purplepatrick

In US corporations that hire for narrow departmental specialties that stay with the company for a few years at best, most definitely.

In European corporations that hire for cross-functional talent that can move around and stay with the company for a long time, founders are a much more welcomed breed.

I can’t speak to other countries.

The above is based on my own experience, that of founder friends, and an interesting exchange with the US and EU heads of one of the largest headhunter firms in the world.

Exactly. Contemporary British English is usually non-rhotic, so very unlikely to closely resemble anything prior to the mid-19th century…

If you paid $150 for LatAm outsourcing before, then this is definitely a better setup. You overpaid by a lot ;)

I used Pocket for a few years but the company never fixed any bugs that severely restricted its utility. Since then I’ve switched to Raindrop.io and have never looked back. I use it on web and mobile, and it’s excellent.

Yes… That’s how all of science works (minus the cabal). Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 classic “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” is about this dynamic…

Same here - no inner voice, no words, no images (unless that’s specifically what I want to do).

So first they’re telling people they must upgrade, then they change their mind and add this option. However, people who have already upgraded because they thought it was the only option are getting screwed now, because they no longer are given this option. I feel like this warrants a complaint with a bunch of consumer protection agencies.

A cursory reading of VC Twitter suggests that it’s getting winter out there, except perhaps for seed & crypto. Late stage / growth has collapsed and funds are holding off on new investments, dedicating more $$ to portfolio maintenance.

I don’t have an inner voice, and it’s a bit puzzling to me to read about journalists and/or scientists who seem not to be aware of that. It’s not that uncommon either: just ask ten people at a party or at work, and you’ll probably find at least one person who doesn’t have an inner voice…

PS: I speak a couple of languages fluently (e.g. English is not my native tongue) and have never experienced any effects between being immersed in one language and “thinking”, except of course when I’m trying to formulate language consciously, for example when writing.

Nope, not possible. You cannot enforce a trademark without using it commercially.

Pretext traffic stops should not be allowed. The rest of the world gets by just fine without them (using traffic cameras and “programmatic stops” that focus on cargo trucks, DUI controls around night life areas, etc). And from what I’ve found, research supports the notion that they do more harm than good.

Wish it said anywhere, including on Runner’s website, what they consider “operations” and how it delineates from non-operations…

This is precisely how science works…

Check out “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn when you get the chance.

Wasn’t this already “debunked”, with the investigators having to basically retract the conclusion as a result? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/books/anne-frank-betrayal...

It’s a startup, so it’s an iterative approach. They launched with a setup that gets them into the market fast. However, you are right in that this ain’t that big of a deal.

Pharmacies pay the acquisition price for the drugs. Then, they make up a fictitious price (called the Usual & Customary price). The U&C is intentionally very high, because it forms the basis for negotiating with pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs).

The Cuban-funded venture uses this as their price comp, calling it the “retail price”. However, the U&C price is only the retail price for one group of people: those without insurance who do not know of drug discount “cards” (nowadays mostly mobile apps such as GoodRx nowadays).

Basically, anyone with insurance or a (free) discount card will get a hefty discount on the U&C (always compare the two before using insurance, as sometimes, the “regular” discount is higher than the insurance one). Just plug some of the expensive drugs into GoodRx et al to compare and you’ll find that in some geographies, the Cuban-funded co is cheaper, while in others, it is more expensive (drug discounts vary across pharmacy geo. locations).

Pharmacies give non-PBM entities discounts bec they make money regardless. Let’s say, you start an Rx discount biz. You can go to pharmacies and negotiate a discount plus a small margin for yourself. This is how GoodRx is making (lots of) money, for example.

Now, the innovation with this new co is that previously, drug discount cards and pharmacies were usually two different parties. All they did was to partner with a mail order pharmacy, negotiate a discount (acquisition + 15% is the classic Costco pharmacy price btw), set up a website, and tell everyone “look at how much cheaper we are!”.

The future vertical integration comes from taking this a step further and partnering with generic drug makers. I also suspect that at some point, they’ll start their own pharmacy.

I’ve been waiting for GoodRx or another discount provider to bundle these 2-3 steps in the distribution chain, but they have never done this. Perhaps they worried about competing with their pharmacy customers, as their model is going wide, rather than deep, while this new Cuban-funded venture is going deep instead, partnering with a single pharmacy.

