder” “startup hacker” on Google. After months of searching for a developer, no success! I became baffled, thinking if I will ever make it past this stage. One day, I was surfing through 37Signals, and I came across an article titled “There’s no room for the idea guy” I quickly clicked on the link to get the main reason why DHH (the author of the article) said so. My main take away from the post is: The truth is that most everyone has plenty of ideas that could work out to be great business. The kicker is most often the right execution that they’d be responsible for anyway, at the right time, which is almost impossible to predict. The value of The Perfect Idea is very small indeed. That doesn’t mean it’s useless to have big ideas and plenty of enthusiasm. If you’re that guy, you’ve got a great start. Now pick up a functional skill and help build it your damn self.
After digesting the article, I decided to take the urge to learn how to code and build the first version of the product myself! Before that however, I mailed a bunch of developers asking them if they would love to work with me on my startup idea, The reply I often got was, • “Nice idea, but I’m very busy with projects. Will try and see what I can do.” • “I don’t think this idea will work out. Besides you don’t have enough funds to get started.” • “Sorry Sam. I’m also working on my projects. Can’t help at this moment.” A developer or two agreed to work with me but after sending the product spec to them they decided to back off and tell me they can’t continue due to different complications. Nothing can be more heart breaking than these kind of replies, If a girl I love tells me she’s not dating me anymore and that she’s bored with the relationship, I won’t feel much sadness compared to if a hacker told me that he’s not interested anymore. Sometimes I feel like giving up but then something keeps telling me to move on. Before I finally jumped on the urge to go learn coding I felt that learning how to code was a waste of time. One of the things that gave me the confidence to learn coding is how hackers hack in hackathons or startup weekend. I feel inspired whenever I watch these videos. One of the startup movies that inspired me most is the “Social Network” - I love Mark’s zeal for hacking on epic shit! My favorite words are “Let the Hacking Begin”. My main goal was to learn two programming languages and build my projects with the programming language I cherish the most. I decided to learn PHP first. I picked up starting eBooks on PHP and I watched videos on how to code in PHP. Within a month I was done with PHP at least. After that, I decided to move on to Python. Learning python was one of the coolest things that ever happened to me. By the time I was done learning Python, I decided to build my project in Python. But before I could build a web app, I will need to learn a web framework for building web applications. So I researched on the Python web framework that will best suit my projects. After my research, I settled down for Django because it’s a Python web framework for building fast and scalable web applications in no time. After learning two programming languages and a web framework (Django) I built two projects, (to a stage where users can test it) from this point I can tell you how it feels to be a hacker. In this book, I will share with you lessons learned when hacking on my startup idea and make you understand why you should learn how to code. Hopefully, it might help you go about hacking on your startup idea yourself.
I was going to say "that's pretty much how Facebook started out, as a website to rate female college students". Then I realised I got that from The Social Network, which is a film, and probably not entirely accurate.
Certainly believable though.
Haha, I actually tried to find that scene on Youtube to reference in my post, but couldn't. All of The Social Network breakup scenes on Youtube start after it. That was like, the most important part for the movie, ffs.
It seems that we need to have a conversation about truth, art, and the space between the two. Just because it happened doesn't mean it is worth telling. Just because it happened doesn't mean that it will sell. Just because it happened doesn't mean that it is art.
Benjamin Franklin probably didn't do anything with a key and a kite and a thunderstorm. Did you know? Do you care? It makes a good story so we tell it. We build the mythology of our heroes (and villains) through the best narratives that we can construct, not necessarily the most true. Aaron Sorkin is not a truth-teller; he is a storyteller. His entire purpose is to entertain and he has a knack for doing just that.[0] Hopefully he manages to do so with this film, because there are parts of Steve Jobs' life that would do incredibly well with the Sorkin treatment. Personally, I can't wait. The author of this piece is not so excited. I have some advice for him: don't watch it, particularly since you don't seem to know the difference between biography and story.
[0]: See: The West Wing, Social Network, A Few Good Men, Moneyball.
"The Social Network" did hacking scenes quite well too. I'd recommend seeing that movie for anyone who's interested in doing a start up.
The Social Network was good about it. Someone online actually reedited the scene where he was grabbing images from frat sites and edited in scenes from other films, like Hacker's "virtual skyscrapers", and suddenly it was like a real Hollywood film again!
He also rented out theatres so that his employees could see The Social Network on opening night - a movie that puts him in a decidedly unfavorable light. Saying that he "screwed over pretty much everyone he's ever worked with" screams of someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.
Sometimes it's not about opportunism. I live in a 4 bedroom hacker house with 11 entrepreneurs/programmers. It's cramped, we have bunk beds and sleeping bags. I've personally never been happier.
Despite many of us being (second time) founders of companies, contractors, or having jobs, we hack together several times a week, work 14+ hour days (including weekends), manage CodeSF events monthly, find time to attend hackathons together, and learn + share knowledge together at our local hackerspace, Noisebridge.
Yes, there are opportunists in the world who want to make a quick buck.
There are also a lot of people who are genuinely enthused (obsessed) with computer science and who devote their lives to knowledge... Who learn how to implement JK flip flops on a breadboard, build languages entirely from lambda calculus, and study convex optimization in their free time. More importantly, they do so because they love hacking, not because they love being a hacker (though I admit hacker culture and community is something I value).
At this stage in my life, getting married and having a family would rob me of my youth more-so than any weekend hackathon -- but I'm sure this mindset will change sooner or later.
There are plenty of great hacker meetups and hackathons (Super Happy Dev House SHDH, for instance) and SF hackerspaces (Noisebridge, Hacker Dojo) which provide non-opportunistic methods for furthering your hacker-foo.
Ryan, I am not sure how many hackathons you've attended or possibly even hosted at "Treehouse Mansion", but it seems like you, especially, would understand the importance of hacker meetups and how to host one effectively. It's also possible you hire great engineers and not hackers, which is fine too.
Here is the _real_ problem: More people want to be hackers than are hackers. Many people only want the stigmas that comes along with being a 'hacker', a term whose meaning has been diluted and whose definition perpetually misrepresented and obfuscated by media.
In San Francisco, for instance, the terms entrepreneur and hacker have been squished uncomfortably close for my liking, partly as a result of media like Hacker News (who I'd argue contributes to the conflation of the term 'hacker' by catering primarily to a general technical startup audience).
I enjoy hacker news, admire Paul Graham and the rest of YC, and believe that anyone can launch a successful startup, with enough hard work and dedication. One problem is, great hackers are not always great entrepreneurs. Great entrepreneurs understand where there's demand for a hack, where many hackers simply want to work on the most exciting and technically challenging problems. Sometimes these two overlap beautifully (I think Stripe is a good example).
The bottom line is, movies like, "Social Network", and media like TechCrunch have spotlighted mergers and acquisitions, high valuations, and a party life style as hacker/entrepreneurial culture. From my experience, this has impacted hackathons in that judges favor high impact web 2.0 viable products over "righteous hacks".
Over the years I've watched this exact conversation play out, dozens of times. I personally was inspired to leave Sun by a guy I know who worked there, and seemed like a complete idiot, who joined a startup and subsequently got reasonably wealthy [1]. The other bit of experience I brought to the table was growing up in Las Vegas Nevada where money was a sort of 'quantum' thing in that sometimes you had it, sometimes you didn't.
The Facebook story is definitely not "a single guy with a computer," which the movie The Social Network should have made abundantly clear, but it does reflect Zuckerberg's singular dedication to his vision of what it should be. Not surprisingly I know other CEOs who have carried that same sort of singular vision in companies right into the ground. That Facebook is IPO'ing today is great, but its story is at least as much luck and circumstance as it is the story of the CEO and his ideas.
What is also true is that human nature involves evaluation of self, and that evaluation is done most strongly against peers. Many people experience it at their first significant High School or College reunion. It goes like this:
"Hey Bob, wow, its been 5 years since Alma Mater U, how is it going?"
"Hi Alice, well I'm really excited because my wife and I just bought a plane! Can you believe it?! You know I've always loved flying and well when I sold Foobits I had some extra cash and its been great! It's surprisingly economical to fly up and down the coast rather than driving for flying commercially ..."
Now if Alice hasn't been as 'successful' as Bob and she feels like she left Alma Mater U with the same 'chances' as Bob did, she might feel any number of negative emotions, anger, shame, jealousy, Etc. Contrast that with the second scenario:
"Hey Charlie, wow its been 5 years since Alma Mater U how is it going?"
"Hey Alice, well its going alright. I managed save up enough to get a house but with the big crash that's underwater. The downturn hit my industry pretty hard and so I've been consulting and what not but now I'm looking into a way to strategically exit my house without having to have a foreclosure or a bankruptcy on my record, but I know its pretty hard everywhere, how about you?"
Now if Alice in this scenario isn't looking at a personal bankruptcy before the age of 25, and is gainfully employed, she might naturally feel like her talents combined with the equivalent experience at Alma Mater U has given her an edge over folks like Charlie. She feels good about her choices.
But what is really happening is that the first 10 years 'out of the gate', starting with the last year of college will show huge variations in 'success' across your peers. Some will prosper quickly, some will spiral into poverty, some will vanish into the fabric of 9 to 5 life and others will quietly end their lives, the whole range of outcomes both good and bad.
And all during that time/process people will be trying to sort out how much of the success or lack of success of their peers reflects on their own success or lack of success. As folks work through that process they sometimes become enlightened, sometimes bitter, often cynical, and ideally wiser.
[1] "Reasonably wealthy" in this context means one could live off the proceeds with a middle income lifestyle without further employment.
Lots of interesting points made here. If I could add only a few data points, I would say the following.
I have taught a very successful class on Investor pitching in SF for 6 months. I have had between 10 and 50 students per class, always sold out, even when I raised prices... (http://fundraisingviparisoma.eventbrite.com/)until end of March. Then, in April, I had to cancel two classes because I had too few students, and I only have 10 next week in a venue when I never had less than 20. It just tells me that we are at the end of a cycle, when everybody who drunk the "Social Network Movie kool aid" thought they could create a Groupon for India, a language learning start up or an Opentable for Hair Salons. It's a good thing for everybody actually.
Now as for Facebook's valuations, the question is - will Facebook bring as much traffic to applications in the future than Google did to commerce websites. My belief is yes (look at Viddy, SocialCam, Zynga, Pinterest, Draw Something if you need examples). In that case, Facebook, like Google in 2004-2008, will grow into a 100B-$200 valuation (which does not mean that I think it is the best stock purchase to do, the big money on Facebook has been made already by earlier investors). Same for Pinterest. If Pinterest users convert like crazy, then they will be able to demand emerchants to "pay to play" and... they will.
Many aspiring entrepreneurs seem to think there is such thing as a 'get rich quick' startup - when the reality is far from this (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3908088)
Additionally, films like the Social Network seem to propagate this myth/stereotype.
So great job Joel for hopefully helping to dispel some of these myths.
I find nothing wrong with the "Me, Too" Startup Syndrome. I know plenty of friends who went to medical school because their parents were doctors, or it's the "Asian thing" to do, and they turned out to be decent doctors. Same for lawyers, accountants and gardners; a lot of "me too" happening outside of the startup world. Unlike 30 years ago, many more people want to go into technology because it's hip to be in a startup - hell, thanks to popular cinema (The Social Network) and mainstream technology (iOS/Android) geekie hobbies are now cool. People got mocked for playing with their Timex Sinclair in the early '80s, whereas today I have to sign up early in order to reserve my son a spot in the mobile game development bootcamp. Times are a changing, and the OP sounds like the indie college guy who's resentful that his secret band is now being followed by everybody.
