I've worked with Markus, it would be very disingenuous to think he works 15 minutes a day. He really loves running the site.

It's just that the feels like work part of his job only lasts 15 minutes, signing cheques, etc. He just doesn't do the "I work 8 hours 5 days a week thing", if the site is fucked up he is there til it's fixed. If everything is on track, he might be there an hour or two.

You've got a bigger chance of winning the lottery than replicating that.

I've been meaning to put a blog post together for a Show HN advocating for buying lottery tickets and working a sane 35-40 hour week job versus slaving away at a startup for 80-100 hours a week with even worse odds of becoming wealthy.

I'd love to see this post as I'm securely in the "lottery is a tax on the desperate" camp.

I'd love a reason to stop disparaging my father's mega-millions dreams and the dozens of people that frequent my local 7-11 for countless scratch-offs everyday.

I have a gut feeling that a study of the odds/payout ratio of being apart of any given startup acquisition is better than what you'd get from any given lottery/scratch off... though I'm not taking into account the associated costs. How many tickets/scratch-offs is an 80 hour week for a full stack engineer worth?

So, here's me hoping you weren't being facetious.

> I have a gut feeling that a study of the odds/payout ratio of being apart of any given startup acquisition is better than what you'd get from any given lottery/scratch off... though I'm not taking into account the associated costs. How many tickets/scratch-offs is an 80 hour week for a full stack engineer worth?

This is the study I'm interested in performing.

> So, here's me hoping you weren't being facetious.

Not at all! I'd rather buy X lottery tickets on the most advantageous schedule, enjoy working 32-35 hours a week, and spend the rest of my time with family, on hobbies, or traveling.

I'm not going to fault someone for working 80-100 hours a week if that's what they enjoy doing, but if they're doing it to get rich, let's see if the data supports those odds.

This is a really interesting comparison. I've done the startup thing (unsuccessfully) and know a fair number of other people who have as well (including one who came within one business decision of being a millionaire but who couldn't convince his partners to accept the buyout offer they were being given.)

When you consider reward/(risk*effort) rather than just risk/reward it wouldn't surprise me if lotteries came out on top.

But... the thing you don't get from a lottery is a statement like this: my life-partner and I met through PoF almost ten years ago, and I will be forever grateful to Marcus for building the site that made that possible.

We had both been on other sites previously, and we had actually seen each other's profiles on other sites in the year or two before we met while we were both in a post-divorce dating phase, but PoF had the right mix of features that it happened to be where we actually connected with each other.

As I recall, I saved her profile for later consideration at one point, and the site (unbeknownst to me) notified users when that happened, so she looked at my profile and contacted me with something along the lines of, "Don't hesitate, I won't be here long!" I didn't, and she wasn't.

Now, I agree that accolades from strangers doesn't necessarily balance off time not spent with your family, but it is another factor in the overall equation, knowing you've made the world a better place for a lot of people.

I'm not discounting the value that PoF provided to its users. That's important, and to be commended.

Do what you enjoy, ensure someone is getting value out of it, but don't spend too much of your life on any one thing. Everything in moderation.

I'd love to see this study but I'm not sure it's possible, especially because of the fact that most startup failures still lead to great success later in life because of, not in spite of, the work done building the startup (whether or not that's fair? well, that's a different question).

For every startup failure that has granted someone the skills to succeed later in life, there's someone who has had their entire life torn apart putting their all into a startup, whether that be founder or an early employee.

We really need to drop the facade that working a startup will always be beneficial to you, or lead you to wealth and/or success. Sometimes, its going to tear your soul from you and you may not come back from it for a long time.

The major difference between your odds of success when playing the lottery and your odds of success when working at a startup is that you can affect your odds of success by your actions when working on a startup.

A successful startup is not an accident, and a failed startup is not just a lack of luck. Make good business choices, product choices, and infrastructure choices and you can make the startup a success. On the other hand make poor product choices, and poor business choices and your startup will fail.

On the other hand there is very little strategy or way to improve your odds of success when gambling.

