aerosmile

It appears that most people are considering the following two scenarios:

1. most employers will pay the same regardless of where I live, and my job security will be the same as before.

2. most employers will pay a bit less if I work remotely, but that's worth it to me since I can pay less for rent and have a higher quality of life. And yes, my job security will be the same as before.

It shocks me that people are not considering the following scenario:

3. most employers will realize that a person living 100 miles away represents the same value to my company as one that lives 5,000 miles away. The latter, of course, is far cheaper, more motivated, and far less likely to cause any problems since they also have far fewer protections. And no, they are not any less talented.

So far, the pandemic has been all about the workforce side of the story. We're about to find out what the employer side of the story looks like. I personally don't mind a future where everyone in this world get equal access to job opportunities, but I don't think that most people advocating for remote work are quite as aware of the long-term ramifications on the US workforce.

I think you might be touching on a taboo that nobody will ever admit publicly: having a baby is no walk in the park, and in comparison sitting in a cubicle and answering a few emails can seem like a massive upgrade.

Phew! For a split second, I thought you were suggesting that the government should regulate this.

Could we get a reference for that attack on PG? Ideally with a direct quote as well, so that we know where exactly you’ve seen that behavior.

Nailed it.

Elon

Edit: lol, this will be the most downvotes on a char count basis I've ever received. I thought it was generally accepted that for better or worse, he does not mince words.

For every instance that results in a win against a patent troll, there are many more instances where people just pay - you just don't hear about them. More recently the portfolio of companies I am a part of has seen an uptick in demands, and I have to assume that this is driven by a feedback loop that's producing good outcomes for trolls.

The beauty of being the first in the market. All the manufacturers with the shiny new EVs will have a higher marketing cost because Tesla is able to get the free PR and the best co-promotional deals like this one.

Many people are wondering where Hertz found the money to make this purchase.

> it will be interesting to see what people think after they have rented one

They will absolutely love it, just like I did when I rented one on Turo and then bought a new one the very next day. Also, the Hertz crowd is exactly the right target customer for Tesla. All of which shows how brilliant this deal is for Tesla, and how incentivized they must have been to make it happen. Which likely answers the question above.

After four years of Trump, I know where you're coming from. But you're projecting the moral and ethical values of one person to millions of people.

Here's the thing - I've run startups that had a strong business, and those that haven't. While I would believe that my fundamental values never changed, I can tell you that I was far more tested in situations when we were running out of money than when we had 8 figures in our bank account. For example, how do you design a paid leave policy? With 8 figures in the bank, you really have to be a psychopath not to leaning on the generous side. But when you don't know if you can do the next payroll and the financial security of 100 people hinges on you hitting the next month's target... and then someone tells you about a family member who just passed away... Sometimes there are no good solutions, and you want to avoid getting yourself in those situations. So ironically, a hard-hitting CEO can sometimes lead to a better paid leave policy than a startup run by the most empathetic social worker in the world.

This comment explains all I needed to know about why so few people in this country are taking this crisis seriously. The understanding is that this is the Amazon drop shippers who are whining, so why bother? There are countless counter arguments provided by other commenters, so I will just add this - the analogy with Lehman Brothers is a gift that keeps on giving; when they failed, there were also people saying "it's just the rich folks who will lose their money."

So the idea that this is all about the drop shippers is laughably wrong. But throwawayboise does bring up a point that's worth discussing - what kind of crises are "beneath" the role and purpose of the US military? Is their role just to blow shit up, or is there an economic and humanitarian angle there as well? For example, if an earthquake took out an entire metropolitan area, would it be beneath all those soldiers to dig for human remains, or would they leave that to whatever the more appropriate branch of public service that would be (even with the understanding that joining forces would save more lives)? I know that in the other two countries I've lived in this would be a silly question - of course the military would roll up their sleeves. In the US, I genuinely don't know. The author of the above comment is obviously ignorant when it comes to economic matters, but when it comes to military matters, I wouldn't be surprised if his tone resonated with many others.

FWIW, Ryan proves that not everyone in the US thinks like that, and certainly all the people from the international community I've met wouldn't agree with throwawayboise either.

I don't disagree that the US made a huge mistake when it outsourced its production (for all the reasons you mentioned). But the solution is not to rip off the bandaid and view millions of businesses as collateral damage. You'll notice that the Chinese government is great at playing a long game, eg: Taiwan. We need to do the same.

