replicatorblog

Our fund, Founder Collective, isn't hardware-focused, but we have backed a lot of transformative hardware startups – E.g., Whoop, Formlabs, Cruise, Desktop Metal, Kinsa, Running Tide.

We've also backed a bunch that haven't been able to make it work. It's a tantalizing space, but wickedly hard. That said, we remain ever optimistic and if you're building something in hardware, please reach out – joeflaherty@foundercollective.com

Disney is really overrated as a park.

I live in NH and the local amusement park, called Canobie Lake, has more rides and ride systems than the Magic Kingdom. The "themeing" isn't as nice but it's a fraction of the cost.

I like the Disney Parks, but you're really paying a heavy premium for IP and a potential visit with a Princess. For most people your local Six Flags will be a far better value for the dollar with not much of a dimunition of the experience.

Thanks! She'll be five years post-treatment in November, so we're blessed on that front!

My nine-year-old daughter has had cancer and been diagnosed with epilepsy and high-functioning autism. Despite these challenges...

+ Being a parent is fun. Kids are super funny. Teaching them stuff is a treat, and seeing their interests emerge is a wonderful feeling. Assuming you love your spouse, you get to see this chimera of the best parts of you and your partner walking around in the world.

+ Kids are also familial and social glue. Even if you live a ways from parents, it's an easy excuse to stay in touch, a place to plan trips. One of the crazy things that as your kids grow they look and sound like different relatives. It's a cool experience.

+ Selfishly, it's nice knowing you'll have some influence on the world, no matter how small, after you pass.

I'm know some childless billionaires and honestly I wouldn't trade the decade-long headstart I've had with my daughter and her brother for all their worldly fun. Everything people say about parenting being the best thing you'll ever do is right – and they're underselling it.

FWIW, I understand the cynicism. You seem like someone who has suffered through tough times. I hope you find peace.

Ecigs are likely one of the most impactful public health interventions of the last 50 years. They provide a substitute that is less dangerous and pleasurable which keeps compliance high.

Juul and their competitors were genius product managers paired with irresponsible to the point of malevolent product marketers.

I would like someone to do a "Years of life saved" calculation that tallies the expected years save by switching smokers to vaping balanced against those who were attracted by vaping who eventually went to smoking. My guess is even with the new entrants the years of life saved would be extraordinary.

Yeah, perhaps they can use catgut or something as a replacement for central lines. Waxed paper is well known to have the same antimicrobial attributes as hydrophobic plastics. All but for the greed of Exxon...

I invite you to spend some time in a pediatric oncology unit, look at the mind-boggling variety of single-use plastics consumed over the course of the day, and research their manufacturers and origins. The results will be more illuminating than some dramatic hypothetical.

Separating worthy designs from wasteful ones is essentially impossible. I spent the first ten years of my career designing medical devices and worked with a wide range of suppliers. One of our key vendors also did a lot of work designing airtight containers for chewing tobacco.

This is true up the entire supply chain. The same machines that produce barrier plastics for first responders also produce material for plastic wrap for retail packaging.

Sure, you could hypothetically ban all the "frivolous" applications, but I don't think people fully understand how the R&D for silly things subsidizes, and cross pollinates life-saving innovations.

The real trade-off isn't plastics or landfills, it is landfills vs. modern oncology.

That is largely not the case. I spent ten years making private label medical devices for CVS, Kroger, Target, and dozens of other stores.

There tend to be specialist manufacturers who fill the store brand niches. E.g. in pharma, close to 90% of the pills, tabs, and liquids sold in front of the pharmacy counter are made by one company, Perrigo, whose entire model is predicated on being a store brand supplier.

I don't think Kimberly Clark makes the store brand paper products, nor does P&G make the store brand beauty/cleaning supplies.

So no private label products from Walmart, Target, Kroger, or CVS?

One of the nuances is thinking about all the advances in other parts of life that have been unlocked thanks to tech.

+ FEA/FEM would make the airplanes you use to travel much safer.

+ The drugs that might not have been developed as quickly might prolong that retirement dramatically.

It's hard to disentangle all the ways tech has improved our life!

