With SpaceX, now Anthropic, and soon OpenAI, we're seeing 3 of the largest IPOs ever. Will existing institutional investors trim other positions to allocate a lot of capital for these mega listings or is this not a concern?
9,144 karma · joined June 23, 2019
Also made HN Wrapped (hn-wrapped.kadoa.com)
Happy to chat about data, AI, startups, or anything else: adrian@kadoa.com
Switzerland has everything to produce successful startups: top universities and talent, stable and sovereign infrastructure and government, capital, and liberal tax and company laws.
However, the reality is different:
As if starting a company isn't hard enough, Swiss (and I guess EU) culture doesn't really recognize entrepreneurship as a valuable career path. You hear a lot of "Are you sure about taking that much risk?" and when you fail you get a "I told you so".
You would think there's plenty of capital here, but unfortunately not in VC. It's getting better, but many Swiss early-stage investors still ask for a detailed 5-year business plan and four due diligence calls for a 5k ticket in your round.
In SF, everyone helps each other out with their network, intros, and so on. In Switzerland, most startups and scaleups still operate in closed gardens and ecosystems are rare or slowly developing, which makes building a network really hard.
Events like these hopefully help to change this :)
Some approaches that I think are promising:
- A robots.txt V2[0] as a standard way for website owners to state how bots and AI crawlers can use their online content and where to go (e.g. distinguish search from AI training use cases, point to a downloadable file instead of crawling everything, etc.).
- Something like Web Bot Auth[1] as a non-centralized standard for self-identifying bots and agents cryptographically. This would allow websites to allow or deny bots very precisely.
- what else?
[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-vaughan-machine-reada...
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meunier-http-mes...
So how do we go from here? Is adding more difficult Anubis and Cloudflare bot protection really the solution? How many millions of human hours and billions in infra costs are we willing to spend on this arms race?
Some approaches that I think are promising:
- A robots.txt V2[0] as a standard way for website owners to state how bots and AI crawlers can use their online content and where to go (e.g. distinguish search from AI training use cases, point to a downloadable file instead of crawling everything, etc.).
- Something like Web Bot Auth[1] as a non-centralized standard for self-identifying bots and agents cryptographically. This would allow websites to allow or deny bots very precisely.
- what else?
[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-vaughan-machine-reada...
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meunier-http-mes...
We are building the web data layer for finance. Our coding agents build, monitor, and repair deterministic ETL pipelines that produce the most reliable web datasets for investors. We serve many of the top hedge funds and asset managers.
Open roles:
- Senior Software Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/senior-software-engineer
- Web Scraping Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/web-scraping-engineer
Reasons you’d love working with us:
* Work with a a lean and very talented team of engineers in a drama-free and distraction-light environment.
* All founders have spent years in the trenches writing web scraping and ETL code and still do it almost every single day.
* Fully remote job with flexible working hours and vacation.
* Work at the forefront of applied AI in finance. Our agents are in use for mission critical production pipelines.
* Minimal distance between the code you ship and the customers who use it. You will get to work with some of the world's top investment firms.
If you're interested, please submit this form: https://forms.gle/JRYUvcbkcdMNejzG9 and I'll be in touch. Not a fan of doing this, but similar to others, my inbox is drowning in AI-generated job applications.
Kadoa is the web data layer for finance. We use coding agents to build, monitor, and repair deterministic data pipelines for investment firms, so they can make faster and better decisions.
All founders have spent years in the trenches writing web scraping and ETL code and still do it almost every single day. We are growing fast, have a drama-free and distraction-light environment, and try to minimize the distance between the code & data you ship and the customers who use it.
We are looking for people who share our passion for software craftsmanship, data, and AI. We're a lean remote team and are looking for low-ego generalists with high agency that can help us build a platform that combines the most intuitive UX with world-class accuracy and performance.
Open roles:
- Web Scraping Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/web-scraping-engineer
- Senior Software Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/senior-software-engineer
If that sounds like you, please email me at (adrian at kadoa dot com) and mention HN in the subject line. Please include any relevant Github projects.
