technotony

It's both, they start by calculating enterprise value, then from there estimate the value of the common stock taking into account the things you mention - then divide that by number of shares (including those expected to be issued shortly).

If only it was so simple. In a typical product there might be dozens or hundreds of patents. How do you decide who gets what royalty? that's a negotiation on a product by product basis and involves things like royalty stacking.

Plant patents [1] and Plant Variety Protection Rights [2] are totally reasonable ways they can protect their crops without blocking at the technology level with patents. Which to use depends on sexual vs asexual reproduction of the crop.

[1] https://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-started/patent-basics/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Variety_Protection_Act_o...

Which apparently was the original reason behind the war on drugs in the first place. Source [1] [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/richard-nix...

Well they are getting a lot of publicity over this, that presumably has some marketing value. Can't imagine that's worth the legal risk, but as Oscar Wilde said "the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about" (I'm not sure this is true myself)

It's also complicated by the fact that news/journalism is the process we use to hold the government/powerful accountable. There are serious agency problems that would develop if the government (or any group) were to regulate it. This is why freedom of speech is such an important part of the constitution.

Also the USA would not exist if it were not for fake news. It was the arrival of printing presses in Boston which allowed political groups to create fake news to inflame the revolution[1], so it's not always clear fake news is a bad thing (I'm English but I think the creation of democratic America is one of the greatest common goods the world has seen, though i'm sure we can debate that).

[1] Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Penguin_History_of_the_Uni...

I don't think that's fair at all, he openly acknowledges the idea that "There are questions about whether we can make a global community that works for everyone". I think he's outlining a vision, aligned with the arrow of history, whereby people come together through technology in greater connection and harmony. I hope we one day all realize that we are one humanity, and from that we can get to greater world peace. Of course we should be discussing how to get to that place, but it's totally reasonable for him to outline his vision/hopes to do that - that's the first part of any sensible discussion.

YC does write letter of recommendations for visas once they get to know you (ie once they've funded you). I'm sure individual partners do this as well for founders they know personally and are outside YC, I doubt VC firms do that without knowing you personally.

It goes even deeper than that. At the time at Cambridge there was only one subject to study, called the Tripos, which included all these things. Overtime they've gradually stripped parts of the course into their own separate subjects. The only thing left is mathematics, which leads to a curious ceremony when you graduate with a maths degree which none of the other subjects have. So to Newton Theology and Maths were taught in the same major!

I'm curious, does anyone know why Americans were killed by 'european' diseases, but not the other way around? Was Europe just lucky there weren't any nasty bugs like that in America or was it statistically likely to be that way due to relative population sizes?

New York times suggests this boom is caused by India and Venezuela, so yes other countries are picking up on this: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/03/business/dealbook/bitcoin-...

If you are interested in taking this idea further, all life is game, I'd recommend the philosophy book 'finite and infinite games'. Can be applied to all kinds of aspects of human life, eg a startup is a game played by founders who win with a successful exit.

With this philosophy text, Carse demonstrates a way of looking at actions in life as being a part of at least two types of what he describes as "games", finite and infinite. Both games are played within rules, as agreed upon by the participants; however, the meaning of the rules is different for the two types of games. The book stresses a non-serious (or "playful") view of life on the part of "players", referring to their choices as "moves", and societal constructs and mores as "rules" and "boundaries".

In short, a finite game is played with the purpose of winning (thus ending the game), while an infinite game is played with the purpose of continuing the play.

It sounds like the problem isn't venture capital returns as a whole, but that Calpers can't get into the best funds for structural reasons related to the need to publicly disclose fund returns. Not surprising it underperforms if it can't get into the best funds. This data point isn't therefore very valuable for assessing Venture Capital returns as a whole which is what the headline implies.

The next step is optimizing the plants to grow better in these greenhouse conditions - currently the plants waste lots of energy. For example my company, TAXA Biotechnologies[1], has identified a gene that doubles the rate of growth of lettuce per unit light energy. It wouldn't work in the wild as the cost is reduced pest-resistance but growing indoors there are other ways to control that. [1]www.taxa.com

The difference is that Facebook was within reach of cashflow positive at all times in it's growth, ie if they fired non-core staff could be cash flow positive within months (source: Mark Zuckerburg talk I went to). It had ad's from within the first few months of existence, that was Saverin's role before he left/was fired but they always built that part of the business and revenues always scaled with expenses.

I don't know, sounds like he went through nine pretty miserable months dealing with the failure, and now is starting a mental health startup to help others manage the mental challenge of startups. Feels to me like he felt the weight of this failure, my read is that the statement about success was himself still trying to tell himself he's ok. Failing in a startup sucks. People kill themselves over that (including a friend of mine). I think we should forgive those who fail, it's a necessary part of the startup ecosystem, and let them move on with their lives.

With any new technology the risk of not applying it should also be offset against the risk of side-effects from using it.

Thanks, it was a lot of work getting ready for launch. Will be writing a post later on all the things you need to do to get live with one of these campaigns.

Especially now Title III campaigns are live and anyone can raise from anyone. See www.wefunder.com for example.

