Start-Up Culture Is Not For Middle-Aged Men
Welcome To What We Learned This Week, a digest of the week's most curiously important facts. This week: start-up culture is hell if you're old, it really pays to be in real estate and mechanical calculators do not like dividing by zero.
THE STANDING DESKS DO NOT HELP
Start-Up Culture Really Isn't For Old People
After reading Dan Lyons' account of start-up culture, you will roll your eyes. At HubSpot, a nebulous online marketing start-up, employees refer to firings as "graduation," the company mantra is "1+1=3" and an employee literally writes "HubSpot = Cool."
But there is a perfectly good explanation for this! Starting a company is not easy. You need money and people. Luckily, young people do not cost much. In fact, you can tell them that their work means something and you can even pay them slightly less! When faced with the option of grinding it out in a big, hairy company or "building something," young people will almost always chose the latter.
And early on, when it's six or seven people, it's probably true: you are building something! Eventually, when that "something" gains traction and you need more people, the prospect of "building something" doesn't ring as true anymore. How can it when you and six or seven other people are trying to sell the thing that's being built? So, you offer something else the big hairy companies can't: free beer, cereal, snacks, foosball, conference names with quirky names and themes, and a sense that the company culture is Good and Cool and unlike any other company. Because, above all, most young people do not want to work in the same place that their parents do.
Enter Lyons and his time at HubSpot. You might feel sympathetic for him. "I was unceremoniously dumped from my job at Newsweek magazine in New York," he writes. "I was terrified that I might never work again." Which is a funny thing to say because in between Newsweek and HubSpot, Lyons was the editor-in-chief of the tech news website ReadWrite. On his first day at HubSpot, Lyons wrote a blog post and said more funny things. "I also had grown less and less enchanted with the kind of work I was doing as a 'mainstream' journalist," he blogs.1 Very funny! Now, Dan Lyons writes for the HBO series Silicon Valley. Which, we can all agree, is a very funny show.
[Fortune]
THE RENT REALLY IS TOO DAMN HIGH
US Residential Real Estate Is The Most Profitable Industry And It's Not Even Close
There is a handy way to calculate just how healthy a business or given industry is: earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBDITA. And if you take a company's EBITDA and divide it by its revenue, you'll have a pretty accurate picture of how profitable is. Companies with high EBDITA margins have strong revenue streams and low overhead costs.
Using this logic, the Financial Times looked at federal economic data for the nation's various industries. At the top you have the usual suspects: Oil, mining and the film industry. And while it's probably not surprising that residential real estate is at the top — everyone needs a place to live right? — what is shocking is that it touts a 90.4 EBDITA margin. At the very least, this means that there is a lot of money flowing into real estate. According to the FT, nearly a quarter of all the money made here in the United States is earned by the real estate industry. And as any seasoned Monopoly player can tell you, owning many houses is much better than owning a single hotel.
IT'S NOT THE END OF THE WORLD
Predictably, Dividing By Zero Does Not Work On A Mechanical Calculator
Thanks to the Internet, the concept of dividing by zero has been played up as some sort of sun-imploding action. And watching this mechanical calculator pitch a hissy-fit would support that line of thinking. But when you look past the sound and the fury and actually learn what's going on, it's really not that world-ending. As Eric Limer explains at Popular Mechanics, the calculator is, strangely, just performing basic arithmetic:
Twenty divided by four, for instance is just:
20 – 4 = 16
16 – 4 = 12
12 – 4 = 8
8 – 4 = 4
4 – 4 = 0
Five steps to get to zero, so the answer is five. Simple!
Of course if you use the same process while dividing by zero, everything explodes because the sequence for 20 divided by zero is:
20 – 0 = 20
20 – 0 = 20
20 – 0 = 20
20 – 0 = 20
20 – 0 = 20
And on and on and oh no oh no oh no oh no.
In reality, the calculator isn't freaking out. It's just diligently trying to divide 1 by 0.
[Digg]
YES, They DID DONE GOOFED
The Internet Was Spectacularly Mean To Jessi Slaughter
You probably vaguely remember chuckling at a video of a pre-teen girl crying and her father yelling in the background, telling the Internet that they "Done goofed," and he "backtraced" them and would report them to the "cyberpolice."
This now infamous video, however, is just the endpoint of a campaign of coordinated harassment from 4Chan. Buzzfeed's Katie Notopoulos caught up with the person formerly known as Jessi Slaughter — they now go by Damien Leonhardt — and things did not get better, even after interest in the video died down. At school Leonhardt lost friends, they were placed into foster care, and their father died from a heart attack just a year after the video went viral.
Today, online harassment is at the forefront of public attention, but looking back at the Jessi Slaughter debacle, and it becomes very clear that the Internet — while still a haven for blind hatred today — used to be even worse.
[BuzzFeed]
YOU CAN PUT MONEY UNDER IT
Yep, A Hydraulic Press Will Smush Coins
Over the past few weeks, you've likely seen the work of The Hydraulic Press Channel. Every day, the owner of a hydraulic press will put something under the press, turn it on, and then film the results. Some are interesting, some are predictable. Recently, the hydraulic press man decided to flatten some coins. Unlike the other hydraulic press victims. They put up a fight.
[Digg]
For more Internet distillations like this, check out our back catalog of Digg Roundups. And for more stuff from Digg, check out our Originals archive.
