Ways YC has changed in the last year
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There's no question in my mind that 'Open'AI is subsidizing the vast majority of LLM research and use today. If the efficacy of LLaMA and its derivatives actually start to approach GPT4+ in any meaningful way, there is quickly going to be a shortage of suitable compute that will completely dwarf the now-subsided Bitcoin mining craze. Plus, untainted training data is going to be harder to find amongst the text contaminated with mountains of early LLM drivel.
As a technology expert, I couldn't in all honesty say that I would want to have money in the YC fund right now. But if it pays off, it could be the biggest software windfall since social networking took off at the beginning of the 2010s.
Nvidia seem to me to have been consistently competent in improving their product lines. Perhaps my only criticism would be of their artificial hampering of some of their products, which they do in order to appease certain PC gamers by excluding the gaming market from usual supply/demand effects. This has the knock-on effect of severely reducing the compatibility of the hardware with Linux, which of course is by far the most sensible option for cloud computing hosts right now.
Can you elaborate what you mean by this? I thought Nvidia is outpricing their PC gamer customers because of their focus on AI? I’m curious how they have hampered their products in your opinion.
My reading of the saga is that the cryptocurrency mining bubble was causing huge demands for Nvidia GPUs as parallel processors (with ASICS for mining only starting to appear at this point). This meant that GPUs were being priced-out of the market for most PC gamers, as it was always profitable for cryptocurrency miners to buy more of them.
Nvidia introduced a lock on 'non-professional' cards which prevented alternative firmware from being loaded on them, effectively splitting the market into two, one for 'gamers' and the other for 'miners'. That lock interferes with the open source driver for Linux, Nouveau, meaning that normal things like CUDA (and not least running games!) couldn't be done on Linux without a labyrinthine network of proprietary drivers that, for instance, couldn't be updated automatically.
It seems as if Nvidia succeeded, because from my passive awareness of the PC gaming world, people seem very happy with their new GPUs. But for those using Linux for servers, at home or for AI research, it has been an ongoing nightmare.
H100's were not used for mining.
Regardless, in general, there is little demand for GPUs for mining any longer after ETH switched to PoS.
Do you think nvidias trillion dollar valuation is because entire governments are buying Nvidia cards to run stable diffusion?!
YC needs to make sure they actually have a market to sell these startups to before their valuation starts dropping again. Predicting that requires a certain kind of intuition, whereas 'traditional' software startups have a more predictable lifecycle. I'm not the 'hype type' myself - I don't really trust stocks without intrinsic value behind them :)
It's probably a good idea for YC to have some thesis about which technologies will be big, and "AI" is probably a good bet. The entire point of investing in so many AI startups is that I'm quite sure YC expects the vast, vast majority to fail (for various definitions of "fail"). But I think most people believe that there will be very few winners in the AI space (like pretty much all the other tech spaces over the past 20 years), so the biggest fears of someone like a YC is not getting in in those one or two AI companies that made it big.
Concentration and diversification are fundamentally opposed in risk management.
It’s ludicrous to suggest that somehow YC is “immune” to the risks that are associated with concentration of investment in one area.
I don’t buy the “we pick founders not technology” argument.
Rubbish. It’s a hype bubble. You’re seeing that as emergent behaviour because it gets funding; there’s no amount of hand waving that makes any of the risks in the parent comment either a) wrong, or b) YC somehow magically exempt from.
Are you seriously suggesting that YC just doesn’t do risk management or cross-startup risk analysis?
I simply cannot believe that.
[1] - https://www.ycdb.co/
But it also didn't do as well as the previous ones. I don't know when exactly YC got that "hit maker" reputation you are talking about, but S06 is an outlier regardless. The class directly before and directly after had failure rates of 29% and 38% compared to S06's 73%. The only classes coming close to the failure rates of S06 were in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis.
For example, in S06 there was one big exit (OMGpop), one company still alive and very well known today (Scribd), and one what I'd call "failure with an exit" - Xobni sold for a relatively low 60 million to Yahoo and was then shutdown.
