jforman

Peppa Pig doesn't sleep. She merely sits in waiting during the nighttime hours.

Lockheed makes those, too. Lasers have unmatched range and speed and would be very useful in some situations.

All three startups I have been involved with have had board-level approval for individual equity grants. I have never seen any real push-back on them, but I have also never heard of the board relinquishing control over something so vital.

The employment contract guarantees the equity subject to board approval. I'm not quite sure why people are making such a big deal out of this.

Indeed, "running a process" is the important skill, which includes the deck, storytelling, etc. I was using "pitching" loosely.

I think everybody is aware that if you never need anybody else's money (as in ever, which includes an IPO), you can write your own rules.

Although YC companies seem by definition to already not be included in that group.

I had assumed they did this already. As much as we hate to admit it, pitching (or "running a process" — see comments below) is critical to the success of a company and therefore a required skill for founders. And YC seems to be an ideal place to build a collective set of best practices.

Well...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00335-8

Maybe the first startup YC should fund is one to mutate the enzyme to avoid immunoreactivity while preserving function...

Home care is important, but technology can make major impacts, too.

Here is a Kaplan-Meier curve for statins:

http://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/337/bmj.a2423/F2.large.jpg?wi...

That is a lot of life that these drugs have given a whole lot of people.

AIDS is largely a managed disease now, thanks to therapeutics, starting with AZT.

Steve Jobs thought that he needed better nutrition to manage his disease, and he was wrong. He had a chance of living a much longer life had he let medicine intervene earlier.

(And I had no idea what your gender was until you mentioned it. I'm sorry that you don't feel heard.)

Every disease is a different beast, and biology is very hard to tame. We've thrown probably trillions of dollars at cancer over the past few decades, and only in the past few years, with immuno-oncology, has there been any real hope of progress toward broad cures (there was a heady moment after Gleevec, too, but that turned out to be the exception rather than the rule).

There was just a huge wave of Alzheimer's treatments that people were so hopeful might make any dent in the disease. They all failed, apparently because the breakthrough we thought we had made in understanding the disease turned out to be specious. Had the drugs made ANY improvement they'd be on the market and we'd all be bitching about how pharma "likes to make bandaids rather than cures," and that would have been a disservice to the years of toil people put into these drugs.

Not every pharma actor is a good actor. But overall the space is mostly filled with scientists and doctors trying to make people healthier, and mostly failing.

These days, that is mitigated partially by salaries that are closer to market (and sometimes even higher than market) than was historically the case for startups.

But the AMT/exercising problem can be severe if you're unlucky.

If Fin is a gauge, the "interesting enough to a large-scale business" number is $1/minute.

Of course you CAN impact the world on $10k.

But the Gates Foundation doesn't run on $10k. You can found zero biotech companies on $10k. Money, alas, has value, believe it or not.

Only if "whatever you want" means lounging on a beach or a yacht. Most of the people on that list had aspirations to impact the world as much as possible, and there isn't a limit to the wealth you can use to do that.

You couldn't start Social Capital on $10M, for example.

To be fair, there are a LOT of early employees at Facebook that got churned through, or who didn't make it to the executive tier. Chamath almost got churned through, but he hit it big on the Growth team. That's the difference between an early employee with $10M and an early employee with $500M.

Moskovitz (now Asana), D'Angelo (now Quora), Vernal (now Sequoia), Bosworth (still at FB on hardware/Building 8), Cohler (now Benchmark), Hammerbacher (now ?), Chamath (now Social Capital) ... those are some of the standouts off of the top of my head, out of hundreds of early employees.

Having a high-security option will be useful for more than executives and politicians. Lawyers, doctors, Equifax employees — anybody who touches highly sensitive data will benefit.

Email is used as a privilege escalation path to pwn almost every other service we use. And we're finding that 2FA isn't the ultimate answer — OTPs are easy to phish, SMS can be socially engineered around without much difficulty, etc. As the value of digital data keeps going up, the sophistication of hacking groups and governments has gone up as well.

A highly secure browser connecting to an account with limited API access using a physical token is an excellent step. I'll buy it myself if it isn't obscenely expensive.

I was a common undergrad in the computer science department, and my freshman Tutor was an awesome guy from the div school. I had no part in politics (although I was aware FAS sat higher than DIV on somebody's totem pole); I just saw no evidence of the behavior described in the article and was curious if other departments behaved differently from CS.

These schools are big places, so it's not all that surprising different people have different experiences. What department, out of curiosity? I had experience in molecular biology and computer science at Harvard and mol bio at Princeton. (But yes, I saw zero of this in any of those places)

"A professor known for harsh grading gets a question from his department head and next year the curve shifts a little."

Professors just don't care about undergrads and teaching to near the degree that you think they do. 95% of their focus is on their research.

The only intervention I saw from administration in regards to grading while at Princeton was to nudge grades down.

Agreed — hence the privileged place of the second half of that sentence

This article has very little basis in reality based on my experience at Harvard as an undergrad and at Princeton as a grad student and TA.

