bksenior

Additionally, odds are that the best thing for the business (and founders) would being admitted to YC over any product change they could possible make.

They had non zero odds and I think it was a clever plan all things considered. If YC is looking at founders above everything else and less product, these young dudes seem to be cut from the cloth.

Eventually there will be something that moves people if it becomes important enough.

People love things, power, sex and connection. Most of the things that lead to those things are exchanged directly or indirectly for money.

You’ll almost certainly always find a personal narrative as to why you want money.

Start-ups are foundationaly bullshit. It's almost always some person with some type of observation and a relative level of blind faith for an idea or system that MAY work. Worse than that, almost every major breakthrough or improvement ends up looking completely different than the original hypothesis immediately rendering the original confidence as bullshit. We just apply genius historically.

In the end startups seem to be a confidence game where a group or person basically need to survive long enough for a point on their series of experiments to work and their bullshit to be "prescient."

My observation on tech and engineering is the disdain for bullshit is a clumsy hatred for the uncertain nature of social exchange amongst people. The rules are very different than the absolute predictability of systems like math and logic and that makes people uncomfortable and angry.

I just imagine if someone found a snuff video on my basement that I would be in violation of a law.

droooool

Musks ambitions and outbursts strike me as a man who suffers from the top killer of successful entrepreneurs, The skill/talent portability fallacy. It's this idea because you did something similar well, that your ability should port to "things like it." Seems like Tesla is going to extend itself to death.

I bet the range range is enormous as to how sleep affects people.

Mark-ups serve as marketing for the next fund which they get a % of an annual basis. The time horizon to see any company turn to cash is so long that their major day-to-day level is to market a strong rising portfolio to new LPs for more money to manage.

I wish people would be like "im rich from it, get over it, but I realize it's the devil." I feel like the disintegration in good faith debate is mostly fucked because of the ease in which social media allows for an ad hominem fallacy.

rant over//

This seems more like the Industrial Revolution + Twitter. Just like all the studies that the world is technically better off in every modern metric of improvement (poverty, starvation, mobility..etc, but things feel shitty because you are forced to read about the one dude kidnapping and eating children one state over, I think it's probably just amplified fears (and ultimately seperation of teams) than it was during other large periods of change.

It's also worth noting that people dont die, jobs just shift unexpectedly. Sure it can crush a generation (see the american midwest from 1960-2020), but most people move to where the work is geographically and intellectually or just die out.

The idea that your local culture is superior to foreign also is problematic, not in a normative way, but in that it almost certainly limits new ideas and general diversity.

The solution is more likely that information is hard to parse and more information is harder. The thing not mentioned in this that I think is the most critical part of the "change" is that historically fringe and minority ideas were kept in check because of basic principals of attention economy. If 10 people believed things, there was most often a limit as to how many those 10 would reach. Now fringe ideas can speak to MANY people, and can be dynamiclly adjusted to catch.

Previously the only real organization that had huge reach was the government and we built a Rube Goldberg machine to insure that one voice didnt dominate. Facebook, Twitter and Google are all bigger than all governments and there is no checks and balances other than one dudes whims in each case. Im all for free market, but this information delivering system is too large, too unregulated and probably for better and worse is going to deliver a deeply different world than we all grew up in. That new world seems more reactive.

First, it was a fail if felt your primary responsibility is to the team, shareholders and just general commitment you often set out to as a founder fulfill in building something that people love and use.

Being fired from something you believe you tried your hardest at doing right is brutally painful to self-identity. The quality of the food you eat after word at best distracts you from some of the pain and nagging "what-ifs."

"Los Angeles is a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit."

Once you understand how to travel the city, it's hard to live anywhere else because quality of life is so ridiculously high. It's why people tend not to leave if they make it past their two year mark.

The interesting take away here at least in my eyes is that incredibly seemingly irrelevant plot points become climaxes. The fact that they invested a bit into the Intel chip for reasons unrelate may have been the fulcrum for the most valuable company in the history of the world.