FWIW, I'd take a 50% pay cut to stay in the modern era...

One of my favorite hypothetical questions is "Would you take a deal where you could 10X your salary, but you'd have to live the rest of your days starting in 1979."

Imagine all the same tech is available at the same periods in time, but produced by different companies so you can't do the "Back to the Future Sports Almanac" thing.

Imagine you're 40 today. Would you rather have 10X as much money, but know you won't get Aol until your 55? No smartphones until you qualify for Social Security? Maybe 10X is worth it, but 5X? 2X? It helps put the value we get from the web in perspective.

Just once, I'd love to read a story about tech in a major pub from the perspective of someone 35-55-ish who remembers the pre-internet world — and can't stop raving about how much better everything is now.

I get that it might not be a majority position, but it's not insignificant, but it's almost entirely invisible in the NYT's tech coverage.

Moreover, I find it crazy how every misstep of American tech companies portends the end of democracy, but they have the gall to write: "In China, a whole new internet is flowering."

Veeva raised $4M in VC to build CRM for life sciences and currently has a $21B market cap. It's one of the 15 or so best exits of the last decade.

I agree that comparing biology today to transistors in the 1950s might seem hubristic. But even if you don't buy that, I would bet on the notion that there are pretty massive opportunities at the intersection of tech and bio.

I work in Boston and there's tremendous activity in the life science space, as traditionally defined. Doesn't seem crazy to believe that market could support many billion-dollar companies that build picks and shovels.

This is an often stated criticism of modern Lego designs, but I wonder if anyone has tried to test this empirically?

E.g. if you gave a group of kids a "classic" set and another a themed set, with no further instructions, would the first group produce more "creative" designs?

I think the critics of the branded sets undervalue the Piagetian concept of scaffolding, basically that having the Harry Potter superstructure allows kids to riff on a variety of concepts that actually may be more "creative" than the random geometric blocks.

E.g. "What if we built a jail around Voldermort instead of killing him" seems like an equally valuable expression of creativity as "I made a vaguely car-shaped thing, but it has six wheels instead of four and has those little lever bricks instead of a steering wheel."

This is accurate, but the sense I get is that there's a deliberate effort to move from licensed IP to Lego-created brands.

E.g. there are vastly more "Friends" kits, the Lego house brand targeted at girls, than Disney princesses.

Ninjago has become a perennial answer to the sword fighting action that Star Wars only delivers intermittently.

Lego's new "Hidden Side" brand seems clearly targeted at being a Lego-owned alternative to Harry Potter with alternative schools, trains, buses, etc.

I also get the sense that the 3rd party licenses are actually more focused towards the "Adult Fan of Lego/AFOL" community, e.g. the $200 Stranger Things kit, the $399 Disney Castle, and the $799 Millenium Falcon seem priced well above even what generous parents will spend on birthday/holiday gifts.

It would be interesting to see the sales breakdown between in-house and licensed brands and how it's shifting over time.

This sentiment drifts dangerously close to a conspiracy theory.

The existence of the vaccine industry demonstrates there is a market for a cure. As do immunotherapies. Where cures are possible, they are commercialized.

United Health Care, one of the largest private insurers in the US covers more lives than the Canadian Government and has every incentive to negotiate low prices.

This simple answer is satisfying to many who otherwise prefer single-payer plans, but doesn't really hold up to scrutiny

Sure,

1) The founder makes the case that if they reach a critical mass of "X users," or "Y Transaction volume," or another relevant metric there will be a windfall to be shared.

2) The investor evaluates the viability of the plan based on macro factors and the track record of the founders.

Every startup pitch has a certain amount of uncertainty. In this case, the market for a Patreon-like service was well-understood. The risk in this deal was whether or not the team could actually execute. There's no definitive way to tell if a team will be able to execute or not until you invest.

It turns out that this team has a strong pedigree in community-building, but perhaps less in the day-to-day operation of a market place in a market with an entrenched competitor. They also seemed to be focused as much on achieving ideological milestones as financial ones (which is fine!).

The outcome is unfortunate, but that doesn't mean the bet was bad when it was made.

