digz

Hah those guys are the worst. My next car was an Infiniti and the closest dealer was in Marin. I was always given at least as good of a loaner and they'd even reimburse me for bridge tolls.

I'm probably going to be booed because It's not politically correct to say this stuff... but so what?

Why does the NHL only have 5% black players while the NBA only has 17% white players? Is it that white people don't have the necessary height or that black people don't have the required thigh muscles? No, obviously not. There are just cultural differences that have lead to certain groups being over/under represented in different areas of the economy. It doesn't require there to be a grand conspiracy to keep non-whites out of SV! I don't even thing you have to go to a Larry Summers type of explanation.

What's the solution? Should we force the NBA to have at most 10% black players (and the NHL to have at least 10%) to be more representative of the population? Should we force investors to back startups that have female founders? Should we force ourselves to stop listening to Miles Davis? We're starting to realize that affirmative action doesn't work and actually creates negative outcomes (see work by Thomas Sowell for example).

Yes it obviously shows that there's a difference in the allure of SV to different groups of people.. but you could also cut the data and see that SV funding disproportionately goes to people with STEM degrees (the poor liberal arts folks!) At most this should be categorized as interesting.

Also the final stat in the article "women make 49 cents for every dollar men make in Silicon Valley" is ridiculous. Obviously, as we've learned, the composition of jobs taken by men and women in SV is different. That's going to be represented in average salaries.

Motherjones as usual seems to be trying to create a controversy where one doesn't exist.. or at least way, way, way downstream from where it truly does exist.

That's the problem.. A few vivid examples shouldn't influence a view on this. Data should.

A little finance 101: The longer you hold an investment, the higher the return demanded. The riskier the investment, the higher the return demanded. To judge the wisdom of an investment strategy, one needs to weigh these against the potential return.

A successful small early investment (for example, Peter Thiel investing in Facebook in 2004) will return much more on a percentage basis than a successful large late investment (for example, Yuri Milner investing 200M in Facebook for 2% of the company in 2009), but they are also much risker and take longer to see a return. Even though Thiel made a billion dollars and Milner only made a few hundred million while investing 400x more money, based on these numbers alone it's hard to say which was a better investment on a risk-adjusted basis. We don't know what the expected value of each investment was (probability weighted terminal value of Facebook). We don't know what their cost of capital was (what else they could have been doing with the money). All of these matter.

My point is that it's hard to figure this stuff out. Real academics have a tough time coming up with definitive answers to these questions. Furthermore, the answer can change over time. The fact that chili tastes better when it's cooked slowly is of no consequence to this question.

I don't disagree with the general argument that degradation happens gradually, and 'truly successful' companies are built gradually. That said, I hate statements like this: "A better strategy is to start doing smaller investments with longer time horizons. Just like chili, low and slow is the way to maximum flavor."

Why? The taste of chili is maximized by cooking it slow.. but the taste of french fries is maximized by cooking them quickly. There's nothing inherently good about doing things slowly. So please give us some evidence that investors should be making smaller investments over longer horizons? Perhaps there's data to show that longer horizon VC investments provide higher risk-adjusted returns.. but I haven't seen it.. and Seth's statement to provide any sort of weight, it would have to be included.

Way too pseudo-intellectual for me with nice meaningless platitudes.

This is a tautological claim. Of course with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the biggest successes were those significantly changed the world... No way!? That's why they're successes! Lots, and lots of examples of people who similarly dreamed of changing the world with BIG ideas that completely failed. The bigger idea, the lower your probability of success, but with a larger potential return (both personal wealth and impact). I've never seen any data to support that your risk adjusted return on big ideas is better than for smaller ideas.

Massive vividness bias here.

I have had the unfortunate pleasure of having to integrate SQL and Excel for my start up. A provider's tool that we need only works in Excel, so I have to bring data from SQL into Excel, process it and then put it back into the DB. Then all of our real data processing is built with python. So far I have just used VBA/ODBC to handle everything, but for obvious reasons, I hate it.

I'll definitely give this plugin a try.

Yep. Which will marginally decrease the purchase of smartphones, which will marginally decrease the revenue to the french telecoms, which would force jobs to be lost, but <sarcasm>thankfully</sarcasm>, french companies aren't really allowed to fire people.

This is a classic deadweight loss. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss

This was also the idea behind the sequester... somehow good ideas aren't exactly flowing.

Unions are not terribly interested in overall productivity/output. Their goal is to maximize the value to their constituents (either through wages or working conditions). By decreasing/holding stagnant the supply of labor available, they are able to force wages to be higher than they should be. Of course, as economists understand, this causes all sorts of problems.

Unions really aren't that different from corporate lobbyists...

What's more impressive I think is how vehemently anti-immigration (and to your point, anti-black at various times) the Democratic party has historically been (mostly driven by union influence) and how quickly that seems to have been forgotten by most.

This study was done by a 'non-partisan' group that's heavily backed by unions. Doesn't seem too non-partisan to me when you consider how significantly anti-immigration unions have been over the last century.

The data may be valid, but the interpretation is always the most important... and a union-backed group masquerading as a non-partisan think tank hardly seems unbiased.

I sent this to my friend who has a phd in physics and is a post-doc at Cambridge and he said it's bogus.