Dear Miss Disruption 2
Silicon Valley’s Favorite Advice Column Returns
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September 2, 2013 — Dealing with Betrayal; Restaurant Reservations in San Francisco; the Subtle Art of Venture Capital
Dear Miss Disruption,
I’m not sure where to begin.
My husband and I have been married for a few years, and we have a small child. For the last few months, I felt like something was wrong. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
Then this morning, while he was in the shower, I looked at his phone on an impulse. There it was, clear as day: he was texting another woman, telling her he loved her. It looked like he had been talking to her nearly every day.
When he came out of the shower, I pretended like I hadn’t seen anything. He doesn’t suspect I know.
I’ve been alternating between white-hot anger and gut-wrenching panic. What happens if I confront him? What if he’s not sorry? What if he is sorry, but I’m never able to forgive him?
Jaded In Love, Terrified of Ending in Divorce
Dear JILTED,
I am so sorry for what has happened to you. I know exactly how you feel.
“But Miss Disruption,” you might say, “you’re an international success! You have a revolutionary advice column start-up with astronomical valuations!” While this may be true, I am quite familiar with rejection and betrayal. This is a tricky situation with much at stake—your marriage, your self-respect, your child. But I think what you have to do is obvious: you have to learn to code.
Have you ever seen The Social Network? It’s a great movie, isn’t it? I love watching it on Saturday night. Just me, my MacBook Retina, and Mark Zuckerberg.
My buddy the Zuckster claims that the movie is wholly inaccurate, but I still find it strangely compelling. Poor Zuck, beset at all sides by ignorant girls and stupid jocks. But never fear, our hero Zuckleberry Finn then goes on to invent the single greatest innovation in history: an internet telephone book. And man, he showed them.
Just think about it. All you need to do is create a new social network. Pick up a little bit of PHP. Not even a lot of PHP, just a little PHP. A tiny bit of work and some clever branding will get you very far. Use a gimmick to stand out. You could try an invite-only system, with invitations issued only at Burning Man. As the Man burns down, a thousand exclusive invite codes could flutter from the sky onto the playa. You’ll generate so much buzz, VentureBeat will give itself an ulcer.
Next thing you know, you’ve raised your first round of VC, you’ve negotiated a domain name out of the hands of a squatter, and you have a nice, clean sans-serif logo. Your product is gaining users exponentially. Your valuation is out of control. The SEC is demanding that you IPO.
Your husband throws his life savings at the shares that become available in the IPO.
But it’s a trap. Your social network is dangerously overvaluated, a defunct hype machine long-since abandoned even by the most gullible of middle school students.
And on top of that, your idiot husband has created an account on your website, which he then uses to message that skank. The fool! You can see, control, and change everything. Because you know how to code.
You then change your husband’s status update to something rude and swap out all of his photos for pictures of butts. That will teach him.
Your revenge will be complete. Your scorn and rage will be seared forever into his eyeballs. He will taste nothing but shame and underperforming shares, forever. And you? You will have become Zuck Incarnate.
Dear Miss Disruption,
What does a guy have to do to get a goddamn table at Quince on a Friday night? My co-worker managed to get a table. How the fuck did he do that? I call and call and they just laugh at me when I try to book a table at 7. Don’t they know who the fuck I am? Get me a fucking table, before I claw your eyeballs out with a pedal wrench and then run you over with my limited edition carbon fiber bicycle. Every night that my mouth is graced by a food of lesser quality than the finest elderflower broth tinged with aloe and black sesame, I am going to bludgeon a homeless man to death with my titanium water bottle.
Who do I have to kill to get a fucking reservation?
San Francisco, Please Solve Your Constantly Howling Organisms
Dear SF PSYCHO,
Your frustration is palpable, but this could have all been avoided if you had just learned to code. What are you doing, making reservations by phone? Don’t make me laugh, bro. No one calls anyone anymore, we disrupted that industry, like, centuries ago.
And don’t tell me you’ve been hitting up OpenTable like some code-illiterate chump. Everyone knows OpenTable is swarming with other people’s bots, thumping away at the system with wget until they can snatch any and all reservations the very moment they become available. Sure, you could try to just write a better bot, or even run your bots from the same colo as OpenTable, but you’re way late to the game, bro. And as you and I both know, when you don’t get exactly what you want, whenever you want, the only thing to do is to disrupt everything. Devise a reservation injection attack to delete all the existing reservations and throw the stale old status quo into total chaos. Be fearless, innovative, and unafraid of breaking things. All those tables are belong to us.
Alternately, you could drop in and just tell them you’re Mark Zuckerberg. I do this all the time. Works like a charm! Last time I did it, the Bad Motherzucker himself was like, “I am going to call the police if you pull this stunt again,” and, “You realize everyone in San Francisco just spits in my food anyways,” but ha ha ha. Oh Zucklehead, you big jokester.
Dear Miss Disruption,
I’m a successful venture capitalist, running one of the world’s foremost startup incubators. Thanks to past experience, we have come to select founders on the basis of certain criteria. For one thing, they have to be young—under thirty-two at least. And no foreign accents— if you’re too clueless to learn to speak idiomatic English, how are you supposed to disrupt anything?
But thanks to those politically correct pansies over at Valleywag,everyone is furious at me for simply following the dictates of my unimpeachable empirical evidence!
To make things worse, my favorite picks of the year are already failing. I’m particular disappointed in one start-up founder—I thought for sure this guy had all the markings of success! A young white college dropout … how could he have been a bad investment? He looked exactly like Mark Zuckerberg!
Am I doing something wrong, Miss Disruption? And what can I say to that screaming horde over at Valleywag to get them to shut up? Perhaps you could shed some light on the situation?
Truly puzzled,
Paul Graham
Dear Paul,
While I normally try to provide upbeat, encouraging advice to my readers, I cannot hide my dismay at what you are describing: a system built on whimsy, bias, and unscientific fallacies. You have created a machine that doles out privilege on the basis of your subjective gut feelings, which you have cloaked in guise of “evidence” by allowing this runaway case of confirmation bias to seep into every aspect of your process. What you have done spits upon all notions of fairness, justice, and meritocracy. I must urge you to immediately eliminate your own personal biases from the equation.
What you have to do is clear: you have to build a facial recognition system that will ensure that the recipients of your investments sufficiently resemble Mark Zuckerberg. It is simply unscientific to fly by the seat of your pants and fund start-ups based on the naked eyeball alone. Embrace the objective precision that a technological solution can bring. Open CV is a great start. Read the latest white paper on making basis vectors with eigenfaces. There are enough pictures of Mark Zuckerberg out there to build a great set of eigenfaces. An EigenZuck, if you will.
Instead of putting your trust in what you think looks like Mark Zuckerberg, put your trust in numbers. Numbers that will tell you how much someone looks like Mark Zuckerberg.
Oh, and on an unrelated note, we should get some drinks sometime. Let me tell you all about my innovative new Mark Zuckerberg plastic surgery startup.
That’s it for today, folks! I’ll be back next week to answer all your burning questions with all the scintillating rigor of a real STEM major. As always, send your letters to DearMissDisruption@gmail.com.
Until then, I am yours truly,
