geoffschmidt

I don't see this as troubling at all - actually, the opposite.

In the 90's, people cashed out by taking their companies public. Now, for a variety of reasons including the new burden of complying with Sarbanes-Oxley, founders are waiting much longer to go public. So they are cashing out by selling some of their founder shares to private investors.

This is in the interests of the investors because it aligns their interests with those of the founders. Say you started a company, it's kicking ass, and you face a choice. Plan A is a $100MM acquisition offer. But there's also Plan B, an ambitious expansion. Plan B gives you a 50% chance of $1B in two years, and a 50% chance of failure. If you had no assets before you started the company, the only sane thing to do is to sell out. (Not that I am suggesting that sanity should always rule the day.) But your investors probably prefer plan B. If they let you cash out $5MM or $10MM of your stock, then they make your risk tolerance more like theirs, and you can both get excited about Plan B -- which, assuming your startup is actually producing something of value, is better for the world, too.

And it's probably also better for the investing public that tech startups don't make it to IPO until they are a bit more fully baked.

I'm willing to believe that the ideal candidate is a fixed point under your operator, but I think it's going to be tricky to prove convergence :)

The danger here is confusing activity with progress.

For music startups, this could make music licensing even more of a mess than it already is. Imagine negotiating separately with every artist in your catalog. I know that to some extent separate negotiations already happen for the biggest artists, but further disaggregation of the rights can only make it worse.

Maybe over the next 35 years, everyone will reclaim their copyright, form a syndicate, and collectively license them on reasonable and flexible terms! I can dream, right?

Now, with a little googling, I learn the following things:

"Most viruses encode proteins that can inhibit apoptosis"

There is actually already cellular machinery for triggering apoptosis when a cell is infected with a virus

Some viruses induce apoptosis themselves, to their own benefit. When the cell falls apart during apoptosis, the virus ends up packaged with bits of the host cell, which stops the immune system from responding to it!

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10547702

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis

EDIT: here is an article that gives a sense of just how complicated this all is, and how much existing machinery in cells and viruses target it:

http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v8/n2/full/4400820a.html

Please assume good faith. My question is, "Is it more likely that natural selection didn't find the apoptotic strategy, or that the apoptotic strategy wasn't a net win, in the environment in which the natural selection happened?"

So let's try to get a handle on which it is likely to be.

The Time article says:

> To fight infection, human cells have proteins that attach to dsRNA and trigger a cascade of reactions that stop viruses from copying themselves.

So, what we observe is: - Human cells have a mechanism to detect dsRNA; - Human cells have a set of countermeasures that they can produce to block viral replication; - Human cells have a mechanism to produce those countermeasures when dsRNA is detected (and I'll give you good odds that they have other ways of detecting viral infections that also activate the countermeasures); - Human cells also have an apoptosis pathway (which, as it turns out, the cell is not shy about activating in other circumstances, like if too much DNA damage is detected)

One of the following must be true

(1) All of the existing machinery (dsRNA detection, existing countermeasures, and the linkage between the detector and the countermeasures), taken together, must be much simpler than this little transducer they engineered that connects the existing dsRNA detection signal to the existing apoptosis pathway, so that X years of natural selection was likely to find the existing machinery but unlikely to come up with this new solution (2) Blindly triggering apoptosis when you detect dsRNA is not the way to maximize the amount of sex your children have (3) The only reason viruses exist, and plague mankind, is that we got incredibly unlucky

My money's on (2). (1) seems unlikely because it seems like you have to search a much larger space of DNA base pairs to find this whole complex of dsRNA detectors and virus replication inhibitors, than to find this transducer. (3) is unlikely a priori.

So, what would explain (2)? Like I said, several options:

(A) The drug isn't valuable in practice (the cure ends up being worse than the disease) (B) The drug is valuable but has a lot of side effects, so taking it all the time is bad. You only want to take it when you have a really nasty viral infections. The machinery to detect the correct case in a cell is too hard, but now that we have brains, doctors, and the internet, we can make a better decision than a cell could about when dsRNA should be connected to apoptosis than a cell could. (C) Having the linkage was a bad idea for most of the history of mammals, but is a good idea for humans today. Maybe we used to have a lot of immune resistance that we no longer have because of our super clean environment. Maybe we have better nutrition and that somehow makes speculative apoptosis hurt less. Maybe viruses are more dangerous in the dense urban environments where we now live. Maybe it's a bad idea for young people, but a good idea for old people.

These all seem possible to me.

So if it's that easy, why did natural selection not find this solution? It sounds like the cells already have far more sophisticated machinery to detect and respond to dsRNA. Evolutionarily, adding apoptosis to that must have been found to be a net loss.

Maybe it's that we're in a cleaner environment and live longer? Maybe it's that we can selectively administer the drugs?

Stripe: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/28/stealth-payment-startup-str...

WePay: http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/26/wepay-ice-paypal/

Both have Paypal founders among their investors.