JamesBarney

Small boring companies don't get funded anywhere.

Yes 100% this, there are lots of people with the same ambitions as the OP, but they aren't getting 600k checks for an idea. They're building companies on side, savings, or with a little help from family or friends.

I raised about that much. We were farther along though, we had 3 founders, 200k in ARR, 300% YoY growth and our projections were to hit 1.5m in ARR in 3 years. Angels we didn't already have relationships with were not even remotely interested. (The ones that did invest were friends). So we were only able to raise from friends and family.

You said you were willing to part with 40% at a 1.5m valuation for an idea which is a very high valuation unless you have a very particular background, or a track record of building successful companies (which I assume you don't have or you'd have the cash or network to fund it). A company with 300k in ARR is maybe worth a million dollars. Do I want my 50k investment to maybe be worth 33k in 3 years IF everything goes according to plan? In addition I don't know how you're going to make this work. If you have a burn rate of 400k your first year, and aren't going to be profitable for three years how do you make 600k last until you hit profitability?

Companies like this with small dreams are mostly bootstrapped with a little money from family or friends (Note you will very likely some or all of this money, keep that in mind when taking money from family and friends). Given you constraints this is realistically your only option. And if you want to accelerate how quickly you go to market find a cofounder.

> I publish copyrighted code. Some company decides to consume it without purchasing a license. The product they distribute is vastly different from my code itself, but I can still sue them into oblivion.

No you can't. If a company reads your copyrighted code, then writes up a spec and sends it to another team that writes up code that accomplishes what you did, that doesn't violate copyright and you wouldn't be able to sue them into oblivion.

> And there’s nothing new being produced. It’s always a statistical output of previous works.

I don't think you can define those terms such that what you say is true of AI but not true of people.

Why shouldn't a prompt output be copyrightable?

My opinion is we should treat AI like photoshop/word/windows. If you use windows to copy a file and distribute it, Microsoft isn't liable you are. If you use word to type up a book and sell it, you're responsible.

Same with a statistical model, if you general a copyrighted work and distribute it you are responsible. But the tool (GPT-4) maker isn't responsible just like Adobe isn't responsible for copyright infringement.

The copyrighted text/image isn't generated until you ask it to. Your prompt is what reproduces the material.

A human is still entering the prompt to generate the possibly copyrighted image/text. I don't think copyright law should care about the implementation. It's ok to copy a style if you use paint brushes or photo shop. But not ok if you use a statistic model?

There is a huge leap from "Infinite growth is not possible" to we're about to hit a wall.

And I don't know how capitalism demands more growth, it just provides more growth which is why capitalism is successful at things like reducing poverty.

I'd rather have laws that prohibit free speech than have the government be able to stifle speech by pressuring large monopolistic organizations behinds closed doors.

The first two I disagree with but could arguably see, but the last three are really the death of the ACLU as we knew it.

I think that the ACLU had a bigger impact with 60m in funding as a nonpartisan organization with a respected reputation than as a soldier in the culture war.

Do you agree with everyone's idea of what a bad actor is?

Because Mississippi and New York have very different ideas about who are bad actors.

My guess is the downvotes are coming because you are expressing a far outside of mainstream science opinion without any substantiation.

I think this is the issue. Starting a company is a lot riskier than working at one. To do that you usually need capital and/or someone who is willing to work their ass off for peanuts for a couple of years. The only reason people will take risks is for outsized returns.

The problem isn't the number of people willing to risk someone else's money to start a company but their own.

We could turn the government into a giant VC. I'm not bullish on the results.

Sure, I'm not arguing that we don't ban contracts between consenting adults. But I think we should be highly suspicious of them.

> - Contracts for the sale or distribution of controlled substances, such as drugs or drug paraphernalia; + Gambling

Consent is a gray area due to the addictive nature of the what the buyer is buying.

> Prostitution

We do ban this, mostly due to I think society finding it icky.

>- Employment contracts that permit hiring underage workers.

Not between consenting adults.

Does it? By economic development do you mean relative to other countries or in absolute terms? The US was pretty democratic way before we were anywhere close to rich my 2023 standards.

It doesn't force people into contracts, but it bans two willing parties from making certain contracts.

I've always enjoyed being a contractor because I have unlimited vacation (within reason) and can balance how much time I want to take off with how much money I want to make.

Or to put it another way.

Everyone has incomplete information. If you bid more than everyone else it's because one of the following is true.

1. It is more valuable to you than anyone else.

2. Everyone else is mistakenly undervaluing it

3. You are mistakenly overvaluing it

If you don't have inside information, or have a unique reason why it is worth more to you than anyone else. Then 3 is far more likely than 2.

I think most companies do this pretty well when deciding what projects different teams are responsible for. Those are usually pretty good business joints to cleave the domain.

People just lose their mind when you say the microservice.

Yeah can't we just have services without making them tiny. Just because I don't think having 7 services is an appropriate architecture for a team of 3 doesn't mean I don't think it's an appropriate architecture for a team of 100.

Having multiple systems managed by different teams sharing a database is not a monolith. I've seen that idea brought up multiple times by microservices enthusiasts as a way to route around the difficulty of transactions. Most monolith enthusiasts like myself would build one service on top of one database.

If big oil writes an environmental organization a check that doesn't make it astro turfing.

Astroturfing is pretending their is a movement when there isn't. The anti-nuclear movement was real, big oil just wrote some of them checks because they realized what was bad for nuclear was good for them.

A lot of this is not inherent to building nuclear reactors. We've regulated nuclear power to the point where it's cost prohibitive. If we required every solar panel installer to have a phd, and only let them work 1 hr per day solar would be incredibly expensive too.

Imagine we were willing to accept the same death rate as natural gas. Reducing regulations to the point of having 100x more nuclear incidents. How much cheaper would they be to build?

Most of which we were going to decommission anyway which would have cost us money. (With the patriot missile battery being a notable exception)

It was not big oil that pushed the anti-nuclear campaign. It was environmentalists. And they're still active today, sometimes pushing for solar. Sometimes fighting solar and windmills to protect wildlife.

Now I'm sure some oil and gas companies decided to fund some of these groups because they saw these people could be useful, but that doesn't mean the movement was astroturfing.

Why? So rich successful individuals spend more time sailing on their yachts instead of building their business?

I'm curious to hear your thoughts, and I don't think you'll bias tptacek, he's spent a long time doing it.

I spent a lot of time in consultancies and started one myself, I'm not tptacek but here's my two cents.

Does the buyer see you as a commodity? How hard is it to find someone else to do what you do?(as defined by the customer not you) Can you differentiate yourself from competitors?

I think it really comes down to establishing a brand. And the problem is if you can't establish a brand you can't charge enough to fund growth (and at the beginning charge enough to give you time to grow the company).

A company with a brand can charge 2-3x their labor costs. A company without one can maybe charge 25% more than their labor costs and this puts you in the classic consultancy spiral where you spend so much time working for your business you don't have enough time to work on your business.

My understanding of fine-tuning is 95% of the work could be re-used between different foundation models.

It is not straight forward that in the counterfactual where we limited CEO pay with government grants in 2010 we would 100% still have a Moderna. I imagine CEOs would be a more hesitant to take government grants if we did. And if they didn't take the 1.7b maybe everything would be the same, or maybe the company would have died/rolled out the vaccine 2 years later.

How profitable do we want to make pandemic preparedness? I think we should make it wildly profitable.