jforman

Startups need moats to fend off existing market bigwigs, story at 10...

(this dynamic dates back to the first startup...MSFT ate up an entire ecosystem of startups for a generation)

Agreed. When I needed a letter of credit BofA refused to issue one to a new company, despite us having ample cash to cover our commercial lease. We switched to SVB, they issued one quickly, and we've been happy ever since. Their technology stack may be a little antiquated, but they are very startup-friendly in their policies. They offer lots, especially to well-funded startups, that you just won't find elsewhere.

"Does it make the farmers' market unfree when it declares a rule that vendors may not purchase their wares (but must grow the produce/animals on a farm)?"

At my local farmer's market vendors are neither contractors nor employees. Vendors rent space and enter into a normal commercial contract, the rules for which are very different.

"it's a bit silly to hold the position that Uber can't regulate the service in any way"

I'm sorry I'm having trouble seeing your argument here through the huge straw man.

You seem to want to kill the messenger here. If Uber's practice was unlawful, it would've been stopped eventually.

And why was Uber's practice unlawful? The "free market" of contractors Uber relies on to drive down costs also allows drivers freedom of speech to ask for tips. Uber can either have an open driver market or they can limit their drivers' speech — they can't do both.

Yeah well I thought GOOG was a dumb investment since >95% of their revenue came from AdWords and surely MSFT & others would pump billions in and make a real dent.

The vast majority of their revenue is still from AdWords despite those billions being spent, but that GOOG pie's only grown over time.

Travis and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Quarter for PR

Mitch Kapor founded Lotus, the EFF, Kapor Capital, and the Kapor Center for Social Impact. I don't know exactly where his wife contributed among those things, but they generally refer to themselves as a unit these days so I do, too.

He's invested in UUNET (!), Real Networks, Asana, AngelList, Dropcam, Omada Health, Optimizely, Twilio, and many more startups.

He was the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation.

And much more. He is a lion of industry, having made his mark across multiple generations. Uber is important, but it's one company whose wins are not yet even solidified. Travis isn't even close to being in the same league yet.

Mitch and Freada have already well accomplished "changing the world." Travis has many years to go yet before he can even be considered to be in the same league.

As they say, GIGO. Feel free to take on garbage investors, but don't be surprised if your probability of success goes down as a result.

Behaving unethically often benefits people in the short-term, but in the long-term it usually ends up a net negative, especially if the behavior keeps up. Uber's founders apparently don't understand this, and have imparted to you their misunderstanding.

Uber will have increasing difficulty attracting and retaining talent now that their toxic culture is public. When you're a rocket ship people are willing to gloss over a lot, but Uber no longer has 100x potential returns on options. The liability only gets worse as the stock matures.

Not to mention the wave of lawsuits that is likely coming as Uber employees are emboldened.

Mitch has invested in a company I founded before, and I would have him as an investor again in a heartbeat.

Your relationship with your investors and your board is both public and private (or at least, it's supposed to be). Yes, you are owed a private space to discuss difficult internal matters. But your investors are also responsible for getting you ready to be a public company, and that means holding you accountable when you've fallen below the threshold of what would be acceptable to public shareholders. As the letter notes, "accountable" by definition means in the open and out of your total control.

Mitch and Freada are doing Uber's shareholders a service (and therefore also doing Travis a service) by helping the company clean house before they're exposed to the harsher sunlight of being a public company. If you wouldn't have them as investors as a result, then you're not ready to be held accountable by others and aren't public CEO material.

They were debarred by CMS, not FDA, since CMS regulates clinical labs (mostly). They can still theoretically sell medical devices that are cleared/approved by FDA.

Real innovation isn't your company doing something in a new way. It's getting your customers to do something in a new way.

Medium has unambiguously, objectively succeeded by that metric. They are by far the premier blogging destination. President Obama didn't post on Blogger. He posted on Medium.

If you think that's easy, you should try it yourself. Maybe you'll be the next Ev.

The Ubiquiti APs (e.g., the AC-PRO) can uplink to each other wirelessly, but only through one hop.

This is probably sufficient for many angel investors, a few seed investors, and very few series A investors. No matter how much homework you've done on a company you can't responsibly deploy $5M after 20 minutes of diligence on the team.

Funny, their Sequoia board member was bragging about going cash flow positive today.

One epic failure and suddenly the entire discipline of investment banking, which moves mind-boggling amounts of money every day, is worthless?

...unless later modified by a contract ENTERED INTO by the parties...

Most types of contracts do not need to be signed.

A lab at Cleveland Clinic was placed in Immediate Jeopardy status a few months ago. They voluntarily stopped some services temporarily and were fined $600,000.

http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/quality/cms-fines-cleve...

Whether or not regulations are technically "laws" is beside the point, and arguing about it so much is pedantic. The feds show up with a gun and have full authority to fine you or even padlock your lab (which has happened plenty of times). Theranos is in plenty of legal (or regulatory, who cares) hot water right now, whatever you call it.

CMS administers the CLIA program. This is about their ability to operate as a lab, not just about Medicare reimbursement.

