Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of my favourite VC story from the height of the dot-com bubble. A few months prior, I had announced my distributed computation of the quadrillionth bit of Pi, and the concept of doing computations using unused CPU capacity from around the Internet was getting a lot of attention. A VC asked me to look at a company they were thinking of investing in and give my opinion as someone with experience in the field.

Stripped down to its core, the company was pitching technology which would allow it to do "useful" internet-wide computations once global communication latency dropped below a certain threshold. Going along with this was a graph showing how internet round trip times had been steadily dropping for the past two decades, and projecting into the future that some time around 2006 the latencies would become short enough to make their solution work.

Unfortunately, their projection had communication becoming faster than the speed of light in 2004.

I pointed this out to the VC in question. They decided to invest anyway. My understanding is that the company raised $10M before going bankrupt.

I had a wonderful discussion about reducing latency in about 2003 where I pointed out that there was a bound on everything imposed by the speed of light; I remember the investor attempting to use his MBA... "Ok, let's challenge that - how can we go about changing that assumption".

You can do anything if you try is a good moto for 4 year olds, but seriously, business schools should set traps for folk that still believe it in their 30's and empty those traps into [[horrid but funny slasher movie imagery removed to protect the innocent]] ^B^B somewhere where they can't do any more damage.

This is where we get issues where software engineers are expected to do things that are difficult to impossible (DRM, safe crypto backdoors, accurate copyright infringement detection, accurate censorship) and are told to just "do their magic" and make it work perfectly.

Hey, if someone wants to waste their money who am I to disagree if it lands in my pockets? :)

Your professional ethics should be guiding you to manage expectations.

"I'm happy to try this, but here are the limitations I'm aware of and some of these are unavoidable."

> Your professional ethics should be guiding you to manage expectations.

Of course. But if someone hires me and then they decide that we need to transfer information faster than at the speed of light there's only so much my professional ethics can do.

If someone asked me to do that, my first response would be to ask for a huge lab and a lot of PhDs for several decades.

Even harder to debate about when it's something on the verge of stupid, but has been decided otherwise by the top brass.

This video seems relevant here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

Maybe he was thinking you could bend space time.

Other researchers are trying to bend the rules rather than break them. In fact, bending space-time is one theory of how superluminal – faster-than-light -- speeds in space travel might be reached.

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/future-tech/information...

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Alcubierre

While I can't speak to the intelligence of that particular VC, there are plenty of ways of "challenging that assumption" without necessarily breaking physical laws.

For example, you could figure out a way to move things closer together, you could build a prediction algorithm and speculatively execute on a result before an input came in, you could modify the UI so the perceived latency is lower, etc.

When you made that comment what was your point? Because it reeks of that dismissive attitude that most people have that stops them from ever trying anything. "There is a bound on everything imposed by the speed of light." "OK. I will get my servers installed in the exchange itself." (http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=colo) In reality there is a lot that can be done to reduce latency before you are faced with the laws of physics.

The difference here is that the 100 dB limit isn't some fundamental law of physics. It's one of the currently accepted standards for safe use of ultrasound. Taking a look through the literature, though, you can find various numbers that say ultrasound several orders of magnitude stronger have had no observable long-term adverse effects. Basically, there's an intensity level that we're pretty sure is harmful, and an intensity level that we're pretty sure is safe, and, as it happens, the intensity level necessary to make uBeam useful is somewhere in between.

Investing in uBeam requires a calculated wager that the threshold for ultrasound safety is a fair bit higher than 100 dB. It's a risky position to take, and I'm not sure how to calculate it, but it's not pure lunacy.

No, 100 dB SPL is not a fundamental law of physics, but it's certainly a fundamental limit of human tolerance (it's about the same sound pressure as standing next to an operating jackhammer), and even if you can't hear it at ~20 kHz, any small animal in the vicinity will likely be tortured (seriously, PETA should take an interest in this technology). And since we're talking about investing in a consumer technology, any fundamental limit in human tolerance or even FDA guidance should be a deal breaker from a business perspective. My objection is that no one did such a sanity check before investing a large sum into this concept.

>> Unfortunately, their projection had communication becoming faster than the speed of light in 2004.

And by 2008, information was received before it was sent!

