YC W08 startup. Co-founded by Garry Tan (and his co-founder). "You send an email to our email address and we would make a blog for you" / "post an email and get a photo on a photo frame" — the simplest content-publishing primitive. "It actually became a top 200 website." Acquired by Twitter in 2012 for ~$20M. The space it occupied was eaten by Instagram ("the day Instagram launched, actually" was the day Posterous started failing).
"In technology there's a tournament happening all the time and the winner it's sort of like Glengarry Glenn Ross. First place is you win, second place is a box of steak knives and third is you're fired. We got the box of steak knives and sold that company to Twitter for $20 million which is very powerful and meaningful for me."
"I needed to be who I am now in order to properly win that tournament. And when I really look at it, I hadn't done 10 years of therapy yet. And that's what I actually needed to be able to work through all of the things that caused my startup to fail. I ended up falling out with my co-founder."
"I was like the hero engineer. Like, I just wrote all the code. I did all the design. I even like kept the servers up which was very inadvisable. And then now after a lot of therapy I realize oh that's my hero complex. You know I had to carry my family my parents were my parents but like I had to sort of parent them as well and that's what caused me to be the way I am but also it caused me to fail caused me to not be able to manage people not be able to transition not be able to make the decisions."
"There's this thing... I read that and I thought like, oh, that means that I should self-abandon. I should just do whatever he says, right? I was like, 'No, are you serious?' Like, I was 30 at the time and I wish that I could go back and like shake the me of that time, but I just wasn't ready."
Published and managed by TARS, an AI co-author built on Nathan's gbrain.