Other "me too" activities: marriage, children, golf, smoking, religion, tantric sex... sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. All a part of life.
I guess one good thing that came out of the Social Network is that they will never live down their parts in the movie. Especially being portrayed as "bad guys." Just the start of the interview the first 30 seconds must have been very awkward for them.
Meh... it isn't about how "startups shouldn't just be for the young," because they're not. No actual intelligent, reasonable person with any life experience at all actually believes bullshit like:
Startups are for the young and hungry. You’re thirty? You’re too old. If you haven’t made your first million by 25, you’ve missed your chance. If you’re not working 130 hours a week, you’ll never create the next Google.
Seriously, it's a fun stereotype and it leads to cool movies like The Social Network but - back here in the real world - there are plenty of startups founded by 30+ folks. And, in the real world, it's results that matter in the end, so if you can compete, you can compete. It doesn't matter if you're 19, 29, 39, 49, or whatever.
Then again, I'm a 38 year old startup founder, so what do I know?
One of her points, stated towards the end, says,
How on earth can Randi Zuckerberg — who knows how one frame of film will be taken as gospel over a thousand books, blog posts, or real interviews — sleep at night?
People are stupid. They are going to assume the Bravo portrayal is an accurate depiction of Silicon Valley, much like how they assumed The Social Network was an accurate depiction of the beginnings of Facebook. She doesn't believe it should be excused because "It's a Bravo reality show."
Kutcher was probably chosen in large part because he looks a good bit like the young Jobs: http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2012/04/ashton-kutcher-steve-jobs-500x281.jpg. For better or for worse, physical resemblance seems to be a large determinant in who is cast to play characters based on real people, not whether their previous acting would fit the target persona. Look at Social Network or any historical film for more evidence. They try to match up visages because that is what's obvious to filmgoers.
(Months ago, a techie friend mused to me that young Steve Jobs did look like Kutcher, so the casting isn't a total shock.)
Thanks for the heads up. I'm eager to hear the Georgetown talk now.
In most contexts, I don't have any trouble with vanity. If you need to stretch the truth to make a better stage show or memoir, that's great. I loved "The Social Network" even though I knew that a lot of the story was stretched to fit a traditional film narrative. I'm OK with that.
The only thing that really went wrong was when he let his story be presented in the wrong context, and how he deliberately misled the TAL folks during fact checking.
That's rubbish, and if you think that is true then you have been watching The Social Network movie a few too many times and brainwashed by Hollywood.
And the way the USA is acting right now trying to pass draconian laws and police the internet for everyone, every sane company will/should be moving their operations to a progressive thinking nation.
I also don't understand why you are so upset. Just because someone else got the visa is no guarantee you would. You know that saying, "don't count your chickens before they've hatched"...
Well put and I agree. What I'm referring to are the people who want to get covered in TechCrunch and have valuations in the millions. I very much respect the people who do something they love and make a comfortable living from. I very much feel sorry for the ones who are looking to have a movie made about them a la The Social Network.
There's nothing as iconic as E=mc^2, but what a fun question! Here are some ideas.
- How about the minimal ANSI C program "int main(int argc, char argv) {return 0;}"?
- You could look up the code designed by Ada Augusta, Countless Lovelace. It's much like a spreadsheet.
- A few code snippets are of historical interest in that they have unfortunately caused satellites to fall out of orbit.
- Some code snippets have been used as email signatures for political reasons, such as short implementations of RSA or DeCSS.
- David A. Wheeler's website has a nice rundown of modern history's important software innovations, but only a couple of those, like RSA, can be implemented in a few (appropriately) cryptic lines.
- There are a number of mathematical algorithms of interest, such as the Euclidean algorithm for greatest common divisor (GCD) and the Newton or Newton-Raphson method.
- Some modern fundamental algorithms such as binary search and quicksort are compact.
- You might like some variant of "the computus", the formula for calculating the date of Easter. It bores me, but I enjoy the similar Zeller's congruence.
- The movie "The Social Network" features something like the tf-idf formula and the movie "A Beautiful Mind" features Nash equilibrium.
- The Ackermann function is fun, being a brief and notably slow formula for practically all arithmetic. Going the other way around you get Peano axioms and perhaps computations with Church numerals.
- A grammar for the lambda calculus can be three simple lines.
- Our gracious host in "The Roots of Lisp" states Lisp "eval" somewhat briefly, based on McCarthy's original, which Alan Kay called "Maxwell's equations of software".
- The truth table for NAND is a nice little graphic and the NAND function happens to be sufficient to implement all Boolean functions.
Now we could start to get into other diagrams from computer science and software engineering, but that's a vast area and you didn't actually ask for it.
"But... the movie The Social Network told me and showed me that..." -The thoughts of too many HN folks
This reminds me a bit of when I watch a Movie or a TV Show and there is some geek or hacker character who is supposed to be doing something related to computers in order to resolve a plot point.
They will often say something like "oh I just.." then spiel of a load of technical phrases some of which I recognize and others which are clearly made up, this is supposed to sound highly complicated and clever but not understandable to the average viewer. Of course if you know anything at all about technology you realize it sounds completely ridiculous.
I always wonder why they do this, since it is something viewers are not supposed to be able to understand anyway. Why not at least make it accurate enough to at least give the geeks watching a chuckle (references to nmap in the matrix for example and apache/perl in "the social network" being examples of this) rather than just roll their eyes.
Sony is reportedly looking into producing a film based on the book. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the script for Academy Award-winning "The Social Network," is said to have been approached regarding the project.
I was waiting for a "Social Network"-esque movie announcement. This is the first hint. When I said that people would be reacting to Steve's death for weeks and weeks when the news broke my classmates didn't believe me.
This movie would be extremely hard to execute accurately, at least much more so than a movie about Facebook, which is barely historical. Granted it can't be worse than "Pirates of Silicon Valley." I wish people would just settle down with the tributes.
You are right. However, not knowing successful entrepreneurs (while being able to name 20 different rappers) is not unique to black high schoolers, so it's up to the mentor to create motivation and make these stories known, e.g. take them to the Social Network movie and explain that that guy in the hoodie is now worth billions, much more than Jay Z.
I don't know about the misguided part, but it's definitely not easier said than done, a lot of people are doing it (although juggling work and a kid is demanding). The response I'm getting from the kids is just awesome.
So, for ordinary engineers like me, the solution is simple: mentor those who you think are underrepresented.
BTW: it's a pity that in FIRST girls around encouraged much, most teams are more than 95% boys.
My take is this: LiveDrive Beta was featured in HN.
LiveDrive got lots of users used to having working and functional virtual drives, including me.
LiveDrive closed the beta and got users searching for a replacement. I found Dropbox in a post about LiveDrive alternatives.
LiveDrive could have been Dropbox, but they 'monetized' too fast and killed the product.
And still some people side with Saverin in the Social Network movie...
I doubt permission would have to be given - and at least in the case of the book permission was given.
I'd also love to see a good Jobs movie, and looking at Moneyball and The Social Network, it proves it can be done right if they continue the trend.
It would be a daunting task on Sorkin's part, that's for sure.
Not TV, The Social Network (seriously, how many of you had friends asking you about their "billion dollar" startup idea after seeing the movie?)
As far as what my coding zone looks like, ours are very similar.
I have found working at night is the best for me.
When I'm coding I find that interruptions don't bother me, because I usually become hyper focused and I block out everything around me.
Strangely enough, I like to watch movies while coding. Preferably ones that motivate me like Limitless, or V for Vendetta, or the Social Network.
Turns out, if I have music or tv playing in the background that works just as well.
I try to eat health and, I don't drink pop or coffee (they make me crash hard once I break out of the zone.)
Finally, once I start coding I must finish what I sat down to start. That way each time I code, when I'm done I feel like I have accomplished something. Which in turn makes me want to do it again.
His interview last year was anything but stodgy as well, with the movie "The Social Network" out and so much growth happening at Facebook. It will be interesting to see what he talks about this year - perhaps privacy issue in Europe?
The other repeats I see (Ron Conway and, of course, the person I'm replying to) will have no problem coming up with things to talk about, given their position in the startup ecosystem. In fact, I felt that the combination of subject matter and the speaker's experience with it outweighed some rough edges in delivery for all the speakers last year.
The entire second disc of The Social Network is filled to the brim with making-of stuff of similar caliber. I know I'm never going to be a filmmaker, but I really get sucked into that sort of thing.
The super mega edition of Blade Runner (with the three or four different cuts) also has a very, very expansive set of documentaries, which cover not only the making of the film (hiring writers, chasing down financing, creating the effects, etc.) but the arduous task of making the re-release. The range of people involved that they talk to goes from the riggers and everyday film crew to the financiers who seemingly didn't much care what it was about so long as it made money.
You joke, but I watched "How Did They Ever Make a Movie of Facebook?" (a making-of doc about The Social Network) and it blew my mind a little bit seeing the process of test-shooting the wardrobes and makeup.
Ah, here's a clip online: http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi1594268185/ ...skip to 6:45
There's a quick cut in there where there's a table with what looks like a hundred pairs of watches.
I'm undecided about "visualizing the movie they make about you." I think every startuper who has seen "The Social Network" or "Pirates of the Silicon Valley" has done this.
However, I'm leaning on considering it an anti pattern because it borders on a pathological amount of ego.
A better rubric in my mind is, "Can I picture this person in my daily life, for the next decade?" as a slightly more sane variant of this test.
just watched social network movie the first time fully; apparently some people are motivated by a failed attempt to date a dream girl. I totally agree, the passion of what you want to work on, that is what I feel too.
> On the subjects of cable specials, I REALLY hope TNT will make a sequel to "Pirates of Silicon Valley" soon
It's not a sequel or a cable special, but I believe you're looking for a film called the "Social Network"
How do professional movie productions do this? For example the Winklevoss brothers in The Social Network both had the face of one of the actors.
Trent Reznor's "The Social Network" from the movie.
A movie length documentary is actually something I am working on putting together. Delving into all that goes into being an entrepreneur. You can check out e-Dreams (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-ELRug6fOM) or Startup.com (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ27rbJH6hI)for examples of older documentaries that are models for what I'd like to produce.
Truly believe that having a full length documentary that outlines what can truly happen in a startup can help inspire people to get involved (as The Social Network seemed to do).
Have 2 video guys (one produces for MTV True Life) involved in helping out. If anyone has ideas let me know! frank at songsicle dot com
Part of the problem with movies like the Social Network is that they leave out key details that enabled a company like Facebook to grow so quickly.
Firstly, Zuckerberg continued coursework and took all of his finals at Harvard the same time he was starting Facebook. If you don't have the business and technology acumen to take on a rigorous Harvard course load and run a regional business (I believe Facebook was well into the Ivy league at the time) at 19 years old, then think about taking a different route to success.
Secondly, I don't know many 19 year olds who can pick up and move to a house in Silicon Valley for the summer without having to hold down a job to pay rent and for food and gas. Heck, I don't know any 30 year olds that can do that. Having achieved 3 months of financial independence at 19 is a good indicator you can do some big things. If I recall, that summer in NorCal cost Zuck upwards of 80k.
Finally, for the geek perspective and those who don't think a LAMP website is anything to be impressed by, Facebook had to maneuver a ton of business landmines in those early days. Zuck may not have had all the answers to social patents and investment valuations and expansion strategy, but he found some people who did - Sean Parker and Don Graham. That ability to find people who provide strengths to your weaknesses is pivotal to the success of an entrepreneur.
