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One of my favorite questions to ask about this topic is:

"Given what you know today (and how blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and decentralized networks work), would you still design the financial system and other systems (ex. identity, currencies, etc) the same way they are designed today?"

My answer is no, and that's why I'm still bullish on decentralized technology and systems winning in the long-term. In that case, investments in Bitcoin and Ethereum are merely call options for an entirely new financial world and a risk still worth betting on.

Very interesting, I'm surprised there aren't more public securities like this.

Here's a harsh, but interesting, counterargument to why GSVC isn't performing well - https://seekingalpha.com/article/1692862-use-the-twitter-ipo...

I really like the idea of doing share buybacks of this public security, and does offer a different path to liquidity for a company and founder/employee (sell a part of your company for a publicly traded security, which you can sell at market prices for immediate cash)

The full paper is here - http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ConsciousRealism2.pdf

I particularly like his thinking around the section titled "3. User Interfaces". I'm new to this area, so would be curious if there are any good rebuttals (or if this in general is not falsifiable)

While I'm not part of any, I have heard from members of the existence of underground slack and FB groups of fairly sophisticated investors and early adopters (obv now all closed to public).

Some money is also from investors escaping currency devaluations or restrictions (ex. China). I've heard of quant traders who are porting public equity algos to crypto. Naval R. Also Said on a recent podcast that some cryptocurrency traders meet in person to do trades too.

Would be interested in hearing what other things people have heard (or can confirm). I have a feeling some big whales(or syndicates) are participating in market making bc of the small caps of some of these coins, and that may cause a lot of boom-busts. Regardless, I'm still really bullish on crypto/blockchain as a whole though!

I'm confused, based on the numbers you provided, doesn't their model make a lot of sense?

If on average you're getting ~$10/user/month, that's $120/user/year of which you're just spending $70/user/year, and thus have gross profits of ~$50/user/year. In other words, you're getting $12B in revenue, $7B of which you're spending on content to ensure that churn stays low and people continue to re-subscribe.

One thing I think a lot of people get wrong about tech is a "fear of large numbers". Our mind is trained to think linearly (ex. Path prediction when we're trying to get somewhere), and so when things don't align to it, it's very hard to comprehend. A friend gave a great example demonstrating this - would you bet that Uber/lyft will grow revenues by 25% next quarter or a boring newspaper company will grow by 3%. Doesnt the 3% seem like such a tempting answer, even though the former bet is most likely better?

I think something similar is happening when looking at cryptocurrencies (and several tech phenomenons). This fear of large growth numbers can inhibit clearer thinking (and you see that among public equity tech investors)

Isn't it risky to selectively back particular YC companies? There's always a negative signal when your lead investor doesn't participate in future rounds - if they start doing that more regularly with this new fund, then it might become a negative signal for a YC company NOT to have Continuity/YC as a follow-on investor (which sucks b/c the firms are so early stage).

Anyone know how VC firms that invest in all early-growth-late firms deal with this dilemma (realizing there are only a few cases)?

Does Opendoor primarily work with high-end homes or your "average" home (relative to the area of course)?

Also thoughts on Ben Thompson's analysis on your company (https://stratechery.com/2016/opendoor-a-startup-worth-emulat...)?

This was a fantastic read, thanks for sharing! Is there a piece you recommend that talks about the cons/rebuts "up to this" Japanese zoning laws just to see both sides?

I had the chance to tour this room and it is a pretty cool experience. It's not like it's completely silent - when you speak or make noise you can hear it, but there are no echoes and everything is just kind of muffled. You hear the sound and then it quickly disappears, very similar to how you hear when your ears are pressurized right after take of. It's like taking the flavor out of voices, or making a picture/video dull.

The coolest part was when they turned the lights off and locked the door. The only thing you hear then is the awkward movements of other people as they make noise just to make sure they still... exist.

The larger idea behind very focused practice of specific skills is called "deliberate practice". Professor/MacArthur Fellow Angela Duckworth has done great work behind this (see her book, "Grit").

Never heard of dividend imputation - thanks for sharing!

Though I still don't agree with withdrawing profits - I think it's smart to reinvest profits into the business (just look at Amazon).

I strongly disagree with this on two points

1) one of the biggest moats for tech companies is talent, and it's necessary to have GOOD employees available to test new fields and grow quickly (when Android came along, Google suddenly needed a lot more engineers that it had available and saved the time/challenge/cost of hiring good quality engineers). Also the numbers you posted are overall employment numbers, not engineering ones (you need to have bigger HR, sales, support etc as you grow). I totally agree that there is a point of diminishing marginal return and they could be bloated, I just don't know what that is and I don't think you do either, so don't discount the number just because it's large.