To be fair, how could they have known? They worked with the data they had at the time, and hindsight is 20/20. Hard things always seem impossible until someone does it, and then everyone else talk about how it was "inevitable".

/s

there is a difference between "impossible" and "hard". Someone comes in and pitches a 60% efficiency solar cell. I know that is an extremely hard problem, but not impossible. I'm going to grill the shit out of them over it.

Someone comes in and pitches a 110% efficiency solar cell; they aren't getting a dime of my money. Normally, they aren't coming pitching a 110% efficiency solar cell, they just haven't done the math to realize that is what they are pitching.

The assumption that needs to be challenged is that you need faster than light latencies to accomplish your objectives, not the notion that faster than light is impossible. Once physical limitations become apparent, you need to focus on the aspects of your design that are not limited by physics.

Hindsight? Grandparent told the VC that it was impossible before they decided to invest tons of money in it.

How could they have known? Acknowledging the special theory of relativity would have been a good start. It's not like they were a bunch of alchemists in the middle ages only having various mystical interpretations of the world to work from.

But, but, but, here's what you are missing, where you are going wrong: The VCs have "deep domain expertise". And we do know this because nearly all their Web sites say that they do! We're talking deep, deep, way down deep domain expertise!

They got this expertise by long and hard study and work in the STEM fields? Oh no! Instead their path was much better, from being an English literature, history, or foreign policy major, maybe an MBA (I used to be an MBA prof), reading 1000 executive summaries, 200 foil decks, with the rules of no more than 10 foils per deck with just a few simple words per foil with 30 point fonts, listening to 5 elevator pitches a day on their phone messaging, and from an earlier career in business development!

Now don't you see why they have such deep domain expertise? Deep, deep here!

Aaron Sorkin could think of a better way of saying it, maybe -- Deep. I've been watching Silicon Valley since before the Bubble, and I've never seen anything so deep. Brutal. Brutally deep. Excruciatingly brutal. As at, say

http://flash.sonypictures.com/video/movies/thesocialnetwork/...

So, what's going on? Hmm, .... Maybe we should, say, "follow the money"? What money? Well, they get their 2 and 20%. To do that they have to have some investments that do obey the laws of physics and become successful companies, have some good exits from those companies, and, thus, make money for their limited partners (LPs)?

Not necessarily! Maybe they don't know much about physics or the STEM fields, but maybe they do have some domain expertise, that is, in making money.

How, then, while trying to violate the laws of physics?

Well, in short, please some other people. Or find some even bigger fools and separate them from their money!

The bigger fools? Would you assume that the portfolio managers at the major institutional investors were better qualified in the STEM fields and building actual successful companies than the VCs? I wouldn't!

Instead these limited partners (LPs), following their herd, the Wildebeest are not all completely wrong, you understand, put a small fraction of their funds into the alternate investment asset class, i.e., VC.

This asset class is making money? Not much on average! Or see

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/venture-capital-returns.html...

Still, the LPs invest! Why? They don't want to miss out on the next Google. Besides, who can be sure what technology will do in the future? Besides, that's what all the other portfolio managers of the state pension funds and university endowments are doing, so just fit into that herd, match the returns they get, and tell any critics that the fund is doing what all the other funds are doing. Besides, the money invested with the VCs is just a small fraction of what the LPs have in their portfolios.

So, if the LPs are happy, then for 10 years or so the VCs get their 2%. Then for the exits, there might be an IPO with, from the 2000 bubble "Never be between a VC and the door when the lock up period is over". Or there might be an M&A when the CEO of a big, old, but now slowly shrinking company UGE buys a start-up, in an all stock deal, to make the stockholders of the big company UGE feel better for a while, long enough for the UGE CEO to get a nice bonus and golden parachute from his BoD. Or, do an M&A for about $2 million per software developer of the start-up, that is, do an acqui hire. Or do an M&A with another company in their portfolio following the rule that combining two, money losing, sick companies can use the law of synergy that the sum is greater than the parts to make one healthy company. In such cases, the VC gets 20%.

VC starts to sound like a good gig, all without any role for the STEM fields or the laws of physics. Or, the deep domain expertise is the bigger fool theory and "follow the money"?

Let me guess the VC was a MBA (and probably not even a decent one at that) and not a graduate from a hard science.

I wonder if there is an opening for a common sense consultant in silicon roundabout I could probably double up as a HR consultant

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