To be able to do all of this at 19, well, there's a reason there's only one Mark Zuckerberg.
A few points.
- The ongoing coverage of Facebook's birth by the press represents an ongoing epic failure of journalism. This article in particular is more pathetic than most. When I read phrases like "Because wading through piles of legalese isn’t something that I (or you) can spend most of my time doing, for better or for worse, I don’t understand the ins and outs of the case," it's simply insulting. Alexia Tsotsis, and just as often her colleagues at TechCrunch, should be embarrassed to admit such things. Any real newspaper would fire her on the spot.
- Facebook did withhold evidence both in the Winklevosses' litigation and my own. It's easy to tell because even after years of said litigation, Business Insider and other sources kept coming out with new IM conversation after new IM conversation. I've still never seen the documents I requested from Facebook in 2008 and 2009 because Facebook claimed they didn't exist. They do.
- I've never met the Winklevosses or Divya. I wasn't there when Mark agreed to work for them, and Mark didn't tell me about them when I met Mark. In other words, what happened from my perspective was independent of anything they've said or done, and I don't know enough to comment on their personalities. I do, however, know enough to comment on their ethics. They lied on national television when they claimed that they had no prior knowledge of The Social Network on Today (one of the morning shows). Random House's general counsel confirmed that Ben Mezrich interviewed them for The Accidental Billionaires.
- I did meet Larry Summers during his monthly office hours while he was president of Harvard. His behavior then was reprehensible, and he hasn't changed a bit.
- Just about everyone primarily involved in this whole story is fairly unpleasant. Relentlessly trying to set the record straight hasn't made me appear much better, but I've done my best to stay away from it all (hence turning down Mezrich's offer to be a "compelling character.") What's truly sad about it is that for seven years now, not a single reporter has done an in-depth investigation in an attempt to get the story right. We all enjoyed the movie, but that's not what happened. And when you start drawing conclusions under headlines like "The Winklevosses vs. Silicon Valley," you're bound to be wrong if you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
I thought most of the article was painful to read as it resurfaced the same set of stereotypes as in the Social Network movie or the Mezrich book.
I felt the did article make a valid point at the end - about the lack of elite university-based social networks in Canada. While having gone to Harvard (or another elite American school) makes you stand out in Canada, I didn't feel it gave people the same rolodex advantages as being in NYC. I have a sibling who went to a top ranked American school ... I had to stop wearing the t-shirt she gave me in NYC because people would stop me and start having conversations (assuming I went to school there)!
Caveat: I went to school in Canada so this is all from an outsider's perspective.
My knowledge of the situation is entirely based on watching "The Social Network", but that sounds more like Eduardo Saverin's lawsuit, whereas the Winklevosses' was about Zuckerberg stealing their idea. Did I misinterpret/misremember the movie or was the movie wrong about the lawsuits or what?
"You don't even know what the thing is yet."
Sorry for the Social Network quote, I didn't like the movie, but I kept thinking about this line.
Look at the success of 4chan or IRC channels or Usenet groups or twitter (140 messages) or Facebook or the blogs or reddit or whatever. They are all different, groups form differently in each of them and they have attracted different types of people sometimes. Sometimes new technology goes in a new direction, sometimes and old one is rediscovered.
You cannot really know sometimes who will adopt your site, especially if doesn't come with built in communities or a particular focus.
If things are as you say, then we may have jumped to conclusions and judged Facebook unfairly on this particular matter. However, I'd say jumping to conclusions is to be expected, given Facebook's track record. I long ago stopped giving FB the benefit of the doubt, considering the many questionable and thoughtless actions in its past. FB has a long way to go in recovering the goodwill it has lost (from me and surely from others).
(BY the way, I have not watched "The Social Network" or formed any opinions on FB based on that movie. My opinions are strictly based on news articles and my personal experience with the service.)
Peter Riche tells us in an exclusive interview that compared to some of the previous movies that have profiled tech startups (i.e. The Social Network), he wanted to find a story where success in the entrepreneurial tech world has helped bring founder friendships closer (as opposed to spurring lawsuits).
After watching Social Network, I was kind of worried about starting a business with friends (or relatives) as co-founders. Is Facebook an outlier in this regard or is it the norm?
The parent company of myspace was a spam/spyware company, so Myspace's past in general is somewhat titillating. They seem like the Bad News Bears of startups really. Well, if the Bad News Bears did a bunch of obnoxious things of dubious legality. It seems like someone could easily make a movie about Myspace without stretching the truth as they did with the Social Network. I suppose Tom Anderson would be an even less likable protagonist than Zuckerberg, but that could make for a more interesting film.
As a college student, I think the best way to get people my age motivated to become geeks and get into computer programming is to show them how cool it can be as well as how it can result in being successful. Students need to see how cool it is to be involved in the tech startup community. The Social Network movie did a great job of showcasing this, but I think it needs to be taken further. Essentially we need to work on turning tech companies and their founders into celebrities in the same way that sports teams and their players are.
Also I think we need to change how people are exposed to programming. For many people, the phrase "I'll explain how this works later" is highly discouraging. As such when the first language they are exposed to is a C variant, they tend to be immediately turned off. Languages like Python should be the base of programming education as they provide the ease of use that can excite new users, while still providing the foundations necessary to learn more complex languages. Also, when learning a language students should really be shown what they can do with the tools they are learning. For example I was in an introductory class and the teacher taught what a class was, but not how we could use it for anything.
A common effective solution to situations like this is for the affected to proactively tell their own story — this seems to be one of the 'only' ways to counter long-standing social image problems.
Recently this website was posted to HN, http://weusemath.org/
They're trying to change the common ideas held in regards to math and what you hear from high schools, "I'll never use math in real life!"
Now seems like the primetime to begin a similar movement for geeks/hackers and I assume this has even been tried before. There is Zuckerberg the successful geek with even the movie (The Social Network) pushing this image. Some of my friends who I know I do some programming have approached me saying they have a cool idea for an app and asked if it'd be hard to make. I think an effective answer would be to explain how the development process goes, show them writing some basic app, and inviting them to learn.
Think twitter would have gone as viral if it was called "smsdispatch.com" or "sms.com".
It wouldn't have.
Names fit a particular purpose. What is good for one purpose (selling to the corporate market for example) then "sms.com" might be worth the money. Another situation, maybe not.
Naming and branding is important because based on psychological principles and things that have been around forever it is important. (Sorry that I don't have time to point to the underpinnings of the research and basis for this statement.)
Ev's argument is also like saying the name of a movie is less important. You can always find isolated cases where the name wasn't that important like "the social network" and counter it with movie names like "goodfellas" "godfather" "rocky" the list is endless.
As John Gotti Jr. said to the interviewer on 60 minutes "la cosa nostra" like the way that rolls off your tongue? The fact is people do like cool names.
I think it is a good article, nowdays EVERYBODY is triying to go rich just like that, mostly because of"The social network" movie, we need to understand that this succes cases are rare BUT we need to learn from them, this guys made something different that the rest and place them on the top. Follow me on twitter: @storm_kid
This is a minor point, but I didn't feel that the Social Network's depiction of hackers was glossy or inaccurate. I was actually very impressed by that aspect of the movie.
"They always want to work on only one thing at a time and get confused/ much slower if they have to work on multiple things, whereas younger developers will happily be able to switch in between tasks while waiting for the previous task to finish compiling/running without problems."
The younger developers get confused/much slower when they work on multiple things, too, they just don't realize it. I'm pretty sure there is experimental data showing that everyone performs worse when they switch tasks often.
I actually just watched The Social Network for the first time a couple of nights ago, and one of the things I appreciated most about the movie is how they would yell at people who tried to interrupt someone who was coding with a question ("Don't interrupt Chris, he's in the zone!"). I suspect that attitude had a lot to do with the productivity needed to get Facebook off the ground, and they were certainly all young people.
(Or maybe the writers of The Social Network just made it all up.)
It's 10 years since Metallica sued Napster. We just had a major motion picture (The Social Network), set in the past, where this event is in the past in the film.
If piracy could kill the music industry, it would have killed it by now. The music industry is not dead. Ergo piracy will not kill it.
I saw Zed live too at SuperConf in Florida, I had dinner with him, he's really what he represents, just a very good programmer, professional and guy, by far the best I know in our field.
He gave me some advices about my career and programming in general (and specific: Testing in Python), we even joke about silly stuff (e.g.: The Social Network movie).
"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth."
- Steve Jobs
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html
The depressing reality in this case is that someone figured out that what sells newspapers to a mainstream audience isn't stories about cool new technology, but stories about conflict. It's why newspapers separate the technology section out from the main news section.
Conflict is what made "The Social Network" such a great movie. The story isn't about social networking, it's about manipulation, ruthless ambition and betrayal. Themes that are as old as humanity itself.
As an aside, I doubt pg will get into a pissing contest with some journalist, as that wouldn't help himself, his reputation or YC. There is nothing to be gained by going to "war".
EDIT: Grammar
I blame "The Social Network" movie. That was the first movie that made software development look like a fun way to party, make tons of money and get hot chicks. The Palo Alto dev house pot smoking scenes and the fictional Sean Parker antics were quite amusing in that regard. That, and there's easy money in software these days.
One of my favorites is this one from The Social Network:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC5wVJrhzl0
Another is the scene in The Fighter where Micky Ward is talking to his girlfriend and there's the "I'm tired of being a fucking disappointment, I told everybody I was gonna win that fight and get back on track, blah, blah" bit.
And plenty of scenes from the Rocky movies, Vision Quest, Rad, The Karate Kid, and a few others...
not one mention of The Social Network movie or if a chunk of this influx is looking for a career at making iPhone apps?
When expensively educated, fashionable young graduates start showing up in your field, you're in a bubble. - Kevin Marks
I fully attribute the increase to The Social Network movie coinciding with the ballooning of Facebook's market cap. Flipping tech startups is the hot new get rich quick scheme. Just like flipping houses and subprime mortgages before it.
In that vein, I was way too excited to see Mark Zuckerberg hacking in Emacs in The Social Network. It's so rare that movies get this stuff right that when they do I can't help but smile.
I guarantee with that hiring process, that you will not want to work with me. Given your interview process, the feeling is likely to be mutual.
(I don't watch TV or most movies, haven't seen The Social Network, and have no interest in doing so. If that is what you value, then I'm going to be a poor fit from both sides.)
I get the feeling that Werner enjoys taking this rebellious attitude towards a technology that so many of his art-film peers have been lauding since the release of the One. Soderberg has been shooting Red for years now. The Social Network was shot on a Red One.
The Epic is taking the technology mainstream. Peter Jackson bought 30 Epics to shoot The Hobbit with.
I rewatched The Social Network. I just realized that Timberlake's final rant as Sean Parker in that film was essentially the premise of Color.com- to wit:
"The next transformative development, a picture-sharing application. A place where you view pictures that coincide with your social life. It is the true digitalization of real life. You don't just go to a party anymore. You go to a party with a digital camera, and then your friends relive the party online. And tagging."
The documentary he may be referring to is Startup.com
I've intentionally not watched 'Social Network' due to the blatant inaccuracies.
Social Network, Wall street and there is some movie about two guys who are making some software and story about their way to top and falling down. But I can't remember title.
Don't worry about the hours, it's the 5% you should be thinking about, specifically dilution. Watch the movie "The Social Network" and what (allegedly) happens to Eduardo. He had 30% and then ultimately had 0.03% ... unfortunately you have to watch the whole movie to see how that works.