Their estimate of the portal fees of 7-12% is wildly wrong. WeFunder[1], a YC company, is charging 3% and there are several others at 5%. [1] www.wefunder.com

I don't think CRISPR is going to face as many regulatory hurdles as you might imagine. USDA is pretty clear that CRISPR plants are unregulated [1] and the White House is likely in the process of making lighter regulations so that you can apply CRISPR to animals as well [2].

[1] https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/biotechnology/am-i...

[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/07/02/improving-transpa...

>I just don't like the idea of imposing licensing restrictions on farmers. It's a dark road that we don't need to go down.

For what it's worth I agree with you, but this is a political problem as it's congress that sets those rules. Also within the current regulatory environment, where it costs >$100MM to deregulate a GMO any other business model will be flawed.

My company (www.taxa.com) makes GMO plants which are not regulated for sale in the United States (which some people thing is a bad idea). But because we have so much lower cost of getting to market we've decided to follow a open source model. Our hope is that if we can continuously improve the product people will come back for the next generation version anyway. But we can only have this model because of the way our products are regulated.

Your allegations miss a crucial detail, Monsanto sued farmers who planted seeds and then sprayed them with herbicide[1]. Ie the farmer knew what he was doing and used the patented trait. Why shouldn’t Monsanto sue over that? Like many things in GMO land the myth that they sue accidental contamination is wrong.

Monsanto has the worst PR team in history, which has made my company’s work much harder, but ‘Monsanto is Evil’ is a marketing slogan developed by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth etc. These environmental groups are actually the true evil in the industry. Their campaigning has held back progress in the industry by many years. Smarter folks than me argue that their actions on Golden Rice meet all the criteria to be considered a crime against humanity[2]

[1] http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/gm-seed-accidentally... [2] http://www.allowgoldenricenow.org/the-crime-against-humanity

I’ve actually wondered if we should create some kind of ‘blackops’ X-prize. Crowdfund a million dollars in bitcoin and release it to someone who can prove they released a gene drive that wiped these monsters out.

Obviously this would be a major violation of the democratic process, but I feel like the utilitarian ends here justify the means. Should an individual have the power to take a global decision like this? Probably not, but this action is needed because the current GMO debate is so bogged down in unmovable, politically entrenched positions.

The environmental and social justice NGOs who campaign against this technology may be doing the world one of the greatest environmental dis-services we’ve ever seen. Biology is the ultimate sustainable technology, it’s crazy that environmental groups are opposing it’s use so strongly.

Everyone seems very worried about entrepreneurs ‘gaming’ the system and it somehow not being fair. Ability to game the system might however be correlated with success at building a company. I don’t know if this is true or not but top quality investors are probably open to the possibility: I know all other things being equal I’d rather invest in someone able to mobilize upvotes/their community than someone who can’t do that as that's correlated with ability to generate inbound traffic/attention.

More interesting to me though with all this is what it say’s about the future of scaling YC. YC’s mission is to enable innovation, and funding more startups hopefully leads to more innovation. The full YC program, already spread across two demo days, is probably close to the limits of how many startups can be funded in one go. The Fellowship, by being virtual, is much more scalable but one of the key bottlenecks is always going to be reviewing applications – this experiment could help remove that bottleneck. (another bottleneck I see is office hours, but getting sci-fi for a moment maybe YC research can develop a chatbot for that one day!).

The interesting thing is that exerting physical control of this place might not be that hard given the lack of anyone else trying to do the same. You'd probably just need to build a runway to be able to bring in supplies etc (no idea how hard that would be obviously).

Once you had control then maybe it would be possible to create a libertarian fantasy land of the kind envisioned by the sea-steading folks. Feels like controlling this desert will be easier than building a floating city.

The network effects come from the driver side of the market. If you have all the drivers, then you have the quickest pick-up/most availability which means best passenger experience and then most customers. This in turn means best utilization for drivers, so you get more drivers etc etc etc.

Correct, if you structure the problem as the proportion completed at time t relative to the proportion at time t-1, then you can sum in the limit as t goes to infinity to show surprisingly that he gets to the end under both scenarios.

My Cambridge interview tested for this explicitly. They gave you 45 minutes to prepare answers to 8 'further maths' type questions, then you had to solve some creative problems at the end. These creative problems required knowledge of further maths concepts but were unusual so you needed time to think about them and develop a mathematical framework for the solution, this therefore tested that you could do the further maths questions easily and quickly and that you could solve new problems.

The 'creative' problem I had was this: A mouse walks along an elastic band at 2 meters per minute. The elastic band stretches by 1 kilometer every hour. How far along the band does the mouse get? If you got that right, then they gave you a stretch question where the band doubles in length every hour.

There's a whole body of poverty work devoted to these kinds of issues, called Institutionalism. My own experience in poverty reduction was working in Microfinance (in Kenya, Uganda and Philippines). I got disillusioned when I realized that even when our loans helped someone make some additional income there was always some group above them in the food chain who would find some way to leach the additional profit from them. The issue wasn't access to loans, our entrepreneur's work ethic, intelligence or creativity - the issue was systemic corruption. Fixing that though wasn't something the free market or bottom up entrepreneurship can solve.