2) Dividends are given if the company doesn't think that it can reinvest those in a more profitable way. Berkshire Hathaway notoriously doesn't give dividends - it doesn't mean Buffett & Munger are personally pocketing all the wealth. Also, dividend returns are taxed so that's why many times shareholders are okay with having the company reinvest it/bring it down as retained earnings because it's smarter that way.

I agree with your point, but would add the nuance of "how much do you actually care?". Humans use heuristics (aka rules of thumb) to answer questions that don't really matter as much, ex "what should I drink". Coke has become that rule of thumb, you don't want to spend extra bandwidth thinking of an inconsequential decision.

This is NOT true for questions where there is a bigger consequence. I feel one is much more rational in those decisions (you carefully consider multiple choices when purchasing a phone, car, etc.) This means there is a greater opportunity of disruption because your brand, while still very important, is not the main differentiation anymore and is not the "rule of thumb".

Same in my social circle - in fact if someone is on Android, we hate using text in general and go straight to FB messenger (or GroupMe depending on the size, but less so recently).

Good thing Dropbox is free cash flow positive then!

https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/14/dropbox-says-it-is-cash-fl...

Can someone (with hopefully a legal background) comment on what the judge will be looking at when deciding if there should be an injunction against Uber and stopping ALL their self-driving car work? What criteria are they specifically looking at/how much burden of proof do they need?

Often the argument is made that automation = abundance which can resolve a lot of problems. However, this assumes that the abundance will be equally distributed, and that is not necessarily true in a capitalistic society (especially within the last decade with the top centile owning most of wealth and income). And if some of Piketty's arguments from Capital in the 21st century hold (particularly r > g), than wealth inequality will continue to increase.

However, inequality increasing itself is not a bad thing (in fact you need inequality for capitalism to work) if the overall quality of life for the bottom improves. If we can reach a point of diminishing marginal returns of just owning wealth (if it's true that people stop caring about collecting wealth once they have enough), than yes I think automation can help stop a collapse because working population won't care because they have enough wealth to be happy.

However, it is human tendency to base satisfaction and happiness RELATIVE to others (look at equity theory from management) so we may still end up in a situation where the quality of life for everyone has improved, but the working population still views that they're still inequal relative to the top (even though they're both better off) and we lead to instability. You can argue that has happened in our modern world today.

Does anyone know or been part of any other company that has run like this (maybe instead of CEO, it's the VP of Product or some other position that is democratically elected)? Thought this was fascinating and prompts the question of why aren't companies more democratic in nature (note, this is for late-stage companies where business risk has been reduced, not your early-stage startup).

I wasn't in love with the one-year term limit and think it should be a lot longer (like 3-5 years). There is also the risk of losing a very long vision (think 10+ years) because of this process, but perhaps you can mitigate that by having candidates address it explicitly while "campaigning". I would even introduce elements such as having debates and town halls.

Interesting to think about regardless!

My bad, when I say geofilters I mean filters in a broader sense (like the Taco Bell filter which was viewed 224 million times)[1].

You can see the international DAU numbers in the S-1, but TC had a good summary and graphs: https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/snap-s1-numbers/

[1] http://www.adweek.com/digital/taco-bells-cinco-de-mayo-snapc...

I'd argue it was poor/slow execution that led Pokemon Go to lose cultural relevance. If they had introduced more pokemon, ability to trade/battle, etc. they would still be highly relevant and a behemoth today.

When I post to Stories I also post to "Memories" so everything is saved on the app. Plus I usually go back to snapchat and save pictures from my story manually if I want to have it saved locally. Most people I know do the same.

The SNAP thesis I like the best is - "Twitter-like growth with FB ARPU".

The monetization potential of this company is massive (geofilters, sponsored content, hardware with spectacles, etc.) and there's no direct comp for that. Pokemon Go showed us the bleeding of digital to physical, and Snap has the potential to be the first company to unlock value from it (ex. geofilters). Plus you can view SNAP as a call option on AR and their potential to be the main camera (when something exciting happens, which app do you open first? For at least in my social circle its by far Snapchat not the Camera app/twitter/etc).

That being said, they face a massive threat from Instagram Stories and now WhatsApp Stories. Though a caveat - while their DAU growth has slowed, it's actually been in international markets primarily (and I think wrongly they don't care enough about dealing with low-bandwith, "unexciting" users). If they can keep a healthy growth in US to escape the FB threat they can afford to lose internationally.

Their first 1-2 earning report will be very revealing for SNAP b/c the expectations have been set and I'm looking for them to do the following: 1) Raise ARPU at similar rates 2) Maintain healthy DAU growth in the US 3) Create new product innovation around AR/Spectacles/Lenses.

If they don't hit at least one of those goals (and preferably two or all three), than I would be very concerned for them.

