The Silicon Valley Loop
nymag.com
nymag.com
Helps explain some of the zany fundraising I saw over the past decade. It’s like a mini series of Ponzi schemes. All that matters is growth, because it’s easy to sell equity when something is rapidly growing. So seed sells to A, A sells to B, B sells to huge fund, and huge fund sells to public markets. The hype lasts just long enough to IPO (as the retail public finally can get a piece of this super hyped company) and…it all falls down because now profitability matters.
Like this article said - it didn’t matter if your product ended up dying. It just mattered that you made a lot of money for early investors, so they’ll want to back you again.
Is there more to it than that? I think you summed it up well. I'll add that other "fancy" professions have structural limitations that seem to cause a glut of money-seeking software engineers (beyond the hyped up non-tech founder). Once upon a time, if you were smart and technical you became a doctor, but med schools haven't expanded capacity and its a long tough process compared to an undergrad CS degree. Lawyers experienced a massive growth a generation ago, and they haven't retired yet, depressing salaries and causing lawyers to work longer. SDEs are still a great career though, considering its still growing in salary and accessibility.
UDP vs TCP what’s tht?
Networking stuff.
Everything here is wrapped in an internal library, why do I need need to know those acronyms?
PS: I suspect this is how companies brazenly violate GPL and other licenses. Not by manager mandate but engineers who don’t know anything about OSS and just git-clone a random GitHub repo.
>In a 2001 interview about his case study of the grocery-delivery site Webvan, Harvard Business School professor John Deighton said that direct-to-consumer internet advertising was here to stay, but “home-delivered groceries? Never.” There was no way to compete with supermarket efficiencies. Deighton’s prediction was — not to belabor the point — wrong.
I'd argue that grocery delivery never really became a mainstream business outside of certain bubbles and urban circumstances.
It actually feels like one of those activities were doing more of during the pandemic but pretty much reset on.
I'd bet if I polled my friends I doubt if I'd find a single person who used grocery delivery regularly outside of specific examples--e.g. post-surgery or new kid.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/coles-swallows-online-grocer...
The Coles-Woolworths supermarket duopoly saw it as an existential threat to their business, so Coles purchased it and shut it down. Coles and Woolworths then simultaneously killed their own online offerings. Shopfast was cashflow positive at the time it was acquired and murdered.
The "textbook" example of Silicon Valley hubris favored by so called "journalists", Theranos, was laughed out of Sand Hill Road and had to go to Washington and the Walmart Brats for capital. In fact, most companies with negative return business plans (Ride sharing, food delivery, commercial realestate subletting, etc) weren't funded by Silly Valley investors at all beyond angel, seed, and A rounds.
Hmmm..last time I checked uber is still around and worth a whopping $70 billion still, which is quite remarkable given how much money it lost and continues to lose. It should not be lumped in with the others.
If they had started small, grew organically and had always maintained a healthy profit margin, it'd be a very different story
Give me GAAP profitability or give me death!
dotcom : "it doesn't matter how much money they are losing, what counts is users"
dotcom2: "it doesn't matter how much money they are losing, what counts is TAM (total addressable market)
The 'dot-com bubble' sounds like the name of a great cautionary tale, but any capitalist who kept taking their investment cues from the collapse of Pets.com missed out on a lot of money
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1626284035348791296
I think if they fixed the homeless problem and converted some of the now unused office buildings to apartments it would go a long way. Think there's a real chance that could happen?
Ask long time Mountain View residents what it's like to live in the online advertising capitol of the world. Their property values are way up but quality of life is worse. Attracting tech giants to your city is in certain ways a Faustian bargain. Be careful what you wish for.
Care to elaborate on this a bit? I imagine things like bad traffic are due to poor urban planning and lack of transit-oriented or walkable/bikeable design.
I imagine a lot of misdirected blame towards the economic boom instead of NIMBYism.
Edit: Forgot about Game Kastle and Lee's Comics. Really I could go on all day. These community establishments are gone and never coming back ever, as long as Google lives.
We know that decentralization and redundancy have massive advantages in systems. Yet we (or at least - rich investors and CEOs and similar) also want to get rid of it in favor of centralized riches.
The financialization of everything, with the drive to concentrate profits into fewer and fewer extremely-big winners, instead of having an organic ecosystem of research, production, and development, is very fragile, all for the benefit of a fairly small few at the very top.
There is no “homeless” problem. There’s a drug epidemic problem. Giving homeless people free housing just moves the problem from the sidewalk to a building. A building that will quickly become a slum. The drug problem is what needs to be fixed.
(Setting aside for now the amount of heavy lifting "if they fixed the homeless problem" is doing there... gee, why did nobody try to fix it ever before, anywhere?)
In the places it has been tried, housing-first solutions have been wildly successful. It turns out getting your shit together is a lot easier when you don't have the constant stressors of living on the street.
It's not terribly likely at all that anyone will ever get any traction on solving a chemical addition problem when they have dramatically more important and basic near term problems such as finding food and shelter.
I live in Portland, where the overwhelming majority of homeless people deny housing because of this fact. Because they are required to get help.
I absolutely do not think providing more “free” housing is the answer.
Putting them in housing solves a few problems. You know where they are and have a contact and can offer lifelines. Requiring people to get help and removing more control over their lives reduces trust, likely hood of success and they end up hiding the fact. You need to constantly watch them now or drug test them. Easier to live on the street than in your world
What's wrong with a drug-addicted person making their little apartment gross?
Are there people who goad and have addictions? Sure. It’s not like that show is 100% drug addicts though.
In fact that show is literally 0% homeless people. So it’s a complete red herring.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-hous...
