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“In addition, processing hundreds of follow-on rounds per year has created significant operational complexities for YC that we did not anticipate. Said simply, investing in every round for every YC company requires more capital than we want to raise and manage. We always tell startups to stay small and manage their budgets carefully. In this instance, we failed to follow our own advice.”
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Is picking winners difficult? Or is it that the economy has a hard cap on how many winners will occur every year?
There are multiple reasons why startups fail. Some of them are:
- Product-market fit: Is there demand for our product? Is the timing for our product right?
- Customer acquisition: How can we make customers know that our product exists? How much does it cost to acquire a new customer (through ads, etc.)?
- Market size and profitability: Is the demand and profitability for our product sufficient to sustain a business?
- Building a viable product within the constraints of the runway capital (Uber for dog walking is not as capital intensive as building a self driving car fleet, for example)
1) It has nothing to do with the economy and everything to do with whether people love your product and you have product-market fit. Getting to that point takes time and mostly companies run out of money before they get there.
With regard to 2), if that's indeed how VC works, then YC just needs to fund every company. There's no need to do vetting if you are guaranteed to fund the next FB and the earnings will outweigh all operational expenditure on non-FBs.
1) People would definitely love a machine that prints gourmet food for them in their house, but it's really difficult to do that. It's so difficult that the amount of money it would take to make such a machine is pronably greater than all of the money in the world. This is what I mean by "the economy has a cap on the number of new ideas that can be funded"
For my specific workflow, Notepad++ and UnrealEd. Mastering bsp is a really fun skill to have and for the most part UnrealEd is intuitive with some practice.
There cannot simultaneously be a surplus of COBOL developers and a shortage of COBOL developers.
Well, supposedly there could be one in the Midwest and one in NJ, but theoretically those who do not have a job in the Midwest would be motivated to move, since their only options are:
A) Remain jobless in Midwest.
B) Switch careers in Midwest.
C) Move to NJ for immediately available position.
The bigger question is why does a COBOL dev accept work for 60k when they could make 120k in Javascript?
The story is that tax payers gave his company money to buy our F18s from us so that he can accumulate a force of enemy aircraft. His company will also train pilots specifically as the enemy would.
And while he will do this at a considerable profit, it will theoretically be better executed per dollar that the military doing it in a separate division. Another post claims he will generate sorties more than twice as efficiently.
So the above is either true or false.
If it is false and the contract costs taxpayers more than the military would then, as you suspect, it is entirely a pork-barrel waste of money. The fact that other nations with highly regraded military don't do this theoretical efficiency boost strongly supports this.
If it is true and the contractor is somehow more efficient, then that is even more worrisome. Scarier still is that it is taken as an inevitable state of affairs and no one seems concerned about it. That US destroyers have a catastrophically bad helm UI supports this, even though that would be conspicuous pork-barrel in it's own right.
Same with the fact the sale was F18s. Either the enemy has them or not. In one case it's pork-barrel, in the other case the US has somehow sold fighters to an enemy.
> That US destroyers have a catastrophically bad helm UI
Hadn't heard of this. Apparently the US Navy are reverting an 'upgrade' to its destroyers which gave them a dangerously poor touchscreen-based helm control UI. The decision was made in the wake of a fatal collision with a civilian vessel in 2017.
That is the purpose of the Navy, just like all the rest of USA armed forces. They haven't won a war in my parents' lifetimes, but just think of all the trillions of dollars that have gone to armaments manufacturers!
We never stopped fighting in Iraq, so in what sense did we "win"? More to the point, we never left Saudi, which was the direct cause of 9/11, which also was not a win. Except, of course, for the armaments manufacturers. For them, 9/11 was most definitely a win.
"Serbia/Kosovo(ish)", whatever specifically is meant by that, is about like "Grenada" mentioned above. When you grasp at such tiny straws, you confirm the point rather than refute it: USA military exists to funnel money to weapons manufacturers and their employees in politics and media while killing mostly innocent, mostly brown people.
The strategic objectives of the two main phases of those conflicts was achieved. Remove Saddam from Kuwait and remove Serbia enough to stabilise Kosovo.
I don't disagree about the Saudis and US military industrial complex but that wasn't the point I was making
Lots of grocery store meat that you buy "fresh" was killed x number of days ago.
If a dog eats raw meat within a few hours of it being killed, it's a big difference.
How did I come to this opinion? Try freezing a super market steak a few days before the "expiration date." Then unfreeze it a few days after the expiration date.
You'll notice a rancid smell immediately upon cooking.
> Lots of grocery store meat that you buy "fresh" was killed x number of days ago.
Most beef, at least that you buy locally from a butcher who got the animal from a local farmer, is dry aged in a cooler for 10 - 14 days after slaughter. [1]
I don't know whether that's true for mass-market meat or not. But it's very common to let meat age before eating it.
Not exactly, if they just so happen to be spending a lot of money on purchases of ad-space, or advertising services.
For example, just one marketing VP with a salary of $120,000 could have an advertising spend budget of a few million.
But in Yelp's specific case, they do have a ton of sales/customer service people who most definitely are among the first to go, along with engineers who are working on projects that are not related to keeping the website from 404ing
Then take a break.
Then try for 2 minutes.
Then take a break.
Repeat until you can focus for a long time :)