Graham's obviously inspired by some Kuhnian paradigms here, but in Grahamiam fashion, he doesn't cite anything to back it up.
What I find interesting where he calls most people conservative is how when I'm discussing VCs, YC, etc with non SV people is we talk about how conservative they are. YC's business model for years was predicated on finding talent (kids) that was undervalued, underpaying them (10k was the initial payouts?), getting them to pack up and move to super-expensive monocultural SV like everyone else, and then when they made bukku money, lose interest in improving the service (Reddit, Dropbox). There's nothing original there, it's the business model of carpetbaggers and robber barons. How boring.
I often feel like Jonah Hill in Moneyball, a pariah for pointing out how ancient VC thinking is. Or maybe I just imagine it. Well, it is my experience that true deep domain knowledge can only come from years of insights. People without years of experience will be lacking maturity and/or won't have time to even consider those insights. Usually people who mainly care about money, influence "becoming powerful" (Graham's words about his protege, not mine) will jump at whatever shortcut they can take instead of spending the card work necessary for learning these deep insights PG is interested in.
With all due respect, Coinbase didn't require deep insight. It was the equivalent of "You like money, too?"
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PG, you should stop the contrarian persecuted intellectual look. You're not the little guy anymore, haven't been for 2 decades.
And the fact that he states that he uses the word in the right way doesn't make it right. In fact, I find the use of the word paradigm quite shallow and disconnected from the Kuhnian definition.
>And the fact that he states that he uses the word in the right way doesn't make it right. In fact, I find the use of the word paradigm quite shallow and disconnected from the Kuhnian definition.
Perhaps because Kuhn doesn't dictate the definition of paradigm (and in general, the originator, etymology, etc. doesn't dictate use), the language community (the speakers of a language) does.
The whole SV/VC thing is just a big shallow marketing scheme to get young people buy into bad deals because they are brainwashed into thinking it's the cool thing to do. Have been there, done that, regret it. It took me years of being outside of SV to realize how brainwashed I was by comparing myself to the media and people around me.
> It took me years of being outside of SV to realize how brainwashed I was by comparing myself to the media and people around me.
The media doesn't represent normal people, and there are different regions of the country with very different norms, cultures, and beliefs. I know we are social animals heavily influenced by those around us, but it's also important to reflect and try to determine if those influences are right or productive.
Capital is the most conservative thing that exists. Any little sign of trouble and it flees. VC is not different, they just play the odds and invest in a way that the money is guaranteed back, but the optics is that they are "taking risks". They then lobby to have the goverment take that risk away, lobby against employees having power to never have any risk and so on. Capitalists are the most risk averse people.
"Crazy new ideas"? A VC, Graham, is praising crazy new ideas?
After I sent some hundreds of emails to Silicon Valley, NY, and Boston venture capital firms with nearly no positive feedback and nearly no feedback at all, I concluded several points:
(1) VCs won't invest in, consider, look at, or pay attention to crazy new ideas. Might guess that one reason can be that when the ideas are deep technically the VCs don't have the expertise to evaluate them, but the VC rarely seek evaluations from technical experts either. Net, VCs don't want to invest in crazy new ideas and hardly value ideas at all.
(2) My best guess is that most of all VCs like to invest in traction already significant and growing rapidly. The traction most desired is after tax earnings, but also good enough can be pre-tax earnings, revenue, or just Web site traffic.
(3) VCs also like the traction to be in a big market.
(4) VCs also like a team of several founders: Maybe the VCs are afraid that a sole, solo founder would get into human relationship problems as their company grew, and the team of several founders helps alleviate that fear. Also with several founders, if the VCs don't like the CEO, then the VCs can fire the CEO and promote one of the other founders to CEO.
E.g., I have had at least two crazy new ideas for new businesses:
The first idea was new and much better than anything else for real-time monitoring of health and wellness of servers and networks. I had running code and some quite good results on a variety of real data. The idea would not have had the potential of building a company worth $10 billion but might have built one worth $500 million and, maybe, with more advanced versions of the product, continued to grow. I gave a talk at the main NASDAQ site in Trumbull, CT, but apparently no VC had any interest at all. So, I went ahead and published the work; so, at least it was good enough to pass peer review!
Second I have an idea, and 100,000 lines of .NET code apparently ready for at least initial production, for a huge market and that, if people like it at all, and there is various evidence they will, should be worth $10 billion, maybe 200 times that if I further develop the work and people around the world like it a lot, and there is some evidence they might.
The idea makes powerful uses of some poorly known and understood advanced pure math (maybe understood by fewer than 10 computer science professors in the whole world, and only a tiny fraction of pure math professors will look for or see the connection with computing or business) and some original applied math I derived likely beyond over 90% of computer scientists.
But apparently no VC in the country is interested at all. Same for YC, the NSF IIP, etc. But, and really I designed this project this way, I don't really need funding now and won't if the traction grows. I've had some delays from unpredictable outside interruptions but am about to return to the work.
I can believe: The $500 million is too small for VCs to care, and the 200 times $10 billion is too big for them to believe.
> I can believe: The $500 million is too small for VCs to care, and the 200 times $10 billion is too big for them to believe.
This is actually true. The model of VCs requires that they take extremely high risk with extremely high upside. But their job is to derisk as much as possible. They derisk market risk, technical risk, and operational risk.
