alexeichemenda's comments

>Best approach would be to make very few investments

Top VCs—who see the best deals and run deep diligence—still only have a 1–5% hit rate. As an angel, you don’t have that level of access or time. Even if you get strong referrals, you’d need to be 10–15x better than elite VCs to pick winners in a small portfolio. Unless you’re investing in at least 10 companies, it’s statistically a losing game.

My experience: I invested in ~200 companies early stage (with some winners like HuggingFace, Checkr & more).

They do, this URL just links to a custom GPT hosted on OpenAI's chatgpt URL.

>"It was very sad to call it quits because getting the funding to make those units was the only hurdle before making serious progress,” Temple said. “If they connected me with investors like they said, I could have made my invention, gotten efficacy and would be shipping units right now. I really do believe that."

It's unfortunate to see a founder believe that one accelerator would make or break their company. Typically an accelerator amplifies your existing trajectory - if you're a fast-growing company, you'll get more term sheets from investors than you know what to do with. If you're flat, they won't be attracting investors in any way. It's a founder's job to navigate this instead of relying on the accelerator to find $500k.

100x is a great return even for YC standards, but the best returns that business angels, VCs and YC have had is in the order of magnitude of 10000x (yes, ten thousand). So capping at 100x still makes it attractive for investors, yet leaves a lot of potential capital for the non-profit.

As one example, Sequoia invested in Airbnb at $0.01 per share, and Airbnb's current stock price is $102, almost exactly 10000x return. This happens more often that you think if you're not in the early stage & top VC world.

What CC is that?

France’s RSA does not meet UBI standards that we’re considering in the US / California because the amount paid is so small. If you live alone with 2 kids, RSA would be 899€/month in 2022, far below minimum wage.

> You just don't sell all of the company

The other option (more often used) is that you can raise more money at a higher valuation. You dilute yourself by the same amount as the initially planned raise, but you get more money and don't end up selling more/all of the company.

I'll also mention: this is a problem that goes up every ladder. Marketing individual contributor wants to show good performance to their manager, so delivering rides for cheap is good. Marketing manager is in the same boat with the CMO. CMO -> Board -> VC (VC will be happy to see great efficiency on the customer acquisition side). VC -> LPs (LPs will be excited about customer acquisition efficiency). A limited number of people are actually deeply concerned with this, and that's why it's taking so long for the top KPIs to change from "cost per action" to "incremental impact and incremental ROI".

What's important to highlight here is that marketing teams at companies such as Uber are incentivized to pus vendors to drive fraud. Specific example: Uber works with vendors A, B, C. Marketing team is incentivized to reach a cost per sign-up of $X (Let's say $50 for the sake of this example). Vendor A, running fraud, delivers sign-ups @ 45$ each. Vendor B, clean, delivers them at $55 each. Vendor C @ $65 each. The new baseline from an exec standpoint is $45 each, and every vendor that doesn't deliver at that level is cut. Repeat with multiple vendors.

The solution to this problem is incrementality measurement at the channel level. Every time you scale with a recently onboarded vendor, measure baseline of ALL conversions happening on your app. If this baseline doesn't move, cut the vendor. I say scale and not launch because upon launh, there won't be a visible impact on the global conversions. To be able to spot this spike from baseline, pick a small market than "worldwide". For ex, pick "California", let the new vendor scale in California, and measure spike in California.

I’m curious how many users (%) are annoyed by this. My gut feeling tells me only HN/Reddit/tech is annoyed by this, most people aren’t. Which is why we haven’t seen a competitor arise

>Doesn't seem that big in comparison to what SF annual budget is.

There are no singled-out pockets that you can tap into and make up SF annual budget. It's all about cumulating a lot fo long-tail small pockets + 1-2 large pockets.

Not aware of any that do that for laptops but I know 2 personally that do that for phones. They have a collection of devices (phones) trash to go, so it’s not as unscalable as I initially thought because they re-use the devices.

So I’m assuming if some do it for phones, must be some doing it in laptops.

Again. It’s all about probabilities. 1/ What’s the likelihood of the company doing that? Close to none. 2/ what would be the severity of the issue if they were doing that for me? Very high. 3/ what’s the effort level to prevent that? Very little.

This ratio ultimately tells us what to do.

You’re focused on the wrong part of the chain here. As the camera system is only as weak as it’s weakest link, if Apple indeed made a circuit connected to the LED (and I fully trust you on that), then the weakest link is elsewhere: company provided laptops are often altered prior to be given to an employee. I know of colonies who install software to track messages etc. What’s to say the same companies don’t alter the circuit board to modify the LED behavior?

There is a risk/reward/effort to look at, putting a small piece of tape is low risk / low effort / high reward (if your company actually angers laptops).

Managers, probably. Companies + investors = less likely.

>what is needed to retain employees and keep churn rates down to acceptable rates

Ultimately, this value depends on the location. Assuming identical salaries, it is more expensive to retain someone for 5 years in NY than in Nebraska, because the person in Nebraska making $200k+ lives like royalty, and whereas NY would be a different story.

Some companies agree with that and some don’t. For companies that disagree with you statement, the rationale is really simple: the company is ready to pay top $ because cost of life is high. They know that the rent you’ll pay is high hence the money. They’re reducing their net profit (ebitda) to lay the high salary you need to pay your rent. They do that because your rent in SF is what it is. But for those companies, there’s no way they reduce their ebitda for you to profit off that.

The other companies, who pay on value of output, will agree with that statement. As far as I know, most companies fall under cost of life approach rather than value of output.

> But I also want to remark that in many ways, building a company is also a silly thing that in fact requires skill.

It is - Tikej's point isn't that it's not a skill - but rather that it's not the right place to share these. Think of the difference between a "Startup News" and "Hacker News". Hacker news used to be very deep on tech topics, now those deep topic have become more rare.

Uber burning money on opex and Uber investing in Uber's future (through Lime) are two very different ways to spend money. Don't expect Uber to stop spending money, it'll simply do that differently.

There is a misconception that Uber loses money on every ride. If you look at their SEC filing, it's not how they actually work (I won't have time to do that search for you now but will try to edit my post later). TL;DR of their SEC filings: They're not losing money on every ride, they just have such a high baseline of fixed costs (payroll being one) that they haven't started being profitable. Doing fewer rides right now is actually killing their profitability.

>If Youtube starts banning those accounts then they are effectively not allowing anyone else to join their platform

That's a huge if - one that Youtube probably is not going to enforce on new customers. The same principle applies to most businesses I know - a new account/client has X months to be profitable until they get dropped.

On the flip side, i've often stumbled (in the days where I was parsing youtube for side projects) on projects with hours long videos with 3 views - for years. My best guess would be that those accounts / uploads are what youtube is targeting, not preventing their new account sign up / new DAU drop.

It's very likely that if the said small channels are indeed too small to be allowed to monetize, then they would fall under the not profitable accounts even if they were allowed to monetize.