ajsharp

This is an MVP, v1 of the product and v0.1 of the company. Judge it as such, with the understanding that things will evolve and grow, or not.

2 thoughts on YC, 1 on the company.

ON YC:

YC's model is: place lots of small bets. They have presumably grown considerably in the last 10+ years, and are likely now managing a lot more capital than they were initially, which means they need to place many more tiny bets than they initially were. YC accepts many teams who just apply as a team.

In other words, YC is not really in the business of evaluating ideas; they evaluate founders and give them money depending probably 80% on the founding team and 20% on the idea.

ON THE COMPANY:

On the company/product, calendar-ing is a relatively high leverage problem. Everyone on the (digital) planet uses a calendar every single day. Scheduling stuff is a nightmare. Being on time for stuff is a nightmare. Apple Calendar sucks. Google Calendar sucks. I assume Microsoft Office calendar also sucks. If you solve this problem in a better way to the extent people are willing to pay for it (not to be underestimated, see Superhuman), there is a large direct and indirect market for such software. Now, if you have a successful calendar app, you could do something like calendly, which is already a billion dollar company.

Try to remember, a lot of companies that come out of YC are in MONTH 3 of their lifecycle. The initial footprint can look small, but dig a little deeper and a lot there. Small footprint, big ideas.

That would be one way to model such a service, but certainly not the only way. Their pricing optimizes for a particular customer profile, and that may not be you.

"The quality of the controls that Amazon has in place is appalling. We found hundreds of thousands of accounts where the employee is no longer there but they still have system access..."

Yikes. Not exactly confidence-inspiring.

When clubhouse is good, it's magic. But they have a content quality / signal noise ratio problem currently, making it hard to find good content. Combined with how notifications work, it makes the app very noisy and hard to find the good stuff.

Not sure where you're getting this, but the Fed has already signalled ZIRP through 2023, and there is little to no inflation showing up in headline measures. Medium to long term rates will likely rise this year, but historically cheap capital is likely here for a few years at least.

The Fed can only directly set the Federal Funds rate, which effectively allows them to set a floor on short-term interest rates. Short term rates influence longer-term rates, but the longer you go out on the yield curve the weaker the effect. So, yes, while the Fed wants lower interest rates generally because lower cost of capital is good for growth, the Fed cannot artificially will long-term interest rates to be at a certain level.

Eventually, the yield curve will start to look somewhat normal again, and we'll start to have a yield curve that rewards longer-term fixed income investors. Longer-term interest rates reflect market forces, and eventually investors will demand higher yields for longer-dated US government and corporate debt.

Finally, though I increasingly see the term "hyperinflation" thrown around in conversation, hyperinflation in the US is just not even a remote possibility. The last time an actual hyperinflation occurred in a major economy was Germany after WW1. The differences between then and now are too many to mention, but here are a few: fiat current vs gold standard, reserve currency status (the US today), massive debt burden denominated in a foreign currency (Germany then), immature and non-independent central banking (Germany then). A Weimar Republic style hyperinflation is just off the table; so let's stop throwing the term around.

Maybe you're referring to something akin to the US 1970s era "very high but not event close to hyper-" inflation, e.g. 5-20+% per year. While possible, it's highly unlikely. Maybe we get to something like 5% annualized inflation for a year or so, but I wouldn't bet on much more than that.

The inflation period in the 70s (stagflation) perplexed monetary policy-makers at the time, who weren't used to seeing high inflation coupled with stagnant or negative growth. This period of inflation was caused largely by market characteristics that simply don't exist today: energy price shocks that caused raw materials supply constraints throughout the economy. The US was a much more concentrated economy in the 70s, with a relatively large portion of GDP tied to raw materials and thus imported oil. Today the US is largely energy independent and does not have such a narrow concentration of supply dependencies in the economy. The US has evolved into a much more diversified and service-based economy, as opposed to the manufacturing-focused economy of the post-war period. There is no one commodity that we rely heavily on that, if unable to access would effectively stagnate economic growth. In the 1970s, OPEC basically said, "hey, no more oil!", and we were like "yea but we need it for pretty much everything and if we can't have it we're fucked" and OPEC basically said "yea well tough shit".