Here's Fred Wilson: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/10/employee-equity-dilution.html
As a matter of fact, I thought of that movie as I was writing the comment. I could have added "however The Social Network might be the exception that proves the rule."
Whatever. This guy really doesn't understand "The Valley" at all if he feels this way. He should just leave and go do something else.
I moved out to San Jose in 1994 and things were just starting to heat up with the Internet and it was super exciting. I lived through the crash and started a company in 2002. I eventually left the US for family reasons after having spent 11 years there.
Guess what? Things change constantly. That's the nature of the place. If you are worried that your friends are leaving etc. it's just that they are leaving, not that the place is dying.
> Of course, I’ve only been around for one cycle, and it’s quite possible it was ever thus.
He should have written that line, realized it was true and then deleted the entire article. Since he's obsessed with Zuckerberg he should think a little about the past: people were emulating Andreesen (now he looks like a pretty 'old' guy) and Filo and Yang were heroes. It just goes on and on like that.
> What I’m trying to say, I suppose, is this: I’m bored.
Fair enough. Naff off back to the UK or wherever. For my part, I'm happiest talking to the young engineers and entrepreneurs thinking of the next big thing while emulating Zuck or whoever. Who cares that they are emulating Zuck? If they have passion, they'll try to make something insanely cool. Many will fail, some others will become the people to emulate.
Sure, The Social Network was a good movie and all, but a good movie about Silicon Valley doesn't mean that now it's going to come to an end. How about Startup.com? That was excellent, or if you want to go further back read Soul of a New Machine (yeah, I know it was Route 128).
Frankly, you're a wannabe if you spend your time thinking Sarah Lacy, SXSW or The Social Network are in any way relevant.
All that matters are coders, and I'm guessing this guy isn't a coder. Just another moth flying around the flame.
The Social Network is a film about startups, they won't re-tell the story for every successful startup.
For example, Titanic had numerous films made about it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Titanic_on_film_and_TV), but not every ship that sinks gets a movie, these didn't: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005329.html
> Another Facebook co-founder, Saverin was given a sympathetic portrayal in the 2010 movie The Social Network.
What exactly was so sympathetic about being portrayed as a guy who could not separate emotion from business, was terrible with girls, nearly destroyed his own business by closing the account, let himself be tricked into giving away his stock. He got off more poorly than Sean Parker.
The Social Network made me like Sean Parker more. Sure, he was a bit of a douche (in the movie), but he was a douche who did something substantial and made something incredibly useful that probably wouldn't have made it so far otherwise. It kind of surprises me that people have responded to it so negatively.
I just wonder what he really is doing now. After creating 2 wildly successful startups, is he really taking it easy and being satisfied as a part-time angel? He seems too ambitious for that.
I also noticed the similarities between the article and his character's introduction in The Social Network. In fact, the similarity is a bit suspect. Either Sean is actually a socialite robot who operates the exact same way every time he enters a restaurant or the author saw the movie first and has some unconscious drive to make the real Parker fit that mold. Either way, he doesn't seem like an asshole, he seems calculated. He's branded himself; he makes you hate him then like him...he keeps people interested and as a result hes extraordinarily successful.
Or: just go for the skinny pale look. Really works thanks to those twilight and social network movies.
thanks, may i explain why i am asking.
maybe this will out of scope too, but i was interested in stories when a business-oriented person with knowledge of interpreted languages but without knowing the DB part succeeds in creating an online service, like here
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230268 (the parent is the story itself)
so i want to think that the database tools (or particular database engines, chosen right) might help more people to succeed, while knowing the basics of things like OO, normalizations and such.
OR should we leave business to businessmen and developing to geeks?
(and is The Social Network movie showing a complete computer nerd get the common human psychology so right a total tale? :) )
Didn't read the article, just the title, but I'd like to chime in to say I'm pretty sure I saw around a dozen good movies in the last year. Subset includes Inception, Social Network, King's Speech, True Grit, Star Trek (too far back? not sure), and The Fighter.
Hmm, I find it hard to feel so pessimistic. I don't go to the cinema very often, but all the films I saw this year were outstanding (Kickass, Inception, Social Network, Kings Speech, True Grit were the latest). Also, sequels aren't necessarily going to be any worse than non-sequels. Often great art arises from restricted subject matter. For instance all the paintings of religious figures, or all the Shakespeare plays that were reworkings of popular stories/dramas.
You hear this every year. And it's still true. Hollywood is wall-to-wall sequels, IP translations (games, comics, tv shows, etc. to movies), remakes, and the remake's newer cousin the "reboot".
Yet even so good films are still being made. The Social Network, True Grit (a remake even!), Toy Story 3 (a sequel!), The Fighter, Black Swan, How to Train Your Dragon, and Inception were all great films from 2010 (I haven't seen The King's Speech or 127 Hours yet but I hear those were good too). If this is what the system pumps out while it's horribly broken, I'm ok with more of the same.
There's always going to be a ready supply of churned out pap in any medium. Just go to a bookstore and look at all the crap that they keep pumping out. But that doesn't necessarily stop truly excellent works being published as well. Some of my most loved books have been published in the last several years. And with the internet it's easier than ever to sift through the dross to find the gems.
> The Social Network - Sort of knew the story and acting was pretty ordinary.
> Inception - Cool story and nice effects, very captivating movie, made me think a little bit, but the ideas of the movie are too far fetched.
> True Grit - I didn't see the original, couldn't work out whether it was fiction until near the middle, and then it just went downhill, for me the girl did the best acting.
Worth watching? Definitely, become classics? Probably not, they're all missing the extra magic sauce.
Don't you feel this might be kind of a cognitive bias? Like when people poll for the best album of all time and it's always something that was released within the last 3 years of whenever the poll was.
The social network is of it's time and will date really badly, to the point where no one will watch or mention it ever again.
True Grit is a remake so specifically cannot be included as it had to be good enough to have been remade.
Inception isn't ever going to be a classic a la The Matrix.
The Kings Speech will definitely have longevity; Black Swan I'm not convinced will float above just being another film you can pick up for £3 in HMV in a couple of months but then think "well, will I ever watch it?"
Huge Moki.TV fan (http://moki.tv/2481). But also a huge movie fan. I entirely disagree.
Think about this years movies:
The Social Network
The Kings Speech
Inception
Black Swan
True Grit
Will all almost certainly become classics.
>I watched Social Network for the second time today, and it got me thinking. Entrepreneurs are no different than struggling actors.
Didn't we already collectively agree that the events depicted in the Social Network were more Hollywood than Silicon Valley?
Not that I totally disagree with the comparison, I've made it myself as recently as yesterday, but it's not exactly a bad thing. There was a time when Hollywood was making a lot of good films. But those films brought in money, and money brought in vanity and all that other nastiness. There's certainly plenty of money bouncing around SV, but the fame is a bit more self-contained. If you move to the valley and send a letter home to your mom about how you bumped into Fred Wilson in a coffee shop, she would probably not run off to tell all her friends about it.
If the worst thing you can say about the valley is that everybody there wants to build something great and is willing to risk a lot to make an effort at it, that sounds like a fantastic environment.
I honestly don't know if I can depend on him or not, if it's any indicator of dependability, he had around a 2.8 GPA in College and he wasn't really doing any side-projects. His main ordeal would probably be his job, as he has a full-time job as a System Admin. If I judge his dependability based on that then it's shit. I think I'll ask him why he wants to do this and if he's honest about that his response will tell me whether he's dependable.
Him watching the Social Network and being motivated from that is slightly worrisome to me as well, but it was a movie that even with it being mostly fictitious, it still showed the possibility of success in Silicon Valley.
thats common with most movies they have add a certain ficiton to it for entertainment puposes like i.e the social network im sure the real truth about mark zucherberg wasn't conveyed properly!!
Is that still true? Arrington and YC have been very vocal about supporting female founders, but not enough female founders get to them.
The #1 obstacle for female founders is a lack of good role models, rather than discrimination. The Social Network is a very sad movie in terms of how misogynistic it was...
You are admittedly a programmer. That is why you didn't like it. You are not the target audience.
Eh, that's over-generalizing a bit, methinks. I'm also a programmer and I loved the movie. I thought it was easily the best movie of 2010, and I've watched it multiple times already, despite "not being the target audience."
FWIW, I can see what Steve is saying, but none of his complaints kept me from enjoying the movie. Maybe it's just a question of expectations... it was Hollywood entertainment, I didn't expect any deeper analysis of IP issues than "a guy who made a nice chair doesn't owe money to everybody who ever made a chair." In fact, that was probably more than I expected from Hollywood!
At the end though, what made the movie so compelling for me was the "inspiration factor." Yes, I knew you could big money building software... like Steve, I've been around this industry long enough to have watched more than a few companies get founded, grow big and make the founders rich.
But watching it unfold on the screen, seeing things on a more personal level, made it feel more real to me. I finished watching it the first time and - literally - rush home to sit down and start hacking as soon as I could. As an aspiring tech-entrepreneur, I found The Social Network to be a great experience, and I recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it yet.
All I want is for any TV or movie on iTunes that is purchasable to also be rentable. I don't have any desire to buy, say, The Social Network for $20, but I'll rent it for $5. This goes double for TV shows. I love Fringe, but if I miss an episode I don't want to spend $3 to buy it, watch it once and never see it again. Let me rent it for $1 and I'll be happy.
I was considering the case when you go to NetFlix, and they recomment the movie "Social Network" to you, and you click on it. Surely the url will have sufficient info to claim that its a recommendation.
Now bing implements a movie recommendation service, which also magically recommends for you "Social Network", based on clicktracking of Netflix.
IMHO, what Bing is doing with Google is exactly the same scenario as above (extract click data from a competitor's service, and surface the exact same data in their own product).
I'm not sure I get your example (not clear when Bing would recommend a movie to me). So let me give that I do understand.
I go to Netflix and search for the move "Network". I end up clicking on "The Social Network". Later on Bing, if I search for "movie Network" -- I'd hope that one of the movies that comes back is "The Social Network", based on that clickthrough data from Netflix..
In my mind the only thing that is borderline unethical is that we've artificially limited this clickstream data to one company. I'd like to give it out more broadly. It's my data right?
I couldn't disagree more with you. Sure, Eisenberg being hired by Facebook would be completely ridiculous, and was clearly written as a joke, not as a serious suggestion.
But as to Sorkin's writing, he's always written that way, right back to fairly unsuccessful TV writing in the 90s. Personally I love it, and have loved everything he's done, he is in my view the best TV/film writer currently working - and I know I'm not alone in that view.
Obviously, his quality is subjective and therefore debatable, but having watched The Social Network a few times, I haven't seen anything that strikes me as anything but classic Sorkin.
The reason he's "wedged in as one of the stars of the movie" is partly because the writing was so good that he's winning awards for it, and partly because many critics share my view of him, so they rave about him. To give some context, before Studio 60 On The Sunset strip aired (in 2005, I think), critics hyped it up SO much, simply because it was created by Sorkin. (And I think that was one of the reasons it was cancelled after one season - it wasn't too bad, but compared to expectations, and his normal work, it just wasn't good enough.)
So, nothing new to how he writes, or to the fact that people pay a fair bit more attention to him than to the average screenplay writer.
As much as I hate the idea of The Social Network, that was actually really f'ing funny. Good one Zuck!
If you haven't seen it, check out Jesse Eisenberg in Holy Rollers - IMHO his best movie.
