alanlammiman

I have worked as a translator and interpreter, and I agree. I have often found translation to be a great way to reveal sloppy thinking that is hiding behind a turn of phrase. I promised myself that if I were ever became important enough to publish things read by lots of people, I would be sure to translate them even if it weren't necessary, as a way to review them.

Well, to take the analogy a step further, if you go out on the street and start pushing people around, and one of them pulls out a baseball bat and beats you to a pulp, should you really complain that they didn't just push back? Nope. You just had it coming, and if you are such a macho street-fighter you should accept you got owned that time.

Sure, if you were in a dojo practicing martial arts - an environment that is safe where engagement has clear rules and often a judge - then it's a fair point to make. So if you are in a very specific context that is intended and structured for open and fair debate (e.g. a debate club), that's a fair argument.

That begs the question of whether a university is such a place. Undoubtedly some of it is. But I do not think all of the university, all of the time, is. Just as going into a gym and doing a judo throw on someone in the middle of their yoga class is not right, even if the gym has judo classes.

thank you, that seems to be a very useful framework to keep in mind

This was also the example that came to my mind. It is perhaps one of the most iconic examples, and as such, absent a concrete example or further clarification, I don't see why you shouldn't assume that this is representative of what the author had in mind.

Regardless of whether one agrees, I had to smile at this, because it is simply a more formal way of saying 'OK, boomer'

Wow, 802 comments here. No way I can go through all that, but I'm really curious. If you happen to have read a significant % of the comments could you do a summary? (wasn't there a blog that had that kind of thing?)

Hi, Sticky developer here - we also published a blow-by-blow timeline in pretty excruciating detail on our medium for anyone who's interested in how these things are working nowadays (uploaded here yesterday) - https://getsticky.medium.com/why-sticky-is-off-the-ios-app-s...

Happy to discuss

Hey, OP here - got lots of views, but would really like to also hear your thoughts.

They discovered it was more profitable and less hassle to focus on selling ads than trying to be a 'social OS'

Brazil circa 92 when president Collor froze everyone's account in an attempt to stop inflation.

oh cmon, this comment (gowld's) should not be downvoted like that. It's a reasonable point to make even if you disagree with it

Cash app, Venmo, Wise, and hundreds of other payment apps are also this - perhaps a bit larger, more reputable, more regulated, but not fundamentally different (or am I missing something?)

While I agree with the sentiment of your first point, in practice if each small business were expected to audit every one of their inputs, it would be hard to get any business done.

As for your second point, yes, that is precisely what I referred to in my original post - that we could deal with the end of IDFA / that we just want to make sure ads are effective - SKAN which provides aggregated statistics is mostly ok for us.

I agree with your first point in the sense that having individualised targeting data necessarily improves advertising by some amount vs. merely contextual and aggregate data. For our specific case I'm not convinced that amount is as big as some people imagine it is, but I haven't found a good way to test that precisely given that facebook doesn't really have a "just give me a representative sample of your audience in this region" targeting feature (wish it did) to compare with the targeted alternatives. In our case, app ads that now use SKAN (the Apple solution that provides aggregated attribution) seem to be working well enough - that was my point.

Regarding your second point, yes, I agree - it's not obvious. Assuming this did indeed affect many developers like us and that it happened to everyone at the same time (which may not be the case - that it happened to us and that it coincided with their earnings report may have just been a coincidence - I haven't seen a mass outcry on twitter or anything), I was wondering whether it might be hedge funds that buy/track aggregated ad spend or attribution data, perhaps from MMPs or media buying agencies. I know they buy app download data from the likes of App Annie, but don't know if equivalent data is available and timely for ad spend. In any case, my point is more that this is illustrative of how they make bad situations worse for themselves.

Yes like the peer reply said that's Notion, not us. But good point, another thing to keep in mind if you try to use the "Share to the web" notion feature.

Yes, agree, we wanted to try it out for this because we like it for work and it was quick to write up and publish and we thought it might be more flexible for writing up documentation, linking, etc. But we are not satisfied either: Very slow to load, formatting is fiddly and imperfect. We will have to use something else.

yikes. I'm all for trying 'nudges' over outright censorship, but actually interfering in the social graph seems wrong.

