I feel an emotional connection with HN. Like a parent or significant other, it knows exactly what I’m passionate about. My favorite interests are startups, technology, math, physics, computer science, and art. These are exactly the fascinating topics that Hacker News consistently delivers to my computer screen every day — for free!

I love posts about startups getting a new round of funding, or realizing a successful acquisition. Nothing gets me more excited than seeing entrepreneurs come a little bit closer to realizing their dreams.

Unfortunately, it sometimes feels like a one way relationship. While articles about my YC friends quickly and gloriously crowd-surf their way to the coveted number 1 spot, for the rest of us HN can seem quite cold and unwelcoming.

After Art.sy finally landed an amazing round of funding, I was very excited for the TechCrunch article on us to get voted up on HackerNews and help us attract a Lead Developer.

But our TechCrunch article barely grazed the front page. Apparently our hard work, sleepless nights, and emotional roller-coaster rides were not worthy of HN’s love. Ouch. I thought we were part of this community too?

hmmm this feeling was so familiar…

[Flashback]

I am a freshman at Princeton going out to the eating clubs for the first time.

The Princeton eating clubs are amazing. Fun parties, fun people, great music, and endless flowing free beer. All available to any student until the late hours of the morning.

Yet beyond the care-free partying veneer, an underlying tension pervades many of the eating clubs and the interactions of their frequent guests.

Every freshman knows that come sophomore year a selective bicker process will decide who gets in and who does not. The members of the club, juniors and seniors, decide which sophomores to accept. So as a freshman, the person you are having a fun and casual conversation with, could end up deciding whether or not you make it through the bicker process.

This process has a very public and painfully obvious result on students’ social lives. Best friends who always went to meals and parties together, are suddenly separated by member-only dinners and formal events.

Luckily the process worked out fine for me, and I was usually too busy staring at code to spend much time worrying about it. But the effects of rejection on people very close to me were unpleasant. And to this day the memory of trying and failing to get some of them into my club recalls very painful emotions.

My brother, who was in the same eating club as me, recently dropped out because he was very disillusioned with the bicker process. While I’m disappointed that he left, I respect his conviction in the face of obvious social drawbacks (although to be fair, as a physics major while also pusuing certificates in math and computer science, it’s not like he goes out much anyway).

Does this interesting parallel imply anything for my beloved Hacker News?

I don’t think so. This post is just an observation of an interesting similarity between two seemingly opposite entities. And, of course, an excuse to start writing again and hopefully attract a Lead Developer .

Is there some prescription for these negative emotions we all sometimes feel in the face of rejection and judgment? Like my brother leaving our eating club, should I stop reading HN in protest and find another, more accepting, online community?

Again, I don’t think so. Rejection is just part of how communities and the world works. Better to accept it for what it is, and focus on making it better, rather than abandon it for some fantasy ideal. Ghandi said it best: “be the change you want to see in the world.”

They also paid well. Really well. Even more than my friends received working 100 hour weeks at I-Banking jobs. In retrospect, no college student should ever have been paid that much (on the bright side, the savings were enough for Art.sy’s initial funding).

But that summer it meant I could go out to nice dinners with my girlfriend, and never worry about paying for drinks at expensive clubs. It meant I could afford fancy clothes, an iPhone, and plane flights to Asia. Having always worked in labs prior to that job, it redefined how I thought about money.

So what is wrong with this picture? I had an extremely fun and challenging job, working with awesome people, that let me afford an incredible lifestyle. It was a dream come true.

But at the end of the summer, the CTO brought me into the corner office and closed the door. I had worked with him all summer and this was my last day, so I was expecting a performance evaluation. Instead, after some chit chatting, he asked me a question:

“Have you ever wondered what value we create here?”

Value? This wasn’t what I was expecting at all.

“Not really.”

“I’ll tell you. We increase the liquidity of the secondary bond market. We shave basis points off of spreads.”

I’ll never forget that question. It turns out that our CTO was saving every penny and had plans of leaving as soon as he had enough cash to pursue his dream.

He didn’t care about the fancy clothes, the clubs, or being a master of the universe. All he cared about was how he would add value to the world. At this point, my story starts to sound cliche, but it was a cliche I needed to experience in person because it radically changed my perspective.

“How am I creating value?”

I realized that the programs I had spent all summer writing were great, if they could make people money and save them time. But if all it resulted in at the end of the day was slightly more efficient markets, well, what was the point of that?

I was so caught up in the fun and camaraderie of my job, so high with the rush of money, I never considered such a simple question.

This probably won’t change the minds of people who have already chosen career paths. But to any students who are thinking about their futures, I hope my story illustrates how easy it is to get swept up by short term pleasures, and how important it is to always ask this question when making important decisions.

Now I’m in NYC starting a company, and he’s leading marines through combat exercises in the woods of Quantico, Virginia. Yet despite our completely different jobs, I was fascinated to discover that we are learning very similar things.

For one, my roommate’s training gives him an intuitive understanding of lean startup principles. The lean startup methodology has only become popularized recently in the startup world. And I think that’s because its principles are very unintuitive. Most startup founders plan everything out years in advance with no expectation for their product or business model to change.

Marines are trained to never plan beyond first encounter with the enemy because “you can never predict in advance how the situation will change.” Instead marines must learn to make quick decisions and become comfortable with uncertainty as the situation changes unpredictably from moment to moment. As my roommate described the process of dealing with enemy combatants, I couldn’t help but think of an entrepreneur performing customer development and pivoting his product and business model around market feedback.

We’ve also experienced similar lessons in leadership and agree that a lot of leadership comes from practice and experience. Effectively leading a platoon of 30-50 marines has a lot to do with the confidence that comes with comfort over time. At first my roommate was very nervous about giving orders to large groups of marines, but over time he started to care less and less. Now he doesn’t bat an eye.

When I was preparing for business plan competitions, I realized the same thing. I was incredibly nervous at the prospect of public speaking. I realized that I just needed to make myself comfortable. So I practiced my pitches hundreds of times until I could visualize all my slides and give the pitch with my eyes closed. I even walked around campus saying my pitch out load to get used to people giving me weird looks or laughing so that audience reactions wouldn’t throw me off on the big day.

Last week there was a great NextNY event on Disruptive Commerce Models or E-Commerce 2.0. Jordan Cooper later wrote a post claiming that the line between emerging commerce models and ad models is blurring.

I couldn’t agree more, and I think there is a 3rd blurring of the line in the commerce space: and that is social media, or more specifically, User Generated Content that is linked (implicitly or explicitly) to commerce.

I am not talking about user generated inventory, as that is nothing new, just consider the success of product companies like Etsy and Threadless, and also service companies like oDesk and eLance. These are great examples of “commerce light” companies that avoid inventory risks and costs. Jordan argues that these companies can be thought of as more advanced advertisers since they perform the same function of driving consumers towards the suppliers. However, what about social media companies that focus on enabling consumer to consumer interactions and converting them into sales?

For other companies, like SponsoredTweets.com,Twitter is a platform for creating conversations and social engagement that leads down the funnel to sales.

In the same way that Commerce 2.0 companies avoid inventory risk and focus on discovery, these social commerce companies aim to avoid discovery risk, and focus on user generated content. Instead of optimizing for search and advertising, they optimize for the viral loop embedded in social interactions. Yet ultimately these services are all part of the same customer acquisition funnel that results in a sale between a consumer and supplier.

Although no-one wants to think about social interactions as ad units, in the abstracted framework Jordan presents in his blog post, there is no doubt that the user generated, or C2C, commerce model of companies like Blippy and Hunch are also becoming harder to distinguish from the new generation of Ad and Commerce startups.