I really applaud Zuckerberg for positively embracing all the attention that's been shouldered on him, really. I think stuff like this SNL skit or him taking his core team at Facebook to watch "The Social Network" together at a movie theatre just shows tremendous inner strength and maturity on his part. It's great to see him be able to laugh it off and joke about it.
He's come a long way in his public speaking skills too, he was pretty natural and comedic during his talk at Startup School. I think he's only going to get better from this point on too.
but doesn't some spam post get more credit than intellectual discussions? Because lately I realized that something Sean Parker said about the Social Network movie got way more credit than it deserved as opposed to some interesting innovative hacking news some newcomer provides
if you were the main source behind the movie "the social network" you can make a door handle and you will still get press.
Given that what Numair wrote in response didn't address the issue of inaccuracies in the movie at all, I disagree--the problem seems to be something else entirely.
I've written about the movie here:
http://www.quora.com/The-Social-Network-2010-Movie/What-parts-of-the-The-Social-Network-movie-are-accurate-and-which-are-not
The movie "Social Network" is a Fiction inspired by real life event. The story itself was re-created from pieces of one sided stories and some publicly available records.
The movie would be really boring if it were following the real life story. Aaron Sorkin is making it into a movie, not a re-enactment.
During the productions, many of the crews were laughing when they heard Justin Timberlake was cast as Sean Parker. Especially for those who know of Sean Parker based on their research and personal knowledge. David Fincher is really particular about making this movie, because it is his passion.
Consider "The Social Network" as a movie inspired but not based on true event.
It is great that he has come to his conclusion on whether he should delete or not. Though... I see the movie for what it is ... just a movie intended to inspire or incite dislike , how much of it is in line with facts who knows ( e.g. where was Adam D’Angelo ?) . To use it as any part of the deletion decision making process does not seem right and seems that maybe the approach/reason for joining the social network was not the correct one. For me this means losing years worth of photos, messages, events that I went to ... I lived my life through facebook and I didn't have to write a single word in a journal. With the new messaging platform http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/ and personal email address contact with friends and acquaintances are now possible without wall posts.
In 2005-2006 (I just started at McGill) when it was still within campuses it was like wild fire and when I watched the movie , I completely related and recalled sitting down with room-mates and class-mates browsing dozens of girls in the school. There were no games just mainly wall posts and photos. You cannot relate that to now ... it is just not equivalent. Privacy was the same back then as it is now... people are just more aware of it or they grew older and understood the effects it wil have with their jobs, lives etc.
> What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.
Yes Zadie Smith is right ... this was never meant for the old folks (no offense), when it started those are the only people there were 18-22 year old college students looking for the bare minimum.
Times are changing though and these kids start to grow up, thus changes to try to satisfy all. But to me it seems harder and harder to define.
Russia has Vkontakte Japan has Mixi
So hopefully the author finds what he is looking for. I would start by just picking up the phone and calling someone. That is my Dad's way of keeping up with his social network. After he finishes work everyday, he has a 5-10 convo with his old friends and co-workers. Sometimes he even visits... (It is a no-brainer but somehow these days people find this hard to do)
> 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore
Is a 26 year old billionaire in charge of a 500 M network something someone would want to fail ? Are the 2000 or so employees that work there doing it for the vision of Zuckerburg? Is jealousy that strong ? I dont want it to fail. I want to be some percentage of whatever he is when I reach 26 not by personality but achievement. Why should I wait for maturity to achieve things, I want to fall, get back up, fall and fall some more if it means I reach closer to what he did (no matter how simple the idea was). It is as if he is not allowed to mature or people are still looking at him as a sophomore that sent those sms messages. He does get assistance from his COO Sheryl Sandberg http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/business/03face.html so maybe back in creation the site was a reflection of the immature sophomore but now it is something different.
This was actually leaked quite a while before the movie was released, although I'm not sure how exactly the original leak matches this officially released version.
http://wiscreenwritersforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Social-Network-The-by-Aaron-Sorkin-May-28-2009.pdf
Side note: Sorkin is an absolute legend, in my view the best film and TV writer there is right now.
Rather than 2010 being a weak year in film, could your taste differ from that of movie buffs/critics because I don't think I saw anything but top-tier reviews for The Social Network. I thought it was superb.
IMO, 2009 was a weakish year.
"The Social Network, I'm really happy for ya and I'mma let you finish, but Inception was one of the best movies of all time."
lol yes, i'm easy to amuse :D
I thought "The Social Network" was decent, but I was actually expecting more from Fincher and Sorkin. It could have been a student film, in some ways. I thought many of the characters were fairly two-dimensional and the "two lawsuit" structure was a little forced. It made me think of the examples in a screenwriting class I took in college. (Oh, and it's not a world I live in or aspire to live in.) My expectations must have been too high after all of the great press it received. It had so many raving critics and fans that I had a long period of people telling me I "had to see it" - but I didn't see it until it came out on DVD and then was fairly disappointed. If it is THE film of 'this generation', as some claim, then I think we're in trouble.
I think "Inception" should have won. It was much more creative and thought-provoking, and I thought the acting was also better. Of course, I had no preconceived notions about it - other than a general idea that it was apparently a goldmine of meme material for sites like Reddit. I've only seen snippets of "Black Swan," but the acting looks better than both "The Social Network" and "Inception."
The movie itself (I saw it twice) was excellent. Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross' score, in particular, blew me away - I saw it a second time just to enjoy the soundscape (note: You can buy the 19 tracks, in your preferred format, for $5 from http://www.nullco.com/TSN/) - the only other score I've ever enjoyed so much was Vangelis's Blade Runner. Reznor/Ross will win the Oscar hands down.
In terms of fairness, I thought that it was a little harsh towards Eduardo Saverin's contribution, and probably made Mark Zuckerberg out as a more sympathetic character than what really went down. Ironically, my "non-valley" friends saw the movie in a completely opposite light - which, too some degree, is a huge credit to the great direction, acting and screen play. So many people could see precisely the same movie, and come out with entirely different conclusions. The screenplay didn't pander, promote, or manipulate - it told an entertaining story in a way that allowed the audience to interpret based on their own background. I really think the Social Network deserved to win Best Picture, here's hoping the Academy thinks so as well.
I don't use Facebook. I'm that friend everyone knows as the one that refuses to join. I like Reznor's work though so was familiar with that and perhaps somewhat predisposed to liking that aspect of the film.
I thought The Social Network was excellent and, though I really liked Inception too, would've picked Social Network as the better of the two. The introductory scenes were excellent. The characters were solid and believable, the tech side of things was handled very well and those involved collectively made a boardroom-and-laptops film into something impressive and enjoyable.
After the first time I saw Inception, I had a sneaking suspicion that my opinion of it might evolve a bit like that of The Matrix - huge at the time, but a bit cheesy down the track. I know the sequels amp the cheese, but they are mostly cringe-worthy now when repeats show up on TV.
As it happens, I saw both of these films for the first time in the last week or so.
I'd say that Inception was a hugely ambitious film which didn't quite hit its mark, while The Social Network was a much simpler, much less ambitious film which just happened to be nearly flawless. Inception was a fifteen-course lobster meal where a couple of the courses were a little salty, while The Social Network was just a dish of masterfully-prepared spaghetti, far better than spaghetti has any right to be. Which of these you think is more worthy of recognition is a bit of a broader question.
Also best director and best screenplay? That seems like a pretty big snub to Nolan for Inception. Social network was a pretty good movie, but it's hard to believe it would have done so well if everyone wasn't so gooey in the pants for facebook.
The Social network was good and all but Inception was a masterful, intelligent film that was original to boot. Far better IMHO.
Cool, it deserved it. It was an excellent movie. The Social Network was my own personal pick for "best movie of 2010", although - to be fair - I didn't see every movie released in 2010. But I would rank it above Inception, Shutter Island, Tron:Legacy, True Grit, Harry Potter, and Red - out of the other good movies that come to mind from last year.
Nice pacing, good acting, great score, inspirational, entertaining, thought-provoking, it really had everything. It was a great trip inside the world that a lot of us live in / aspire to live in. Maybe a non-hacker wouldn't see it in quite the same light, but I really thought it was just excellent.
He's an extremely successful singer, first as part of 'N Sync and later on his own. Up through now he's won 6 Grammy and 2 Emmy awards. He's been in a handful of movies before, but I think the Social Network was the first I recognized him in.
When I was running my completely un-funded zero-revenue startup, college kids would daily send me emails begging me to give them a job doing non-technical BS work, often for free.
Fortunately a non-technical rockstar (who is willing to work for dirt cheap) is substantially easier to find a technical rockstar... I imagine now after "The Social Network" social media startups almost have an entertainment industry-like glamor at the moment, like breaking into the music business or movies. Non-technical people often will work for free or dirt cheap for years to 'make it' in these fields.
Milk it.
I think a big part of the problem is that the general public doesn't really understand how good software is written. It's a confusing issue, of course, and there's hardly any agreement among developers either. But the notion of a clean separation between "idea" and "execution" seems less prevalent among people who actually write the code. In my experience, the idea and execution are almost indistinguishable by the time a meaningful program has been created.
Certain types of app development, I think, are a creative act more akin to writing a book than developing a very specific, patentable technology. Sorry to torture an analogy, but this has helped shape my thinking lately... imagine two writers are at a dinner party, and one tells the other "hey, I've been writing a book about Beowulf - except this time, I'm telling the story from the point of view of the beast." The other writer thinks it's a cool idea, and (unbeknownst to writer #1) goes off and codes (er, writes) it up.
Clearly, writer #2 has done a crappy thing, but would you call it theft? The reason I like thinking of it this way is that the idea was worth something, but really just as a starting point. The two books produced by the two writers will be dramatically different, even starting from this identical premise. Furthermore, I think that the creative process of actually taking a one sentence idea and turning it into a 300+ page novel will produce an outcome that removes the separation of idea and execution - they will be two different products, two related but ultimately different ideas.
Unless someone went through another writer's book or screenplay and paraphrased sentence by sentence, or perhaps deconstructed the plot to an extreme level of detail and rewrote it changing names and locations only, I'd be disinclined to give much credence to a claim "he stole my idea for a novel", mainly because I'm not sure an idea, in a general sense, is worth all that much, and by the time it has been turned into an actual novel, it will always have been transformed into something different.
Of course, I don't really know the truth about what happened between the winklevosses and zuckerberg, and of course the movie is an entertaining work of fiction and should be treat "stole". He evidenty used none of the code. Did he go through screen by screen and implement all the mock-ups? If so, that would seem like theft to me. Or did he just run with a very general idea and produce something ultimately very different from what anyone else would have produced - different because two creative types will always produce different products, and better because zuck is far more creative than the winks, and capable of executing on his vision as well.
Ultimately, I suspect that the winks got the best outcome they could possibly have hoped for. Hard to believe their "social network idea" would have been worth $65 million. These ideas were a dime a dozen.
In case you haven't watched it yet: this is a quote from The Social Network - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/quotes?qt1307141
'Swordfish' was 9 years ago and 'Hackers' was 15.
'The Social Network' made me giggle in geek happiness when every glimpse of technical detail the was a legitimate tech shoutout. The following is a screenshot from 'Tron: Legacy' http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20101111213709/tron/images/f/f9/Tron-Legacy_SolarOS-frame.png
When computers were exotic, any hack could invoke utter wizardry and magic. The creative types behind modern movies are sufficiently aware and sufficiently confident the median American will be aware that the serious shit that happens to make computers work is a lot of typing plain text on flat, stationary screens, and some wonderful dramatic devices have been developed to extract accessible engagement from technical scenes beyond the old attempts at whiz-bang shiny awe (which never really worked anyway). So today you see a lot of bash, because the producers need text, and the graphic artists are like "why not make this legit?"