Compare that with the batch directly after that, W07, which had 13 companies. Of those 13, it had one smash hit (Twitch) and one other relatively big success (Weebly). While it may have a lot fewer overall "dead" markers than S06, a lot of its exits look like acqui-hires or "OK buy our IP before we die" type exits. Better than an outright "dead" score I guess, but from the perspective of a VC like YC it hardly makes any difference. Point being I think it's a stretch to say there were really much significance in the "success difference" between S06 and W07 despite the differences in dead counts (with the possible exception that Twitch ended up being such a home run, but those are so rare they average 1 or fewer per batch anyway).
Actually, it says something much deeper about the world than whatever YC's partners' opinions are. YC funds founders, not ideas, so the reason that so many companies in S23 are AI startups is that that's what founders want to work on right now. It's an emergent phenomenon, like stock prices in the market.
One thing that's interesting is that there have been many hype cycles between 2006 and now (chatbots, several waves of crypto, VR, online-to-offline, etc). YC funded a few companies in each of those hype cycles but never anything like the current %.
I was hyped about Bitcoin when it came out, but the only truly revolutionary thing that happened after Bitcoin in that field was Ethereum, and there really wasn't anything to be hyped about besides that in the decade since even though people kept hyping it.
This hype is so different, it's as powerful as web 2.0 was. I felt like I missed out on building something epic then, and now I get another shot so I'm not gonna miss it. I bet there's thousands of people who feel this way.
So being wrong one time means you're not a great founder?
Maybe YC isn't investing in the right founders, and that's why it has so many AI startups.
your statement fails to consider the possibility that the pool of applicants to YC are not great and the demographic of such founders are bad founders who are easily swayed by hype into fragile and failing topics such as "AI" and crypto.
in the situation where the applicant pool of ideas is in fact incredibly diverse, then it supports the thesis even moreso because it would show YC went with "AI" founders over other founders, regardless of their quality as potential business owners.
At some level, YC is a marketplace for VCs. One'd think that this over-emphasis (it was crypto, b2b SaaS, mobile app startups before this) is YC working as it is supposed to be? http://paulgraham.com/herd.html / https://archive.is/vkzMd
Even after you strip off the 80% “and then LangChain connects to a different API” stuff, this technology is still massive and it’s here to stay.
Tuning up a bunch of bright founders on some really highly leveraged ways of looking at problems? At some VC’s expense?
It could be worse.
How was this determined to be best?
(Obviously, they haven't controlled for variables like the switch to 4 smaller batches, and the high percentage of startups all doing one exciting thing (AI). And do they realize the costs. And is it best for some people, and not for others.)
Absolutely breathtaking level of cynicism from executive class that as soon as interest rates went up, hiring market cooled, and the power balance between workers & bosses swung back their way, suddenly in-office was "most productive".
100% vibes and "because we say so / we can get away with it".
Just cause you can't imagine why anyone would care about being in person doesn't mean the only remaining reason is a greedy powertrip. You're just not being sufficiently imaginative.
But the lingering question is... Why is it that everyone was super cool with hybrid & remote, even past COVID danger, but as soon as FAANG had massive layoffs we went from 2days to 3days to majority back in office at many tech companies?
And the east coast bank/fund/finance tech companies quickly dragged everyone else back to the office as soon as we all stopped quitting for FAANG jobs?
Hard to tell what the cause could possibly be.
Correlation, causation.. who knows!
Or perhaps all the managers, typically fairly extroverted people, get more depressed over time the longer their daily social interactions are just on video calls.
Or perhaps over time it's found that new hires do worse and worse without an office to bond with others in and a culture to absorb.
Etc. No shortage of plausible reasons.
Perhaps these companies were remote for a while because a lot of people were loud and annoying about it, and now a lot of them are quietly backpedaling to avoid offending the people who love it while reclaiming the benefits of an office?
Perhaps! I don't know. You'd have to ask them. One thing is for sure: there are a lot of plausible reasons besides 'evil'.
Simply stating that tech employers have the power back and now they are using it.
Umm? Pot meet kettle
Aka - the old Wall St saying that when the economy turns and labor loses power, casual Fridays go out the window and everyone is back to wearing suits.
So I do think that the debate is all kayfabe. There is no data.
They really see remote/hybrid as just an accommodation like allowing jeans, paying for your lunch, or having yoga classes on site... and look forward to cutting it at any time of their choosing, when they can get away with it.
