corry

Isn’t the decision to either fire the executives/CEO or others the domain of the owners of the company? And perhaps rightly so?

It’s not like shareholders/boards LIKE paying CEOs more than they otherwise could - especially if performance is bad enough to warrant big cuts. They would pay them as little as they can get away with to maximize their own return, similar to all roles down the hierarchy.

To my uneducated mind, it seems far better to (1) have better gov-mandated worker protections around termination/layoffs - longer severance, continued benefits, etc; and/or (2) higher corporate taxes to fund programs that assist in job transition/EI/etc… than arbitrary rules around CEO pay ratios or “executives always get fired first” rules.

Good point, if your options are underwater you probably aren't exercising... although would be sad to watch them expire.

The decline in employee option exercise... is that the canary in the mine? If the team itself is saying less and less that their company's equity is worth taking a risk on -- and they are in a good position to be optimistic, rightly or wrong -- then that's a pretty bearish signal.

Of course there are other pressures on peoples' personal finances that makes money dearer... but still.

Or perhaps with layoffs there is just a lot of people who could be exercising vested options, but won't because (1) they no longer work there and won't be able to contribute or have an insider advantage, and/or (2) they now don't have a job so won't risk the capital in buying out their options.

The advice is generally that (1) ideas are worthless until they are well-implemented (and even then, might be worthless); (2) if your idea is truly so easily-copyable, then it's probably not an idea worth trying to protect; and (3) your time is MUCH better spent actually building it and getting users than worrying about this stuff.

You unique ability to translate the idea into a product that people love, and deliver a service that wow's them, is far more valuable than the idea itself.

Of course there are caveats for things that are truly hard innovations, but from the sounds of things here you're more worried about UI (will always be easily copyable, no protection possible) and back-end (which doesn't matter unless it's some completely novel and order-of-magnitude improvement thing, in which case THAT's the true interesting part of your idea).

While I think parent confused dopamine and serotonin, I'd echo this sentiment. In the rave community terms like "blue Monday" or the grimmer "suicide Tuesday" are there for a reason. Many people have a week or even more of 'depression', which thankfully seems transitory for most (although we all know depression can lead to negative feedback loops).

And while caution is definitely needed, the research is mind-blowing. Veterans who have seen and done horrible things find relief in MDMA therapy (in a proper clinic) when nothing else has worked. Powerful stuff, not just a party drug.

Could it be that the initial set of M1s was just “too good”? Mine is several years old now and I have zero desire to upgrade to an M2 or whatever we’re at. It’s so fast and snappy, even when doing 300k row DB updates (to pick a potentially meaningless example).

I just googled when our ancestors started using tools. It’s 2,500,000 years ago. My god.

Right, but homo sapiens go back 200,000 (!!!) years. That’s a lot of hunting and gathering, shamans, generations, and gradual process where life wasn’t changing much generation to generation (for thousands of iterations).

And here we are going from electricity to AI in 3 - 6 generations.

One is struck by the sheer raw amount of time that this woman was separated from us (9,000 years). How many hundreds or thousands of generations of our ancestors lived in this almost completely different world?

And how advanced our technology is to determine so much about her.

But perhaps the biggest mind-blower is that — against this backdrop of 9,000 years, where there was very little change in technology — in a few decades our modern technology progressed so quickly from her first discovery to now to learn so much about her.

We can barely comprehend the rate of change we’re seeing compared to the eons before. And today we’re seeing AI burst on the scene, a few decades since we started digitizing information. Wild stuff. I wonder how far we’ll get before I die.

Quite a read. I enjoyed it. He describes the point of view you get in certain altered states very well, poetically and with subtly that matches my experiences.

I’m sure strict materialists will find his characterization of them unsatisfying, and maybe he should have railed against the other extreme (psychedelic woo woo mystics) a bit more to balance it out — he has one quick comment at the end warning against that side — but he ends in a non-committal, I dare say humble spot.

It really is remarkable how little — or at all — we allow ourselves to feel the cosmic dread at our unexplained and unexplainable existence. It is the central mystery and (possibly?) horror of our lives, and yet we barely wrestle with it. Or worse we dismiss it out of hand, because we think science has answered enough to make us feel we know reality.

