Reputation

I really like this scene from the movie The Beach. The backstory is that the farmer allowing them to stay there finds that someone has created a map or something and he says he wants the guy who did it killed because the farmer is growing illegal drugs.

So he hands a gun to their leader and she pulls the trigger but there's no bullets. The farmer smiles and people flee, having seen what she's WILLING to do to keep their secret and also heard DiCaprio list off other dirty secrets that happened less publicly than his proposed execution.

That's a dramatization and real life doesn't necessarily work that way. It's here for illustration purposes that PR and smoke and mirrors and talking a good game isn't REALLY how you build a reputation. A solid reputation is based on your behavior and your choices, especially in difficult circumstances.

I've told the story about the John Deere tractor company elsewhere. During The Great Depression, while other tractor companies repossessed tractors in large numbers, they told farmers to keep their tractors and "Pay us when you can. The Dust Bowl will end. The rains will return. You'll need your tractor when the good weather returns."

Decades later in the 1970s, someone working for a different tractor company concluded there was no point in stopping at a small farm with a John Deere tractor on it because they were diehard loyal to that company. They only still had a farm at all because dad or grandpa got told "Keep your tractor. Pay us when you can."

Most people seem unaware of that history and in recent years I think even the people at the company have forgotten it. Not too many people care what small farmers think about anything nor why they do what they do.

That reputation was established among the people that mattered to the company and there's apparently relatively little talk about that history and how it made a core part of the market diehard loyal to one company who made a counterintuitive decision during an unusually widespread economic crisis such that repossession wasn't the right way to handle it.

Some people might see that decision as idealistic or generous or charitable. Whomever made that decision may not have seen it that way at all.

They may have realized this is BIG. It's not just a few fools who didn't know what they were doing going bankrupt, so it's really not good business to put our customers in a position where they can't recover financially.

Hacker News is the funnel for Y Combinator. You have to have a Hacker News account to apply for their VC money at all.

If life worked like the movies, mistreating the highest ranked woman on Hacker News until she doesn't want to put up with your shit anymore should have potential applicants -- especially potential women applicants -- fleeing while screaming like in the clip above.

But this is real life and that's probably not happening. They've openly shit all over me the entire almost sixteen years I've been there and had no problem growing a multi billion dollar company.

But at the same time, most people on planet Earth seem oblivious to the singular decision during The Great Depression that made so many farmers diehard loyal to John Deere. Even John Deere seems to no longer remember the cause and effect connection between their decision and their reputation among the people most critical to their business.

It would be amusing if it turned out applicants are down, especially women applicants, and there's some correlation between that data and the steady downward spiral of my relationship to their funnel in recent years.

No, I can't be arsed to look if they even bother to publish that kind of data, much less try to determine if there's any pattern along the lines of this WILD speculation on a lazy Saturday afternoon.