I'm also following the very inspirational journey of the former Gitlab CEO who battles cancer by founding companies with his own money [0].
Kadoa is the web data layer for finance. We use the best coding agents to produce the most accurate web datasets, so the leading investment firms can make faster and better decisions.
All founders have spent years in the trenches writing web scraping and ETL code and still do it almost every single day. We are growing fast, have a drama-free and distraction-light environment, and try to minimize the distance between the code & data you ship and the customers who use it.
We are looking for people who share our passion for software craftsmanship, web data, and AI.
Open roles:
- Web Scraping Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/web-scraping-engineer
- Senior Software Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/senior-software-engineer
If that sounds like you, please email me at (adrian at kadoa dot com) and mention HN in the subject line.
Reminds me of the early days of World of Warcraft, when servers went down frequently because Blizzard couldn't keep up with all the load. Everyone was frustrated but of course nobody stopped playing.
> For affected deployments created during this window, any requests served until 21:10 UTC did not execute Middleware. The issue has been fully remediated and no redeployment is required.
> If, for authentication, authorization, or access control, you are exclusively relying upon Middleware, this incident may have allowed requests to bypass Middleware logic that would normally run. We recommend that you analyze your logs for the period between 11:20 UTC and 21:10 UTC on March 6, 2026, for any potential unauthorized access or activity.
Previous nano banana frequently made speech attribution errors, the new one seems a lot more consistent.
Web scraping hasn't changed in decades: engineers still write brittle scripts that constantly break. Kadoa automates the entire web data pipeline with AI agents that build, maintain, and validate scraper code themselves.
All 3 founders have spent years in the trenches writing web scraping and ETL software and still do it almost every single day. We’re making sure every team member can do the best work of their career at Kadoa.
We are growing fast, have a drama-free and distraction-light environment, and try to minimize the distance between the code you ship and the customers who use it.
We are looking for people who share our passion for software craftsmanship, web scraping, and AI.
Open roles:
- Senior Frontend Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/frontend-engineer
- Senior Software Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/senior-software-engineer
If that sounds like you, please email me at (adrian at kadoa dot com) and mention HN in the subject line.
> It's human nature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias. Everyone does it, but we perceive other people as doing it more than we do, which is itself a variation of the bias. You can even see it in the title of the OP, in the word "overwhelmingly". That's excessive: the negative bias is noticeable, but if you look closely, it's not overwhelming. (To make up some numbers, it's more like 60-40, not 90-10.)
However, it often feels as if it is overwhelming; in fact, one or two datapoints, plus negativity bias, are enough to create just such a feeling. The feeling gets expressed in ways that trigger similar feelings in other people, so we end up with a positive* feedback loop.
The interesting question is, what factors mitigate this? how do we dampen negativity bias? or, how do we get negative feedback into our positive feedback loop of negative affect? That must also be happening all the time, or we'd be in a "war of all against all", which isn't the case, though (again) it may feel like it.
* ['positive' in the sense of increasing; a positive loop of negative affect!]
We’re on a mission to give humans and LLMs reliable and fast access to web data.
Web scraping used to be the same for decades (brittle scripts that break constantly). We're automating that end-to-end with LLMs that build and maintain data pipelines. We're also heavily focused on making ethical scraping the default (robots.txt checks, rate limiting, etc.).
All 3 founders have spent years in the trenches writing web scraping and ETL software and still do it almost every single day. We’re making sure every team member can do the best work of their career at Kadoa.
We are looking for people who share our passion for software craftsmanship, data, and AI.
We are growing fast, have a no-bullshit culture, and try to minimize the distance between the code you write and the customers who use it.
We have openings for:
- Senior Frontend Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/frontend-engineer
- Senior Software Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/senior-software-engineer
If that sounds like you, please email me at (adrian at kadoa dot com) and mention HN in the subject line. AI slop applications will be filtered out immediately ;)