But Roger Penrose has a great quote in a interview I saw - he says something like “It’s all well and good to call yourself a materialist, like I do, but honesty then compels you to admit that you’re saying far less than you wish… because we understand almost nothing about what matter is, or what we are, or what ‘knowing’ means…”

So what are you left with? Maybe the plants know something we don’t… :)

Sales and Marketing costs ARE the CAC. It's literally (Sales&Marketing Costs) / (Number of Clients Added) for a given period.

The problem is that if LTV <= CAC -- let alone under the 3:1 ratio -- you aren't making any gross margin/profit.

LTV = the expected cashflows on a gross margin basis, for the life of the customer. If you get $100 @ 80% gross margin, you have $80 gross margin profit per year. If you lose 100% of your clients after 3 years, you expect to make $80+$80+$80 = $240 of profit. Ah but you also need to discount those future cashflows (let's use a discount rate of 10%). So you really are making $80 + ($80 x 0.9)+($80 x 0.9^2) = $217.

That's your total LTV. Your total profit from the client before ANY "operating expenses" like Sales and Marketing costs and salaries, Rent, Overheads, R&D costs and salaries, office supplies, professional services, etc.

So OK you have $217 of LTV. But you have to spend $250 of CAC (which is "total sales and marketing spending and salaries divided by total new clients added") then you are losing $33 per customer BEFORE all the money you're spending on everything else required to run the business.

Now, of course, reality isn't this simple. And it's not all VC bullshit. Maybe this LTV is dramatically underselling the value of having that client, because in Year 2, you'll have New Product Module ready to sell them for $75. And your cost to sell (CAC) that module to them is $1 - since you've already done the hard work of getting them as a client. So now you adjust your LTV calculation and it's not quite as bad.

Or... by having 100,000 customers, network effects mean that either the lifetime of a customer is actually 10 years (vs 3) or the network effects mean you can monetize something else or... lots of arguments you could make for "grabbing the real estate now".

So if VCs -- who aren't idiots even if some are morally questionable -- see a path to greater LTV, you can kind of get comfortable with a higher CAC.

BUT AGAIN - the rule of thumb is that 3:1 is healthy, since that provides gross margin profit from the get-go, and any other LTV expansion from upsells is gravy.

Yes I think so! Thanks

I get where you're coming from, but since the dawn of SaaS we've had rules of thumb about LTV-to-CAC, CAC payback period, etc.

Most SaaS founders know that a 3:1 ratio between LTV and CAC is ideal - and while arguments might hold water that a worse ratio is OK for a brief period, I don't think anyone involved doesn't realize that it's difficult to sustain that.

The mental magic trick to justify it probably goes like this - "Yes, we're underwater on the LTV-CAC ratio for now, but once we're in position XYZ we'll be able to launch new products ABC and increase LTV from there". Which isn't wrong. And the new CAC to upsell product ABC to existing clients is going to be very low. So in a sense, you CAN justify (at least in a 'superficially prudent way') a worse ratio with that argument.

And ironically, Salesforce is a GREAT example of this WORKING (up until now?). They have ruthlessly increased ACV and LTV for decades, through increases to pricing, growing features, launching new products, creating the app ecosystem, etc.

I forget which podcast I heard it on (so forgive me if my memory is sloppy), but after their latest quarterly report didn't CAC payback go from 24 months to something wild like 10 years? Meaning their new ARR add rapidly fell off so quickly, before they adjusted their Sales and Marketing salaries and spending, that it immediately put their unit economics way way way way underwater.

So I'd expect at least a big chunk would be S&M cuts, even through of course you still need salespeople.

10% of a 75k company is still 7k people. From the King of SaaS. Wild times.

Their point is that for an individual, yes, it's not that much of a deterrent - but that individual can only park poorly with 1 car at a time.

The USPS has a fleet of many (hundreds of thousands?) vehicles, so their capacity to ruin it for everyone is much larger - but their potential liability from fines is too. So they treat it very seriously.

The poster is saying that spam is more like the USPS situation, where single entities control thousands of potential infractions, not the rich individual.

Thanks! I'll give it a try. V1 sounds frustrating since those use-cases are precisely what I do with Illustrator lol.

