On $600B of Y Combinator startup success
jaredheyman.medium.com
jaredheyman.medium.com
Pros:
- The HN/YC community would almost certainly contribute new models with new types of signal.
- It's been proven many times that we mere mortals often unknowingly either bake-in our own biases into models or act on model output unaware that the models arrived at what could be undesirable, unintentional bias. Having more eyes on the data & methodology could not only prevent unintended biases but reveal signals that turn out to be much more insightful.
- If these signals point to real, underlying fundamentals (which they likely do) perhaps YC startups could benefit by learning from them or using them as guideposts.
Cons:
- Obviously Rebel Fund may risk giving away their competitive advantage.
- YC startups and applicants may over-optimize for these signals, distracting them from their unique challenges and overall end-user value generation.
On one hand it seems obvious for Rebel Fund to protect their IP- on the other hand what if more value could be generated for YC, YC startups and Rebel Fund by finding a way to introduce a cooperative positive feedback loop? Any loss of their slice could be outweighed by growing the pie. This is likely an oversimplification and naive to the many factors being weighed but it's an interesting space for thought!
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That’s what I meant by collapse, but maybe in astronomy collapse means supernova?
Interesting that it started by building Buddhist Temples and has been building and maintaining them for that long. Cool!
It's really a message to those of us retail investors buying the IPO or post IPO shares of YC companies that need to be aware of the track record w.r.t. an investment. Most of the gains have been extracted already and future post IPO growth has already been priced in.
It also does suggests that YC was perhaps a beneficiary of easy monetary conditions that lifted valuation.
Perhaps its less clear given the current state of things whether their companies are good for long term earnings performance for long term ownership by retail investors.
What needed correcting is getting corrected. What was correct is staying correct.
The rise in interest rates means that companies that have been producing their own cash can fund growth initiatives internally. Companies who were funding growth initiatives using outside capital (debt, VC investment) are now going to be paying 10%+ to do so.
900B! Is this time travel or cognitive dissonance?
#3-5 on the list are being valued significantly above 50B and closer to 100B Meanwhile...
#3, Instacart now 24B (private valuation)
#4, Doordash now 20B
#5, Coinbase now 12B
Well, they suffer no consequences, and get more money to lose, so that's success, I guess.
This is as absurd as saying "data-driven approach for finding out successful humans".
I am kind of aggravated to see drivel like this from VC's. This is similar to algorithm trading on stock market and not funding deserving startups. This 'data-drive' garbage is how you end up with more grocery delivery, food delivery and pet walking startups.
But yes, these days I think "data-driven" is really just a convoluted way of saying "we approximate the informed decisions of others without specifically understanding what we're doing". This is ML in a nut-shell after all. Is it possible to use ML and data science to find insights and draw conclusions that you then base your activities off of? Sure, but most are just looking for a magic black box that makes decisions for them specifically because they don't want to go to the trouble of understanding X. Once you abstract things away to that extent, you're inevitably training your algorithms to do what others do in an informed way, because where else would the training data come from?
not absurd at all, simply do IQ tests
WTF is a penny and wtf is a nickel? Nickel is supposed to be a metal.
Or "If you hit a golf ball 50 yards..." what's golf? wtf is a yard? one kilometer?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matric...
> All of the questions on the Raven's progressives consist of visual geometric design with a missing piece. The test taker is given six to eight choices to pick from and fill in the missing piece.
Are you serious? I am interested to hear your perspective.
Meanwhile, we haven't been to the moon since the '70s, life expectancy in the US is declining, and a substantial percentage of our energy comes from coal. Oh, but if you want to bet your life savings on (entries in a distributed ledger that say you own) digital pictures of dog penises, I imagine there's a way to do it.
Technology didn't fix the evil of neoliberalism. It didn't clean anything up. It accelerated the corrosion.
Do you feel that the world shouldn’t be allowed to have casinos?
Casinos don't dominate the economy.
Casinos haven't wasted the bulk of a generation's top talent to enrich a small number of pederasts in a tiny geographic area.
My view of "morals" laws is that harm reduction should be the policy. Do I like gambling or drug abuse? Of course not. Do I think they should be illegal? Probably not, because empirical evidence shows that harm is better reduced by making these things legal and then regulating them.
Of course, if I found that casinos were having huge negative externalities, then my opinion would change.