The problem isn't just Apple's action on IDFA. It's that Facebook seems to be so poorly managed on some fronts that its reactions, rather than mitigating problems, has caused further harm. For example - in a rushed effort to get their privacy issues in order, they are deactivating the live facebook integrations of customers based on cursory/mistaken/possibly machine-based readings of their privacy policies.

They did that to us yesterday: https://shared-crater-f3a.notion.site/Facebook-is-Breaking-A...

We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on facebook app ads per month. We can deal with IDFA giving way to more aggregated attribution (we don't want to track individuals - we just want to measure if the ads we paid for led to sales). But facebook breaking our app in production because they can't be bothered doing their job properly is very serious. It can't be solved by reducing ad spend, only by removing their SDK from our app.

If this is also happening to many other developers right now, that, more than the Q4 results or the IDFA issue itself, could be causing the drop in the share price.

In fact, if you look at the Q4 results, the earnings miss was more because of growth in G&A (which grew by 3 percentage-points of revenue if I'm not mistaken) than because of a top-line slowdown. And if you read the comments as to what made G&A grow, it's 'legal costs'.

I agree with other posts that it's unlikely, but hey - they really are good at shooting themselves in the foot. At the moment to comply with laws requiring "account deletion", I suspect they are doing some kind of automated reading of developers/advertisers privacy policies (or having them poorly read by humans) which results in false positives, which would be fine if it were just a first filter. But they're then disabling the apps on that basis, which is insane. This happened to us yesterday:

https://shared-crater-f3a.notion.site/Facebook-is-Breaking-A...

Well, but you're also cutting the cash outflow. From a P&L perspective it doesn't matter if you're paying $20 in cash or in stock.

I was reading about early Islam (Reza Aslan's 'no god but god'). It's not a rule that has aged well, but according to him the reasoning was that basically in pre-islamic arabia if you didn't have family support (e.g. widow, orphan), you'd have no livelihood, would end up borrowing money and then fall into slavery. In the absence of financial markets, bankruptcy laws, social safety net, free markets for labour/entrepreneurship, forbidding usury potentially made sense.

As an economist, I still think consumer lending (excluding consumer lending that is actually funding investment like mortgages and vehicle financing) in 2022 is pretty questionable and only economically logical in a minority of cases, and that it would make sense to restrict/regulate some of it more heavily.

Sharing my personal experience here, as I found this thread interesting. To be clear: this anecdote isn't intended to argue with the statistics mentioned in sibling comments, or that YC doesn't fund outsiders, nor do I claim to be 'an outsider' in the first place. In any case I believe YC should fund or not fund whomever they want. But I hope it shows how some of these feelings can arise.

For context: white man from Brazil, top Brazilian uni but no brand-name US MBA or MS, Bain + Private Equity, first applied to YC with a startup in my late 20s when I left PE in late 2015. Since then have applied perhaps half a dozen times, sometimes with something that was still on paper, sometimes with things I was working on with a team and were already advanced. Some theses more enterprise-y (e.g. corporate education benefit platform), some pure consumer fun (e.g. stickers), some 'you must be joking' (e.g. let's redesign the web). My cofounders are brilliant in their domains but often don't speak great English, and they have small shares in the company as they need to take salaries, while I don't and I do the initial funding, so either I show up as a sole founder, or I have them on the video subtitled which ends up a bit weird.

About 2 years ago, our startup (which we had applied with to YC a couple of times before) reached US$6M ARR. Until then we had bootstrapped it, but decided it now made sense to go for VC. At that size we spoke directly to VC firms, of course, but given that we were all the way over here in Brazil, and Brazilian VCs by and large focus on local theses (at least in the early stage) rather than global ones, I also thought that it would make sense to talk to YC, as even though the dilution would be painful, that would multiply our global VC network in one go and thereby perhaps pay for itself. One catalyst for that was when a VC from a top-10 US firm reached out to us, but ultimately said "Look, if you were in the US, we'd be able to fund you Series A no sweat, but in Latam we only go in once things are at Series C". So I led our presentation video for YC with "Hi! We're X. We have US$6M ARR" making a 6 with my fingers. I realize of course that that per se doesn't make a company attractive, but I thought that at least it would buy us an interview. Nope.

