Sam Parr and his co-host break down the hype cycle using a clock metaphor: ideas launch at midnight, hit peak hype by 6 PM as world-changing, then crash into criticism by 7 PM. They trace Lambda School from bootcamp darling to target of attacks, showing the pattern repeats throughout history. Founders should expect these waves instead of panicking.
Have you seen this blog post called, uh, What Time Is It in Silicon Valley?
You ever seen this? Yeah, it was a clock.
Yeah, it's basically, it describes what you're talking about, which is, um, this guy who was doing like PR or comms for tech companies for a long time. He's like, hey, you know, I've been through this cycle 5 times now. This is how it works. He's like, imagine a clock and, you know, from midnight to 1 AM, it's like, okay, this new thing is born. Oh, this is interesting. That's the narrative. And then as you get to sort of like 3, you know, 3 o'clock, it's like, oh, ooh, this is the shiny new fun thing to play with. Everybody talks about it. Everybody has opinion of it. Everybody wants to show their friend this thing cuz it's the new thing. And then when you get, by the time you get to 4 or 5, people start to, the narrative changes to like, hey, this is not just a toy. This could be something big. And by 6:00 PM, you know, you know, the, the clock hand has gone halfway around by 6:00 PM. It's like, um, this is gonna change the world. And that's, so like right now the company going through this is Lambda School where it started as this little bootcamp. Then it was like, holy shit, this is gonna disrupt universities. And then if you've noticed in the last month, there's all this press coming out in some ways rightfully so, cuz they make mistakes as they grow and whatnot. Uh, but some of these things were always there. It's just the narrative changed. So by 7:00 PM it starts to be like, eh, you know what? It's not as good as everyone says. Actually, the product kind of sucks. You know what? This founder is like, doesn't know what the hell they're doing. This thing's about to crash. And then it goes through this cycle of rebirth. And so now once you read that post and then you start reading the news, you start to just see that everywhere. It's like, oh, this is the hype cycle. It's going, you know, you can just tell what, what hour of the clock are we in? And it's like, you know, not to use the pun, but it's like clockwork. It just, you see it happening over and over again.
Yeah. And that, and I read a lot of history books. It happens like that. Like Rockefeller had the same thing, anti-billionaire. Anti-this, anti-that. It, it, it's cyclical. So this isn't anything new.
Yeah. They build you up, they break you down. And if you're, if you're in that company, you just gotta know, um, this is, these are the waves to be expected. You shouldn't be surprised and reacting when it happens. And if you're the reader, like, you know, the stuff is entertaining, but like, don't just go for the ride.
You know? And if you're gonna be success— successful, you're gonna, you gotta go, you gotta get a, you're gonna get a lot of hate. Yeah. Like, On this little podcast in the comment section, we get called, we get made fun of all the time.
Not enough hate.
I would like more hate actually, but we've, I, we've been called ugly.
Yeah, we've got ugly. Some guy wrote like, uh, when we started doing video, they were like, hey, audio guys, audio.
And then another guy was like, you know, you should show a background video of whatever they're talking about because I don't wanna look at these fools. Yeah.