There is not a modern equivalent of imported oil that is the lifeblood of the economy controlled by a cartel that when supply is artificially constrained we would be completely fucked. Even something like semi-conductors while worrisome, is fundamentally different than a commodity like oil. We can decide to produce semi-conductors if it's in our economic interest, but we can't just decide to have more oil.

Finally, central bankers are not stupid. They're very aware of inflation risks. And while they are committed to keeping short-term interest rates low for an unusually long period of time, long-term interest rates do and will reflect market conditions.

This does not end in hyperinflation; it ends with moderately elevated inflation and that outcome is undeniably better than a deflationary outcome.

Hey -- he likes the stock: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/lj8djx/day_...

Nothing else matters.

I appreciate a good catchy headline as much as the next person, but it's a ridiculous claim that "source code is worthless". On some level maybe it's not worth as much as some might make it out to be, but it's not worthless. There's a ton of strategic insight to be derived from the source code, not to mention just a basic time-value of money level of value.

"When we hired a new COO, who had mainly worked at bigger companies before, he was shocked to hear that all our code, communication infrastructure and internal systems were living in the cloud. He argued that we should move to on-premise solutions as soon as possible, partially out of fear of intellectual property theft, partially to appease investors with similar fears."

[shudder]

god bless you smollett for posting this

Oh they do.

"On Thursday, Robinhood was forced to stop customers from buying a number of stocks, like GameStop, that were heavily traded this week. To continue operating, it drew on a line of credit from six banks amounting to between $500 million and $600 million to meet higher margin, or lending, requirements from its central clearing facility for stock trades, known as the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/technology/robinhood-fund...

Josh Brown starts the podcast episode released yesterday telling this story. It's a fantastic re-telling, highly recommend.

As he says repeatedly in the episode, "Wall Street always changes the rules."

https://thereformedbroker.com/2021/01/29/pigs-get-slaughtere...

Was today not a bloodbath? GME closed Thursday at $193.60 and closed today at $325. That's an absolutely murderous day for a short.

Also AMD is pretty close to AMC lol. Seems absurd but they also restricted trading on GM.

That's just how a call option works. I don't know the specifics of custodianship around an executed option and what collateral the buyer's broker is responsible for upon execution, but it's probably equivalent to buying 100 shares.

With respect to it being possible -- if RH denied options holders the right to execute they'd be prosecuted and fined an enormous amount. There is quite literally a contract that says the buyer has the right to acquire shares in a certain scenario -- the buyer's broker responsibility here is simply to facilitate, and is in no place legally to deny that right.

To kinda tl;dr 015a's comment (which you should read, it's excellent), a liquidity crisis, generally, is when you start running out of cash to settle things that require cash, for various practical and/or regulatory reasons. You might have plenty of other assets on your books, but you're short on cash or cash equivalents.

For a brokerage, the T+2 transaction settlement system requires brokers post collateral while a trade is in the process of being settled. T+2 means 2 business days.

On top of that Robinhood does all kinds of promotional stuff that's a drain on their cash position like giving away stock to new users.

According to the NYT story it sounds like a convertible note or something similar:

"Investors who provide new financing to Robinhood will receive additional equity in the company. The investors will get that equity at a discounted valuation tied to the price of Robinhood shares when the company goes public, two of the people said."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/technology/robinhood-fund...

I just checked in on this from yesterday and this is just fantastic. Such a clear explanation of T+2 and all the extra stuff specific to Robinhood that's probably a further drain on their cash position. So thanks SO much for this.

Also, it should probably exist somewhere a bit more first-class than buried in an HN thread, because it's just unbelievably educational.

"To continue operating, it drew on a line of credit from six banks amounting to between $500 million and $600 million to meet higher margin, or lending, requirements from its central clearing facility for stock trades, known as the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation."

Non-zero chance had they not haulted trading on those symbols they would've been insolvent by close of trading today, depending on the size of their credit line.

I watched the CEO on CNN tonight, and while I found him pretty difficult to watch, this is a very difficult position to be in. If you admit on TV that your company is experiencing liquidity issues -- even if temporary in nature such as with clearing custodianship requirements -- you run the risk of triggering a greater panic through customer withdrawals/redemptions.

This could turn into a run on the brokerage pretty quickly, and probably already has in some measure, especially after a day of massively lost customer trust. He certainly didn't help it by going on TV and lying about their liquidity issues. They probably would've been better off by issuing a statement and keeping him off TV.

