johnloeber

1. 25% equity for 200k EUR (=800k valuation) is a bad deal. This is the hottest ever seed-stage funding environment, even in Europe. People are raising at 5m+ valuations on a slide deck alone. If you were to raise from professional venture capitalists (angels/funds), even at this early stage you would most likely get a much better deal.

2. Hold on... a four-way 25% equity split? You mean you've built a product from scratch, and now you want to give away 75% of the value to a bunch of random guys? I wouldn't do that.

3. And you don't even get to be the CEO/Chairman? The money guy is going to be a part-time CEO? That's a recipe for failure.

Run, don't walk. This is a terrible deal. You seem to have built something of value and you're about to throw it away. Bootstrap your business for a couple of months -- build a product, validate there's interest for it -- and then seek real funding.

Usually you can get all the intel/network about the "industry" that you need by spending less than 2% equity on advisors, or by spending a couple hours with a knowledgeable paid consultant.

No they don't. Taxi drivers are exploited end-to-end. There's a reason why the medallions eclipsed a million dollars in price. The drivers have to lease their cars on a daily basis, and start at around $160 leasing fee in the hole. They're driving for many hours before they start making any money at all. That's not "power and control", that's getting totally screwed. And every Uber or Lyft driver who has ever driven taxis before will tell you that.

It makes no sense from a risk diversification POV to spend your life savings (pre-)seeding your startup.

In what sense are you “launching” today? In the news, you raised a 45m Series B recently. According to LinkedIn, you’ve been at it for 18 months already. So what’s new?

In Chrome and Firefox, you can turn off video autoplay at the browser level. It’s a config option.

On this topic, I witnessed the "Bicycle of Education" just earlier today, which had me thoroughly impressed.

https://twitter.com/research_tim/status/737757291437527040

The term "arrow" is from category theory, not graph theory.

Thanks for this perspective. I didn't know about this.

I'm surprised to see the omission of top machine learning engineers from this article, who are currently priced in the $1m-5m range. Facebook has placed such offers to industry experts, as well as to the world's strongest PhD students in computer vision. I am under the impression that other tech giants are competing similarly.

(Note: when I say top, we're talking about a pool of <500 people worldwide.)

> In the prior 17 years of professional experience, I have never needed to write a graph traversal algorithm.

I don't get this. I'm in my early 20s and have professionally implemented graph traversal algorithms at least five times. Graphs are extremely powerful data structures, and if you have them, then you can expect to traverse/search them.

Shameless plug: I have written a similar tool to also archive all of your tweets, with a delete option. It's a little more fully featured. https://github.com/Datamine/Archive-Tweets

I suspect this might be a candidate for PCA, or a similarly driven approach.

Let's talk when you've saved 6 million lives, thanks

Oh wow. This is an incredibly well-crafted piece of music. That vocal arrangement is insane!

Great stuff. The lack of surface and volume plotting was one of my perpetual gripes with matplotlib.

To be clear: it's not just hard, it is explicitly wrong.

A more correct measure is a much simpler one: the aggregate product of all these companies over the GDP. Note that this aggregate product is of course a component of the GDP, so you can express this neatly as a percentage. I see only one major accounting complication in constructing this metric, and that's the inclusion/exclusion of foreign products and subsidiaries. (See e.g. offshore revenues that are not repatriated, and therefore not part of the domestic product calculations -- I think?)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is just a proposal that has to get ratified by the House of Congress, right?

It's noteworthy that Zoe Lofgren, the sponsor of this bill, has attempted to pass similar bills before, which were not successful. See e.g. https://www.us-immigration.com/blog/bill-fails-in-the-house-...

> What's the worst thing a monopolist can do? Charge unfairly large prices.

It's not so much about Rockefeller being a monopolist as it is about him being a private citizen with truly enormous economic power, while being zealously devoted to a simple cause, and having the ability to rationalize away all doubts. These are worrying personality traits that facilitate doing great damage.

In the case of Rockefeller, these personality traits led to constructive outcomes, but the point I was trying to make toward the end was that it seemed a chance event that he would use his power for the philanthropic projects that he chose.

Here's a hypothetical: what if, for instance, Rockefeller had supported eugenics rather than medical science? How would that have turned out?

Yes, exactly. Rockefeller constructed a mental framework for himself, by which he could rationalize away just about any action.

He was distrustful of doctors for the course of his life, and subscribed to herbal/folk medicines. The reason why he funded so much medical science is mostly that Frederick T. Gates, the manager of his philanthropic affairs, managed to persuade him to do so.

I tried to show that Rockefeller was essentially a zealot: unwilling to ever admit to any nuance, and impossible to bring off his course.

It's good that his actions were constructive, but they very easily could have been destructive (e.g. had he held slightly different values, had malicious advisors). That inspires worry in me.

Fun! Needs tab-complete.

I agree. I went to a circus once, as a child, in 1999. I found it to be a mostly disturbing and garish experience featuring tired and exploited performers, humans as well as animals.

I don't know which the cities are, but I'd guess they're among the wealthiest ones. Maybe you'll find this useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._metropolitan_area...

As a young hipster developer, I agree with you 100%. Modern startups have generally been taking an approach that is totally dismissive of long-tail risks such as this one.

I think it is extremely unfortunate that financial incentives are currently stacked against engineering responsibly -- a startup that tries to actually secure a well-built product will need to spend an often unaffordable amount of money or time doing so.

I guess I'll be the first to deliver negative feedback.

Technically, it's well-designed. It's a fine-looking product that is easy and compelling to use. The key-point summary is a good feature. That's all granted.

However, I think this is a bad product to build. The past weeks and months have shown us that we probably need more long-form content and less short-form content, where the loss of details robs us of important nuances. Just reading the headlines -- and that is what this product allows you to do very efficiently -- does not necessarily make the user better-informed, but it dangerously gives the user the probably-false impression that they are now actually informed.

I would encourage you to think not just about the problems you would like your product to solve, but also the problems that your product might contribute to.

A superb case of Betteridge's Law of Headlines

I'm not sure whether the relationship between startup success and public speaking engagements is established. Why do you think the relationship/correlation should be negative?

Successful startup founders are not one-dimensional business machines, they're usually smart people who have some kind of different view on the world (which enables them to succeed in the first place). As such, you can assume that they have interesting things to say.

I don't see why you'd deny them the right to speak about topics outside the narrow band of their startup.

To be clear: the bad parenting lesson is that the child learns that their actions don't matter. Rolling the dice gives the illusion of agency, but of course the child does not actually get to make any decisions. Their actions do not map to any recognizable outcomes; they may as well act completely randomly. This strikes me as a bad thing to learn.

> Lots of things in life (good and bad) are pure luck. Handling things you "do/don't deserve" with appropriate emotional responses is a valuable life skill.

That is also true.