I think a lot of Patreon's controversial decisions, e.g. raising fees, have come largely because they gave VCs control.

I have no inside knowledge, but Patreon seems to be straining to meet the needs of its creators while also reaching the scale its investors expect.

With Amazon, I have the ability to list my product, and buy ads pointing people directly to it.

With physical retailers, I have to hope I can convince the retailer to stock it, often have to pay up front for shelf space, and then have to continue to pay co-op fees for advertising services of dubious value.

Moreover, with Amazon, I know exactly how many units have been sold at any time and have the ability, for a fee, to get feedback from the buyers. With retail, you only get a rough estimate of sales, usually lagging by a quarter, and have no easy way to survey buyers.

I'm not saying that Amazon is acting like a great corporate citizen, but having worked with Amazon and most of the major national retailers, I'd take Amazon in a heartbeat.

That seems like the weakest part of the argument — Walmart, Kroger, Walgreens, Costco, and every other major retailer has a similar program.

All use sales data to determine what sells best and copy it. I did this for a decade, designing store brand medical devices for all the major retailers.

There are plenty of legitimate critiques of Amazon. The "private label" one is by far the weakest.

This is an important point. There's nothing to stop Harvard or Stanford from commercializing their research directly. They have massive endowments of financial and human capital.

The flip critique of the drug industry is to suggest they're basically taking miracle cures developed in toto in publicly-funded labs and taking pure profits.

If that were the case, shouldn't one of the dozens of well-capitalized research institutions just go to market?

The reality is the drug companies take on a tremendous burden turning high-level research into a product that works, including:

+ Formulating a product that will work at scale,

+ In widely diverse populations,

+ While eliminating potential side effects, + Adapting for human UX limitations,

+ Exhaustively guarding against adverse reactions,

+ At the same time, building production capacity,

+ Creates marketing materials for patients, but also to educate doctors who don't have scads of time to study new treatments,

+ Physically distributing the product

+ Monitoring the product fastidiously once it's on the market for negative reactions,

+ Sending humans to almost every doctor's office to answer any questions about the product,

+ While staffing a 24/7 customer service number to sort out any problems

It's not as easy as it's made out to be!

It might soon be time for The Oatmeal to add a new panel to his famous "Digg vs. Reddit" cartoon:

https://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter_2012/reddit_digg

I love Reddit and have no problem with this move in principle, though I do wish there was at least one social platform that would try to follow the Craigslist ethos and stay "proudly independent."

I'm not a big believer in crypto, but Reddit seems like one of the few platforms that would allow a crypto economy to develop and provide an alternative to the dominant money-making models.

It's a great point! I'm always skeptical of the "move to experiences" narrative, but it sounds like you're having success there! I think that's definitely one route to go. I'm mostly curious about how Simon and similar companies are viewing this landscape? Are they planning on managing these malls indefinitely? Or do they largely view them as depreciating assets that they'll milk until they are demolished?

Apple never co-locates with a Dollar Tree store. There's a point at which Apple and other high-end retailers will decide that their brands are being diminished by being located next to an Alpaca-based clothing store. This may create a death spiral that accelerates the demise of the mall.

I was at the Pheasant Lane Mall the weekend it opened! You are 100% right, it's decidedly middle-brow, compared to something like the Copley Mall in Boston.

Author here. My point is that if a mall that is by all accounts one of the success stories can only fill space with low-quality retailers, maybe the situation is more dire than we're being led to believe. I live in that area and was shocked to see how many storefronts had suddenly gone low-rent. But YMMV.

Hey, author here. If you look at my submission history, you'll note vote manipulation is not my foray :)

If you want a clear point, how about "At what percent of mom and pop retail occupancy do malls, even successful ones, become unattractive destinations for the stores that are still driving retail sales."

+1. My daughter was being treated for Leukemia when she developed Sepsis and hovered near death for a week in the ICU of Boston Children's Hospital, generally considered the best pediatric unit in the world. It was touch and go the whole time, even with the best possible care. For the sake of your children, and children with suppressed immune systems, please vaccinate your children.

That's fair, but how many 45+ founders can you rattle off, who have founded companies with $10M+ in revenue?