There are hackers out there looking for a "business guy" to "marry," but... the "business guy" has to bring more to the table than just an idea. If I partnered up with a "business guy" I'd be expecting somebody with some serious chops when it comes to prospecting and selling (and closing!), some useful connections to potential customers, partners and/or investors, and some knowledge of how to do business development and marketing. And if he knows at least a little bit about accounting and taxes, that would be a bonus.
But wanna-be Jack Welches who think their idea alone is enough to stand on, "if I can just find a hacker to build it" are a dime a dozen. So don't be surprised when you don't find a veritable onslaught of hackers lining up to beat down your door.
Anyway, to answer your question "Where to find a good hacker?" Well... there are lots of places. Starting here is a decent bet, but look for meetups in or near your town... if there is a HN meetup, or any technical user-group (Ruby User's Group, Java User's Group, Linux User's Group, Perl Mongers, whatever) go find them and start hanging out with those folks. Use LinkedIn, poke around sites like Quora and the various StackExchange sites... just don't be too obnoxious with the solicitations, or you'll piss off people who might otherwise be willing to help.
CS departments at area universities might give you useful leads as well. But read this:
http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-12.html#e2010-12-01T15_45_40.htm
before calling up CS professors.
Some other food for thought:
http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-10.html#e2010-10-28T16_27_55.htm
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2010/10/05/social-network-the-movie/
somebody just watched The Social Network movie.
meh. Everybody crashes, eventually. Software/hardware is just too complex, with too many cooks in the kitchen, evolving too fast, with too many unknowns. That quote from Mark's character in the movie Social Network was more of an ideal/goal statement rather than fact or hard requirement. Overall I think Facebook has had great availability/performance considering how many active users they have.
Then they probably made the right choice. Zuck has done far more to influence things in the past year than Wikileaks. I'm not saying Wikileaks hasn't done it's fair share, but as far as real impact to people around the world, Facebook has done more than Wikileaks.
What were the results of the Iraq information Wikileaks released earlier this year? Besides getting coverage in the papers?
Also, consider how much is being done in the business world because of Facebook. Apple, Microsoft, Google - three giants in the industry - are practically dancing to Facebooks tune, reacting. Entire industries are popping up around the social network.
And there was even a movie.
While I don't doubt the good WL is doing, Zuckerberg is doing far, far more than many realize.
No doubt The social network (Movie of entrepreneur for entrepreneurs )
My Choice: The Social Network
Why? Largely because I find it inspirational, vis-a-vis my own entrepreneurial ambitions. I've watched it twice already, and every time I watch that, I feel very inspired to sit down and start hacking, and work on building something.
I'm not the world's biggest fan of Mark Zuckerberg, or even of Facebook; but the movie was well-done, entertaining AND inspirational. What more can you ask for?
Honorable Mentions:
Red
Inception
Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows Pt 1
Looking forward to:
Tron: Legacy
The Social Network is probably the best movie of the year, but I've got a soft spot in my heart for Scott Pilgrim. Characters that behave like people, 1000 jokes per minute and phenomenally executed action sequences.
I doubt Calacanis take parts in the above activities, and likely, they segment by group, as you say.
If something universally appealing, like going to a nice restaurant or seeing a popular movie like The Social Network, you decided to opt-out of, I would be pretty put-off as an employee, or manager, if you chose not to attend.
Few things happen for individuals - if you declared that you didn't want to spend time with your company, socially, that says you don't really love your job - because the people, and the committed, single vision that comes with it is what makes that adoration arise. If you don't love your job, I question what great things you can truly do, given that non-commitment.
So, sure, you can be OK and opt-out. But if you do, I'm pretty certain that's exactly all you can be.
I'd prefer reading the book "The Accidental billionaire" instead of watching the movie "The social Network".
I'd agree with two here, while adding one of my own.
The Social Network - have seen it twice, both times eager to get out of the cinema and rush home to continue working on my own projects. We all know it's possible to create something and have the world take notice, but to see the journey and the all too familiar scenarios was hugely inspiring. As much as the lead character may come across as an unemotional awkward individual - you can't help but want his sharpness and drive. Oh, and success.
Good Will Hunting - Maybe I happened to watch this at the right time, during a period where I had met someone special and certain obstacles had me holding back. This movie had me book a flight the second the credits began rolling. There's similarities with The Social Network too, a special yet flawed individual, whose mistakes pale in comparison to his potential. Every line in the film is a quotable.
Hangover - This will be the first and only mention I expect of this film, but in terms of leaving a cinema and feeling inspired, this is up there for me. Would happily have left on the road trip of a lifetime if my groups of friends were to join me. Sure I'd have broken down 2 miles into the journey, broke and a little homesick but I'd have given it a go.
Star Wars, the original movie
Superman, the original movie
Star Trek, the first movie with Shatner, Nimoy, etc. Also Wrath of Khan.
The Matrix
300 probably will become one
The Social Network was surprisingly motivational. Fairly realistic portrayal of programming and programmers and startup life, and I loved many of Sean Parker's motivational speeches, and some of the Zuckerberg character's speeches as well.
Before embarking on new venture, everybody should watch the "Treasure of the Sierra Madre", a great movie, directed by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart. There you will see that the real problems begin once you have a whiff of success.
Oh forget it. Go see the "The Social Network" if you want to see that. Give a huge majority of shares to your technical cofounder and try to stay on his good side.
Not to mention keeping an eye out for the movie. It would be awesome, and perhaps the commercial success of The Social Network will make it more likely.
Vanity Fair interviews people it wants to be amazing, so it makes them look good; the author of a book about Zuckerburg is hardly likely to say he's not worth writing about; and the Social Network is a movie about the drama of the guy's life, not a business commentary. These are terrible sources to claim the guy has is 'overrated'. And he hasn't had anywhere near the time yet to show whether he's Bezos or Yang, as the writer points out, while at the same criticizing him for not doing the things great CEOs have done. Sheesh.
i hope when the author refers to zuck's "rejection", he/she isn't referring to the narrative popularized by The Social Network movie that he started facemash/facebook purely motivated by getting rejected by girls (or 'mainstream society'). from what i've heard and read from the news, it doesn't seem like zuck was a 'reject' at all. he grew up in an upper-middle-class community, went to a prestigious boarding school, then Harvard, all while having great opportunities to develop his amazing hacking talent. it seems like he grew up surrounded by geeks and other uber-smart people, so i hardly think that the origins of facebook were from a sense of 'rejection' (although that makes for a more sensational blog post).
So you are surprised that a title like, "Google UX Researcher Explains the Social Networking Gay Bar Problem" gets more votes/views than one with this title, "The Real Life Social Network v2"? And four months ago - wasn't that around the time of the Facebook movie w/ a similar title?
At $30 a ticket, Gold Class Cinemas seems reasonable for both Teens and Parents to enjoy a movie that they want to see in a theater.
I get what you're saying: Teens use theaters as a social meeting point and I agree. However, I look at the number of people seeding The Social Network and I compare that against the Saturday night attendance at my local theater and it's not hard to forecast the winner.
I enjoy going to a theater as well... but eventually, the only theaters that will exist will be high-end, classy joints like Gold Class Cinemas (http://www.goldclasscinemas.com/).
When I want to see a movie in a theater, I want to receive the best experience possible.
If the movie isn't worth seeing on a high-end screen, with high-end sound in a high-end facility, I want to download (and pay for) a good quality copy of the movie. Recently, I've seen Inception, Avatar, and a couple of other movies that between the sound and the picture deserve an experience.
The Social Network is a great movie that does not deserve an experience. It's a entertaining mockumentary that I really enjoyed watching - I did not miss anything by foregoing the theater. When the DVD comes out, I'll buy it.
This simply isn't true.
I just watched RED a few days ago (in my home) and it just opened 2 weeks ago, if that.
Ditto on Monsters, which I saw before it opened around here.
And tonight I'll be watching Social Network, which is in the theaters everywhere but it's just not convenient for me to drag my gf and her 6 and 9 year old to see a movie they won't want to sit through (well she will, but the kids, not likely).
I'd be willing to pay for this privilege - aka watching in the comfort of my own home - but they leave me no choice in the matter.
The appeal of Diaspora was its story (university students raising money to build a version of facebook which would not raise privacy concerns) not its technical superiority. It also explains the amount of media coverage Diaspora received. Having just watched the social network, I came to the conclusion that the only reason that movie was made was the law suits surrounding the creation of that company. There's no appeal making a movie about two or three guys working harmoniously together to build something useful.
I'm also a Sorkin / WW fanboy and would add:
1) The movie isn't for y'all (i.e. SV programmers) - it's for everyone else. How Raiders of the Lost Ark is Spielberg's action-adventure archeology, The Social Network is a Sorkin-banter exercise.
2) Sorkin enjoys writing for intellectual ideology, which is very difficult to position in any form of entertainment. In a way, he's forced to choose personas capable of centering his complex dialog, be it the President of the United States or a 20-something self-made billionaire.
The movie claims that Zuckerberg created the primordial version of facebook after getting dumped and subsequently drunk. He stole a bunch of images and created a "hot or not" thing called FaceSmash. This supposedly set him on the path towards creating facebook.
The weakest part of the whole film was at the end when it shows Zuckerberg alone, pitiful, refreshing his facebook page hoping his long lost ex would be his "friend" on facebook. I'm one of those people who feels insulted when filmmakers pull overt, lazy stunts like that.
Sorkin hates the idea of facebook. He thinks the whole idea of a social network is a lie and he may be right. He thinks people who use facebook are wasting their time. I saw that on Colbert I think.
I applaud Sorkin's candor. Not too many people say what they think these days, but I felt like he was insulting the audience with that last scene, saying, essentially, "You people do this too, and you're pitiful." He didn't have to show us what was on Zuckerberg's screen. Most people could have guessed what he was doing without seeing the screen. Sorkin decided to show the screen so people would have no doubts about what was happening. I'm reasonably certain Zuckerberg was not actually doing that during his deposition.
Agreed; maybe the point is that Hollywood seems disproportionately interested in explaining the urge to create (especially when the ambitions are grand) as sublimated need for intimacy.
This may be in part because Citizen Kane casts a long shadow on Hollywood film, e.g. over The Social Network & There Will Be Blood.
I do appreciate the rarer films where ambition seems substantially driven by a person's interest in problems, tools, and intrinsic desire to create or innovate: e.g. The Fountainhead (better than the book), Ratatouille.
Could MZ have done more damage control since the release of the social network? He's given away hundreds of millions of dollars and done myriad interviews since then. This is at least the most direct he's been about why he's around so much in the public eye. But really, come on, it's a movie.
Watch the Facebook movie "The Social Network" for an example of this.
It's too bad OpenID isn't cool. The Social Network movie is just going to exacerbate people's infatuation with Facebook and social networking in my opinion. This will lead to the common person being even more accepting of Facebook becoming ubiquitous across the internet. The side benefit of the movie though is that I am finding girls are much more into me talking about working as programmer at the bar...
Not exactly. Keep in mind that the movie "The Social Network" is not a 100% accurate telling of history. In the movie Eduardo (a co-founder of Facebook and initial source of funding) has his shares diluted from 30% down to a fraction of a percent. In reality Eduardo's shares were diluted (by issuance of new stock) from about 1/4 of the company to less than 10%. And it was probably a necessary move as well, seeing as Eduardo was no longer very connected with the company (it took him some time to even discover that his share of the company had been diluted, despite having been the CFO of the company on paper. In the end he ended up realizing something like a 6 million percent return on his initial investments (according to the value of his share of Facebook at the moment).
