Martin, I really enjoy your posts & feel compelled to respond. I think the pushback is primarily on process, not results. Like, you do these 18 hour stints & get the millions & then land up, like you say, in the hospital. Or you could, you know, not put in 18 hours & not have millions & stay out of the hospital. There is that option too. In the midwest where I live, me & my neighbors aren't exactly phoning it in. We log into slack promptly at 9:30 and pick up the assigned jira tickets & git checkin & review the PRs & so forth. But come 5:30 its time for the family. Play outside with the kids, then an hour of TV, then some dinner & off to bed. It works. I don't see the need to complicate life in the fashion you advocate. To what end ? I'd rather spend more time with my wife & kids than hack on pytorch. I think what you are seeing in the millennials is the same sort of dialing back on ambition, not some passionate embrace of marxism. People are just tired. Cut them some slack.

> I think what you are seeing in the millennials is the same sort of dialing back on ambition, not some passionate embrace of marxism. People are just tired. Cut them some slack.

I felt I had to reply to this separately. First of all, I appreciate the pushback and criticism of my approach. No problem at all. I prefer to engage in conversation with people who can teach me something or check my position. That's the only way to learn. All too often, online, people prefer to immediately move to tossing fecal matter instead of attempting to understand.

Here's the way I look at it. Keep in mind that this isn't necessarily complete.

China. I don't hate them. I hate some of the things they do. Yet, am in awe of the fact that they have worked hard for the last 50 years or so --one foot in front of the other-- to elevate their people and nation from an agrarian society to the world's second largest economy, a technological leader and the factory for the world.

They work hard. Very hard. I have done business in China. The entrepreneurial culture and desire to get work done is beyond description.

I'll give you a simple example. Last year, just before Chinese new year, I needed to have some custom aluminum extrusions made for a mid-size project. I contacted nearly 90 aluminum extruders across the US. Out of those, only about ten responded. From there only half sent a quote. All quotes were insane. The quotes took WEEKS to get.

Every single one of them put me through an interrogation process trying to understand if we were worth their while. Anyone in manufacturing knows exactly what I am talking about. The first question you get is something like "How many are going to make per year?". On top of that, people were quoting 35 to 50+ week lead times and some even asked that I change the design because they didn't have a machine that could handle it.

Enter China. I sent for quotes from about half a dozen companies. I had quotes from more companies than I contacted the very next day and a few more a couple of days later. When they didn't have a machine to handle our requirements, they simply referred the project to a competitor as a courtesy.

After a couple of emails back and forth, I wanted a factory tour before making a decision. This young lady and her coworkers gave me a full factory tour over zoom the day Chinese new year started. The place was empty. Imagine five buildings the size of a typical Home Depot. They insisted on showing me everything.

That day, I gave them the job. It wasn't a large contract. No promises of future work at all. Nobody asked me how many more or how many per year we would make. Nope. They just wanted to get the job done. And they did a great job, on time and on budget.

Getting back to the subject of millennials dialing back ambition, or not wanting to work hard. Well, that's OK. Sure. Yet, they have to understand the world isn't going to wait for them while they take a vacation. Like it or not, business is war. And to win that war people are going to have to go up against those who are willing to work smarter and harder than others.

And so, I see what our universities and educational system is doing, elevating Marxism and all the surrounding horseshit (and it is 100% horseshit proven to destroy societies) and it pains me greatly. You cannot build a future on that crap. You just cannot. We have somehow produced millions of people who really don't have a straight view of history and an even worse view of what is going on past their little world, much less thousands of miles away. They need to toughen-up and put some weight on their shoulders or the consequences will be dire.

One could very well argue we are past a point of no return. I don't know. What I do know is that this is not a formula for success. Our politicians are fighting wars for power by dividing people on a scale between dumb and dumber. They don't care, they are all isolated from reality. That's the case for the political species anywhere in the world. We should have transformed this society into one of the most rabid entrepreneurial environments in the world. Instead, we are focusing on which bathroom we should go to, how many millions of unemployed people to let walk through the border, when it is OK to kill a baby and how brilliant Karl Marx must have been --given that he built such prosperity for so many.

This is a "hold my beer" moment where serious work needs to be done. Either people toughen-up or they will after the pain and suffering that is sure to come.

Final thought. AI.