If data shows some % of the company has been completely slacking off with WFH (or over employed etc) you could either hold mgmt accountable (but how? Fire all VPs for letting that happen? Fire all line managers?) or just make blanket policies…
My spouse is at a shop that keeps ratcheting up the RTO days “because people aren’t abiding by the current RTO days”.
This of course is idiotic because the shirkers don’t get punished and everyone ends up worst off. In fact the people already complying are worst effected.
If you can’t count on managers to enforce rules then why have managers or rules?
I understand some people are more productive at home but I’m yet to see a _team_ that is more productive being remote. I lack the experience working in remote-first companies like gitlab though.
In my career I've generally been on teams spread across 3 continents and sit in open floorplan offices surrounded by other loud teams. So I commute into the office to be collocated with at-best 1/3 of my team, surrounded by unrelated noise.
In some ideal state where we were 100% in the same city, sat in a dedicated pod area without so much commotion & distraction, in-office might be great. I've never experienced this.
Even in that ideal state, it may likely turn out ideal team productivity happens at 3-4 days in-office, as there's time for coordination and then time for deep quiet work.
The top-down, C-suite level dictates are not based on what's most productive.
Your anecdata vs mine? ;)
This was a startup, that had one big problem: a CEO that believed he was better than any and all of his workers at what the workers did. He also believed that collaboration was important, as through discussion, everyone would agree that he was right all along. You can imagine how unhealthy someone like that can be.
In a remote world, dealing with problem people is easier. The amount of acting one has to perform lowers. The lower visibility also allows people to self organize: Ignore coworker A as much as necessary, yet pair all day with coworker B, who is useful. Is someone very loud, or getting into other people's business? Being far from each other can help!
It didn't take 8 weeks in-office for all the coping that people were doing to become clear to everyone in the company. A CEO that was manageable via short interactions became an unavoidable thorn into the company's side, as remoteness covered their weaknesses. An open office didn't help matters. Everyone that wasn't a founder knew this was all untenable and quit.
So a team can definitely be far more productive being remote, as remoteness mandates far less gelling. Local conflict often has explosive results. People you dislike become far more tolerable. And really, every company ends up getting people like that, and sometimes chooses them over those that are team builders: I've seen my fair share of horrible managers that cost a company money in supposedly high performance, well known companies, and I have yet to see one getting a Pip out of it.
You more quickly arrived at the point were the company fell apart, which was clearly inevitable.
It’s also for only 11 weeks. Other companies probably want to be always be intense and hands-on and have the YC atmosphere, but that’s actually a terrible way to manage a company, a recipe for getting everyone to burnout and quit, and even if people stay after awhile the intensity will cool off.
I don’t doubt YC is better in-person, but also that your typical boring company is better remote.
I'm sure they get lots of feedback from the companies in a batch, not to mention the partners' own assessments of how things work. It seems entirely reasonable to me then, after they did have different sessions with different configurations, to point to particular points and say "in-person just worked way better".
Why not? There is a barrage of companies touting the benefits of in person collaboration, thinly veiled to just being "surveil the workers"
Is this a serious question? For one thing, every founder will obviously know whether they are in-person or not, so it's not even possible to do a single-blind study.
I'm certain CEOs of FAANG are looking at stats to make these decisions. And what many WFH diehards miss is that your (or my) individual productivity is irrelevant, because all that matters is the output of the company as a whole. I can work really efficiently on the wrong thing and/or not spend time helping others in a way that my overall output for the company, not myself, is worse vs. in-office.
I'm not so certain. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re...
What do you have in mind for a quantitative assessment?
(Disclosure: I'm pro-WFH overall, or, ideally, my own version of hybrid. I can see some benefits to some uses of in-person. I can also see WFH problems that still need creative solutions. I'm also aware that, in dialogue around this, some other people might not be playing the same game of nuance and problem-solving.)
From my perspective WFH saves me so much time, money, and stress that I’d be insane to not insist on it. Why would I read a study that doesn’t take my perspective into account?
WFH saves me tens of thousands a year. Any conversation that ignores the financial impact of return to office from my point of view is worthless.
To put it another way... In-person is best for the business in the short term and detrimental to their long term but it is a sacrifice startups make as they have no long term without the short term success so just punt all the long term stuff until they've made it that far.
I have family members in SV who have started their own startup. Talking to them, "founder" seems to be a roll which needs a lot of social interactions and they are constantly networking. Right from raising money to making the first hires to finding the first customers. So no wonder YC batch finds in-person to be the best experience.