Clickable: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1798548 or http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-business-of-the-social-network/?singlepage=true on "The Business of The Social Network"
Edgelings blog http://pajamasmedia.com/edgelings/
Also note this recent "Ask HN: Best movie about work/business?" item: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1776345
This is a very strangely organized article, though I guess it's because it's trying to use the movie as a hook? The outline is something like:
1. Watching a movie about me was quite interesting/surreal.
2. However, I don't really want to talk about the movie; whether it got things right or not isn't that important.
3. Instead, I'd like to talk about entrepreneurship and innovation, and won't mention the movie again, despite this article supposedly being about what I "Learned From Watching 'The Social Network'".
This reminds me of the scene in "The Social Network" where Mark Zuckerburg sits in front of the Harvard disciplinary board for hacking into house face books to harvest student images.
The Zuckerburg in the movie thought that he deserved credit for pointing out security vulnerabilities in the Harvard network.
I do not believe the actions of these traders (or Zuckerburg) were correct. That being said, I still think their actions have value.
One way we learn is through our mistakes. There are many proprietary electronic trading platforms. Who checks them for bugs? Who checks them for accuracy or possible manipulation? I do not think these Norwegian programmers should be gaming a trading robot. At the same time, the SEC and other market regulators need to uphold their end of the bargain. If they would like to see a fair market, I think they should check trading robots for possible manipulation.
There are a bunch of fun articles for those who have seen The Social Network. Like this one about FaceMash, which was quoted in the movie:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creator-survives-ad-board-the/
And some comments from Slashdot when Zuckerberg was in high school: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=61425&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=5774175
I think this is one of those arguments where its really hard to find the line between art and reality, which has the effect of simultaneously making The Social Network an amazing and controversial film.
I'm a huge fan of Aaron Sorkin and I think he takes the screenwriting craft to a whole new level. When he's writing something I don't think he just creates a "story" in his head, I think he crafts a whole society as a canvas. He has the ability, like many artists, to craft an extremely vivid picture in his mind and then translate that vision and eventually the story to his writing. So when he's telling the "Zuckerburg" story he creates an alternate reality but with some small basis in truth. A world where women are treated in a misogynistic manner, in a world inhabited by socially inept genius and an out of touch upper crust.
In this case he bases a lot of what he's built on the books and stories written, quite frankly, by the losers of the Facebook battles. These inform and lead the story but by the time its complete the villains, attitudes, and societies have been morphed into something quite more archetypical then their corresponding reality. Small quirks he finds interesting get expanded into large issues. Molehills are turned into mountains.
And really he's done a great job. The level of discourse on HN alone testifies to his ability to tell a story - like it or not.
I was one of the people who downvoted you (though it looks like the crowd is back on your side again), so here's an explanation:
First and mostly unrelated to your post: I have big issues with the Social Network's accuracy in its storytelling. Besides all the things that were completely made up, it's very telling that Sorkin in the OP states that the voiceover from the Facemash sequence was completely factual, with only minor things removed from Zuckerberg's blog posts. In fact, if you track down the original blog posts on Scribd, you'll find that Sorkin inserted several of the most offensive sentences, such as the crack about the Erica character's bra size, and also including the sentence "Do you think that's because all BU girls are bitches?", which Sorkin seems to be attributing as a quote in the OP but were not in the blog posts. So when I talk about Zuckerberg's misogyny, I'm talking about the misogyny of the character named Mark Zuckerberg that Aaron Sorkin made up for the movie, not Zuckerberg himself, as I'm convinced the two are mostly unrelated.
So all that said, the stuff movie-Zuckerberg does in the Facemash scene is blatantly and unambiguously misogynistic. He blogs about his ex-girlfriends bra size, he calls her and all other girls attending BU a bitch, and creates a site allowing you to publicly compare the hotness of various women using pictures obtained without their permission. These acts demean women, portray them as just sexual objects, and are essentially misogynistic.
What's bizarre about your post is that you didn't dispute any of those things. Instead, you presented an argument than women and men are equally petty and immature, and then an argument for how the feminist movement has led to an over-interrogation of male sexist behavior while ignoring similarly problematic female behavior. You can make those arguments, but the fact that you did so in reply to the paragraph you quoted strongly implies that you believe that the actions portrayed in the movie were not sexism and not misogynistic. You seem to be characterizing the things movie-Zuckerberg did as just "a bunch of 20 year olds drinking too much and jockeying for attention and being to mean to each other", as if those were the reasons why people saw movie-Zuckerberg as misogynistic.
I agree that feminists are often too quick to see male sexism in places were it isn't there, but that doesn't mean that male sexism doesn't exist. It's one thing to think that feminists go too far, and another thing to go on a rant about the excesses of feminism when confronted with a (fictional) example of actual sexism. The things movie-Zuckerberg did were sexist, and if you disagree with that, and it seems like you do, I'm honestly a little disturbed.
Seconded on both. I also enjoyed The Social Network.
On documentaries, I highly recommend Code Rush, a story of Netscape. It's actually in full here (scroll down to The Film): http://clickmovement.org/coderush
the new Social Network movie is pretty damn good. Doesn't exactly focus on the work side, but it has some good cues on business strategies and the social side related to SV.
Plenty of films with that rating. Just a few off the top of my head:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/citizen_kane/
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/godfather/
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chinatown/
(Note: I haven't seen The Social Network and I don't mean to imply that it is comparable to the iconic movies I have listed above. That said, the more reviews I see trickling in, the more it seems like it.)
I think this movie was issued by Facebooks PR department, to further embark the notion that Facebook is 'the only social network'.
Lawrence Lessig has an interesting take on the movie: http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/78081/sorkin-zuckerberg-the-social-network
He basically says that it's old media (Sorkin and Hollywood) casting new media (Zuckerberg) in a bad light, compared to the good guys - the honorable and respectable lawyers (of all people).
The real point of Facebook's success according to Lessig: "Instead, what’s important here is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone. The real story is not the invention. It is the platform that makes the invention sing."
Hmm
Social network has superior directing and writing IMO. But they are similar in many respects.
PoSV simply tells the story in a pretty straightforward way, while TSN is structured more as a search for the true story. It's structured as a bunch of flashbacks from the depositions of Mark, Eduardo, and the Winklevoss twins. Each party tells their version of things, and as a character says at one point, 15% of typical testimony is lies, the remaining 85% is exaggerated.
The movie doesn't try to take sides, and leaves it up to the viewer to decide who was right and wrong (if anyone.)
I haven't seen The Social Network. I'm fully willing to believe that it is a fantastic movie, and, just based on collateral evidence, I'd even put some money down on Sorkin doing well in the Academy Awards. I will probably see it very soon.
Nevertheless, I still think that this post is mostly evidence that Scott Adams hasn't watched a lot of classic movies that have stood the test of time. To state that The Social Network stands with the greatest movies of all time (as Adams' statement could have meant if he'd seen a lot of them) is one thing, but I take it as pretty unlikely that it surpasses the whole field. Unless, of course, the "whole field" he's implying it compares to is pretty small.
So, cool, I'm glad he liked it. I'm also not sure what knowing his opinion earned me.
To examine this I think we need to think about the stereotypes in modern terms and apply them to future trends.
Here are my top 3:
1. Startups - Nerds these days are worshipped more-so for their mainstream accomplishments than their underworrld ones. It's cool and sexy to own your own startup in the nerd world and it's still for the elite. The best data point for this is the movie The Social Network. All around the world people are envious of Mark, who is portrayed as the ultimate alpha geek. Moving forward, startups are going to be further romanticized and every fanboy is going to want to try their own (more-so than the common trend already).
2. Anime. It seems to me that a lot of Alpha Geeks like Anime and Manga. Over the summer Naruto was the #1 show on Hulu. This trend will definitely continue to grow. As a general trend, I'd bet on more mainstream adoption of Asian culture as a whole.
3. Social Shopping. Sites like thinkgeek.com, woot.com, sparkfun.com are filled with Alpha Geeks tweaking with the latest gadget (Arudino, which is still primarily an Alpha Geek toy). This will slowly adapt to other more mainstream consumer companies as consumers start coming online.
Another Excellent article on this: http://baglady.dreamhosters.com/2007/11/16/california-dreamin-incentive-stock-options-and-the-silicon-valley-workerbee/
Preferred Share Liquidation Preference is another landmine.
I know at least one (world class valley player) early epinions employee who walked away with almost nothing - The common shareholders got screwed when epinions merged with dealtime to form shopping.com - but he had already left the company for another gig, so there was really zero benefit to taking care of him.
At Oblix, anybody who was an ex-employee ended up with zero on equity when they sold to Oracle for $85 Million - preferred shareholders ended up with everything. Existing employee who made it through the transition landed a retention bonus, and the founders (some of who were no longer at Oblix) picked up a "consulting" bonus to make sure the deal went through and they didn't block it.
A few lessons learned from all these experiences:
o At the end of the Day, you really are at the mercy of the Majority Shareholders, regardless of what equity you think you may have - unless you are prepared to go to war in court.
o Always be aware of how much leverage you have with Founders Stock. When a final sale is going through, you may not have enough voting stock to defeat the deal, but you may have a large enough block to mount a legal challenge - it might be easier, and cheaper, and certainly less risky to simply buy you off. Protect your position.
o Stay close and friendly to the CEO, VCs, and Board Members driving the financial structure (typically the ones selected by the VCs) They will be the ones who can re-up you when the dilutive rounds hit the company, or hand out "retention" bonuses after a sale - and they are the only ones who really have a clue as to what machinations are taking place.
o Probably most importantly - bring unique value to the table that the company requires to succeed, and continue to succeed after a sale. I remember walking out of "The Social Network" wondering how on earth Eduardo manage to walk away with 7%. The way I watched the movie, Facebook succeeded despite his efforts to slam it with Ads too early, and his inability to pull in Angels like Thiel. And how he wasn't sitting right beside Mark night and day, is beyond me. And seriously, how could he claim to be the "CFO" and not be intimately familiar with each and every clause of the stock events that were taking place. It was liked he'd totally checked out and was just showing up now and then to see what was happening at the company. The movie was very unsympathetic to him. Now I have go read "The Facebook Effect" and "The accidental Billionaires"just to see if they portrayed Eduardo in a more sympathetic light.
The movie portrayed Sean Parker as playing a much, much larger role in Facebook's success than Eduardo - yet they ended up with similar amounts of equity, which befuddles me.
If you got bored reading this, it may be because you've read this same article a dozen times before. The only difference was the name of the movie.
Whether it's The Social Network or, say, any Judd Apatow film of the last few years, there's been no shortage of oblivious feminista blogger-types dying to tell you how offended they were by...(what are actually) figments of their own imagination/ the selection errors of their own narrow perception.
The Social Network is an exposé on Mark Zuckerberg. It is NOT a commentary on the state of gender relations in the social areas of either college or the tech community at large. As an exposé on Mark Zuckerberg, its main focus will be, you guessed it, Mark Zuckerberg. If you, Jezebel columnist Irin Carmon, happen to place your focus anywhere other than Zuckerberg, you are bound to find inconsistencies with the real world (movies, as portrayals of the real world, are inherently fake and inconsistent). Women never have ideas. Also, a disproportionate number of the lampshades are forest green; in FY 2004 forest green accounted for a mere 3.3% of lampshade sales in the United States, whereas in the movie, no fewer than 4 of 9 lampshades is forest green-- WHAT THE FUCK.