For me, it's nice to think of the "what if..." as I will generally only buy a single ticket per drawing over 100 million. I've never gone out and bought multiples of tickets. It's mainly to keep the dream/fantasy. I only even check my tickets a few times a year.

Then again, I'm not much of a gambler in general.

Scratch-offs are for suckers IMO. On pure EV alone, once you hit the 200M range the lottery makes sense to play. It doesn't mean you'll win but buying a ticket for $2 pays a little better than even if I remember the odds correctly.

Think of it as a really large poker game where you didn't have to put any money in the pot and can play a random hand for $2 and win the entire pot. Personally, once it's in the 100M+ range I'll grab a ticket while getting gas.

Such an article would probably not have the conclusion that playing the lottery was a wise investment, exactly.

9 out of 10 startups fail. Those that don't, don't necessarily have prosperous exits. Unless you're a VC or accelerator (which is essentially a fund buying educated "lottery tickets"), the odds are not in your favor.

I'm not saying that startups are that likely to make you rich; what I'm saying is that even in the case that they're an even worse bet than the lottery (and I agree that it is likely), that doesn't mean that playing the lottery is smart; it just means both things are ill advised.

I'd really love to see the numbers on failed startups, though I suspect that they don't exist (since a fair chunk of startups don't even get as far as incorporating)

The odds for a VC are better than the lottery. They get free options giving to them by every startup - "Call us when you have traction".

It's time we started charging them for those options.

That isn't an option. You valuation goes up when you have traction and they buy at the new price...

Darius Kazemi did a talk on a similar idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw

Kazemi is more of an programmer-artist or -comedian, but he releases dozens of side projects a year, all relatively low effort. He uses himself as a test case and also examines KickStarters and how unpredictable their success is.

It all depends on the work you do. If you're coding, the knowledge you gain during the experience is valuable too. If you're in sales and marketing, the networks you build are valuable too.

I found it pretty funny that he said Match is "dying" in that article:

When he does engage in conversation, Frind can be disarmingly frank, delivering vitriolic quips with a self-assured cheerfulness that feels almost mean. Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), he says, is "a complete joke," Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is "a cult," and Match is "dying." ...

That article is from 2009, I remember reading that he was forced to hire more people to do marketing etc. which made the job full time.

iirc, he was was able to scale easily since his c# based dev allowed for performance etc. tl;dr he knew how to build a big site.

Using a “compiled” language like C# probably didn't hurt, but Markus Frind is also wicked smart. Some of his work was cited in a published number theory textbook.

Specifically, he wrote a computer program to look for primes.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sci.math/AZD_CalO7as

I am not an expert, but it seems he wrote some highly optimized code to do it:

> The search was conducted over 10 days on a AMD 1800XP and checked > about 20,667,931,547 Potential AP 22's per Second.

It's a combination of Moore's law and churn, since the site is reasonably effective it generates huge churn.

Since RAM follows Moore's law you could always keep the users in RAM if you wrote effective queries because user growth didn't outpace Moore's law. All you had to do was build a server big enough.

C# definitely helped vs ruby, the real kicker was stored procs, everything was a highly tuned stored proc. The huge insights I got was latency, by keeping everything close together you could run some really abysmal synchronous code with out cratering everything.

Also, he really cared about the ant hill more than the ants. He would do horrible things to the ants that would encourage them to build a bigger ant hill. (Ants are users, employees were treated very well)

As a fictional example, lets say the site was skewing too heavily male by 20%, just add a line in the stored proc that gave a male user a 20% chance of their registration not being written to disk. Voila, site has the proper mix, onto the next problem. He was the most brutally effective person I've ever worked with.

The memory vs users idea is briliant. I would love to have observed him although working under someone like that sounds like it requires a great amount of patience.

The architecture post on high scalability is truly inspirational.

Is that last anecdote true? When did you work with him?

As a fictional example... The ant thing was verbatim while we were all drinking...

But seriously, go to a club... same thing...