13,551 karma · joined May 15, 2013
You posted this as a reply to a top comment. Perhaps re-post as a top-level comment? I think dang can move these, but likely won't see it for a while.
The price and market cap both collapsed. https://www.coinbase.com/price/chia-network tells me the latest daily volume is less than $5M USD.
The obvious downside is that you still need regular banks and financial institutions for loans, but for large operating accounts for many companies you just want something you can spend and won't disappear. And presumably this is why the Fed doesn't permit narrow banking: major deposits would dry up, loan rates would have to be much higher, and so on.
It actually started in North America around the time of the oil embargo as a mechanism to reduce energy costs. (See the history section of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house). Once that shock passed, people went back to not caring.
Even at the time, and still today, most write ups are focused on harsh climates like New England or Canada in Winter, because it's harder. It's also the case that in milder climates, the cost to make your home passive has historically been higher than just paying the subsidized bills (and/or requires capital). So most of the US hasn't cared (again) until recently.
Superior in what ways?
I could imagine simplicity for many problems. Roughly "here, replace your complex simulation with this magic function approximator". But for problems where you're calculating a physical quantity with a true answer, I don't see NNs being "much superior".
... How? That is, through what mechanism?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YbYWhdLO43Q
It's definitely bizarre. I assume they were going for memorable, but your report sounds like it failed at the basic goal: remembering the product.
Investors are sophisticated enough to quickly reason about basic margin opportunity, and decide if the company could ever be profitable, even if the founders have no real business experience. The assumption is that by the second round or so, you can refine the estimate of "Could ever be profitable".
More importantly for venture capital, is that there are many profitable businesses in the world that have people with finance expertise. If you just wanted to invest in profitable companies, you wouldn't be doing venture capital. Instead, you're seeking companies that will have massive returns and become profitable some day.
If the founders still don't know how to do finance, but they're making a ton of money, you send them a CFO to tighten that up. Same way you send them names for VP of Sales, or whatever else they need.
Deciding to give up on a company that seems to be generating lots of money, and "just" needs to improve margins is hard. If you tighten too early, you've blunted growth. If you tighten too late, you've thrown away the money. For the last few years, the amount of money sloshing around meant you saw more of the latter. The firms "had" to keep investing their funds, so they were chasing more and more deals on hope. But $10M out of a $1B fund is still no big deal.
tl;dr: the rare thing is rocket ships, not financial sophistication.
[1] https://www.k9ventures.com/blog/2012/05/31/hope-and-numbers/
> There was a collision on Geary Boulevard where a Waymo vehicle detected a speeding car during a left turn and stopped, rather than accelerating to escape. That's their worse accident so far, and the other driver was at fault.
You're thinking of Cruise.
> The imagery starts with panchromatic plus 4 color aerial imagery that was collected at a native GSD of 3.8 cm, which enables accurate removal of aerial sensor properties and resampling to the Albedo 10 cm resolution and camera properties.
Makes it sound like they have a spatial resolution of 3.8cm per pixel. This isn't panchromatic in a single pixel, but that's also true of things like Bayer mosaics in digital cameras.
Where do you see 30cm+?
Berkeley?
> Google was born into an economy that was just starting to recover from being bad.
I don't think being grad students at Stanford and then incorporating in 1998 counts as "just starting to recover". The economy in 1996 wasn't bad. 1998 definitely wasn't.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=YUZM
Sure, it was still above 5% in 96 nationally. But strongly down from the summer of 92 peak.
Additionally, Netscape's IPO was in August 1995. I wouldn't call that a bad environment for starting an internet company.
Huh? Google was started in the mid to late 90s (incorporated 1998 but started earlier at Stanford). It was quite literally during the peak years of the dot com bubble and the US economy was doing fantastically well. The Clinton administration was even trying to draw up plans for what to do if the national debt was paid off...
Are you thinking about when Google went public in 2004?
The second revision of the A100 has 80 GiB of memory: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/a100/
> "Are you rich?" No. I have a good student job. "Are your parents in government?" No. My dad's dead; Cassie's dad is a doctor in another state. "Anyone can shop here?" Absolutely.
In multiple communist countries in Eastern Europe, bananas were special because they only came ~once a year from Cuba. Anyone having access to them outside that time and/or getting more than a few would fit the profiles he described.
By contrast, some people in Eastern Europe had fancy ski huts available to them. You or I might have asked the same questions if you'd gone skiing with them in the 80s only to find out that his father is a draftsman. "Don't all of you have ski houses?"
I'm curious if you perceive white-labeling as a stepping stone or a reasonable destination. That is, it seems like you'd prefer for customers to buy directly from you, once you're ready for it. Precisely because of the diversity of vendors problem: you don't want them to think of the PrintNanny appliance/service as being from FormLabs or Inkbit or anybody else, you want them to know "We have our printers and then we have our PrintNanny". Right?
They seem instead to have created some other management consulting thing called "Humanocracy".
I'm not defending any of it, but HBR articles are not necessarily from HBS.
I'm curious though about the business plan going forward though (after the beta). My assumption would be that PrintNanny is currently targeting hobbyists and smaller 3d printing services.
I say smaller, because I assume that companies like Shapeways either already have something similar or would build their own if you tried to charge enough. (E.g., for $XM/yr they could hire multiple engineers to work on it full time).
Is the angle to expand laterally into more manual monitoring opportunities? (ShopNanny?) Go deeper? Is this market bigger than people think?
Of course, in 1896 an Edison company merged with the derivative of the original San Francisco Gas, to become San Francisco Gas and Electric. By 1905, that merged with something else to become PG&E.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Compa...