The only way we can get better at long games is to examine what's driving our current weakness in that area. My guess is that it has to do with the dynamics of presidential terms. To get re-elected, you have to achieve something big in the first four years, and anything big will piss off the other half of the country and will make you lose the congressional elections at the end of your second year. So the solution is to either do something big that buys you favors with both political parties (literally nothing comes to mind), or to get it done in the first two years. China, in comparison, has been plotting the takeover of Taiwan for decades, and is very strategically, step by step, moving in that direction. If this was the US, the only option would have been a quick invasion or a start-stop effort every 4-8 years.

You're missing an important point here - if US customers cannot get their Xmas gifts on time, they won't buy them (nobody is going to order Xmas gifts if they will likely only arrive in January of later). Facebook has about 5 million advertisers, and a material percentage of them relies on the Xmas season for their financials to work out on an annual basis. Millions of US business have deposited 7+ figures each in inventory deposits a few months ago, with the understanding that they will convert those deposits into profit by December at the latest. If that doesn't happen, how many of them will get bank loans to get them out of this mess? And how many people will lose their jobs with or without those loans? We truly are talking about a Lehman Brothers scale of a problem, and as Ryan pointed out, the only way to fix this is to unblock the ports. So if you're eventually going to have to do it, why not do it before millions of companies go out of business as opposed to only after that's happened?

So this is not just a matter of Chinese factories not being able to sell their goods (in which case their government will take care of them as they have done in the past). This is about US e-commerce businesses who can only fall back on their banks (and which are far more unpredictable in their generosity).

Ryan's idea to mobilize the military resources would have been a no-brainer and would have already happened in at least two countries I have lived in before.

One final detail - this may seem like a recent issue, and most of us only heard about the problem sometime in early October. In reality, the industry press has been covering this since at least March [1], when the backlog of cargo ships at LAX started exceeding 20 (it's supposed to be well below that). Now it's at over 70. So it's been 7 months with practically no action until a week ago. I am a Democrat, but this is not going to bode well for Biden.

[1] https://edisonreport.com/latest-update-on-the-global-shippin...

I am sure you noticed that Ryan gently exposed those in charge of not doing enough by repeating the ship captain's comments that Ryan's team was the first to ask to get a tour of the port from the ocean side. Granted, perhaps those in charge have their own boats or are using helicopters, but the lack of action does make me wonder.

The guy is a bad ass. If he wanted to run for President, he would win. I am really not exaggerating - I had a chance to meet him a few years back, and at that time he was the most impressive person I had talked to in person for an extended amount of time (not based on credentials or achievement, but simply based on clarity of thought and new ways of thinking). I also know that PG rates him incredibly highly.

To give you a taste, this is him 3 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjUs7o-TnjY. I remember watching that video the first time and being particularly struck by his insight on how entrepreneurial sales is different from regular sales [1], which I have been able to apply since then on a regular basis.

[1] https://youtu.be/hjUs7o-TnjY?t=2499

Everyone's focused on Ryan's comments about stacking, and the subsequent win there. Amazing job, Ryan, and thank you Robert Garcia for being a man to take one on the chin (for this solution not coming from your team) and for then doing the right thing. I am seriously impressed by not seeing any NIH (not invented here) behavior here.

But why stop there? Ryan suggested 5 courses of actions, and made it clear that we need to act on all of them at the same time. So far only the first of those 5 steps have been acted on. The rest of the steps are likely either bad or the people needed to act on them are doing that NIH bullshit (which I can understand to some extent given how much negativity is being directed at Robert Garcia). But negativity or not, if those are good suggestions, we need to act on them. Would love to hear any thoughts on how to mobilize support for quickly validating/invalidating those suggestions, and then acting accordingly.

If it's possible to cancel brands and individuals, it should be possible to do the same with politicians as well. I hope it doesn't turn out that we care more about certain individuals' views than the prevention of a nationwide and potentially even global crisis [1].

[1] From Ryan's tweet:

> I can't stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don't work. Every company selling physical goods bought or sold internationally will fail. The circulatory system our globalized economy depends has collapsed. And thanks to the negative feedback loops involved, it's getting worse not better every day that goes by..

If Ryan's tweets had anything to do with this, my respect for him just went through the roof (and my disappointment with people actually tasked with figuring this out diminished proportionally).

100% agreed!

That average relative valuation is a good way to think about it. I would propose that most people don't believe in the exponential potential of individuals, so you'll find that people undervaluing the top CEOs outweigh those overvaluing them.

You're not wrong with the description, although I would counter that you don't have to be smarter than anyone else - even if just a fraction of people is undervaluing an asset, you can still make a profit.

I think Elon is a good example of that - a lot of coverage in the past years focused on missed production numbers and that sent his reputation into a tailspin. But anyone who actually bought and drove a Tesla knew that the cars were ahead of their time and that the rest of the country would eventually catch on.