Maybe the roles women fill in the movie isn't some sort of perverse commentary on everyone with two X chromosomes. Maybe those roles are just the only ones available for women to fill in a movie about a Harvard computer hacker, his Harvard computer hacker buddies, and the tech company they founded together. Or does Sorkin need to manufacture a prominent female character who's smart, comes up with lots of fantastic ideas, actually happens to be the best computer hacker on campus, would never stoop to wearing slutty clothing to attract men, sometimes wears slutty clothing but lambasts every man who compliments her attire by asking why you don't compliment Joey on his rugby shirt because you're a sexist that's why, would never have an abortion because of her earth-shattering instinct for motherhood no matter what society says about the appropriate time and place to have a family, would definitely have an abortion if she wanted to because it's her choice anyway not that dumb jock's and who cares what her dad says anyway he's just a cog in the Patriarchy.
I wonder if Wall Street, back in the 80's, generated a lot of interest in people to work in finance. It's an interesting case since in both cases the point of the movie seems to be to make the person (the startup founder in The Social Network, the corporate raider in Wall Street) out to be the bad guy.
EDIT: Wikipedia: "It has also proven influential in inspiring people to work on Wall Street with Sheen, Douglas, and Stone commenting over the years how people still approach them and say that they became stockbrokers because of their respective characters in the film."
I hope people don't start referring to Facebook as "The Social Network". It's the name of a movie and there's really no reason to use it instead of just saying "Facebook".
I think while you're definitely free to leave, just keep in mind that the movie is very exaggerated and the truth is really not anywhere as bad as it seems. I think Lawrence Lessig had some great commentary on this the other day:
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/78081/sorkin-zuckerberg-the-social-network
Aaron Sorkin is a great writer, but he's writing for dramatic effect, not truth. Don't let the film factor in to your escape.
I just got home from watching the movie, fired up HN and was pleased to see this review. But now I'm wondering if Lessig and I watched the same movie. I don't think it portrays the Zuckerberg character as evil or the others as victims.
The Winkelvii, as the movie hilariously calls them, seem indignant not so much that their idea was "stolen" as that the geek refused to know his place, which presumably was to code things up for them in exchange for token equity. They're not bad guys, but they're angry that their skewed view of the world, with them naturally at the top, turns out wrong. The movie does not make it seem like the Zuckerberg character owes these dudes shit or that they could ever in 65 million years have created Facebook. They thought of an exclusive friends website merely because they were steeped in exclusivity to begin with. Only the Zuckerberg character grasps its real power. That's the meaning of the lightbulb moment where a friend asks him about a girl and he suddenly sees "relationship status" as a way for Facebook to address this need.
The Saverin character (marvelously acted, by the way - who is that guy? - his emotional vibrancy is remarkable) is sympathetic but clueless, doggedly trying to turn Facebook into a small business that ekes out a bit of ad revenue. His dream for Facebook is that it be allowed to join the business club the way he personally craves admission into a prestigious student club. His happiest moment is when he gets an executive title; his main frustration that more mid-level ad execs don't throw him a few bones. The movie makes it clear that despite being "the business guy" he has no understanding of the business, whereas the Zuckerberg character grasps it instinctively, spends half the movie trying to explain it to him and finally gives up. On this point I think the movie gets startups right. I was rather astonished by that. The other point on which it gets startups -- and Facebook's significance as a startup -- right is in its emphasis on the founder as CEO. The contrast between Parker as the dot-com era founder who got deposed and Zuckerberg as a new generation of founder who retains control is pretty impressive historical precision on the part of filmmakers who presumably don't know much about startups.
(Incidentally, it also gets technical details right: the references to wget and Emacs in the opening scene made my jaw drop for a moment.)
As for Saverin, the movie consistently implies that he could never have remained part of Facebook, not because Zuckerberg is evil but because the abyss between the two of them is huge. Indeed, the tragic inevitability of their split is the core plot of the movie. (The Winkelvoss twins are mostly comic relief, and boy did those actors nail that.) It does, however, portray Saverin getting screwed out of his Facebook stock and Zuckerberg not doing anything about it; that was perhaps the one evil moment.
Even the Sean Parker character is only half-bad. He's a bad boy, but that's a dramatic device: the movie badly needs some shaking-up by the time Timberlake appears and his character comes with the trickster energy to do it. Beyond that, though, the Sean Parker character is the only one who gets what Zuckerberg is doing, the only one who gives consistently good advice, and the one who acts as a midwife to Facebook's birth as a real startup.
As for the Zuckerberg character, he's portrayed as an intense Asperger type who cares more about his vision than he does other people, but also more than money. The movie flirts with but eventually abandons the idea that he's motivated by petty revenge. His obsession is with making Facebook as big as it can get. I've never seen Zuckerberg as an Aspie type (and thought the actor overdid that aspect, going out of his way to hold the same furrowed expression the entire movie), but the obsession with making something great and refusal to let anything stand in its way are classic entrepreneurial qualities that the movie grants to Zuckerberg fully.
I think Lessig is wrong about the trite moral he thinks the movie is imposing on the story. The movie doesn't advance that interpretation, it vividly portrays some of the characters advancing it. That's totally different. The movie per se isn't concerned with individual characters. Everyone is granted his/her perspective but no one has any absolute status. What it's about is The Social Network, not the online one, the real one.
I went to this movie grudgingly and left surprised by how bad I didn't find it. Guess I shouldn't be, since David Fincher is my favorite working director (or would be if I could forget the execrable Benjamin Button); as Bob Mondello said on NPR the other night, I'd pay to watch him direct the phone book. Beyond that, the acting is unusually good all the way down to the cameos (except the Zuckerberg actor is too monotone). Where I really disagree with Lessig is about the writing, which he loved and which to me was ok-with-awful-bits: it's smart the way that "smartass" is smart and has way too many TV zingers. (Even those, though, were toned down from the script that was leaked. That horribly contrived line everyone was quoting a few months ago where a girl tells Zuckerberg that girls will always hate him because he's an asshole, I'm happy to report, never made it into the film. [<-- edit: oops! wrong!] Fincher has taste.)
Lawrence Lessig's thoughts on the movie, posted as a separate story on HN, but I felt I should add it here as well: http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/78081/sorkin-zuckerberg-the-social-network?page=0,1
I left the movie quite satisfied. It was such marvelous dialog paired with excellent directing. I love Fincher's style, though at times it felt like he was being held back, such as during the regatta segment, I felt like he couldn't go as crazy as he would like given the soundtrack.
Sorkin is a master of dialogue, and though the story is wildly inaccurate, I suspended disbelief and enjoyed the ride.
Bazaarvoice is hiring in Austin, TX.
They just rented out a movie theater (alamo drafthouse) for all of us to see the Social Network.
Also it's a cool company. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/10/01/bazaarvoice-ramps-up-for-social-shopping/
This is an excellent post, and a very timely one with The Social Network coming out. The film certainly glamorizes startup life, and makes it seem like you won't fail.
I released my iPhone app this Summer (SeizeTheDay, http://seizethedayapp.com). I'm in school at Ohio State for my senior year. We got featured on the App Store, and received app of the week from Time and CNET. This has put us around 100k downloads in the first couple of months. While in SF this Summer, I received a lot of advice to drop out and blow it up. I disagree significantly. College is fun, and the idea is that it's something I can do on the side while I'm in school.
I'm currently making somewhere between beer money and a salary from iAds (will probably post some data on this at some point when we have more data available). I figure if I can grow revenue to about 4x what we're currently doing, I can afford to dive in full time. This gives me 9 months of school to keep working on the side, and see if it's realistic when I graduate.
We put about $800 of investment into it, and our only recurring cost is Apple's dev license ($100/year). While not every startup can operate this way, I feel this is the way to do it. Our model lends itself pretty well to tackling a small problem and growing slowly.
The 100 million for schools is a preemptive publicity stunt ahead of "The Social Network" film premiere next week.
It will be interesting to see how hundreds of millions of people seeing a film (on- and off- cinema screen) – supposedly depicting shady roots of their favourite website – will react.
Most likely, with a "meh…" but let's wait and see.
Did you have any contact with the producers of "The Social Network" movie coming out soon?
I'm just curious in the event that I get pulled in to see it.
My bet is Zuck has a contract with Fincher for The Social Network, its sequel and prequel, and maybe even TV series.
There is this great article on Make Magazine called "Why Those Kids from Podunk Are Keeping You Down" And it says something in the lines, "So they made something cooler than yours, so what? It wasn't you anyways".
And I belive its true, most Successful guys are just "lucky" (paraphrasing Sarah Lacy's book "Once you are Lucky, twice you are good") so there is no point in comparing yourself to them, you should use them as inspiration and not exacly as role models.
For example, I really liked this Dustin Moskowitz (Facebook co-founder) answer when asked about the Social Network Movie:
"It is interesting to see my past rewritten in a way that emphasizes things that didn't matter [...] A lot of exciting things happened in 2004, but mostly we just worked a lot and stressed out about things"
http://www.quora.com/What-does-Dustin-Moskovitz-think-of-the-Facebook-movie
So at my 27 years old, I may not be Mark Zuckerberg or even the more cooler and loved Matt Mullenweg, but I know that reading about them and how they think make me think different too; that somehow by entreprenurship there is a way to change this world and though it's really hard, I know that now I can't stop trying.
You see. This is a producer's movie, not directorial. Screenwriter is important here, more so than director which is here to do technical stuff, and do it good. Producer calls the shots anyways in this case, screenwriter executes them and director makes it into a product. Sorkin is a wizard though, especially in dialog construction.
However, I've read through this blag post http://scriptshadow.blogspot.com/2009/07/social-network-facebook-movie.html and it really seems good enough. That blog is truly great for screenwriters btw, lots of great tips and stuff.
The script of this movie embellishes even more than the book itself. David Fincher was given a sweet deal by Sony if he directed "The Social Network" even though he could care less for it.
The Set Design and Props department for this movie are the best in the business, but they're getting no help from Sony when it comes to anything that is not Sony branded. No other companies are allowed to make endorsements to this movie. Yes there were a lot of Apple and Dell products in this movie; not sure if they're going to make prominent appearance though.
Yes, but the story of why Facebook is successful is more involved than that, and much more useful than you give it credit for.
Facebook started because Mark Zuckerberg was notorious for hacking yearbook pictures out of a sort of Harvard-official online phonebook (a "facebook") and setting a website to mash them up against each other in a hot-or-not style competition. Capitalizing on this notoriety, he was able to replace the original "facebook" directory, commenting to the Crimson something to the effect "I can do it better, and I can do it in two weeks".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook http://scriptshadow.blogspot.com/2009/07/social-network-facebook-movie.html << fascinating, maybe not the best source
After that, yes, there is very probably some truth to the fact that it may have pandered to the elitism of ivy league schools, but the real lesson here is that Facebook had access to probably the best audience of any social networking site, ever -- a group of highly-social shakers and movers -- and was able to expand because there were similar needs in other similar schools. There have been probably hundreds of social networking sites that never failed to take off; this is, IMO, the key factor that separates them. The other thing is that, they were lucky about the network they were replacing; an online student directory translates very well into a MySpace alternative, as MySpace is arguably really a tool to interact in the world of MySpace. People were ready to be themselves online, they just needed good privacy control.
A startup like Diaspora does not have the luxury of a built-in user base like the Harvard student body. Nor does it replace a very extensible tool that everyone likes/needs. These are all very big disadvantages.