Although it may come across as arrogant to do so, I do think that was a clear-cut investing mistake of omission, simply because our actual ex-post performance would have compensated YC very well had they invested, even without factoring in any value-add.

I later found out YC in that batch backed a tiny startup in the same field which (to the best of my knowledge) had struggled in consumer (competing directly against us), had little-to-no-revenue and was now trying to go for a B2B approach (which we had analyzed but dismissed as unattractive). Really made me rethink whether it was a good idea to put lots of our sexy stats in the application; not that I am saying YC used them - but it drove home how they could have.

We applied with a new unrelated thing once after that, even though we didn't need the money, mostly because we think it would be an interesting personal experience, and a good investment for the long-term to build that network. But frankly the program now being remote also puts a bit of a question mark there - it's a mixed blessing.

Anyway, we've done well enough, and one thing I'm considering is setting up a small angel fund just focused on founders in emerging markets (esp. Latam, esp. Brazil) whose products are global from the start, like ours, as I do feel that still falls in-between the cracks. But I'm busy with our company so don't have much time for that yet.

I hope this was helpful without coming across as too whiny or salty!

I realize that these funnel processes with vast amounts of applications are needle-in-the-haystack hell. I experience it when we open up a job post and get just 200 applications 180 of which aren't a great fit, let alone the thousands YC gets. Perhaps with some of these demographics, YC faces, to a small degree, a problem analogous to iBuying (e.g. as discussed by Rich Barton when Zillow quit that market), where the selectiveness by definition means that the majority of applications are rejected, thus contradicting the 'fast & easy' value-proposition and thereby generating negative sentiment among those rejected, no matter how generous the offer to those accepted or how representative the sample of those accepted.

well maybe if you made $20/h in cash and the share price is $20 you get 1 share/h. You can sell it (so you dont need to keep the equity in perpetuity) but if you live off $15, that you can have $5 (plus/minus appreciation/depreciation &dividends) shares in 60y time is a feature not a bug. Or maybe you have some mechanism whereby people have to sell back their shares when they leave (like partners at professional service firms).

A classic economist would say that the 1st example proves that its the same as cash and thus nothing much should change, but behaviourally there is endowment bias etc. I wouldn't be surprised if paying people in savings/investments and then letting them liquidate would result in a much higher saving/investment rate than giving them cash and expecting them to invest.

I wonder what would happen if private sector wage-based jobs were forbidden. If essentially your only option as an entrepreneur/company were to pay in equity/profit-sharing. The labor equivalent of, on the capital front, religions that forbid lending with interest but allow equity investing. I wonder if the complexity/transaction costs/uncertainty/governance problems would kill the economy or if it would be possible to somehow eventually get to an economy where everybody eventually thinks like a business owner. Here in Brazil, the labor laws are tricky and payroll taxes are high, so many people now work as contractors setting up small companies. That means they need to do a few things like get an accountant, a separate bank account for the business, pay business income tax (rather than have taxes deducted from their pay), but more often than not end up working full time for 1 client much like employees. I have been struck (anecdotally) how these hybrid employees/business owners seem to develop a more entrepreneurial mindset that can ultimately lead to more success. Maybe jobs do need a rethink.

not to mention the risk of blood clots. my wife had thrombosis and nearly died because of birth control meds, and once you look into it, it's more common than you'd think and women do not get nearly enough warning about the risk. All her friends went back to condoms and those more localized IUD hormone things

This sounds interesting. Does anybody have comments on how helpful it is?

These should be NFTs.

yes agree

I get that often. I assume that when there is travel involves (esp air travel) a big piece is exposure to new viruses and bacteria + stress. if you get it even without travel: before your holidays do you have to crunch to get things done before you leave? The stress, reduced sleep could be lowering your immunity.

you have tokenized shares, yes.