That's an important debate but orthogonal to what I wrote. The YC batch is not a company. It doesn't really have a close analogue, but if you forced me to choose, I'd say that doing YC is more similar to going to college than working at a company. And as all we all know, while many companies are staying fully remote, hardly any university is.
Having now done this back-to-back, I can tell you exactly the ways in which in-person YC turned out to be better than remote YC.
1). Most founders in remote YC didn't make strong connections with their batchmates. When I ask founders from remote batches "how many founders in your batch are you still close with?", they typically give an answer that's 0-3. When I ask founders from in-person batches the same question, it's 10+.
2). When YC really works, it's because it not only conveys some factual advice, but changes the way founders think and behave.
When founders go through in-person batches, they're usually significantly different by the end of the batch - tougher, savvier, and more formidable. Whatever causes that did not translate well to zoom.
3). In-person YC is simply more fun. YC has always been in part about being fun experience, because startups need to be fun or they'd be too difficult and demoralizing. Zoom is very effective for communicating information, but no one has fun at Zoom parties.
> YC is more similar to going to college than working at a company.
The 3 ways you mentioned are also critical for a successful company.
1. Strong connections: you want to make strong connections in your company. That is what your network is and those connections help you in countless ways like referrals, job search or mentorships.
2. A company with "tougher, savvier, and more formidable" employees can wipe the competition against a company who doesn't have this kind of workforce. If zoom didn't work for YC to foster this, then why do you think it will do the trick for companies?
3. More fun - I really prefer a workplace which is fun than the one which is not. A fun workplace also helps with stronger connections with colleagues (#1).
My actual experience also aligns with these observations. In-person workplaces really produced stronger connections, more fun and better/stronger teams. Fully remote companies simply never had that level of camaraderie.
I do believe remote work can "work" - so can four day work weeks (probably even three day) and many other arrangements. Companies and individuals can do it and not go bankrupt.
But I think to reach your fullest potential as a team/company/unit, you simply need to spend a lot of time together. If you don't want to reach your full potential, then that's a choice you can make.
I imagine the biggest reason is it raises the sense of commitment for everyone involved.
Networking is fundamentally an in-person thing. The remote-only people can whine all they want, but that is simply an immutable fact.
Building a startup requires most of your time on non-coding tasks.
It’s harder to do because we aren’t used to it but I attended a really well done Zoom mixer in 2021 that was absolutely amazing and didn’t great job. It almost felt like I was in person honestly.
People aren’t used to changing their norms so quickly. This is what the real issue is
I participated in YC S15.
We all quit our jobs, and my co-founders moved to from Atlanta to SF for the summer, we rented a big house as a live/work space, and drove together to Mountain View the required few times a week. We went to a lot of optional things together like additional office hours, parties, meetups, together and in person.
That level of commitment and pretty much daily face to face working time is powerful.
It's not possible for everyone given circumstances, and its not sustainable forever. But that means that the teams that can and do opt into a summer like this are very committed to their idea.
So it's not hard to imagine it's "better" to relocate for a stretch of something hard like getting a business off the ground than doing it all fully distributed.
So yeah, it isn’t possible for many, if not most people. I’m not a fan of the model.
Comparing “move to another city (or country) for three months” with “there is a limited amount of time in everyone’s day” is a rather disingenuous way to frame the discussion. You make it sound like it _must_ be a zero-sum game when it doesn’t have to be.
The YC (and by extension, all YC-like) model comes across more as a system of selection and control for a specific demographic that has little to do with potential for success.
Have people tried remote accelerators? If they're viable and competitive then they should have no problem flourishing, especially given the apparent number of WFH diehards. Honestly I wouldn't bet on it.
What if you want to be an actor, or a comic, or a filmmaker? You basically have to move to LA or NY. There are lots of opportunities that require very large commitments. You can think of your commitments, hobbies, routines, each on average occupying a certain percentage of your day. Having a kid is a huge one. Doing a hustle growth startup is another. Is it really reasonable to try and do both at the same time? One or both will suffer.
Thats not what I said.
> it's hard to argue that they haven't hit on something that works better than the known alternatives.
Does it work better though? Barring some statistical outliers such as unicorns, VC backed startups from accelerators don’t measurably do better at all for the founders.
