technotony

There must be some difficult conversations happening at Airbnb leadership/Board right now. IPO has to look like needing to be postponed and I guess they will need to start figuring out ways to reduce their burn-rate until market conditions improve.

This is smart. If coronavirus is growing by a factor of 10 per week then we are all going to be in lockdown/isolation in two weeks time and probably not focusing on doing seed deals.

There's probably some hidden clause that's costing them something with their Stripe investment. Any tiny effect there is going to cost them way more than $21MM.

But at the same time enterprize value increased 40x. Paying 1/3 of the gains to management seems fair given the performance.

The problem is the return of the reusable containers. I've collaborating with several startups working on this problem. Shipping costs are 20-40% of COGS for many ecommerce catagories and you are basically doubling them when you require return for reuse and consumers don't want to pay the price premium that requires.

To be fair, those in authority were doing a pretty good job decimating the male working age population before flu came along. They could probably model the daily death rate from flu in it's early days to be less than that on the Western front... especially if they weren't very good at modelling exponential growth.

> After years of indifference, individual investors seem to be finding their way back to stocks, for better or worse.

There's an old adage in London that it's time to sell when the retail buyers start entering the marketing...

You don't get to decide who leaves. If people don't like a companies dictator then they are free to go join another company. It's this competition in the free market for labor that helps prevent the abuses of tyranny.

Yeah, I think people can move between both states. Meditation in particular, if practiced deeply/for long enough, can lead to the non-narrative state. Ever since I did a ten day vipassana meditation course 18 months ago I've been able to spend long periods without verbal thoughts though I still feel sensation throughout my body.

I've had people cancel meetings with me in San Francisco 'because it was raining'. To be fair the roads here do become significantly more stressful then, but whenever it happens it feels ridiculous. My theory is that whatever the worst 1-2% of weather days per year becomes a weather excuse anywhere in the world. In the Phillipines it had to be bad typhoon, not just a normal one. In London it was moderate snowfall (that wouldn't cause a dent in switzerland for instance).

He was eating yeast which is a solid protein source...

> it's not like they are genetically engineering giant mutant pigs.

No but they've gene edited pet dwarf pigs: https://www.nature.com/news/gene-edited-micropigs-to-be-sold...

Netflix has slightly reduced the value of this because it now resets your viewing history each time you do this. This means losing recommendations, which personally I find valuable.

Another big change that plays into this trend is the switch in markets. Traditionally biotech was B2B focused (eg drugs, ingredients, biofuel commodity plays) but as the science platforms are being developed as articulated in this article we are seeing the beginnings of B2C biotech companies, eg Impossible Foods. I think this shift in the market is also going to drive very different fundraising strategies.

In this case it's mainly our understanding of protein structure/texture/taste which is a new capability.

The science is in picking the isolates. They don't market that science, but it's the reason their burger is so much better than other veggie burgers. The Stanford RNA scientist (and some colleagues) helped them figure out which proteins to focus on and how to modify those proteins based on ph and other conditions to create the taste/texture they wanted. What they are doing is much harder than it looks from the ingredients list. This is one of the scientists who helped: https://profiles.stanford.edu/joseph-puglisi

Have a look at their IPO prospectus. Until they built their plant in 2018 they were selling at below COGS. But this is mostly a scale problem, which is why the stock is still performing well, as they are growing so fast the market is confident they will fix the cost problem over time.

The naysayers in the comment thread are missing the understanding that the fundamental technologies driving this are all moving exponentially. Beyond Meat's innovation came from a Stanford professor who is an expert in RNA molecules (he helped them figure out their protein structure/selection), impossible foods is a synthetic biology company. Exponential techs always underwhelm in the beginning but soon deliver more powerful products than people imagined. That's going to happen with this industry and faster than people expect.

This is too simplistic. Certain types of intellect seem to peak around there, like mathematical ability, but other types of intellect such as emotional intelligence or verbal skills (think nobel prize winning author) peak much much later in life - certainly into our 50's.

The increased risk is passenger's opening the door right as you bike past or jumping out at a stop light or something. with cabs you know the risk so raise your awareness but with ridesharing could be anycar as you normally can't tell from the rear whose ridesharing.

Why should they offer a free maps service? They are a business with shareholder responsibilities, not a charity, and maps must cost them a ton of money to operate.

The main thing* holding back this is that we don't understand the human genome enough to make really useful edits. It's very rare that there's a change that would be better done with germline engineering than somatic cell engineering or gene therapy. One day that won't be true however, and that's when the problems will really begin.

To me the strongest non-religious argument against doing this is that it will further accelerate wealth benefits, eg if you could make your kids smarter. One of the problems with that however is that this technique is so cheap and easy that banning it will just create a black market, or a single country decides to allow it for economic or political reasons and people travel there to get pregnant.

That impossibility of controlling this is why I think we have no choice but to proceed slowly, cautiously, but under full transparency.

* there are also uncertainties about off-target effects and overall safety of the technique but I'm confident those issues will eventually be fixed too.

And presumably if there remains any debate about this we could settle it with a genomic study.

It's not that you lack the language skills to describe it, it's that you accessed a state of consciousness that exists before/beyond language. This is a state that has been extensively explored through meditation by yogis and which the foundation of Vedantic teachings if you want to learn more. The way I (poorly) understand it is that language is part of the veil that separates us from Source. You can't communicate what lies beyond the veil because the tool of communication is of the veil.

Maybe 1 calorie of cow per 12 of corn, but dairy cows are much more efficient than that:

Cow eats 40.57 MCAl/day [1]

Produces 45.5 KGS of milk [1]

Milk 610 kcal/liter

Energy of cows milk per day 27.755 MCAL

Cow milk efficiency 68%

This feels high as a gut reaction, maybe calculation is missing energy to grow the cow. Still it shows how efficient they are!

Would love a source for your cow meat efficiency numbers, I'm currently exploring efficiency of fermentation methods to produce meat alternatives and that would be a helpful data point.

Source: [1] http://www.milkproduction.com/Library/Scientific-articles/Nu...

We had a version of this at college where if you left a computer logged in (this was the days before everyone had their own device) then you would send an email to the dean of the school making some or other outrageous request and cc'ing the whole school year mailing list. They were pretty funny!

I've seen many many of my friends try the side hustle, and none succeed. Mostly they burn themselves out from working so many hours and then stuff gets tough, as it does, and they bail. I think a better approach is to make some savings and take a sabbatical to test out what it's really like. If your day job is cushy and unstressful then maybe that's a different story...

This group is working on that. You can currently buy a moss engineered to put fragrance in your home: https://www.mosspirationbiotech.com/shop

Not these particular ones, they have been genetically engineered to do this job. They added a gene from mice liver that takes out certain toxins. I think/hope the team plans to commercialize the plants though.

Some think you should do this annually. "Back when he was running GE, Jack Welch famously argued that leaders should fire the bottom 10 percent of their workforce each year, as part of an orderly continuous improvement process." https://www.inc.com/paul-b-brown/should-you-fire-10-of-your-...