1,370 karma · joined July 19, 2011
Not uncommon for public equity hedge funds. Makes sense that someone would do it in the wild west of cryptocurrencies.
Certainly not fool-proof, but enough hurdles to weed out fraud. Seems to work as voter fraud is minimal.
Thinking about it more, all media should be in the running, from HN to Netflix, because it's really about time spent.
Yeah, that explains why younger generations care less about data privacy. Already the convenience is hard to beat.
Facebook makes fantastic communications tool and gives them away for a whopping $0. I love staying aware of what's going on with my grandparents, old classmates, friends, and family, AND not having to directly pay money for this.
I would love to hear other perspectives.
EDIT: Downvote away, but my point is that people pick on Facebook for privacy concerns but we all know it's an advertising company (probably the best the world has ever seen). It also operates the best communications tools the world has ever seen and it doesn't get enough credit for that. In 2006, the News Feed was publicly bemoaned because of privacy issues and it's now the core product. Facebook has built great tools over time, even when people didn't initially agree. Not trying to incite anger, just pushing toward a debate.
Tl;dr - CoS stands in for the CEO in meetings, fills her in on what's going on across the organization (or outside of it), and overall leverages her time. It's beyond someone who just does scheduling but short of being COO, which entails direct reports and accountability.
Debt incentives do not align with equity.
Debt vs. equity is always a case-by-case situation. Debt is cheaper but comes with strings attached. Equity is pricey but more flexible.
Seems like a smart market entry point. Enterprise employee virtual assistants are probably a wide open market today because Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Samsung focus on consumer AIs. Easy to envision a startup getting solid, near-term customer traction with a keyword-driven voice product.
Bluetooth issues galore. Completely stopped using them. As standalone sunglasses, they are inferior to a good $10 pair from amazon - heavier, worse lens quality, and limited viewable area.
It earns this healthy margin because customers pay Amazon before Amazon pays suppliers. Normal companies have to fund their businesses by raising debt or equity, whereas Amazon gets free loans from merchants. Exceptional way to fund growth.
They built a system that does this at scale: 1) collects and organizes the right data and spits out analysis -- this can be painful from the many times I've done it. Investment banks hire armies of young analysts and pay them six figures to do this at scale 2) made it self-serve for entrepreneurs seeking funding -- not having to do the CRM/pipeline mgmt process associated with private investing is a massive efficiency improvement. VCs hire associates and partners and pay them handsomely to do this at small scale (hundreds of deals seen / year / professional)
As someone who has done a lot of private investing, the value here is obvious and substantial for the investors and the entrepreneurs.
Although the author is vague, it sounds like they built a system to analyze company metrics and thus screen investments at scale. This enables them to see more investments around the world, and makes it easier for entrepreneurs to "pitch" them, because they don't need to do the time consuming, typical Silicon Valley pitch process. Many more companies can get funded this way. And those investments will be less competitive and garner lower valuations (implying better returns). Again... genius.
It's awesome.
It's also remarkable that four people independently derived the formula: "In coming up with a trading strategy for warrants, Ed discovered a handy formula. A few years later, three finance professors independently came up with their own slight mathematical variant of the same formula. Ed Thorp, Myron Scholes, Robert Merton, and Fischer Black all had almost the same formula, but each had a different reason for believing it was true. Ed showed that it was a way to make money..." Source: The Poker Face of Wall Street (Wiley 2006)
Netflix is brain-dead easy to use. I don't always know what I want to watch so I browse and can watch anything. Movies Anywhere sounds like more work than it's worth.