Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

I work in an indie coworking place now and I have had a month in a WeWork. For remote people they are good as an idea. The vibe in WeWorks is weird and not pleasant. And in a corporate finance sense WeWork is a real estate Ponzi scheme grift on SoftBank as far as I can tell.

'my superpower is change'

love how the article goes on about all kinds of shit without ever explaining what WeWork actually does. good indicator what they actually do.. is beside the point

i thought that was a deliberate choice since the ceo is such a knob

i have been hunting for like 30 mins to find ilx's original YTMND thread, but maybe we never had one?

anyway, pour one out for an internet thing that was great and is now dead and impossible to imagine seeing its like again.

i did find what i think is its first mention here:

I pointed this out on another thread, but best site ever: www.yourethemannowdog.com< br>
My friend used to have his alert be a clip of Mike Patton asking "Safeway?", which he blurted out randomly in the middle of a Mario Bros. cover.
― Vinnie, Saturday, May 11, 2002 7:00 PM (seventeen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

HOLY SHIT. I've never seen such brilliance. Oh my god, that's almost as good as Peanut Butter Jelly Time.
― Ally, Saturday, May 11, 2002 7:00 PM (seventeen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

guess what's STILL around

http://superbad.com

I still don't completely get the entire coworking space model and I'm not sure my confusion is wrong

― mh, Wednesday, May 15, 2019 8:29 AM (one week ago)

i think it makes the most sense for people who live in areas where the cost of renting private office space would be ridiculously expensive, and their homes aren't really suitable for some of their work: either because of size or sharing with others (including small children). People that pay for co-working space because being around other people typing on laptops and checking their phones is comforting to them or increases their productivity ... I do not understand these people, like this is the opposite of me.

like if I had to do the co-working space thing, I would be spending so much time on ilx and facebook posting about all the awkward, stupid and annoying people in the co-working space rather than doing my own work

I’d bookmark that thread.

xxp no, that is the part that completely makes sense

The entire part where 90% of their marketing is about start-up weirdness and sub-TED talk stuff and whatever the hell the wework guy is on about all the time, that is the nonsense

also why do most of the pictures look like ergonomic nightmares

i think the ergonomic nightmares are definitely related to the sub-TED talk stuff

it's more about the idea of a comfortable chair

maybe they also want to disrupt chairs

xp to goole: in that post, I said I already posted it in another thread! So there must be an earlier mention of YTMND unless I was lying, which is a very real possibility

Also, this may be the first time I was first at anything

so I was working for a blockchain startup until recently. technically I still "work" there - they haven't fired me or laid me off - but they stopped paying me and two other people at the beginning of May. the three of us were the only employees being paid; the senior staff had gone without since mid-January and a host of technical workers (and at least one lawyer!) since a little after that. they raised a fuckton of money about a year and a half ago but blew threw the vast majority in less than a year, largely on trips, big salaries (incl at least one hefty severance package), and stupid marketing stunts. since mid-October (a little after I was brought in full-time; I'd done some work for them as a contractor), we've been hearing that new sources of funding are "just being held up by red tape" etc. the three of us were told that should there end up being any difficulty in making payroll, we'd be told in advance; another lie, and they wound up getting a couple weeks' worth of free labor out of us. we're filing a claim with the ministry of labor to get that covered but idk what sort of timeline we can realistically expect anything to happen in

anyway the really wild part is that a number of coders, graphic designers, marketers, and other skilled workers have been working for free for *months*, and the way they've gotten away with this is:

1. selling employees and contractors on the potential value and utility of the technology and its potential use cases, including "social impact" applications
2. promising said employees etc. that WHEN (not if) funding inevitably comes in, they'll be offered (cash) bonuses and/or (token) equity (they made us an offer to come back to work that included both; we didn't bite as it was strictly conditional based on said ever-elusive funding coming in)
3. once senior/c-level staff had committed to forfeting a salary, they quietly started informing other employees about it, thus normalizing working for free / subconsciously making people feel like assholes if they had the temerity to insist that getting paid on time / getting paid at all was too much to ask. if you've never had the experience of being paid for a job whilst you're surrounded by people who aren't....well, it's weird, and bad, in a lot of ways that are tough to articulate.

would it surprise anyone to learn that the CEO's background is in multi-level marketing?

anyway I don't regret it cause I got in at the right time (I was well-paid) and got out just slightly too late and I met some excellent people. but man if you're ever gonna consider working for a startup, make sure you *really* do your homework.

how many employees were there total, at peak?

tough to measure for a variety of boring reasons but I'd say about 15 employees and a constellation of contractors. at least one of the firms we worked closely with ended up having to lay off a number of staff because we stiffed them.