Yes, students are arrogant and push for grades quite a bit. But I saw zero evidence of systemic catering to them as a whole or to any specific sub-population. I imagine the Development Office (the folks who would cater to the ultra powerful) may get involved in extreme cases? But it would be a huge to-do among the faculty (tenured faculty at Harvard and most elite institutions are incredibly powerful) and I never heard of it happening.

As an undergrad, I pressed for grade changes twice and was denied, reasonably, both times. As a TA at Princeton I was often pressed for grade changes and all were denied.

What almost certainly happened in this person's case is that the Professors either a) weren't tenured and couldn't bother with student push-back given a sea of work and anxiety (or mistakenly thought student perceptions matter), or b) were tenured and didn't care to deal with student push-back.

"Not available for sales in the USA"

And these are point-of-care devices, not DTC devices. There are a lot of POC diagnostics devices out there and very few DTC diagnostic devices.

Did you submit a 513(g) to get classified as (apparently) Class I Non-Exempt?

Requestatest.com also offers Quest (& LabCorp in some states) DTC orders, and Everlywell does the sample-collection-by-mail thing in the US as well.

That's far more simplistic than what the law actually says (where "law" is the collection of statutes and judicial interpretations).

As an example:

http://resources.uscannenbergmedia.com/2016/08/videotaping-a...

"Remember, even if you’re in public, you cannot record conversations between two people unless you have their permission. This includes conversations that you’re one of the parties to. If one person in the conversation can reasonably expect his or her conversation to be confidential, this standard applies."

If you're having a private conversation in a public park, then it is probably illegal for somebody else to record you.

Driving is a different question. Personally I think since a license plate is literally meant to publicly identify your car, a reasonable person should expect it to be recorded. But my guess is this will go to SCOTUS at some point, since privacy is increasingly being invaded in unanticipated ways by private companies.

A VC's reputation is privately held data. The same for a founder's reputation. Public data is largely useless.

And there is, of course, evidence that Khosla is not 100% founder-friendly, as there is data for every other VC and every other founder out there. Every conflict is gray.

But choose as you wish, of course. That's capitalism.

I've lost a parent and left a startup I founded, so I can sympathize with how incredibly terrible it must be to deal with two huge losses at the same time.

But Uber has grown to impact an incredible number of souls. Gurley et al. have a serious fiduciary duty to exercise here, one not just aligned with their own greed.

Separately, Khosla is not a paragon of founder-friendliness despite his public attestations. No VC is. It is silly to think that 100% alignment can ever exist with an investor — they legally cannot abdicate their voice entirely. At some point Travis needs to recognize that he consciously took risks that diluted his power in exchange for funding. Had he run a profitable business that would not have needed to happen. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.

A humiliating year of PR that makes it impossible to fill the empty executive ranks, followed by a crippling power struggle because I submitted a resignation I didn't mean?

I would 100% have expected Sequoia to sue me after I took their money if I had done the same.

We are not kings. At some point misalignment with your board is your responsibility. This isn't some Series B spat.

The quasi-firing of TK isn't an indictment of Uber as a product, or an overall social good (although both have been intensely debated). It is an indictment of Uber as a business.

Even if we grant that Uber is a huge overall social good, it is clearly not sustainable at its current pace. Uber's burn rate is the highest in history, and the C-suite is barren. The board clearly felt that TK couldn't get Uber out of this mess. And the board, at the end of the day, only cares about long-term share price.

Lots of companies have been improving attribution online. Offline is quite a different beast.

I find your analysis to be incorrect. To avoid needless bickering about it, here are the first few paragraphs of the ruling, which people can derive their own conclusions from:

"By way of summary, this order finds plaintiff Waymo LLC has shown compellingevidence that its former star engineer, Anthony Levandowski, downloaded over 14,000confidential files from Waymo immediately before leaving his employment there. The evidenceshows that, both before and after his departure, Levandowski and defendant Uber Technologies,Inc., planned for Uber to acquire Levandowski’s new companies, defendants Ottomotto LLCand Otto Trucking LLC, and to hire Levandowski as the head of its self-driving car efforts. Moreover, defendants and Levandowski anticipated and took steps to defend against litigationwith Waymo in connection with his move to Uber. Significantly, the evidence indicates that, during the acquisition, Uber likely knew or at least should have known that Levandowski had taken and retained possession of Waymo’s confidential files. Waymo has also sufficientlyshown, for purposes of the instant motion only, that the 14,000-plus purloined files likelycontain at least some trade secrets, and that some provisional relief is warranted while this case progresses toward trial. The scope of relief warranted at this stage, however, is limited byseveral countervailing factors. As nonexhaustive examples, not all of Waymo’s 121 asserted trade secrets actually qualify as such, and few have been traced into the accused technology. Waymo’s patent infringement accusations on this motion also proved meritless. Accordingly,this order grants important but narrowly-tailored provisional relief necessary to equitably balance the parties’ competing needs at this stage. Now follow the details."