Congrats Jeff and David!!
2,176 karma · joined December 5, 2010
Well, there are other markets that fall outside this... For example, at Quartzy we are working in the life-sciences market. There are multi-billion dollar incumbents like Thermo Fisher, VWR, EMD, Sigma and scores of others but the game is different because you are distributing stuff that could be hazardous/require ice/could be radioactive etc. Amazon's warehouses are not equipped (as far as I know) to handle such products.
So one can target markets that have seen no innovation in the last 15 years where Amazon does not have an advantage...
Amazon is getting into lab supplies (glassware etc) but a problem here is that Amazon likes to have one-price and all the manufacturers play a game where there is a list price and a special price at your institution. This is a game for some reason that Amazon does not want to play so in general for a couple of reasons they are locked out for a large fraction of the huge life-sciences market.
Wonder if there are other markets like this out there?
From Feynman's Caltech commencement speech on this:
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
The classical formulation of Kalman filters assumes gaussian distributions for the variables. This makes the computations much faster since the posterior distributions is a few matrix operations away. This works fine when the model for the plant is linear (since a linear transformation of a gaussian variable is gaussian). In situations where the plant model is not linear estimates can go awry quickly.
In the case of particle filters you sample the prior distribution, simulate the non-linear plant with these initial conditions and then construct the posterior distribution by incorporating the measurements. This process is computationally more expensive than classical Kalman filtering but is more accurate for non-linear plants.
And then you have to think a lot more about the team/culture fit since you will spend way more time with the team than any investor.
Right now you say 'items being referred now' but I refresh the page and it shows the same items sliding of the page again and again... Makes the activity on the site appear fake...
Adam and I were once on a call with an academic consortium that had received ~$15M in funding from ARAA. The objective of this group was quite similar to what we are doing with our startup. This group reached out to us too see if there was a way we could work together. During the conference call it was Adam and me on our side and at least 10 researchers from institutions all over the US on the other side!
Those were the early days of our startup and we thought that we would be obliterated by them with their vast resources. It turns out that with 1/10th their funding we have done more than 10x of what they did. And they are floundering while we are just warming up.
- Startups fail because they run out of money
- VC's like to invest in smart passionate entrepreneurs who are solving a personal problem who are not in it for the money.
- VC's like either big markets or great teams or both
- etc etc
Some of the interviews were great (Howard Morgan) but the problem with interviewing active vcs is that they can't talk about the stuff behind the scenes. Often founder's who have had successful exits have no such qualms.
Are you just upset that he is competing on price? Given his cost structure it makes perfect sense for him to want to deliver desirable projects for great customers at a great price.
Clearly you know that there is no fixed price that the market has decided professional iOS development is worth. And now that there is one additional professional iOS developer working from Vietnam the price turns out to be lower than what you think it should be.
To me it is plausible that the average price of an apartment would actually drop if they were no rent-controlled apartments. You would have more supply etc...
If the stock market picks up again I think that the tech scene will start receding. It is hard for quite a few people to turn down the pay that banks offer for the uncertain economic rewards of a startup.
I am not sure how many others had a similar experience but I just left the site after that. It made the site feel unwelcoming.