2,488 karma · joined October 18, 2010
Close but I don't think this is quite right ... "PR conultant's way of doing things: [Find and convince the client on your abilities.] Spend the budget. If project was a win, [convince your client that it was your] own success. If the project was a failure, [convince the client that it was their] business, [always] show results."
If you own anything, you're not a peon. However, owning 100% of something is simply a very different mindset than owning just 99% of something. In the former, you solely control you own destiny.
In the latter example, you're beholden or subject to others. Not necessarily bad, but a very different experience.
Kind of like long term dating versus getting married.
More generally I mean, give up a piece of your company as a last resort. Not saying investor money is always evil, sometimes it's simply necessary to make it through a bad patch or to get off the ground if you're broke. But if someone is giving you money for your company, it means that they value it more than you, which is immediately suspect.
Being in control of your life, or of anything, is a huge benefit and comes with a big premium. When one company acquires a public company, they usually pay more than the public stock price. If you don't drive to work, owning a car is very likely more expensive than renting, but many buy because control over when and how to drive is gained is worth the cost.
This was a simple example to illustrate a point. A more realistic example would be: owning 100% of a company making $1M/year is better than owning 40% of a company making $100M/year where investors put in $500M with a 4X liquidation preference. This case is even clearer here, but not quite as easy to parse.
Modern VCs allow founders to retain a large "percentage" of their company in stock or other ownership terms, but they use liquidation preferences and other mechanisms to effectively increase their financial leverage.
The article listed a host of real and bad experiences, but it never said that if they could go back and do it again, they wouldn't.
In practice, founder burnout is pretty rare. The stresses of running a business are real and can affect your life and decision making process, but the business challenges themselves are often even more difficult. Also, founders don't just start a company as any employee would start a job, they need to start with a huge reserve of enthusiasm or motivation. Emotionally, they start from a higher place, are subjected to higher than normal stresses, but their stress tolerance itself is not often the limiting factor.
Consider YC as a last resort if you have no other options.
Gary Vee's main resume star is that he has become successful and well known. He has become more of a celebrity than an oracle, and many of his side-companies have not done well. Still, his main points that the internet has changed the way of doing business and you need to utilize social media to be successful are sound.
Generally, if you want to sell technology to lawyers, telling them they will be more efficient will not work, they are simply not motivated to spend money for something makes something they are already doing take less time.
If you want to sell to lawyers, the best arguments you have are:
- Increase Quality / Reduce Errors: There are tons of mistakes that lawyers can make, and they are constantly terrified of making them. As a lawyer reputation is everything, and even silly inconsequential mistakes hurt.
- Get More Clients: Small-time lawyers spend up to 50% of their time trying to attract clients. At larger firms, it's less than that, but it's still a constant pressure that they are judged on. They may not be willing to pay for something that makes their work 10% faster, but they will pay for something that gets them 10% more clients.
- Capabilities That Change the Law Itself: Some technology really changes the rules itself. E-discovery allowed firms to look through millions of pages of documents, and to bury their opponents in the same. If you didn't have it, you were at a disadvantage and would lose your case.
As a lawyer, if you read and understand a document in 10 minutes and bill an hour of time for it, that's lying and you can lose your bar license over it. However, if you read that same document very slowly and carefully over a full hour, then you are considered a high quality detail-oriented attorney.
You are definitely correct. Also, disclosure... I worked on that EAL7 Virtual OS. When I left it was only EAL6+, likely leading to my bias towards it.
If you consider why a company makes something reliable or not, it's a relatively simple formula:
= Number of Users x (Benefit of Getting it Right x Probability of Getting it Right) - (Cost of Getting it Wrong x (1 - Probability of Getting it Right)))
If something can only be proven to a 99.999999% certainty, is that still "unscientific"? What if scientists predict something happening with only 0.1% chance, for example the likelihood of a particular asteroid hitting earth? Or what about 60%, like a typical weather report predicting rain.
Generally, the high, low, or intermediate likelihood of some event happening does not make it unscientific.
While it would be unscientific to simply say that aliens exist, it's plenty scientific to consider the rate of star formation and age, conditions for life around stars, and time it takes to develop intelligent life to say that there is a particular likelihood of there being alien life.
Well, yeah, because the government and military industrial complex censored all of it. But don't worry, Q Anon will figure it out for us.
How is jit.si able to do this for free where many other companies charge? Are they monetizing user data? Or trying to upsell some parent company services? Is this an honest-for-goodness non-profit because someone was fed up with video conferencing?
None of these are potentially deal-breakers, but they need to be transparent about why they are doing this for free and what they are getting out of it. In 2020, the understanding of "free" is much more sophisticated than it was in say 2010.
While reading the original material design spec, it seemed enlightened, but now its clear it's more of a standard than a best-practice. Its by no means the "best" design, just like the qwerty keyboard wasn't the best. However, due to a huge marketing push by google, it's now considered a standard and if you do not conform, you'll look weird. Not so different than in the 1990s, if you had a Windows application without a "file" drop-down menubar, you would also be considered weird.
Material design should not be thought of as an optimal design approach, it should be thought of as a standard to rally behind. If you build something adhering to the standard, regardless of whether it's a good or bad design choice, users will understand it because they have already been it by Google.
If you have something that's better, it may be rejected simply because folks weren't already trained on it.
Given that most crises seem to occur roughly every 7-15 years, there will always be such a generation.
