No, Michael Arrington, you are not Jack Sparrow
Our Kindly Uncle Mike “Uncrunched” Arrington told us recently that “startups are hard, so work more, cry less, and quit all the whining.” He quoted journal posts from former Netscape engineer Jamie “jwz” Zawinski back in 1994 to make the point that startup life has always sucked, or as Zawinski put it in his rebuttal:
[Arrington] is trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to work insane hours, sleep under your desk, and give up your one and only youth, and if you don’t do that, you’re a pussy. He’s using my words to try and back up that thesis. He’s telling you the story of, “If you bust your ass and don’t sleep, you’ll get rich.”
Arrington’s response:
No. I was making the point that people have been working crushingly hard in our industry for quite a while now, and that today’s hard workers shouldn’t assume this is something new. I’m saying that working hard is a necessary ingredient to being successful, but working hard doesn’t mean you’ll get rich. Your chances are still abysmally, wonderfully slim.
Arrington links that last oddly poetic phrase—“abysmally, wonderfully slim”—to an earlier TechCrunch piece where he compares the life of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur to pirates.
Why did some people way back in the seventeenth century, or whenever, become pirates? The likely payoff was abysmal, I imagine. There’s a very small chance you’d make a fortune from some prize, and a very large chance you’d drown, or be hung, or shot, or whatever. And living on a small ship with a hundred other guys must have sucked, even for the captain.
But in my fantasy pirate world these guys just had really screwed up risk aversion algorithms. Unlike most of the other people they actually lusted after that risk. The potential for riches was just an argument for the venture. But the real payoff was the pirate life itself.
This is where Arrington goes both right and wrong.
Normally working hard is a necessary ingredient to being successful, but this misses JWZ’s point. If you’re the first engineering hire, your equity will probably be around 1–2%. If your little team sells for $10M, the VCs get the bulk of that, the founders become millionaires, and for your two years of 80+ hour weeks you’ll get, give or take, $150K. If you’re the second engineering hire, then maybe you get $25–50K. This is still nothing to sneeze at, but if you’ve been putting in that time for $60K a year when you could have been making $90K a year in a “boring” job with sane hours, you have not come out ahead. (And, of course, your little team may sell for $3M, or not at all.)
“But the real payoff is the pirate life itself!” The argument for doing the insane startup work is the slim potential the team sells for $100M or more, but really, you’re in it because you love risk. You love the lifestyle! You love the sailing around the world and visiting exotic new ports of call and the rum and the wenches and oh wait we’re not actually talking about pirates you idiot.
Real pirates tended to be out-of-work privateers who had nowhere else to go, criminals trying to escape the law, or the desperately poor; their careers at sea rarely lasted more than a few years and usually ended in death. The number who retired comfortably in their mid-30s to start investment funds to back new up-and-coming pirates is roughly zero. But in Arrington’s “fantasy pirate world,” they’re all Jack Sparrow.
There may well be an “entrepreneur lifestyle” which roughly corresponds to the pirate lifestyle. I know a serial entrepreneur who seems to always be traveling to meet with high-power executives and VCs, to make deals over lunch and dinner and wine and bocce, and I don’t doubt for a minute that he puts in 80+ hour weeks or that it isn’t genuinely hard work. But the lifestyle that people are “crying and whining about” is, ultimately, not the entrepreneur lifestyle. It’s the first-hire lifestyle. Arrington may genuinely believe that all hard work is roughly identical, but it isn’t. The hard work he put in building TechCrunch was finding and managing employees, writing, and a lot of meetings with Internet movers and shakers. Surely that is hard work, but it’s no more comparable to an 80+ hour week of sitting at (or under) a desk coding until you have RSI than it is to tomato farming.
What brought on Arrington’s righteous anger was the complaints that people like, well, me had about Zynga reneging on stock options. He thinks that’s just whining. Bullshit. Zynga is whining. And let’s not pretend that Zynga is a Google or Twitter or a JWZ-era Netscape—or even a TechCrunch. They’re a Skinner box. I won’t go so far as to say that Mark Pincus should be first against the wall when the revolution comes, but he should be sleeping under a desk.
Pincus started—started—where Uncle Mike is now: as a venture capitalist. The material wealth both of them enjoy came from work very far removed from first-hire engineering. Arrington may fancy himself a pirate, but he hasn’t ever had to worry about scurvy.
