This is bizarre. I don't think anyone would argue that it would be great to have more diverse venture-backed businesses in the world, but the fact that the government is spending time scrutinizing private investment firms' portfolios just doesn't make any sense to me.
That just means poor people are dividing their already limited resources to buy a fraction of something that they can't use to pay for rent, food, and clothing. If you can only afford to buy a fraction of something, then you can't afford it.
Either you have a product that customers clearly love and are willing to spend money on, or you yourself (and your team) are very impressive people in some way. The investor is ideally betting on both an impressive company && an impressive team, but at the very least one of those needs to be true to have a shot.
Who does the distribution? The vast majority of people in the world can't afford to buy crypto. The people who hold most of the BTC, ETH, SOL, and whatever other major coins were already rich before they got into it. Maybe single digit thousands of people went from non-rich to rich through buying and holding crypto, but that's a tiny fraction.
Yeah, but buying things online and having it shipped to your house was so very obviously useful and something that should exist, and you didn't have to be a PhD to realize it then. Pets.com was clearly not a bad idea. But I haven't yet heard of a crypto use-case that is obvious, at all.
I'd love to see some analysis (probably impossible at this point) of VCs on Twitter who added "crypto/web3" into their bios over the course of late 2021 through early 2022, and how many of them have deleted any reference to it since then.
I've come to a personal conclusion that hiring is an unsolvable "problem". When the problem and the product essentially distill to people - many individuals - it unravels. People are unique. There is never a broad, one-size-fits-all solution. Companies are just collections of people. There are way too many variables to ever reach the level of consistency that a product/solution needs to provide in order to retain customers and grow into a large, sustainable business.
Totally valid, but you could also say the same thing about C and C++, i.e. you can wield your tool with mastery, then that's awesome. But I think the average startup would likely struggle needlessly when they really just need to ship products that people want/need to use. Rust is likely not the smartest choice for the average startup.
Keith Rabois and David Sacks and all of the other billionaire VCs who love to whine and complain about SF on twitter are nowhere near the crime (which is totally blown out of proportion). These guys own $20-30MM homes in Pacific Heights which is one of the poshest neighborhoods in the world. They're complaining because they're used to being able to pay for perfection - perfect dinners, perfect vacations, assistants and workers who do exactly as they're told, and SF is frustrating because if you live here you can almost see how it could nearly be the perfect city, but no amount of money can make it perfect - there is no such thing in reality as perfection and these VCs are pissed that they can't throw money at it and make it so.
I think the due diligence at the point of acceptance into YC is fairly minimal. It might not even go beyond the application answers and the 10min interview... not sure though. I'd be curious to learn more about it.
*edit: Seems YC participated in the follow-on round after the batch ended, so I imagine some extra due diligence goes into that.
I have to say, that based on my family and friends who I occasionally watch TV shows and movies with, I'm the only person who is able to focus on the TV screen without my phone in sight. Everyone else I know is constantly half-listening, half-watching, while simultaneously browsing IG, Zillow, YT, TikTok, etc. I think our very real phone addictions are going to play an adverse role in VR adoption until the VR app space fully replaces everything in the mobile app space (plus the time it will take for people to break their phone habits and replace them with VR habits)... seems like a uphill slog for Meta.
I think it might be more apt to say that there are "10x employees" because it doesn't just apply to engineers. A small minority of people are just freakishly good at what they do (whatever that might be).
Eventually the majority realizes that 'big data' doesn't apply to them. It just doesn't work for what they need to do. I think it follows that the same reasoning applies to ML - works great for a few, but not at all for most.
That might be hyperbolic, but directionally I agree. The interesting part is that there are enough of those people out there in enterprise who fall into that "don't really know what they're doing but want to try something cool" bucket to keep Databricks flush with cash for years on end.
It's still in its toddler years and growing taller by the day. Crypto fans love to tout the "early days" but bitcoin was released circa 2009 (roughly when Google Cloud Platform was introduced), and Ethereum in the mid 2010s...
More broadly I've gotta believe that raising $335 million (after many more hundreds of millions previously), and still expecting to need to raise more down the road is just a seriously flawed approach to running a business.
San Jose, Calif – November 18, 2021 – Lacework, the data-driven security platform for the cloud, today announced it has raised $1.3 billion in growth funding at a valuation of $8.3 billion. With this capital, which is the largest funding round in security industry history, Lacework will continue to invest in rapidly scaling its business globally, building on recent momentum of more than 3x year-over-year revenue growth, a 3.5x year-over-year increase in new customers, including LogicMonitor, Hypergiant, Sprinklr, and more than 3x year-over-year employee growth worldwide.
If a bit of inflation and modest interest rate hikes is enough to lead a company to lay off ~20% of its workforce after raising 1.3 $BILLION less than 6 months ago, then this company must be a total mess.
a16z is really sticking to their beliefs that there must be a major computing cycle every 10-15 years, and that it must be blockchains. Personally, I think its the public cloud, but I'm not nearly as rich as Chris Dixon et al.
I'm really curious to know whether this view is at all reflected in the wider population outside of tech. For myself, being a tech-y person in SF, Google is good enough 99.9% of the time. I have a hard time believing there is a significant percentage of 'normal' people who think Google is a paint point in their daily lives, and good luck to any company who tries to break the "just Google it" habit that we've all developed over the past ~20yrs...
One plausible reason in my mind is that startups tend to hire devs on the younger side, and it seems (from my perspective in the USA) that most new-ish grads come out of school having done most of their programming in Python. Plus some Javascript if they've dabbled in web dev building hobby projects.
Spoken like an experienced software engineer and certainly not the type of person who is well suited for a formal classroom environment. But take a peak inside any of the Fortune 500 and you would surely walk back your assertion that it's effectively over for C++ and Java, regardless of how useful or elegant Rust might be.
Can this really be classified as a "crash"? They're a 20+ year old company, a hugely successful business, and likely to continue to be a major player in both entertainment & tech for the next decade+. Perpetual high growth is a fantasy.
Totally unrelated to the link/book, but sparked a question that I've had for a while (curious to hear any answers) --> when you take an initial look at a programming language that you're completely unfamiliar with, and you glance through the syntax of all the basic constructs, do you ever have a particularly strong reaction (be it negative or positive), and if so have you tried to identify why that might be the case?