What kind of an offer is “come in here, sleep in a crowded room filled with a bunch of other people you may have conflict with, with no place to store your stuff, oh and you’ll be kicked out during the day and have to take all your shit with you”.
And housing doesn’t need to be free, it just needs to be relatively cheap. It wasn’t that long ago that you could afford a basic apartment on a part time job.
In any case, the War on (Some) Drugs has clearly been lost and the drugs aren't going away. What is your solution?
In the US, we've done a spectacular job of pricong working people out of housing, creating a ridiculously incompetent drug policy (simultaneously too lax and too punitive), and closing down all reasonable avenues to mental health care. This dates back to Reagan or before but both left and right-wing parties have considerable blame to carry. You dont have to believe that they were malicious, but the results have been disastrous.
You either fix all three coherently, or none.
This idea that drugs cause most homeless is largely just confirmation bias. You likely cross paths with many homeless people that you don't realize are homeless. It is the drug addicts and the mentally ill that stand out as obviously homeless. The person who is out on the street because they couldn't make rent, probably isn't noticeably homeless if they spend their nights in a shelter or sleep in a car before showering at a local gym.
[1] - https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/homeles...
You never notice the single mom living in a shelter, who takes her kids to work at a laundromat, or the guy who sleeps in his car and does landscaping jobs during the day.
https://www.sightline.org/2022/03/16/homelessness-is-a-housi... https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle...
That’s because drugs are still illegal in those areas. California and Oregon have essentially legalized every drug. If you’re caught on the street smoking meth or fentanyl, it’s more than likely that a police officer walks right past you.
Also, the previous rebuttal makes no sense. If an area has a high amount of drug use, what does it matter whether if the law there are legal or illegal, with respect to how that affects homelessness? Was the GP claiming only the well-to-do housed are using drugs there?
The west coast is more lenient on drug use, im guessing that leads to fewer overdoses as a result.
The claim isn’t “there aren’t large drug problems I. California/Oregon” which is what you are correctly stating is true, the claim is “drug problems are not the primary driver of homelessness, housing costs are”.
Saying “California and Oregon have effectively legalized drugs so that’s why there is homelessness” just isn’t an accurate statement. As noted in other parts of the thread, people who use drugs will happily rent a place of it is cheap.
Now is it a contributing factor? Probably a minor one, yes. But the primary driver of the size of the homeless population is housing costs, and for the unsheltered population it’s definitely weather. New York actually has a very sizeable homeless population, the difference with California is that people are much more likely to be living in shelters there.
You're flat out wrong here. It's drug addiction, alcoholism, mental illness and in some cases a complete lack of a social safety net. There is free housing, subsidized housing, shared housing, and more available to low/no income people all over California, Oregon and Washington. The majority of the homeless population does not take advantage of these programs because they require addiction therapy. They stay on the streets because drugs can be legally consumed and purchased without consequence. The sooner we listen to the police, fire fighters, and first responders who are on the ground dealing with these issues every single day, the better. Doing yet another study to prove it's housing costs and not the rampant out of control drug problem is worthless.
Listening to the police on this is why there are federal drug, alcohol, and criminal restrictions on federally funded public housing programs, and why most public housing authorities impose even stricter rules than the federal requirements, which serve as a bar for many of the people who need help.
But, sure, lie and claim its that homeless people with current or past drug problems choose not to avail themselves of programs they are banned by official policy from.
(I don’t live in CA, but I have somewhat frequently sat on an airplane de-icing pad waiting to travel to CA.)
I think we will have AGI before America fixes the homelessness problem.
SF attracts homeless people because it's a better place to live than most other places.
Fixing homelessness requires a national solution or internal borders.
As long as the possibility that 5% of participants will take advantage of the program, the program is doomed.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-16/californ...
"BART oversaw $350,000 Salvation Army program that treated one person, audit finds"
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/02/03/bart-oversaw-350000-s...
A lot of tax payer money is funneled into non profits that are revoked, suspended or delinquent nonprofits
https://sfstandard.com/politics/san-francisco-nonprofits-rev...
And of course those that directly steal funding:
https://apnews.com/article/california-los-angeles-embezzleme...
Lots of money is invested into homelessness, but the problem of homelessness in America isn't money, it's incentives.
Home equity represents a large chunk of retirement savings for boomers and is largely an investment vehicle for many funds. This means two things:
1. The prices of homes are designed to go up every year; money "invested" into your home must grow.
2. Any action (new homes, legislation, etc) designed to decrease the cost of homes will be actively fought.
As the cost of homes continues to balloon, more and more people will be priced out of home. As landlords need to cover larger and larger mortgages rents will also increase. The trend is already starting; the people you see on the street are those that would have been living in cheap neighborhoods that you would avoid driving in at night (those neighborhoods were gentrified and the people who were priced out and didn't have any family were put on a greyhound to SF/LA).
My theory is that we will get AGI before we blow up the real estate investment market.
Homelessness didn't stop tech companies having SF offices previously, why would it stop them now?
OpenAI itself has only ~300 employees. This is not going to be like the FAANG era at all, much more competition, much higher automation, fewer people required. And the real estate ship has already sailed in the Bay Area... that's a problem they should have been aggressively addressing 10 years ago, but they didn't.
Don't think the VC types understand how much cost of living is an enormous turnoff to the average worker. The majority of tech employees, including myself, lived there for the career opportunities. Now it's no longer required. Why would I ever give up 60% of my take-home pay to state taxes to also pay a much higher CoL?
I do expect RE costs to decline considerably there in real terms though, so perhaps in 5-10 years SF will have another shot
What? Don’t be absurd.
The point is you can cut taxes significantly while also reducing CoL… the economic benefit is far too high to justify people crowding back into SF again