Beats me why their pharmacy partner (or other such cos) wouldn’t just start adding their own discount biz. But perhaps they’re doing that and they had other reasons to do this…

So, more like:

Self Awareness, Naïveté, Perseverance, Emotional Distance, Vision, Skepticism, Humor

Also not new: the outsized impact fragile masculinity has on violence…

I second the importance of subtitles. I grew up in a country where dubbing is a huge industry and everything is dubbed. I’ve also lived in another country where almost nothing is dubbed. After moving to the US and seeing many of the films I had previously only known in their dubbed version, I can no longer stand dubbing. I can tell that something is dubbed without having to look at the screen. I’d never want to not have subtitles — I’d rather not watch at all…

That being said, as I understand the article this marvel ai thing is supposed to replicate the original performance using the original voice in another language? Of course that would be fantastic a solution, but I doubt that the technology is anything near what it wants to do…

I think this post is fake news ;)

A higher interest rate increases the cost of capital. As with other assets, a stock’s present value is the sum of its future cash flows discounted to their present value, using the weighted average cost of capital as discount factor.

Because tech stocks tend to be growth stocks, i.e. most of their value (expected cash flows) derives from their high-growth period, not their steady state (their post-high-growth life period), they are more sensitive to changes in the cost of capital and this, interest rates.

More “mature” companies, i.e. companies that have reached steady state (low growth) are companies that no longer invest as much excess capital in their business because they cannot find (enough or big enough) capital projects to generate a positive return on their invested capital.

These companies tend to instead distribute excess returns as dividends. Once a company is known as a dividend-paying company, it’s very hard for it to go back to anything else, as the composition of their shareholders now represents entities that want dividend yield. That’s where, for example, buy-backs come in handy, as they’re perceived to be temporary measures. In other words, companies that still think they may find sufficient capital projects and don’t want to become steady dividend payers tend to often embark on buy-backs instead.

In sum, more nature (low growth) companies are less sensitive to interest rates because their stock prices derive from more predictable low-growth expectations, while tech stock prices as per their discounted cash flow value tend to still be driven by high-growth period expectations.

The reason why there are very large tech companies shows that the notion of “large” has, over the past few decades, decoupled from the notion of “mature”. The latter would more aptly be characterized as “driven by low growth expectations”. This is how you end up with an entire industry (tech) that hasn’t matured yet (of course, “mature” can mean different things outside of this context, which can create confusion).

I don’t get why we need to have good ratings and reviews at all.

Why not only allow bad ratings (eg a simple thumbs down) and reviews, then run some ML to detect and normalize semantic patterns (“short battery life”), and then word-cloud or summarize those.

Users could then sort ratings ascendingly from least number of bad ratings and scan the semantic patterns.

Voilà - a functioning ratings and review setup…

Amen. Funny how Peter Thiel parlays something that was obvious to many, if not most, people outside the SV echo chamber into some sort of new insight…

It’s not that simple: https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2021/04/19/myth-bust...

Yes this is cool. But c’mon — these scientists should know better (correlation vs. causation, yada yada).

Humans have always believed that their current state of technology reflects how the brain works — clay pots and waterworks, electric circuits, cogs, etc. Just because there’s an “I” in AI and a “neural” in front of “network” doesn’t mean you’re not just mimicking something as opposed to replicating how it actually works…

That’s a long-winded way of saying “try to test a new business hypothesis before building anything”.

None of this kind of testing that VCs love and founders do is real testing, statistically speaking. Just because you can sell a bunch of lemonade at the street corner on a hot summer’s day doesn’t mean that you should be going into the lemonade business…

Conversely, Jeff Bezos may have put up a pseudo website when he started Amazon to “test” whether ppl wanna buy books online. After three months maybe a few ppl would’ve bought a few books, but that would’ve told him nothing about whether it’s a good idea.

Yes, lots of startups come out with crap products that no one needs, but I’d argue that much of it isn’t as “testable” as articles like this (which are written ‘from hindsight’) make it seem.

There are plenty of large companies that test extensively and then demand is either spurious or not sustainable. Other products “grow” on ppl, or some celeb makes them fashionable if otherwise, they would’ve died a quiet death.

At the end of the day, these “tests” are just a good persuasion technique for when you need to raise money, but they lack scientific basis, and they won’t “derisk” much. But they make things sound salient and rational like all persuasion techniques, and for that, they certainly have their place.

I just don’t think this needs a 5-page blog post that is abstracting and “frameworkizing” something pretty basic, obvious, and not that interesting.