Has anyone switched to Affinity Designer from Illustrator for vector work (logos, svg, icons, etc) and liked it? I've been avoiding paying for Illustrator given the extreme monthly cost for my use-case, but found Inkspace and other alternatives pretty lacking. I pay for Photoshop since I'm so comfortable with it, but can't justify the extra $$$ to add Illustrator given I'd use it a handful of times a month max.

Key is to position the product evolution from this point as a journey, with discrete steps/periods on a quasi-roadmap, and make it clear to them that they as users/clients will help shape that journey.

So picture a slide with 4 steps/phases enumerated, and a talk track like: "Today, we're at Phase 1 which provides the most important feature XYZ but has some constraints around diction; next, in Phase 2, the algorithms will allow for even mediocre diction and feature ABC will also come online deliver 123 value; in Phase 3, we'll have enough data that diction is a non-issue, and features DEF and FGI are planned".

So the core question is - does Phase 1 have enough value? Is that journey/roadmap worth it for the customer putting up with limited value today?

You might be surprised either way. If even the limited experience is still super valuable, great! Or you may find that you DON'T have an MVP yet since it's not usable in its current form regardless of the journey from here.

The issue is Job's training data is likely 99% his public "presentation voice" audio -- cadence, inflection, emphasis from public remarks at Apple events, commencement addresses, shareholder meetings, etc -- which OF COURSE sounds unnatural in regular conversation.

Meanwhile Rogan has million hours of regular conversation audio to learn from.

Of course everyone's different, but to me "hallucinate" is a bit too strong of an expectation anyways. Or perhaps "hallucinate" is technically accurate, but I've found that uninitiated people expect to have crazy full immersive seeing-things-that-aren't-there experiences on psilocybin (like how DMT trips are described) but almost everyone I've talked with about this stuff has "visuals" and certainly interesting mental imaginings, but not full-fledged hallucinations.

Like shifting patterns of colours and light that overlay your regular vision? Sure. Morphing patterns in things that are actually there like plants or carpets, like your brain can't "keep it straight" for more than a millisecond? Yup. Ability to "travel" in your minds eye into past memories? Totally. Feelings of union with God/Source/Divine/Other/Higher_Reality? You bet.

But not like full-fledged high-fidelity sights and sounds that one would mistake for reality as you normally perceive it, like a man standing there or a crazy monster appearing right in front of you.

Interestingly, it appears different strains of mushrooms produce different amounts or types of visuals too, and I'm sure there are hundreds of other variables also at play (captured in 'set and setting').

Thank goodness this stuff is being studied properly again.

Ah this article put the finger on why I don't trust my 'new dentist':

The operation is just too slick from a business POV. As someone familiar with SaaS or in general this kind of recurring business model, you can sense all the little operational policies and procedures designed to increase your LTV.

It's a well-oiled machine. Without fail, the hygienist recommends cleaning not once every 12 months or even every 6 months, but every 3 months. When pressed on why, eventually they'll admit it's how nice it feels to have clean teeth and how important your smile is - but NOT strictly necessary for health.

This particular dentist also will shut down and take their entire staff to a resort for a week every winter if the team "hit their targets" for the prior year. That's the literal phrase they used to explain the trip. When I asked what those targets were, the person turned bright red.

So dentistry has a trifecta of factors that will encourage dark-patterns: (1) a true health-related reason for going both preventatively and to deal with problems; (2) a cosmetic / vanity-related reason (white teeth), and (3) the air of higher-educated medical authority.

Wrap that all in a lucrative recurring business model and of course it's going to lead to people taking advantage or at least overpaying for what they really need.

Just writing all this out made me realize I shouldn't be going to my current dentist! Thanks OP. :)

This reminds me of how the shroom dispensaries popped up in Vancouver because City Council has barred the police force from enforcing psilocybin prohibition (ostensibly so that police can focus on opioids instead, although any positive outcomes from that approach seems dubious).

So you have 'mainstream' online shrooms shops in Canada. It's great, on the one hand. On the other hand, it's easy for everyone to assume that magic mushrooms are almost legal (like cannabis was) even though it's very different. Medicinal cannabis was around for a long time; currently Health Canada only allows ~80 people in the country to use psilocybin for health.