From what I've heard/read telomere length as the anti-aging curing may be a bit overrated, because we actually want to prevent cognitive degeneration (who cares if you live longer if you can't think as well). There's a very interesting ongoing study called the Lothian Birth Cohort Study, where they tested cognitive functioning in 11 year olds born in Edinburgh in the years 1921 and 1936. In the late 1990s/early 2000s the individuals were tracked down (now in their 70-80s) and researchers did extensive, extensive testing to try to explain variances in cognitive functioning between their scores at age 11 and now (why did some people lose ability/others gain?)

I talked to the director of this massive study and he said there was no correlation with cognitive functioning and telomere length [1] and the entire thing may be a bit overrated. Interestingly enough though, he said there there was a strong correlation with DNA methylation[2] with increased methylation associated with worse cognitive aging.

Very interestingly, DNA methylation decreased for Scott after his time in space...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21194798 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/study.cgi?...

Two really unique things I think this product does

1) The use of GIFs/memes. While this seems silly, it is actually a big deal because it lowers the formalization of communication. Having used this product, you just have much better free flowing conversation and many times these "fun" items help you get the message across significantly better (ex. asking for updates or bumping things can now be done in a funny way).

2) Creation of a horizontal matrix. Having tabs is awesome because it makes information more compartmentalized and helps keep the priority the same on each screen. This essentially adds an extra layer of depth into the product without overcomplicating things (and imagine one day having ability to live edit documents on a tab, while chatting and seeing metrics). Keeping a multi-dimensional communication design model is very scalable to mixed reality too.

Essentially I see MSFT Teams as "Slack meets Google Hangouts meets Email", and see it doing very well from a product sense. However, their business strategy of bundling with O365 will not help them hit SMB, which is a conscious decision I think they made. I would have actually used Teams as a trojan horse to capture stickiness and then upsell users to O365, but overall still excited to see where this goes.

Can someone speak to Tesla's approach of collecting real-world data, and Google's approach of "simulating" roads and conditions and running self-driving models on that (so technically their vehicles drive millions of miles on simulated roads).

Intuitively Tesla's approach makes more sense, but would love to hear someone with domain knowledge on how much of a difference it can actually make (after all, you need quality training data and Tesla may now have to navigate through significant more noise).

I agree, but there are different types of commitment. There's commitment in terms of time, energy, emotion, attention, etc.

While VR provides anonymity (taking away some emotional commitment of human expression/emotion), the actual shared experiences you're doing is more powerful than any other medium and is pushing on the multiple other levers of commitment such as time, energy, attention, etc.

So VR is creating better relationships through commitments of multiple type and strength.

I think two major things social VR and this demo highlight:

1) The amount of things you can do in VR is more expansive than any medium before. Video conferences for the most part is used to catch up or transfer information faster (or at least that's how I use it, to catch up with friends/business who are far away). However, it's tougher to use video chats to build NEW experiences, and I can only really think of Google Hangouts and playing something like WarLight/editing a doc that does that. Humans for the most part build better relationships when both parties have shared experiences, and in VR you can actually do a lot of things that you could in real life. This is why it's so different from just "videoconferencing"

2) It finds a balance in anonymity and not having to commit 100% to a conversation. For example, when you video conference you have to pay more attention/be more aware of how you're acting, which explains why many times we choose to have text convos rather than just calling the other person. In social VR you're just an avatar so you don't have to care as much about your appearance/interaction/subtle facial expressions etc. The outward behavioral bar is lower so you can relax and enjoy the environment even more.

VR is a powerful medium because it addresses the above two points - you don't have to be as concerned about your appearance/interaction when you're an avatar AND you can actually do more tangible things in VR to actually BUILD better relationships.

The bridge is a hybrid model where you can have humans responding and an AI in the back learning. With enough training data the hope is that the AI would take over and be able to do the tasks.

That being said, I actually haven't seen a successful implementation of a full transition from a hybrid to a chatbot example (maybe like x.ai or something, but nothing on a large scale). Think there is really good opportunity there for some basic tasks, but still see bots as glorified menu options for the time being.

Having worked at 2 of the firms you listed above and doing some deep V1 bot explorations for one of them, the immediate idea for bots in the short-term is to replace apps (which is not the best UI interaction model for tail-end apps)

Can you name a few (besides like Operator or Magic, which I don't even know would qualify since they're more hybrid)? I've done some explorations into bots for a project I worked on, and most of it just seems to be glorified menus.

I've had the privilege to hear you speak a couple times (and ask a few questions) and I thought your greatest strength was/is the following -

Take extremely complicated topics and succinctly and concisely boil it down to its fundamentals and present that in an easy-to-understand manner. Aka cut out the bullshit.

Thoughts on whether you agree/disagree?