Oh, and I still don’t know wth a “cohort based course” is supposed to be. Sounds to me it’s just a regular real-time class taking place online?

I’m not clear if your customers process payments through your Stripe account, but if this is the case (it sounds like it) you need to work with a network that serves “high-risk” customers.

There are brokers that can place you with the right network if you have a hard time finding one yourself. You will have to get transparency on the industries of your customers, though, and may have to focus on a couple of them, as otherwise, underwriting you gets very complex.

With CBD customers, Stripe is not the right solution for you, no matter what, as they don’t serve “high risk” industries with higher rates of chargebacks and other payment default permutations. Stripe’s way of managing that risk is to kick you out when your chargebacks hit a certain threshold (in exchange for your not having to get fully underwritten as you would if you got your own merchant account).

Or you cease being “high-risk”, for example by cutting your own high-risk customers. It sounds like this is what you’ve started doing already. In that, you’ll have to replicate some of what a network would have to do during underwriting, ie look at the industry of your customers and hope that the industry risk will adequately reflect their future chargebacks.

That way, you can also filter out the geographic compliance issue at least during signup. In addition, I don’t know how challenging it would be for you to add a lookup table to your data model, but if you’ll continue serving CBD customers that may sell in different states, I’d say that’ll come in handy.

Still, if a customer of yours switched to selling high risk stuff all of a sudden, then you’d still have to deal with a fair amount of legal trouble. I would make sure that that kind of scenario is addressed in your customer agreements (eg by having customers agree to needing your approval before adding new product lines from a list of high risk products or disallowing these products right away).

I don’t know much about the payment network industry or whether the above address some of your (past) issues, but hopefully some of this is somewhat helpful. I hope you can keep your business going. Good luck!

Remarkable — all that without explaining anywhere what a “corporate card” is. Is it a debit card (debits immediately)? Or a delayed debit card (debits at month end)? Or a credit card (credit balance up to a specified limit)?

And why do they brag about “no credit checks”? Brex already tried that in the beginning. That’s really only a thing for businesses so small that they definitely do not need a corporate credit card (and who are bad at picking banks). I scaled a startup to 100 people and had 0 need for issuing cards to employees…

But all of these companies seems to do really well, so there must be plenty of demand…

Can you explain what the “expertise” and “team” circles are supposed to mean? Also, does light color mean something else than dark color? And what are the “clinical trial” lists for?

It’d also be great if you could offer the link to their website.

Oh, and when I look at the map I see around 10 but when I switch to list, I seem to see all of them (?). This makes me think the map only show the top 10 maybe?

IMHO this is a terrible idea, because I guarantee you they’d screw up the categorization of “topics”.

How granular should a “topic” be? “Financial services” isn’t gonna cut it. Or how about medical sites? “Medical” or “health” are useless mean-nothing buckets, while “rectal bleeding” may be too granular.

Ditto the issue of topic visit frequency - sure, someone visiting shoe sites multiple times is a thing, but how often is someone going to look for, say, mortgage loans? ~90%+ of people only gather two offers for home loans, for example. They can get that on one site in one visit. But they may have read a ton about it before on sites that may only have been tagged as “financial content” or some wish washy label.

Data structuring for topics, occupations, etc. online or offline has almost never succeeded. Ever. I have never seen anyone do it well and I work in an industry that depends on it.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on sets…

Making this the basis for targeting is really only going to help sell shoes, fashion, porn, jewelry, and cars.

I like the idea and wish you the best of luck. In my experience, this is a bit of a “neither fish nor fowl” kind of situation, though.

Your model seems most viable for customers who need design work all the time, e.g. to replace a FT resource. However, whenever I was involved in a company that needed frequent design work, we ended up holding on to dear life to any designer we liked because there is so much variance in terms of quality, work habits, communication skills that we happily paid up for continuity and control by hiring full time instead.

On the other hand, for many customers of those freelance sites that you identify as comps, that’s not the situation, though. For them, design work usually comes up in chunks. So, those folks may attempt to churn and reenroll frequently in your service to match the flow of their design needs. To prevent that kind of churn, you may end up trying to manage deliverables and/or debate semantics (e.g. what constitutes a “task”, 50 app screens or picking the color of a button?), which ends up driving customers away.

This last bit could be remedied if you built a very detailed catalogue of tasks, but that may not be worth anyone’s while…