(15 not including execs)

to make that small anecdote even worse, I only found out about that other company's layoffs in the last week. at the time, we were told that *they* hadn't done their work according to spec and generally made them out to be incompetent no-nothings as opposed to people we completely fucked over

Upper management seems to attract and reward serial liars at a disproportionate rate.

some liars, some hopelessly naive, some just psychotic

speaking of which the chairman (who is significantly younger than me; I'm 32) once posted a viral hoax to our all-company WhatsApp channel about how there was an Assange "dead drop" that was released following his arrest alleging "white genocide: not such a myth after all!"

hmm I'm debating whether that is better or worse than a higher-level exec at my Fortune 500-style company referencing a Thomas Friedman book some years ago

probably worse, but to their credit I think they got rid of that guy anyway

I used to work for Meg Whitman and honestly I have very few complaints about her CEO-wise, especially when compared to these stories

one last story: my former boss at this place was very high up at Le@n !n Canada and was well acquainted with $heryl S@ndberg. unfortunately she was sacked just as the scandal from a few months back was breaking out so I didn't get to inquire about how her good pal was handling all of this. (appropriately enough the sacking took place because she was giving her male bosses a little too much pushback. but as it turns out she got out at an excellent time.)

feel free to keep going! today i heard a couple variations on 'uh-oh tableau to salesforce' from friends around both, and your stories are much more interesting

so I was working for a blockchain startup

can we back up to how this even started, was the alternative mugging grandmas

For real

the silicon valley startup whose business model was to steal bongos from grandmothers and use them to join the fall foundered when mark e. smith died, but not before raising $100 million in venture capital through ycombinator

He's optimized the space with the ingenuity of a startup founder, installing ample shelves and hooks for storage and even some foam acoustic panels to mitigate the noise from below and beyond his window.

daamn these startup founders really are more ingenious than the rest of us

https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/startup-CEO-lives-works-Zeitgeist-Vivek-Kumar-13969019.php

nice place to live if u spend half the year in pittsburgh

so I was working for a blockchain startup

can we back up to how this even started, was the alternative mugging grandmas

a fair question lol, a few years back I had just gotten my technical writing certificate and I was looking for work in a couple different cities, and I just so happened to get a job working for a *different* blockchain startup, before it was quite the dirty word it is now. the job itself was sort of a nightmare, but it was specifically because of the asshole who ran the place - everyone else was great and the work was sort of interesting, not to mention getting to meet all the industry's weirdos and psychos. then I left to work a steadier corporate job for a couple of years, and one of my former co-workers tapped me for this job, where I'd be working with some of those same people I liked, without (that) asshole boss, and for considerably more money than I was making at the time. so that's how that started.

since I last posted at least one exec has left the company, I'll be surprised if they survive the summer

tbh i don't really understand what "blockchain" even means and i don't give a fuck.

I strongly suspect knowing what it means would never, ever impact your life in any meaningful way

great! *whistles and skips*

(i mean, tbh, i do have some idea, but mostly a vague notion that it's connected to cryptocurrency)

Do you know what a database is? Imagine that but extremely slow and used for fraud.

^^^^ yes

One of the equity crowd funding sites I track offered me the opportunity to fund a startup that loans people ‘fiat currency’ secured on their crypto holdings. Other than the use of the term ‘fiat currency’ sending me purple with rage, even though that is exactly what they wanted me to invest; this seems like a perfectly legitimate way to light a pile of money on fire.

The same crowd funding platform was recently also offering me an opportunity to earn 19% ‘risk free’ on secondary debt for construction finance. I need to unsubscribe from this email nonsense.

I used to be quite positive about equity crowd funding but it appears to only attract the dross that can’t get funded elsewhere. I did some work for a company that had equity crowd funded because it couldn’t get other finance, it then attracted traditional investment which was tranched based on hitting customer acquisition targets. They failed to even hit a tenth of the first target so they are now out shaking down the gullible in another equity crowd funding raise.

Of course, whatever else happens the equity crowd funding platform gets 30% of the loot.

ed you are also supposed to defend pittsburgh here

I’m assuming you could still rent a whole city block in Braddock for whatever he’s paying for the 85 sqft in downtown San Francisco.

Zeitgeist is not downtown SF, it's in the Mission several miles southwest.

Mountaineering is an extreme example where you’re trying to summit, while also trying to survive.

In some ways, it is like a startup, where you’re trying to maximize and become a unicorn, while also making sure details don’t pull you under. https://t.co/lYADRGMdVG

— Stanford Business (@StanfordGSB) June 29, 2019

Both are full of idiots that die and nobody cares

The most overlooked engine of growth is the individual. If you are really looking to move the world forward, begin by innovating on the inside, and disrupt yourself. https://t.co/SwYIgcnIqh

— Harvard Business Review (@HarvardBiz) June 28, 2019

chugging expired milk to disrupt myself

knocking over a marching band in a domino formation is how i disrupt my sense of personal ethics

Getting back to Zeitgeist...

There's something quintessentially San Francisco about a startup CEO living and working above a longtime bar.

Soon there will be five startup CEO's living and working up there, and no more longtime bar. Ah, metastasizing gentrification. So quintessentially SF. One day in the near future Vivek Kumar will be reminiscing wistfully about back when he used to have to step over puddles of vomit when he left for his morning lattes.

most of the people who used to live above Zeitgeist worked at Zeitgeist or other neighborhood spots. the rents were insanely cheap (my friend rented a room for $300/month there from 2007-2009) and allowed weird people to live in SF, as was kind of possible then.

that some yuppie trash now runs a start-up out of the place is yet another sign that we are in the worst of timelines, and San Francisco as a city is one of the biggest victims of it.

Wow, $300 is insanely cheap. I was paying more than twice that for a similarly sized space in Oakland around the same time. I did have a little kitchen tho and a nice bath. But I also had to deal with the heroin addict who lived downstairs and had a personal grudge against me...long story. Anyway when I was partying at Zeitgeist it was mostly with said yuppie trash so I can't be too self-righteous about it.