> What if you want to be an actor, or a comic, or a filmmaker? You basically have to move to LA or NY.
So, actors only work in […checks notes…] LA or NY?
This kind of egregious reductionism as support for the idea that a startup can only be successful if you dedicate your entire life to it to the exclusion of literally everything else (family, hobbies, “routines” - whatever that may mean) is not giving me the feeling that you are interested in a meaningful discussion, this is more like reddit point-scoring, which is not interesting, so I’m leaving it at this.
Does it work better though? Barring some statistical outliers such as unicorns, VC backed startups from accelerators don’t measurably do better at all for the founders.
Ok, then what's the problem? Just don't do it, easy. You started this off by lamenting that they ask for too much of a commitment, now you're saying that they don't really add value. I'm not sure what argument you're driving at.
"Egregious reductionism"? Who's point-scoring again? That sentiment about e.g. Hollywood is pretty widespread conventional wisdom. Can you make it elsewhere, sure, but that's beside the point. My point is that there are certain jobs and opportunities that require a lot of commitment and giving up of other things, and that closes them off to a lot of people, but that's ok. You've avoided making any argument against that by nitpicking and shifting your argument.
Nobody is stopping anybody from living a family life in the suburbs and starting a VC backed startup in their spare time. Be a rebel, buck the trend, prove 'em wrong! But maybe understand that there may be some truth to the idea that you're putting yourself at a disadvantage in an already tough environment, and that getting a bunch of people together in the same room and grinding actually does have value, it's not just toxic YC bro culture or whatever.
exclusion of literally everything else (family, hobbies, “routines” - whatever that may mean)
Routines are things like brushing your teeth, showering, sleeping; eating may even be considered a routine. You have a very real time budget you have to balance. You seem unwilling to accept this. Go ahead, do it all, I wish you luck!
The core hypothesis is that the startup team should be working in person to be more effective. If one doesn't agree with that, they have a great market opportunity - start "YC, but fully remote". YC is not going to compete there it seems.
I do wonder what percent of YC companies force moves to SF. If a bunch of those people are moving anyways, running a batch in some other city (hell, Seattle or NY is surely filled with decent stuff) would be interesting. And on the YC-side, moving out somewhere for 3 months might give them their own novelty bonus as well.
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
I knew this was a thing, but I didn't realize it worked by messing with timestamps.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
But don’t expect anything else. It would not help, if you are outside of that scenario. It easily can screw you, by using any product ideas that you’ve refined and sharing these freely with a relevant startup in the batch.
Do you have an example of this happening in the past?
Was pretty annoying to watch, because it was quite clear that the idea was too early to try productizing YC-style at the time. It was essentially “code understanding” with early transformers, buck in 2017. But YC tried turning this into a product, while it was time to do foundational research.
Again, the lesson - it is important to understand that YC is specializing on a particular way of bringing up a startup.
There is a difference between “an idea” versus investment of a few months of prototyping and market research that goes into distilling an approach to a product.
You can simply multiply going salary of the professional that us doing it onto the time spent. And then get a rough estimate of the value of that IP.
When a startup goes to a VC there is inevitably a transfer of that IP to the VC. And the transfer is unidirectional, until a partner invests their capital and time.
- company X raises at $Y valuation before YC
- company X raises at $Z valuation after YC
- if Z / Y > YC dilution then YC is a good value
Z/Y > dilution in virtually all cases.
Sorry, but life isn't fair.
Pretty sure this plays fast and loose with the history of American naval warfare. The only battleship built in San Francisco, that I can think of, is the 19th-century relic USS Ohio.
Probably the tweeter was just using that term colloquially, like "ship of war", rather than as a classification of size and function.
At a time when I can use ML algorithms to create beautiful images from a simple description, Twitter feels positively prehistoric. And yet the people investing in the bleeding edge continue using smoke signals to reach their audience. It’s remarkable.
Technology matters far less than network effects. Not saying it doesn't matter at all, but you have to overcome the audiences stickiness to a platform first.
It’s literally just bad UI.
Um,... just because OP does that, doesn't mean it's necessary.
Here's an example of a long-form post, with embedded images: https://twitter.com/myles_cooks/status/1689022160780791812
This is a recipe with short (but not one-liners) yet helpful instructions, including images of how the cooking process would work.