A hypothesis: the reason why crises occur roughly 7-15 years is because that is approximately the length of society's collective memory concerning monetary issues.
Is it just me, or does it feel like the only people using Robinhood are college students gambling with their parent's money?
Given that many extremely smart people who have devoted their lives to the stock market cannot beat average returns, the lack of Robinhood user's knowledge of "pin risk" seems to miss the greater point.
Here are some vague uptime reliability measures and what you need to get there:
- 70% reliability: you can often just free-code it and pray.
- 95% reliability: you better have a bunch of tests.
- 99.5%: you need automated testing, coverage tools, documentation, team coordination tools, and and solid merge/deployment process.
- 99.99%: all-of-the-above plus tests that aggressively attack and analyze production systems (eg, Netflix Chaos Monkey), coverage tests that do branch coverage and not just line coverage, simulating network failures, and/or test on a variety of hardware and user-configurations.
- 100%: The only way to be absolutely certain, is to convert each line of code into a mathematical operator and solve for a formal proof of correctness.
The 100% reliability standard is not just theoretical. The U.S. government issues software standards for safety critical devices (military, aviation, healthcare), and some of them do indeed require mathematical proof of correctness (EAL6+ being a key standard). They generally do not require 100% bug-free code, but just that some particular features are 100% bug free (e.g., the OS/scheduler will never deadlock).
Generally true, but there is a couple of exceptions to this rule: if everyone knows that the company is brand new and does not have an established reputation, then using that app requires a general acceptance of risk.
Robinhood was brand new, and outages should have been expected. The problem with Robinhood isn't the outage, it's that it was marketed to college students gambling with their parent's money, who know just enough about the stock market to be dangerous, but not enough to invest properly.
This principle can start at a very basic level, like don't give them a ball until they find a small round rock to play with or let them use a chunk of charcoal to draw with before giving them a pencil.
It goes further:
- give them a few batteries and LEDs before giving them a flashlight
- give them some logic gates before giving them a calculator
- make them come up with a problem that can't be solved on a calculator before giving them a computer
- giving them a text-based computer, and make them create something that generates ascii art before giving them anything with a GUI.
- force them to create some sort of networked application before giving them social media.
Etc., etc. I know that in practice, the above sounds ridiculous: kids will grab that iPad as soon as they can use their fingers. However, the point is that there must be an incremental way to introduce kids to technology that forces them to learn, and rewards that learning with more sophisticated technology and learning.
> what is "blood equity"?
Even failing startups, with little cash and poor market penetration are often worth something to somebody. It could be a small client list, the team, patents, or just an attractive domain name. Most founders leading failing startups will try to sell to suitors for pennies on the dollar invested. Sometimes they get a small cash bump (or in WeWork's case, a small $1B), but it also means they can say they were acquired rather than simply failed. And they're right, building a company and selling it for $1.00 is far more difficult than not selling it at all.
Investors don't always like this because they recognize the loss at acquisition, which hurts their published returns. But more often, they don't care. They know the odds before-hand and prepare for events like this.
The people who lose the hardest are the employees with just stock-options or small equity stakes. Everyone's stock will be worthless, but the founder can potentially walk-away with a decent "consulting" contract. The best a standard employee can hope for is being hired by the acquiring company and that their culture doesn't suck.
From the employees perspective, the bright side is that they are often the first people to figure out that a company is doomed (before investors, customers, or the press). They have the advantage of time when it comes to planning their next move.
While I generally agree with you in the vast majority of practical cases, it can make sense in some circumstances, namely, if there is a very clear logical abstraction between one service and another.
A microservice is just another layer of abstraction, similar to functions, classes, files, libraries, and programs, but even higher up the food-chain, and it comes with its own characteristics and peculiarities. If you have high confidence that one component is (1) logically extremely different from all of the other components, (2) has no side effects, (3) is not I/O bound as it's going over a network, and critically, (4) is on a separate development timeline, then you have a solid candidate for a microservice.
While Abbyy is likely the best, it's also incredibly expensive. Roughly on the order of $0.01/page or maybe at best a tenth of that in high volume.
For comparison, I run a bunch of OCR servers using the open source tesseract library. The machine-time on one of the major cloud providers works out to roughly $0.01 for 100-1000 pages.
Can't stress this enough. The next time you open a multi-column PDF in adobe reader and it selects a set of lines or a paragraph in the way you would expect, know that there is a huge amount of technology going on behind the scenes trying to figure out the start and end of each line and paragraph.
Legal technology. Pretty much everything a lawyer submits to a court is in PDF, or is physically mailed and then scanned in as PDF. If you want to build any technology that understands the law, you have to understand PDFs.
Converting PDFs to HTML well is a very hard problem, but hard by itself to create a very big company. When processing PDFs or documents generally, the value is not in the format, it's in the substantive content.
The real money is not going from PDF to HTML, but from HTML (or any doc format) into structured knowledge. There are plenty of companies trying to do this (including mine! www.docketalarm.com), and I agree it has the potential to be as big as self-driving cars. However, technology to understand human language and ideas is not nearly as well developed as technology to understand images, video, and radar (what self-driving care rely on).
The problem is much more difficult to solve than building safer-than-human self-driving cars. If you can build a machine that truly understands text, you have built a general AI.
This should be obvious, but the answer is because OCR engines are not terribly accurate. If you have a native PDF, you're far better off parsing the PDF then converting to an image and OCRing. But if OCR ever becomes perfect, then sure.