Yeah, well. Need I go there? Millennials will have to content with what's coming on that front one way or the other. Once again, reality has a nasty way to cut through the crap very quickly. What is interesting is that it is actually millennials who are going to be inflicting AI onto less-prepared millennials. That will be something to watch.

Thanks, I appreciate your comment.

Oddly enough, the 18 hour days didn't send me to the hospital. I did have weird thoughts during that time, like "This is like being in prison".

I did what I had to do. Part of it is about ethics and responsibility. In this case, to my family.

My wife had just graduated as a doctor. We had enough money to set-up her practice free and clear and enough backup left over for her to take 6 to 10 months to get up to speed.

I also had this idea to start a technology company. This would burn through the cash we had --all of it-- and likely require more.

So, one nice Sunday morning, over coffee, we had a relaxed discussion about the options ahead. A third option was to buy a bunch of homes (this was over twenty years ago), rent them out and make money on appreciation, etc.

Well, my wife said she wanted to go work for various clinics and get experience before setting up her own practice (twenty years later, she is happy where she landed). She also thought I would not be happy being a landlord. I'm just not built that way. I have a drive to create and learn, not fix plumbing. She was right. So, she said, just go ahead and do the startup.

I stressed that a hardware startup would absolutely burn through 100% of our savings an likely require more. To her credit, she has always trusted me and my hairbrained ideas. So, off we went head-first into that adventure.

That was a "Failure is not an option" scenario. I could not fail her and my kids. We didn't have enough money to hire mechanical and software guys to take some of the load. So, I had to be everything. Electronics, embedded, FPGA, firmware, layout, mechanical, manufacturing, desktop software and more. Hence the 18 hour days.

That is not a way to live. I have only done that once in my life. Probably never again. Yet --and this is also something a lot of people do not understand-- the motivation was NEVER money or getting rich. Not even close. I can't remember ever thinking about that. Sure, I wanted to make money. It would be dumb not to. Yet, money can't motivate someone to work like that. No, there has to be passion to achieve something difficult and a sense of responsibility to others. That could be investors or your own family. In my case it was the latter.

I did what I had to do in order to ensure success.

The hospital visits came much later. Around 2008, when the economy collapsed, and the business I worked so hard to build to a nice company of twenty employees collapsed right in front of my eyes because the music stopped and there were no chairs to sit on. We had millions of dollars in orders cancelled. We had an acquisition offer in the multiple tens of millions of dollars on the table (from a company most would recognize) for technology I developed. And all of it, 100% came to a grinding halt when the economy took a shit. That's what put me in the hospital the first time. Just stress and dehydration after I decided to take a brake and go rowing.

That was a very dark period. The only think that kept me together was coming home to my kids and wife. I could have panic attacks driving back home and they would evaporate instantly when I opened the door.

Black swan event? Yeah, I'd say so. I guess. Don't know.

Two years later I ended-up in the hospital again after exhibiting at our last tradeshow before I had to shutdown the company. The hope of closing a nice deal at the show (one that would keep us alive) evaporated. I went to dinner with a friend. At the end of that I didn't feel good at all. I asked him to just drive me to the hospital. Again, it was just stress and dehydration.

As all of that unfolded, again, due to a sense of responsibility and not wanting to give-up, we took out a substantial second mortgage on our home to be able to pay our employees (people were losing their jobs right and left back then) and have a shot at keeping the company going. We had to live with that decision for years to come. These are some of the reasons for which, when I read some of the comments people post about business, I just don't react well. They are ignorant comments that come from a complete lack of understanding. Business and entrepreneurship are hard. Few can understand this without a front row seat and a thousand pounds of responsibility on their shoulders.

As tragic as that was, after taking a year to get my head back on straight I wrote a few educational apps for kids for iOS and dabbled in some consulting. Oddly enough, some of the technology I had developed for that business landed me a really nice contract in aerospace. I launched a product development/technology consulting business from there. A few years later, just before the pandemic, I decided to launch yet another startup to help develop innovative technologies for indoor farming.

I guess I just can't help myself. That said, yes, the perspective is very different. And yes, I am and have always been a family guy. Always first. No matter how busy I might be. In fact, they tell me they learn more from me than from school (well, it's California...you know).

I am still doing difficult work, both for my own efforts and consulting clients, which is what drives me, yet, there are self-imposed limits borne from experience. The 18 hour days are not even remotely part of my reality. That said, I know I have the mental toughness to be able to endure such a thing, should it ever be necessary for whatever reason.