Do you have an example of a better recipe post?
It was just recipes.
It seems to pull from other sites, but just give the recipe. Don't click on the link, only the cooking instructions.
As for bleeding edge people using it, if someone is still using this platform they lose all credibility with me.
If (you are democrat ) read above post If (you are not democrat ) Twitter is great! If (you are female ) Twitter is sexist If (well you get the picture ) ...
Instead, users get taught to visit the comments first and upvote a comment with that link.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37627964.
Completely ignoring the founders who still have to move, apparently?
This is an incredibly long time to be away from your family for many people.
> Before cellphones went mainstream.
Yeah, and before we had antibiotics people would die from simple infections, that doesn’t mean we should “rough it out” or somesuch nonsense.
If not moving is not right for you, then you that's fine.
Unfortunately there are just too many people willing to jump at the chance for you to matter
COVID having forced you to be remote is not enough to validate this constant preaching from SV leadership (and only leadership - no one without millions in equity ever lobbies for this) that nothing can replace in person.
The fact that Paul Graham compares it to communism is fitting for so many reasons.
So we've got (A) a misleading "productivity" metric sometimes being used to rationalize (B) one-sided policies which are (C) not sustainable in the long term anyway.
Commute costs are kind of like inflation: In the very long term it's balanced by wages... but there's a lot of living that happens at shorter timescales. The longer before the situation is renegotiated, the more time one side has to exploit the imbalance.
First week? Had a fever, didn't go in. Second week? Went in 2 days. Had too much shit to do to worry about office crap. Third week? Also 2 days. There were less than 10% of the desks filled on both days I went.
Going real smooth. And I guarantee you that every single person who is actually going into the office is counting commute time against their working hours.
Has the physical world discovered how to replay past conversations where important decisions were made? Has it become socially acceptable to have long silences of 5-10 minutes while people formulate thoughtful replies in a conversation?
Yes, they're called "minutes", memos or simply taking notes in meetings.
> Has it become socially acceptable to have long silences of 5-10 minutes while people formulate thoughtful replies in a conversation?
Yes, you can always say "let me think about that for a minute"
At google, doc reading is done before the meeting along with comments/replies, but during a design review, the host will go through each comment and then open a live discussion if needed.
Both of these formats allow for productive meetings but it does require a culture to support it and people to write down their thoughts ahead of the meeting and share it around.
there's something positive about setting time on the calendar and then sitting down with someone (or a group of people) to talk about a specific subject that we've all prepared for. yes, you can do that with Zoom, but then you miss the ability to speak simultaneously and the body language / nonverbal.
not everything should be a meeting, but not everything should be IM / phone calls either. being able to mix and match is what makes in-person somewhat positive (even if I personally prefer a hybrid model)
For other problems? Sure, slack and zoom are perfectly adequate to preferable.
People say this, but FigJam or even Microsoft Whiteboard work fantastically for this if you've equipped your team with the right hardware. I often sit down with people and noodle through problems on an iPad (and for me at least the Pencil is required) with FigJam in a low-friction manner.
I’m certainly not going to make my team move to my city and rent an office for those meetings, but getting together a few times a year can allow for solving some tough/intractable problems much more easily/efficiently.
I think FigJam is pretty bad with a mouse and keyboard, honestly. It wasn't until I started using it with an iPad that it made sense to me and it wasn't until I got other people doing it that it was actually any good at all. It also suffers if you have the sort of group that needs a facilitator for these kinds of processes--I had a PM who had formerly been at Figma and their process for trying to get people to use it at the new job hurt me physically.
(The funny thing is, while I do like FigJam I don't like Figma at all; I am an Illustrator man and will be until I blow away like dust in the wind.)
> I’m certainly not going to make my team move to my city and rent an office for those meetings, but getting together a few times a year can allow for solving some tough/intractable problems much more easily/efficiently.
I agree with this, FWIW, but not for the problem-solving aspect at a whiteboard. I use it for the sticky, annoying people-y problems where you do lose something over a teleconference connection when dealing with most people. (Some folks I've worked with, like me, have an on-camera background and can project effectively over teleconferences; most can't.)
When did this pseudo math talk creep into normal speech?
It reeks of charlatans pretending to be technical when there is no need to be technical.