sethbannon

This title is misleading (no one has spent a dollar as far as I can tell) and the article gets several facts wrong. For instance, it says "Meat The Future" is a clean meat company when in fact it's a sort of marketing and design group. There is no way China could buy meat from them. Poorly researched clickbait.

Dangerous advice. From the article: "if a VC sends a follow-up email asking factual questions, they’re already emotionally uninterested. Many entrepreneurs get caught up in this process: they send the VC a fact and citation, which the VC nitpicks, etc., but it’s already too late. The entrepreneur has failed by not creating the type of confidence necessary to de-risk the investment."

If you want investors that actually understand what you do generally, or even better yet understand what you do on a technical level, this is terrible advice to follow. Investors literally become co-owners of your company, and there is no easy way to get rid of them. Raising from the right people slowly is better than raising from just anyone fast. It's a positive sign when investors actually dig in with real substantive questions after thinking things over, and an indication of how thoughtful they'll be as co-owners.

They did: http://blog.ycombinator.com/open-application-for-yc-growth-p...

A lot of what you're saying makes a lot of sense. It's certainly very difficult to know if a non-human animal is suffering without them being able to communicate it using language. We can know when another human is suffering even if we don't speak their language because we can empathize with them, but this is harder for non-human animals.

I think you might be conflating "pain" with "suffering". Pain is simply a reaction to a negative stimuli. Pain response has been shown in plants and insects, for instance. But I don't place any value on pain that doesn't lead to a negative subjective experience. That's what I think is actually bad. Suffering has not been shown in plants or insects.

But there has been a lot of research showing that many non-human mammalian animals do suffer. Here's some research on chickens, for instance: https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-016-1064-4

And I've found this to be a good resource for navigating the sentience debate: http://www.animal-ethics.org/sentience-section/

Yes, we do need to draw the line somewhere. I'm glad you agree. I'm also glad you agree that we shouldn't cause suffering to Orcas, Dolphins, primates, or elephants. Why do you think we should not cause suffering to those non-human animals but think that it's ok to cause suffering to other non-human animals?

My line in the sand is sentience (the ability to suffer). What's yours?

Listening to these remarkable recordings, I can't help but think that as time goes on, more and more of the artificial mental barriers we've built between us and non-human animals will fall. I hope with more research humanity stops seeing non-human animals as resources to be exploited but rather as sentient beings to be respected.

Full article: http://archive.is/WqK6L

For the interested in the clean meat (aka lab grown meat) space, there was a recent cover story in Inc on the industry leader Memphis Meats that's well worth a read: https://www.inc.com/magazine/201711/jeff-bercovici/memphis-m...

Ayn Rand ideology in its purest form.

A startup called Catalog Technologies has been already demonstrated DNA storage. For their demo they encoded Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy in DNA.

https://youtu.be/ESGVJBXR4KE

I'd love to know how these birds acquire the knowledge that fumigating with cigarettes Works and if/how they pass that knowledge along.

Incredible that now the best engine (Stockfish) is open source engine and the best server / app (Lichess) is also open source. Well done chess community!

I once challenged Magnus and, while I lost, did much much better than Max. Where's my WSJ puff piece?

https://youtu.be/sZFZBf6aTF4

Are there any advantages to an enzymatic approach to chemical production vs fermentation?

What exactly are the fields appearing around each atom?

Duplicate of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15332147

I literally had flashbacks of the 12 year old me. It was a taste I hadn't experienced in some time. But your point is a fair one. For what it's worth, the WSJ was also at the tasting and their reporter (a meat eater) also said that it tasted exactly like meat.

Here's a point by point rebuttal of Pat Brown's comments I wrote: https://medium.com/@sethbannon/cleaning-the-record-on-clean-...

For those that are curious, as an early investor and advocate for clean meat, I wrote about my experience eating Memphis Meats' products and why their solution is so much better than convention meat production: https://medium.com/@sethbannon/i-just-ate-meat-for-the-first...

Probably a typo or mistake by the reporters.

How is this different than Make School's model (also a YC company)? I understand they've been doing this for some time, and even offer a stipend to people who are accepted in the program to help pay for housing and other costs.

https://www.makeschool.com/product-college/admissions#tuitio...

"Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.” - Biz Stone

I am so insanely excited for the potential of this technology. There are many ethical questions here, but the potential benefits far outweigh the downsides. In the near future, we can detect and eliminate genetic disorders, ensuring no child has to suffer from these defects any longer. Long term, this gives us a tool to take control of our own evolution in a way never before possible.

Couldn't be more excited for what's possible.

Can someone explain why they're sure this is causation and not correlation? Intuitively it seems to me a happier person would be more inclined to spend money on buying extra time than someone who's unhappy, who would be more inclined to spend on things or experiences.

I look forward to the day a majority of people realize that our biology is, to a large extent, something to be overcome. Our "natural" biological impulses are often incredibly destructive, for both ourselves (e.g. sugar cravings) and for those around us (e.g. the impulses in this article).

It takes such incredible bravery to call out this kind of behavior in a palce that can feel too much like an old boys club. I'm in awe of these women. From Susan Fowler to Niniane Wang to Leiti Hsu & Susan Ho to the ones in this article. I don't know any of them but they are the catalysts of progress. It's up to all of us to make sure this is a turning point for an industry that needs to do so much better.

"While we acknowledge that we are a partnership of six middle-aged white men, we have tried to be a positive force in support of women as entrepreneurs and venture capitalists."

I'm sorry. I have no doubt the Foundry Group partners are good people (I've met and liked a few of them) but this disclaimer simply doesn't fly. If you really want to stand up for gender equality in tech, hire more women into the partnership. That would do far more than another blog post with a set of commitments that dance around that.

Fantastic app. Really nicely designed. Question on the personalized learning: what factors go into determining when and what content to show me to optimize my learning?

I really like the UN's Sustainable Development Goals as a guide for "the world's biggest problems". See them here: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/?menu=1300

Luckily, these days there are an abundance of ways you can 1) make money, 2) work on interesting problems, 3) work with amazing people, and 4) do social good. You used to have to choose 2 or 3 of those things, but no longer. I run a nonprofit organization that highlights these opportunities: http://impact.tech/

I also run a VC fund that supports these sorts of startups. You can see an example of the companies we back here: http://www.fifty.vc/companies/

If anyone is considering jumping into the social impact startup space, feel free to drop me a line and I can help you navigate the opportunities. First name AT the URL of the nonprofit I mentioned.

Correct. Apologies!