My thoughts exactly on point #1. Nothing in a hot path should take multiple seconds.

Appreciate the clarification.

There's a lot about Signal in particular that they get right. AFAIK:

(1) All Signal messaging is E2EE; (2) they don't store messages on their servers; (3) the client code is open source, and it seems like a good portion of the server code is open source.

Where I think Signal could go further on being the most secure, useful, and privacy-conscious messaging app/company in the world:

1. Open source ALL of the server code. They have something called Signal-Server (https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server) on their Github, but it's unclear if this is the server they use, or simply a server one could theoretically use to run a private Signal server.

2. Open source all server-side services/infrastructure code that doesn't compromise security in some way.

3. Better features. Signal is currently the most secure and privacy-conscious of the messaging apps, but solidly the worst overall user experience. It's not that it's bad, it's just that the other apps are much better. People like gifs and giphy and emojis and a fast-feeling interface. This is important, because it's hard to be a privacy-conscious individual when all your friends want to text on other apps. At least in my social circle, Signal is still the thing that people jump over to when they want be extra super sure they're not leaving a paper trail, but not the default messaging app they use.

4. Introduce a user-supported business model. This probably makes a lot of people uneasy, and while I appreciate the current grant and donation-based business model (the Wikipedia model), that model comes at great cost of efficiency. By operating effectively as a non-profit, you are inherently in a less competitive position relative to your competitors (the best product and engineering people are more likely to go competitors who can pay more), and you're persistently in fund-raising mode (again, see: Wikipedia). There are lots of ways to skin this cat, maybe the easiest is to ask power users to pay like $5/mo. Or just give people the option to pay with absolutely zero obligation. Some non-zero cohort would inevitably take them up on this.

Most of these suggestions, of course, especially 1-3, are very very hard and come at an enormous cost. Building in public as an open source business seems to massively slows things down and introducing a huge amount of community management overhead. That said I'm sure there are ways to manage/mitigate those costs.

Yea, I believe telegram "secret chats" are E2EE and also have auto-destruct capabilities.

There's a great rule of thumb for workplace communication mediums I saw long ago. It was something like this:

- Email: Not urgent. Expected response: ~1 day. - Chat: Somewhat urgent. Expected response: < 1 hour. - Text: Shit is on fire. Expected response: Immediate.

Building on the points OP makes re the problems thinking one line at a time in chat, in this little mental model there's a whole lot of daylight between email and chat. And there's lots of problems with email that make it not a great communication medium for semi-urgent things.

My sense is that we need a better primitive inside chat platforms to differentiate between "this is important and we need to have this discussion now" and something closer to email-ish pace.

100%. The market is fundamentally different than it was the last time "green tech" tried to become a thing. Solar is nearly at price parity with fossil fuels. The space is currently exploding and will transform the world in the next 10-20 years. In many ways it already is (see: Tesla).

why....why is this so satisfying??

> Our work describes a side-channel attack that targets the Google Titan Security Key’s secure element (the NXP A700X chip) by the observation of its local electromagnetic radiations during ECDSA signatures (the core cryptographic operation of the FIDO U2F protocol). In other words, an attacker can create a clone of a legitimate Google Titan Security Key.

This is a wildly impressive vuln to discover. Cheers to these guys. Holy hell.

A $10 million dollar fine for this is hardly a disincentive for similarly minded actors to do the same. If you're a large incumbent company fearing a challenger, a $10 million worst-case scenario fine for taking them out is pennies compared to the saved revenue.

I noticed the site isn't using Google Analytics, or any tracking pixels for that matter. Wonder if this is in any way connected to the ranking algo.

The author correctly identifies the problem as part technical, part people. My shot-in-the-dark estimation is probably 70% of teams doing microservices do it to solve the people problem before (if ever) they need it to solve the technical problem.

Technical solutions are _usually_ bad solutions for people problems, and architectural patterns are probably even worse solutions at solving the problem of human collaboration. It doesn't help that microservices are mostly a better-sounding name for "SOA, but smaller", that has grown in prominence mostly to sell you hosting for your very many microservices. Microservices takes one of the hardest and most important parts of of SOA (service boundaries) and replaces it with...smaller.

Glad to see someone at a larger company publishing about this.