Poker is so much fun with friends. It's not about winning, it's about hanging out and being a little competitive. It's a great way to hang out in real life for a few hours in today's online world.
Self-driving EVs are not a solution to most of the externalities of personal automobiles. No means of transport is that requires twenty square meters of space and 2000 kg of matter to move 1.4 persons at a time on average.
It’s not even clear as of now whether they have a net positive effect on the society, even if they ever become viable in climates that aren’t always sunny.
> Self-driving EVs are not a solution to most of the externalities of personal automobiles.
Why do you think self-driving cars are meant to solve automobile externalities? I don't view them in that way. I view them as solving personal problems with driving - attention, safety, comfort, utilization rate, cost, etc..
> It’s not even clear as of now whether they have a net positive effect on the society
Why not? Personal automobiles have a utilization rate of around 5%. If Waymo can get that to even 40% that means you can reduce the number of vehicles by 8x (let's be conservative and say 4x to account for potentially higher use of them a la Jevon's Paradox). They're also infinitely safer and it's likely that they'll get to the point where there are no automobile related deaths. They'll replace the likes of Uber and taxis which have been known to be sources of assaults and other crimes. They'll unlock other opportunities too but regardless of how conservative you want to be with their effects, if they roll out to the point where one can forgo buying a personal automobile, it's very very hard to argue it won't be a huge net positive to society.
I bet your reason against it is that you believe something like trains and metros and bikes are better. And to an extent they are, I live in a city and prefer to ride the metro when I can. But it's pure hopium thinking they can ever fully obviate cars.
Biggest thing I'm excited for is knowing what the cost will be ahead of time
Which Uber used to provide... Until they were infected with tipping. Hell, I will gladly pay more than I would've spent on a tip (20%) just to avoid the hassle.
My worst personal quality is that while I tip extremely well for everything (like $15 for a $40 haircut) I absolutely refuse to leave tips almost always for Ubers. I will if it was genuinely good service, a clean car that doesn’t have a gallon of fragrance in it that I’m massively allergic to, and the driver either leaves me alone or has a nice convo with me when it’s clear I’m trying to engage in one, and drives safely. However the combination of these things is really uncommon, and I’m usually very unhappy with at least one aspect of the ride.
On the flip side I very rarely take Ubers so my shitty obstinance here doesn’t have a big impact
I was also really salty when they decided to make tips a huge part of it. I hate tipping culture despite tipping very well. And if you read the subreddit for drivers they are constantly complaining about how people tip, and complaining that even 20% is not anywhere near enough
Both have benefits. Staying private means a lot less distractions, less investor scrutiny (good and bad), and the general ability to do whatever you want (good and bad).
It's a lot easier to stay long-term focused without investors breathing down your neck. As a private company you're not dealing with shortsellers, retail memers, institutional capital that wants good earnings now, etc..
Of course, the bad side is that if the company gets mismanaged, there's far less accountability and thus it could continue until it's too late. In the public markets it's far easier to oust the C-suite if things go south.
It's a shame that the trend of staying private longer means retail gets shut out from companies like this.
Yes but free cash flow is free cash flow, and that's what matters for survival (i.e. run-rate). So long as fcf is positive, you'll never go bankrupt.
Really what they don't tell you is how much SBC they have. That's what crushes public tech stocks so much. They'll have nice fcf, but when you look under the hood you realize they're diluting you by 5% every year. Take a look at MongoDB (picked one randomly). It went public in 2016 with 48.9m shares outstanding. Today, it has 81.7m shares outstanding. 67% dilution in 9 years.
Early investors (the main ones at least) usually get pro-rate rights - which means you can invest in later rounds to maintain your ownership percentage (i.e a later round dilutes your ownership, so you invest a bit until the ownership stays the same).
But the pref stack always favors later investors, partly because that's just the way it's always been, and if you try to change that now no one will take your money, and later investors will not want to invest in a company unless they get the senior liquidity pref.
> However genuinely curious about the thesis applied by the VC’s/Funds that invest in such a late stage round
1) It's evaluated as any other deal. If you model out a good return quantitatively/qualitatively, then you do the deal. Doesn't really matter how far along it is.
2) Large private funds have far fewer opportunities to deploy because of the scale. If you have a $10B fund, you'd need to fund 2,000 seed companies (at a generous $5m on $25m cap). Obviously that's not scalable and too diversified. With this Databricks round, you can invest a few billion in one go, which solves both problems.
> How about pitching an hour of work to make it easy to read on mobile? Not that I think BH cares, but in this day and age making it layout nicely on mobile is the least you can do and isn’t particularly difficult anymore.
I think it looks great on mobile. It's fast as shit and I'm still just a 2 clicks away from an annual report. Frankly I often prefer the desktop layout even on mobile.