All governments are slowly and inexorably moving towards a synthetic mix of capitalism and socialism. The problem in the US is _unfettered_ capitalism, which has metastasized into an attempt to capture the ENTIRE vertical stack of any business enterprise. That's the whole play of VC money today: find a segment of the economy to monopolize, run everyone else out, and then extract ALL the profits, from top to bottom. In my opinion, we need GDP-adjusted limits on how large a company can be, in several different dimensions.
Capitalism for all its flaws at least taps into what motivates people to work really hard and encourages it. It mimics nature itself. Some ideas might be mundane but others can be extraordinary, it’s par for the course.
As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel corona-virus within a year. These companies didn’t do it out of good will, they did it because they knew they could make money. Many socialist countries are struggling because it turns out it’s hard to force people to produce innovation without the right incentive structures in place.
If you want to blame anyone blame God for making human nature this way. Capitalism is just the system that is most effective at tapping human psychology to push people to produce the best possible work.
As of November last year (let alone anything since re: distribution), US governmental agencies paid $2.5 billion to Moderna to develop the vaccine and buy doses (and there already had been work done by Moderna on mRNA vaccines).
As of July last year (again, let alone anything since), US governmental agencies had paid Pfizer $1.95 billion.
So, basically, the government spent billions for something they then distributed 'for free' to the taxpayers.
That's an interesting example to pick for 'capitalism'.
The companies you just mentioned all got Paid at whatever market rate they/the market set.
Just because it was the government that paid them, why isn’t that capitalism?
Socialism and Communism is when you tell people what they’ll charge for the greater good of the people. At least that’s what it is to me, someone from a former communist country.
Edit: not only did those companies get paid to invent it, but others got paid to make it, and yet others got paid to distribute it (pharmacies etc).
Really? I would have expected something a bit higher than $20-$25 a dose, given the limited supply (it was pure research at the time), and COVID was decimating the country (so extremely high demand). I mean, a single dose of insulin, requiring no research, and no protective IP, and costing cents to produce, will run you or an insurance company hundreds of dollars. Given the huge demand, and the non-existent supply at that time, there is -nothing- in the market that would have capped the price for the vaccine at $20-25, except either human good will (which is not a market factor; again, see insulin), or the very real threat of government action.
>> At least that’s what it is to me, someone from a former communist country
And voting Republican is what Democracy means to plenty of people living in the US. If we actually go to what the dictionary definition of socialism is, rather than a particular interpretation or lived experience of something called it, it's "(a political system wherein) the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole".
The governmental decision to offer something for free to everyone is a socialist one; the use of government regulation as an implicit threat to pay what is reasonable to offset cost, rather than what the market could dictate, also speaks to socialism. Yes, it was a private company that produced it, but both the exchange and the bulk of its distribution are very much being carried out by government, and even where not, are being very tightly regulated by government. All of that in response to community need and desire, not merely the strictures of the market (which otherwise would have seen a major profit opportunity).
Appreciate your comment, it’s good learning for me to hear a different opinion.
I might have extrapolated the benefits of a capitalist system too far.
But the main point still stands I think, the response to the above comment and the fact that it is very much those strong incentives that drive much of the innovation in our society today. It is not someone forcing someone to do something or pure good will that lead to these results.
That I can agree with. Ensuring people can reap some benefit to their efforts is important. The problems with capitalism that I personally have tend to be around places that people are able to reap benefit from other people's efforts unduly (i.e., billionaires), or from other people's needs unduly (i.e., shareholders making bank from healthcare).
> As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel corona-virus within a year.
You realize Cuba also produced a vaccine within one year. So did China; though some people consider Dengism a kind of capitalism, so who knows, good for you, maybe.
> As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel corona-virus within a year. These companies didn’t do it out of good will, they did it because they knew they could make money. Many socialist countries are struggling because it turns out it’s hard to force people to produce innovation without the right incentive structures in place.
Most vaccine development occurs in academic research institutions, even if the large-scale manufacturing is then taken up by the capitalists. For example, the Covid vaccine manufactured by AstraZeneca was created by and innovated upon by a vaccine research group in Oxford University, who are obviously not in it for making vast wads of cash. And in general, it's the state who funds vaccine development, and the state who buys the vaccines.
On the broader subject of medicine, capitalism also gives us harsh enforcement of supposed 'intellectual property rights', stymieing the availability of medicines in developing countries. Fortunately, it looks like this will be waived for Covid vaccines, thanks to some government intervention. But it shouldn't have to be this way. Jonas Salk had the right idea when he released his polio vaccine freely to the world, to benefit all, without profit motive.
What I find interesting where he calls most people conservative is how when I'm discussing VCs, YC, etc with non SV people is we talk about how conservative they are. YC's business model for years was predicated on finding talent (kids) that was undervalued, underpaying them (10k was the initial payouts?), getting them to pack up and move to super-expensive monocultural SV like everyone else, and then when they made bukku money, lose interest in improving the service (Reddit, Dropbox). There's nothing original there, it's the business model of carpetbaggers and robber barons. How boring.
I often feel like Jonah Hill in Moneyball, a pariah for pointing out how ancient VC thinking is. Or maybe I just imagine it. Well, it is my experience that true deep domain knowledge can only come from years of insights. People without years of experience will be lacking maturity and/or won't have time to even consider those insights. Usually people who mainly care about money, influence "becoming powerful" (Graham's words about his protege, not mine) will jump at whatever shortcut they can take instead of spending the card work necessary for learning these deep insights PG is interested in.
With all due respect, Coinbase didn't require deep insight. It was the equivalent of "You like money, too?" . PG, you should stop the contrarian persecuted intellectual look. You're not the little guy anymore, haven't been for 2 decades.