See here for a clear breakdown of responsibility among government agencies: http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidanc...

I worked at the Broad in a past life. I find it shocking that Cell let Lander publish his article without a conflict of interest statement, considering a) a key patent just went into interference proceedings and b) most people assume a Nobel will be issued in the not-too-distant future and the Broad would benefit greatly from having sponsored Nobel-winning science.

Take, for example, Church's newly released comment that he was NOT "aware of Zhang’s efforts" like Lander claims he was in the article when his lab tried to move CRISPR into a mammalian system. Zhang et al. are trying to paint the move to a mammalian system as a key moment of invention, making it patent-worthy. If another scientist's first instinct is to do the exact same thing, it suggests that such a move is "obvious to a person skilled in the art" and casts doubt on the novelty of Zhang's work.

According to the Warning Letter, Pathway never registered with the FDA, never received clearance, and never performed any (reported) clinical trials. The key sentence from the letter is:

"We have conducted a review of our files and have been unable to identify any Food and Drug Administration (FDA) records reflecting the approval, clearance, or listing of these devices."

They were seeking to fly under the radar as a "lab-derived test" or LDT, using an FDA loophole that the FDA is increasingly seeking to close (also see Theranos). The "we've reviewed the literature" part is just the FDA's attempt to dig into what's been published to see if they can find ANY support for their marketing claims — even if there were volumes of papers on their method, they still would have been sent the warning letter (which is a Very Serious thing to get from the FDA).

The issue wasn't that "this test is too risky for us" it's that they were 100% out of compliance. If you sell a medical device, it must be classified for risk and at the very least registered with the FDA. In the case of a cancer diagnostic, there is zero chance it would be a Class I (lowest) device, so they (at least) would have needed "clearance" requiring a submission of something called a 510(k) documenting tests they've done on their product, audits of suppliers, etc. etc. In addition to the 510(k) submission itself, they would need documented evidence of having put in place a "quality management system" that puts standard operating procedures around 100% of product development from cradle to grave. This is why health tech/biotech companies need to raise so much money, as this is a lot of overhead.

If their test were classified as Class III (highest risk), they would need "approval" rather than "clearance," the bar for which is even higher (although this is primarily limited to ingestibles/implantables). Just the FDA submission itself costs something like a quarter million dollars.

GRAIL, on the other hand, is raising a huge amount of money partially because they know how much it costs to run proper trials and earn a clearance or approval. It's apples and oranges to compare the two.

CRISPR is far from being the first technology to be held up in the United States while being available elsewhere. There is very little chance the FDA will materially budge on their standards, and even less chance the FDA will be abolished. Most people have a high degree of trust in the FDA (they have a 65% favorability rating according to Pew).

Note that the FDA does allow some compassionate use of experimental medications and technologies in extreme cases. I'm not familiar with Editas's regulatory strategy but it wouldn't be crazy for them to pursue that avenue for, say, a child cancer patient as an early step. But even they will be cautious, as any misstep (i.e., harm to a patient) will have major negative consequences for the technology as a whole.

Depends on what license was communicated with the books when you downloaded them (or that is in the books themselves).

If there's no license specified, default is "all rights reserved" and you cannot distribute the books to your students free of liability.

The greatest barrier here is the FDA. They don't let you perform medical interventions (even breakthroughs like this) without going through a rigorous process. Companies like Editas ($43M Series A) are going through those motions right now.

Having been both a scientist and, now, a product manager for a medical device, I think science would benefit from the work around verification vs. validation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verification_and_validation

A p-value is a verification tool and nothing more, and yet scientists all too often take the "hunt for the p-value" as the only goal. Rather than fish through data for a p-value that ends up defining the scientific narrative in a paper, p-values need to be integrated into a much larger validation process driven by pre-defined scientific goals. It's no wonder that so many results are found to be specious given today's scientific culture.

I'm scared for the future of Congress. What thoughtful person would want to enter that environment?

Probably more important than probiotics are patents for biologically engineered bacteria, like those made by Ginkgo Bioworks. A lot of work goes into engineering bugs to execute specific chemical synthesis pathways, and it's trivial to reverse engineer.

Baby steps to taking on Okta et al. They're going up market with this launch — doesn't seem wise to jump too far at once.

The headline is "Homosexuality may be caused by chemical modifications to DNA" and yet there is zero evidence of causation, merely preliminary data showing a correlation. Science should be above this.

In American law, there are civil offenses (torts) and criminal offenses (crimes). Criminal cases are prosecuted exclusively by the government.

In both categories of law, there is a subset of offenses that fall under "strict liability" — for which you can be punished regardless of your state of mind when committing the offense.

Fraud, like most criminal offenses, requires establishment of mens rea (knowing wrongdoing), so Sam is incorrect in saying that financial misstates are "felonies" on their face. But once you've become an investor you can bring a claim of breach of fiduciary duty (a tort) — rather than establishing that the CEO intentionally misled you, in this case you only need to show that they breached a "duty of care" — essentially, "you should have known".