527 karma · joined July 4, 2021
Unicorn status (1 billion) in 2020, to bankrupt in 2025. Another Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonder_(company) https://www.linkedin.com/in/francisdavidson/
"If we assume for a moment that Tesla’s recent sales declines are entirely due to faulty management, specifically caused by people with the job title “program manager,” then Tesla is well in its way to massive improvements. " - This style of writing is hard to parse and dumb.
"Awasthi notes in his post that his signature accomplishments at Tesla occurred “all before hitting 30.” Indeed, it appears that in 2017, when he was 23, he was a student at the University of Cincinnati working on a school project related to the Musk-led “Hyperloop” concept. "
I mean he's most likely late 20's early 30's at the moment so not sure what this is getting at.
> Through an op-ed in Time, Altman and Huffington had just announced the launch of a new company called Thrive AI Health
Launching Companies Grifter, I guess he found his shtick.
Because these apps are designed to be targeted and specific with some of the brightest minds in the world working on them, it's easy to overdose and become addicted.
t. recovering addict
Does this mean they had a relationship
- 6 years of experience including stints as a PM at Tesla and some experience at Goldman and LeapMotion
- joined OpenAI in 2018, shortly became CTO and now CEO
While credentialism and gatekeeping is all too prominent in society today, for Mira I have serious doubts about her capacity as a leader. A serious lack of experience in all aspects
If someone said I can’t call myself a software engineer until I had interned at XYZ company and understood Kubernetes, Docker, Typescript, AWS, Rust, etc. I would say ok and?
I know there are thousands and thousands of producers and artists making content that isn’t of the highest quality, but at the end of the day they are creating. Setting an unreasonable bar of skill is not the way forward.
But back at Arbinet, reality proved less inspiring. Mashinsky's creativity provided an endless stream of new ideas that he loved to strut for interested audiences. But while Mashinsky traveled and talked, promising initiatives at the company – like Internet telephony – were lost because of a lack of focus. In addition, says Bravard, Arbinet's former president, "Clients were extremely frustrated by the gap between Alex's talk and the reality." Arbinet couldn't keep up with the ideas as quickly as Mashinsky could spin them out."
"With Wall Street spooked and Mashinsky on an extended trip to Asia, Bravard and his team made their ultimatum. Mashinsky rushed home from China and fired Arbinet's management for trying to "steal the company." A week later, he temporarily rehired them."
"He was also an early developer of voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP).[10][11]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Mashinsky#cite_note-10 , check out the sources if you want a laugh.
"What if Mashinsky's telecom dreams ultimately fail? He has other, even more ambitious plans. He wants to tap recent advances in genetics to commercialize "body transplants." Companies of the future will be able to "give an old person a new body – keep the head, keep the spine and re-create the rest," he predicts. "That'll be my next assignment.""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Mashinsky
Mashinsky attended a few different universities where he majored in electrical engineering but did not graduate. He later served in the Israeli Army.
"As the founder of eight startups and three Unicorns, Alex has raised more than $1.5B with over $3B in exits, 50+ patents, and led the Celsius team with over $25B in assets." -> 50 patents, credentialism. This man is not a scientist/researcher devoting his time in this pursuit.
See: "a long tradition of decent achievement bestowing authority, then making one's personal fortune by leveraging that earned authority into decades of hackery. See Krugman, Paul and Jay Gould, Steven. It is a symptom of our overcredentialed and credential obsessed society"
https://web.archive.org/web/20000818233151/http://thestandar...
"Visitors to his family home in the Israeli city of Ashkelon say the place is a Rube Goldberg assemblage of energy-saving gadgets ginned up by Mashinsky's father Boris, such as solar panels that heat rainwater to supply the family bath, which then drains outside to water the lawn. It was years before the elder Mashinsky realized that diluted bath soap was killing his trees.
Always tinkering, the younger Mashinsky liked to tap into public phone lines until Israel's national telco threatened to shut off his family's telephone service. He flitted through three universities, never finishing a degree in electrical engineering, served his requisite time in the Israeli army and then struck out to find the promised land, his own global company."
"In his teens he began buying confiscated goods from customs auctions at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport. He bought hairdryers, VCRs, pens, electrostatic paper and anything he could snatch up with borrowed money, resold them and pocketed a tidy profit."
To me it sounds like Alex was in over his head from a young age, poverty changes people and it seems like he was raised a certain way. Entrepreneurial? Sure. Smart? Sure. Grifter? Yes.
"He tried importing urea from Russia, selling Indonesian gold to Switzerland and brokering poisonous sodium cyanide excavated in China for use by gold miners in the U.S. The cyanide business collapsed in 1989 as Mashinsky watched the Tiananmen Square crackdown on CNN.
"I saw this guy standing in front of a tank and I asked the bartender what was going on," Mashinsky says. "My big deal went through the floor." "
Always someone else responsible.
One way to see this is looking at the user who posted the review, even if it's an old account, some companies are lazy and only have a few comments on sports/entertainment subreddits and then their most recent being a link to their comment. Of course this could be a real user, but I believe I can discern a fake. Tougher are those who interleave paid posts in between real comments.
I think with the rise of Chat-GPT esque farms, user reviews will be tougher.
I find people place a lot of trust in creators (tiktok, instagram, etc.) believing because the creator is "big" (5-100k followers), but not too big, they can trust them. They often are just in it for the money though and grift often as well.
>That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.”
>Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out.
>“I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner.
>“I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another.
>“YES!!!” exclaimed a third.
>What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet.
>“I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, shit, that was really good,” remembers Arora. “And it turns out that that fucker was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.”
https://stockx.com/supreme-clay-brick-red
Both art and grifts have changing value > 0.
So many people lose sight of the bigger picture, workers are always cogs in the machine. Luxurious, comfortable cogs, sure. But its crabs in a bucket.