But why didn't they include psilocybin or other psychedelics in this decriminalization? It is because they are defacto decriminalized already due to this policing decision?

Well, actually -- and I think you'd agree -- he truly died whether or not he resurrected. So my point stands, death rate is 100%. ;)

One of my favourite quotes (no idea who made it) is that in all of human history, the death rate is exactly 100%. Outside of people's religious beliefs (Jesus, Lazarus, etc) and fiction (vampires, sci-fi, etc), we'd all agree that no-one has escaped death.

The death rate is 100%, no-one gets out alive. So we should get as much out of this life as we can. What that means for you can differ from others, but to me that's a central question as we enter middle-age.

I disagree. If anything, most of us NEED reminding that our time is limited and precious, and that our circumstances can change in an instant.

The practical value of me after reading this (YMMV) is that I'll be a bit more present, do more meaningful things, heck even just appreciate that hug or phone call a bit more, today and probably tomorrow too.

Do you have kids? I find thinking about this stuff particularly valuable in a way I probably couldn't grasp before them. Spending 30 minutes playing blocks with a 2-year-old can be a mundane, frustrating experience. Or -- if you realize that this 30 minutes is probably one of the last dozens or so times you will EVER play blocks with this little wonder child, in all of time -- you relish it, like you would relish seeing a great movie for the first time, or (better comparison) your first kiss with someone. It's rare and precious.

I would be BEYOND shocked if any decent VC is hiring off cold applications even for basic entry-level positions. In fact, it's almost definitely a bad sign because it means that despite the VC's job being connected to capital, connected to startup people, entrepreneurs, etc -- in other words, their job is to have a huge and valuable network -- and despite these being high paying, prestigious jobs with wealth-creation potential - they have to put up a post soliciting random people to work for them?

Heck even in hedge fund circles there seems to be a meme around how cushy VC jobs are, but how it's very hard to transition into them. (Correct me if I'm wrong, this is my impression from IG hedge fund meme pages).

The role of VC job postings are (1) give a superficial appearance that it's an open process, which is importantly especially for diversity virtue signalling and (2) serve as a public notification to warm connections that there is a job opening up. But trying to get a job at a VC by blind applying will have a low % success rate.

I agree this is closer to the root of the problem. It's not just foreign capital, or faceless corporate ownership (although both are part of it).

IMO it's that every professional / business / owner / wealthy person in Canada can basically easily borrow against their existing home equity, use that to purchase add'l rental units, and claim the mortgage interest as an expense against the rental income (thereby making the loan "free" of cost, although obviously you're still on for the principle). You have the risk of the housing market crashing, but that hasn't seemed realistic for the past 10+ years or so.

I'm not sure what the solution would be. I hesitate to even call it a "loophole" since to me, from a business POV, it makes sense (the cost of the debt is an expense to be put against the income, so you shouldn't have to pay tax on it).

Then, even if you're just breaking even as a landlord after the interest, property tax, maintenance, vacant times, etc - the underlying asset is appreciating as well.

So there needs to be solutions (like graduated tax on subsequent properties, or perhaps changes to being able to claim your mortgage interest as deductible, etc) to change this underlying dynamic.

Yes, dramatically increasing the supply of housing would be a better fix, but that's not likely to change quickly while economically de-incentivizing the real estate investment I described above would change things.

My $0.02, not an expert.

"You can't outrun a bad diet" - this right here.

Yes, regular exercise is important (lifting + some light cardio like power walking); but the real battle is around your food intake. Find a way of eating that works for you. Many of us find low-carb or macro-focused ways of eating helpful, mostly because of what you AVOID.

Curious if others have had this experience too - many successful founder CEOs I've known through my career (working closely with them) are excellent at ball-parking / order-of-magnitude / back-of-napkin thinking off the top of their mind.

There's something about it that IMO is an excellent 'tell' for a certain kind of intelligence especially for startups. I imagine part of it is that it's a good sign of 'technical skills' like fluency with math, and fluency with modelling scenarios. The other part is it's a 'demonstration of fitness' to others. Like, wow, our CEO is SMART and thinks FAST - great!