They're cashing in. I'm sure they're both well paid by Stanford and Columbia, but they have the opportunity to makes 10s or 100s of millions of dollars through a16z.
Eliminating a subset of buyers, i.e. slightly decreasing demand, is an easy and obvious action to take. Will it have a significant and long lasting effect? Very likely not. But when examining the supply-demand equation, it's painfully obvious to say "foreigners who don't live here should not be allowed to buy residential housing". It's way, way easier than incentivizing developers to build affordable housing and dealing with all of the in-place bureaucracies and regulations and all of the hard stuff that comes along with constructing new neighborhoods and large residential buildings.
I think the fact that he's a power lifter is an important factor to consider in your impression. Power lifters are generally obsessed with their physical metrics and numbers, so this just seems like an optimization exercise in a similar vein. Clearly not a "fulfill the purpose of my life" exercise.
I'm still really fascinated/confused by Tobi's demonstrated obsession with crypto/nft/web3. He's obviously not in it to get rich because he's already rich, and he actually has a presumably deep understanding of technology (unlike most of the crypto fanatics), so all I can imagine is that he really must be caught up in the philosophical/cultural trappings of it.
"We are pleased to reveal that we have raised a $150 million USD funding round led by the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance, with participation from Animoca Brands, a16z, Dialectic, Paradigm and Accel. The round will be used to reimburse user funds affected by the Ronin Validator Hack."
This immediately paints an image of a massive bonfire of cash in my brain.
The confusing part for some people who don't live in SF is the realization that "downtown SF" is essentially the worst part of the city - the part that people love to complain about on Twitter. The primary reason for venturing into the FiDi/SoMa/Civic Center areas was because that's where the office buildings are, and people had to be in the office. Now that most tech workers in the city don't have to be in the office, they're free to avoid that part of the city and stay/live/explore the many other neighborhoods of SF that are nothing like "downtown". As a transplant it took me a little while to understand this because typically a city's downtown area is a desirable place to be - untrue for SF (and also LA while I'm on the topic).
I took two separate 1-yr breaks in my 20s, and I can't say it has had any negative impact career-wise (some might view fewer years of work experience as a negative, but strictly speaking it hasn't made getting other jobs more difficult for me). If you have a solid skill set / body of work to share and speak about, and great recommendations from previous co-workers then I would say do what feels right to you.
This was me for a while in my early 20s... In retrospect it was similar to that sign you'll see in some old coffee shops: "Drink coffee! Do stupid things faster and with more energy!"
For those who haven't clicked the link: This is a really cool list of ambitious projects that were successfully delivered in relatively short amounts of time.
The pro's of YC are staggeringly overweight in comparison to the cons. You trade 7% of your mostly-worthless startup for $500k and the YC network? That's such an easy decision.
You cannot literally connect with anyone through Linkedin or social media. It just doesn't work like that.
I'm not against these types of documents in theory... I can see the use. But anecdotally, the two coworkers who've provided me with 'How to Work with Me' docs have been the most difficult, overly detailed micromanagers that I've interacted with. And on the other hand, all of the great colleagues I've worked with have just been personable, talented people who didn't come with an operating manual.
How is OP spreading inaccurate statements? He/she shared their perspective, just as you have shared yours. And my personal experience as a tech employee in SF mirrors the OP - a lot of my friends and colleagues have been job hopping over the past couple of years, but very few to crypto. None of us can make broad generalizations based on our own rather limited points of view.
Maybe you have a better view, but I don't understand what you mean here:
"My work (household name so we work with a lot of companies) has been seeing increased spend from crypto companies and so we've talked with a few folks from these companies and they've been hiring headcount like crazy."
I thought this part about closely tracking cryptocurrency transactions was interesting:
"IRS-CI Special Agent-in-Charge Thomas Fattorusso said: “NFTs represent a new era for financial investments, but the same rules apply to an investment in an NFT or a real estate development. You can’t solicit funds for a business opportunity, abandon that business and abscond with money investors provided you. Our team here at IRS-CI and our partners at HSI closely track cryptocurrency transactions in an effort to uncover alleged schemes like this one.”"
So I looked a little more into this scenario and found this additional info[0] which although not incredibly sophisticated, left me feeling somewhat impressed with the IRS:
"...investigators matched Nguyen and Llacuna’s Discord account data (including Nguyen’s IP address and Llacuna’s email address and phone number) with corresponding accounts on the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange. The Coinbase accounts were linked with a Citibank credit card and government ID that let law enforcement track the pair down. Investigators also traced a series of transfers through which Nguyen and Llacuna allegedly tried to obscure where they were sending the Frosties funds, leading to the money laundering accusations."
And from what I can tell, the root of the most-students-don't-find-jobs problem is that as much as people love to promote coding as being something for everyone, the reality is that it is not. It is actually really hard to become (and stay) a good software engineer. You have to really want it AND work really hard at it. And a lot of the people attracted to these ISA bootcamps are people who don't like their current career/job/trajectory and have heard that software pays well, and maybe they've done some Hello World tutorials that give you a bit of a rush but don't scratch the surface of what this career actually entails. Then when these people get 2 months in the bootcamp they realize that software engineering is difficult, and requires possibly more strenuous mental work than they've ever done before, but now they're on the hook and it's not easy to reverse course, so they finish the bootcamp with a half-hearted desire and poor-to-mediocre skills that hundreds of thousands of other wannabe devs from all over the world already have, and then they get smacked in the face with 6 rounds of technical interviews that they can't pass. It's not a good scenario.
Spiders and Argentine ants. Those are the only insects I consistently see in SF. Nothing in comparison to the Southeast though... I do not miss the mosquitoes and roaches.
+1 after talking to a lot of people about this I have come away with the impression that it's mostly a stage-of-life thing. I had a blast in the office in my early/mid-20s with bunch of coworkers around the same age. Met my now-wife at the office. However, in my 30s, I have zero desire to return to any office even if it's a hybrid scenario. The good thing is that there do seem to be lots of viable fully remote opportunities now.
Series C or later is what I've typically seen, and I'm not talking market rate for "Big Co CEO", i.e. I doubt any VC would be comfortable with a portfolio company CEO taking home over $600k/yr regardless of stage.
Cloud infrastructure, the Go programming language, Kubernetes. Now of course your definition of "change the world" comes into play here, but it certainly hasn't just been advertising and acquisitions.