It does seem that most of the prominent entrepreneurs of our age are focused on tech. Before that it was finance, and going back further, steel, oil and railroad. In the future, I expect to see more bioengineering.

That's the whole point, you invest in people once they've had significant traction. I think Dustin Moskovitz is a strong candidate, along with Brian Armstrong and as mentioned earlier Max Levchin and Jack Dorsey. PG's YC and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund are only accessible to HNWIs. If you can get your hands on secondary shares, Patrick Collison, Parker Conrad and Ryan Peterson would be at the top of my list. Last but not least, I bet that Mikhail Kokorich will go public again, despite all the turbulence.

The mainstream strategy is to invest in highly diversified ETFs. Investing in just 4 companies would be considered exceptionally risky and contrarian by most people (I would personally also advocate going up to 20).

Also, not to nitpick, but Jobs and Gates are no longer running their companies, and Zuck is down to part-time. I don't consider either of those companies at the same level of growth potential as Apple back when Steve was running it.

Yeah, I've been going back and forth. Kind of leaning in at the moment.

Seems like people are sharing their investment theories, so I'll add mine. Invest in 100x-ers, like Zuck or Musk.

To be clear, a 10x-er is not good enough for this strategy to work. Those are the people who lead at SpaceX and make the impossible possible. What I am talking about is the person who is the 10x-er to the 10x-ers. The person who comes up with the idea and gets those 10x-ers into the same room and organizes them.

Obviously, the scale of that talent is hard to estimate, and "100x-er" is just a figurative term. Think of it this way - there should be only 10-20 such people among the CEOs of public companies (the other 100x-ers are musicians, politicians, authors, athletes, etc). They are easy to spot - definitionally, they do extremely well and will be in the fortune 500, shooting rapidly towards the fortune 50.

The cornerstone of this theory is that given enough talent, an individual can outperform the efforts of thousands or tens of thousands of regular people (hence think of the 100x-er as a figurative term). Just look at Musk going up against the entire automobile industry (while also building SpaceX on the side). Such people tend to find the right problems to work on, get the needed funding, hire the right people, and avoid all the possible calamities. Occasionally they also crack under pressure and smoke a joint on Joe Rogan's podcast, but they always prevail in the end.

Another way of looking at this is to look back in history. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Edison, Ford, Merrill, Walton, Schwab, etc. Would you want to bet against any one of them? So the key is to find that same group of people in today's society. I already mentioned the two obvious ones, but there should be another 10-20, at various stages of their careers. One that recently retired would be Bezos, some of the younger ones could be Max Levchin, Jack Dorsey, etc.

The important point here is to be extremely picky. Max and Jack are probably still too young and need a few more cycles before you can expect them to move mountains. Don't get me wrong, they are exceptionally amazing today. But if you're going to put a considerable amount of money on them (which you would have to if you buy into the idea that there are only 20 investable people of this caliber), you want them to be Steve Jobs-level at his prime in the 2000s, not Steve Jobs-level in the 1980s.

This is super contrarian and the difference between wins and losses will hinge on picking the top 20 versus the top 100 people. YMMV!

> where I did my PhD in France almost all fellow PhD students in my group had parents that were high-ranking scientists

You'll see this across all professional areas in the world. Medical students overindex on parents being doctors, law students on parents being lawyers. Heck, even young 10-year-old motorcycle racers at your local mini moto track almost all have a Dad back in the pit who is wrenching on their bikes and who comes from a moto background. It's literally everywhere you look.

The reality is that most of us can be successful in several different professional paths, and that we'll often choose the path that we're most familiar with from our upbringing.

On that note, whenever I meet someone who successfully broke their "family mold," I appreciate their success that much more.

How does this metric compare to other countries? Certain European countries I am familiar with don't have a strong emphasis on stocks as a wealth builder (as wrong as I personally think that is), and instead overindex on real estate.

Decades ago, if you wanted a work-when-you-want lifestyle and no boss, and you didn't know how to start your own business, becoming a cabbie was the obvious career path. And cabbies do occasionally experience unpleasant customers with nobody to turn to for help, so you have to have a thick skin to last in that job.

For whatever reason, in the US the crowd self-selected towards the immigrant population, whereas in many less developed countries it went towards the bare knuckle boxing type of crowd. No wonder that the latter didn't hesitate to use their knuckles on Uber drivers, whereas in the US that rarely ever happened.

Not at all. Most companies are not in the business of making the world a better place, and therefore they are not going to be optimizing their info access policies against that target, but instead they will be optimizing for shareholder value or what have you.

Don't confuse this statement with an endorsement - I wish it all worked differently, but this is the reality.

Yep, sorry for the logic brain fart. Updated the parent comment accordingly.