hackitup7

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

This line is especially silly when making B2B products, especially very expensive enterprise ones. It's often used to justify building "great ideas" from some exec or overzealous PM/engineer over concrete asks from customers. Like you really think that a team of 20 experienced people paying >$1M to help run their multi-billion dollar business, both have no idea what they actually want and don't understand the capabilities of new technologies in the market? Totally condescending.

I've had the exact same experience. I'd add that Substack will give you some mildly helpful distribution at times as well.

If you look at the companies that went public from 2018-2021 (boom/tail end of the latest "bubble"), you should assume that all of those generated somewhere in the range of 25-500+ non-founders who cleared $1m+ worth of stock pre-tax (a small-mid cap SaaS will be on the lower end, Uber/AirBnB will be at the higher end).

It's harder to know from acquisitions, but I'd guess that most of those with sale prices >$1b generated ~10-250 non-founders with $1m+ share packages. I think that the Qualtrics founders said that they minted 250 millionaires from their initial sale to SAP.

No, the VCs tell the founder/CEO to hire people who've done it before to help pay down the risks of unknown unknowns (which are real – this advice is overly simplistic but isn't conceptually wrong). This translates into them hiring from FAANGs if they take the advice semi-literally.

Having spent ~15 years in enterprise software I doubt that this works at higher price points but holy hell is this guy living the dream

I couldn't care less about their structure but the level of effort to put a positive spin on it makes the whole thing look more sketchy rather than less.

I find the experience of watching these SpaceX videos very emotional. There's something really inspiring both from an "exploring the universe" perspective and also just from the human side of all of the effort that went into them.

The first video that really got to me was when they landed multiple boosters. This one as well, especially seeing the rocket take off with every booster firing when compared with the first Starship launch when you could see that some failed to light. It's like watching your child take their first steps, and then seeing them win an Olympic medal for running. Just incredible stuff.

I had a similar negative reaction to the grandiose title but in this case it was totally deserved and I am pretty blown away.

That's not quite how it works. Certain people are required (or strongly encouraged) to sell on a 10b5-1 plan. These plans can trade outside of open trading windows, but they have a meaningful cooldown period before they go into effect and can only be entered into during open trading windows. So it's not necessarily "better."

For job searching, not being on it won't hurt you in any way, but you're missing out on potential upside in terms of recruiting. You can have a LinkedIn, use it only for job searching, and not read the bizarre cringe content.

If you find value in networking or keeping in touch with people, simply put it is the directory for many industries (including SV tech) and a good way to stay in contact, and I think that you are definitely missing out on the network value if you aren't on it. Like you called out, unlike email it does not require anything proactive and in my experience people are often excited to hear from you years later. I'm not here to tell you what to value though.

The content is pretty accurate

He came out of retirement for this job, so the market certainly knew that his retirement was possible (although maybe not imminent).

These sorts of transitions take time, when you're the CEO of a $75B public company you typically don't up and quit because you see some bad news on the horizon. Especially not when you have such a stellar reputation and are already a billionaire. Slootman didn't need this job.

Snowflake also missed on guidance.

From what I've seen, think of it as greatly amplifying the variance of the friendship. I've seen it break friendships in rare cases, and in the median case I've seen it build friendships to the point where people are often as close family members. It is a deep bonding experience in the purest sense, with all of the good and bad that that entails.

A significant positive: You have a lot of information about your friend's integrity and values.

A maybe-negative: You will probably feel somewhat less comfortable grabbing a beer and talking about whatever is on your mind, at least for the first few years.

Sometimes, although working with focused M&A bankers is the typical strategy for large transactions

I believe that Twilio owns Authy fwiw

Just write, and remember that it's your choice whether you want to read the comments. We have a blog and while we get all sorts of commentary, I've found that the overwhelming majority of commenters are positive. For direct mail commentary to our email address it's 100% positive or positive leaning.

The hardest part of blogging is not giving up, I'd work on that.

That was a weird dream!

Hi, I'm the author. This is a personal blog, it says "we" because there are two of us that write as a team. Thanks for reading!

I'd take the even stronger stance that additional technical cofounders seems to deliver increasing rather than diminishing returns.

Agreed, it's very common to see. In many cases you're talking about people who worked together very closely for years and are verging on as close as family. Also, in higher-level roles you often get fired due to a very specific lack of skills or a very specific weakness that wouldn't be at all applicable for another job.

Ex "this person is an amazing startup CTO but they get problematically overwhelmed when the organization gets to 100 engineers" – you would 1000% recommend that person to a 50-person startup even if they got fired from their job at a 500-person company. They might even be better at it the next time around.

I'm also neither a Sam Altman booster or detractor, but the types of activities described here (and honestly, sometimes much much worse) are very common at startups.

I've been really impressed at how much better weather forecasting has become already. I remember weather forecasts feeling like a total crapshoot as recently as 15 years ago or so.

I've never met an executive at a well known tech company who didn't know the basics of how VC works (e.g. incentivized to seek home runs).

The problem that I've observed is that far too many bosses made their decisions about remote based on emotion, despite the fact that it is incredibly obviously a decision that should be made based on logic.

Not saying that one answer was right or wrong. Just that it has shocked me to hear otherwise smart people using subjective emotional decision making on this topic, when it's so clearly just an economic / incentive decision.

It's not even good PE. Like unironically Vista and Thoma Bravo are too smart to do stuff like this. This is like MBA search funds rebranding the trash disposal company they purchased.

Dude your face is falling off!

The greatest instance like this that I've seen on the internet: https://youtu.be/TjVOWOKa-lY

I love when they're pulling him off of the printer. Like no bro, it's not worth it, he's already down bro, you're gonna catch a charge.

Damn it feels good to be a gangster

These people migrated to AI because their goal is to get rich quick. Whether or not it's a scam is orthogonal. It's the same people got excited about metaverse, producing online courses, and weed startups. If they aren't in tech they're doing supplements and drop shipping.

Unrelated, but I don't think AI is a scam.