rogerkirkness

Yes. Also, keep in mind, YC investing as a fund without taking a board seat has no Duty of Loyalty at all, they could fund every company in an industry and so long as the founders were cool with it there's no issue. So it specifically relates to board seats, which investors and YC tend to be prudent about.

Yes, it is meaningfully better at coding. Put in a large file and ask for a refactor with some criteria.

If YC partners are on the board as YC rather than as individuals, then YC as a whole has a Duty of Loyalty to that company and could not sit the other board or invest as a Major Investor. There are scenarios though where the individual at YC is on a board as themselves, and YC invests in another company where unrelated group partners are the ones working on the investment and that is fine.

Disclosure: not a lawyer, YC is a Major Investor in my startup.

Google is in a long, slow decline to irrelevance.

Not true for me. No social media other than HN and got in first try.

"He contends that treatments used for patients who have brain injuries have also been shown to be effective in treating long COVID–related brain fog symptoms. These may include speech, cognitive, and occupational therapy as well as meeting with a neuropsychiatrist for the treatment of related mental health concerns."

Is that a brain injury, or just... mental health challenges? I was expecting something more permanent but in practice if occupational therapy and such work then it implies a significant psychological feedback loop component at least.

The latter, viruses are just stressful on the body and recent research is finding the more subtle and long term ways they affect us. Rather than Long Covid being some historically unusual phenomenon, the research is showing that there is Long versions of other viruses we were misattributing before with similar frequency.

Current B2B software founder here:

1. Customers all have a singular convergent goal to 'get efficient'. The only thing better than software which can reduce jobs, is having less software.

2. That is happening in all companies, so whatever type of software you are selling it becoming more difficult. Doesn't matter if former PMF existed.

3. Some of the digital boom during Covid (e.g. ecommerce) that floated so many startups is running backwards. Wealthy consumers mostly spending money in person. So e-commerce went from insane growth to slow growth, etc.

Those are the three things we've seen but really they apply to any B2B startup.

Any non cash expense like stock-based compensation is pretend from a cash perspective. Stacking money in the bank with no debt is the purpose of a company and what Tesla is doing in increasingly effective fashion.

"The Austin, Texas, electric vehicle, solar panel and battery maker said Wednesday that its net income was $7.93 billion from October through December, compared with $3.69 billion a year earlier."

Damn they must really be hand to mouth right now...

The best products tend to have PMs willing to say No the most, though.

I'd go further and say that among the intellectual elite, having a degree is more based on whether or not your interests overlap with things that colleges have to offer than some default for very smart people. It is not the default now.

The standard vesting schedule for founders if you decide to fundraise is 4-5 years with a cliff at one year.

That said, you typically start the vesting at the start date of service to the company, so you would credit yourself with 6-7 months of vesting and your co-founder with 0-1 months.

The general assumption at this point is that it takes 10-15 years to reach a meaningful exit, so a split that unequal six months in is uncommon because it's a small percentage either way of the totality of the founder journey.

Split is up to you but I'd recommend four year vesting for both of you, one year cliff for both, starting on service start date.

Who do you talk to about stuff? -> Most age peers don't have kids yet, so I rebuild relationships with people I went to high school with that do have kids.

Do you have any time for yourself? -> One kid is not that bad from a free time perspective, but when you have two there's maybe five hours a week for each parent and it ends up being zero sum with two (or more) on one childcare.

Where are all the tech dads? -> Age peers in tech don't seem to have kids despite being the small slice of people arguably able to comfortably afford it. Mostly seem to bank up cash and have kids in mid to late 30s and slow lane themselves.

I wrote a bit about my experience being a founder and a dad where I started my company in the same month as my wife and I found out she was pregnant with our first child. Link here: https://rogerkirkness.com/founder-and-father

Canadian universities moral police work instead of doing anything actually useful. The state of innovation in Canada is next to non existent. I live in Waterloo and 95% of the best comp sci and comp eng grads to the US. It's really not surprising when you compare the importance of the creation of ChatGPT with think piece blog posts about DEI.

This must have been what it was like watching General Electric go from 'maker of all the things' to 'very financially unsound derivatives trader'

Yeah I think there's a paper about how brains most likely represent some things with quantum states which may explain why we don't understand them yet.

Smartphones are textbook consumer overshoot. More people seem to want degraded phone experiences (e.g. dumb phones) than foldable or more contrived phones. The next step is for the average sale price of "Phones people actually buy" to fall.

For business focused software, we have had success simply not allowing direct prompting and rather having prompting happen behind the scenes, kind of like backend code. Narrow prompts return results to the UI for interaction indirectly through structured data fields. Obviously not possible in all LLM applications.

By market share, Android is over 80%. But Apple still makes 100% of the profit. I think I'm referring more to the diffusion of technology than the success of the company in the space, there's other examples.

My version of this:

1. Make it possible (even if it's ugly and expensive to do) - Blackberry

2. Make it pleasant/probable (aka improve the UX to customer maximum) - iPhone

3. Make it profitable/cheap (optimize efficiency/cost to deliver) - Android

Which is about 8-16% of GDP. Seems doable.

Google doesn't do business in China because they won't agree to the privacy violating terms of doing so, that is at least a $1T principle if you compare it to the amount of hardware and services that Apple sells there.

I think bioplastic is a much, much better way to solve this than zero waste. We tried to do zero waste and the personal lifestyle overhead expense was near impossible. Have switched most things in the house to bioplastic, way better.

That too!

Battery life. Compute has overshot battery life.

This is basically the plot line of Childhood's End on Sci-fi channel.

Better to look at what people do than what they say for the real truth.

This is sort of half true. It appears to act biologically on serotonin, which affects anxiety, but the mechanism is the nervous system damage (as well as reducing the efficiency of oxygen diffusion in tissue, found recently in Nature study). Given the two, it appears long Covid is 1. Serotonin syndrome and 2. Affects oxygen diffusion, which together cause a variety of vague but real symptoms. Benzos addressing anxiety would give temporary relief from the serotonin dysregulation/depletion.

Yeah Long Covid appears to have a component that is serotonin syndrome, basically a chronic depletion in serotonin. For many people SSRIs also help based on recent studies.