majani

In the last 10 years there has been a global explosion in the forms of monetization possible on the web. Subscriptions, transaction fees, donations and just straight up charging people for goods and services is very possible now. It's no longer the case that people bristle at the thought of monetization. Even VC fueled businesses charge money from day 1. It's as though the gospel of Basecamp went mainstream

I can see the case for Apple and Amazon going away, but Google and Microsoft are just so fundamentally strong that they should last 100 years. Turning bits into money is the highest margin business out there, and owning an OS is the most lucrative position within the software world.

If you think you went to a school for the gifted without your IQ being measured, then perhaps you're not as gifted as you claim.

Unfortunately this company would be hated by component manufacturers and they would actively sabotage it

It's intuitive. 1st generation, 3 children. They each marry and have 3 kids each. Those are now 15 people with a direct "right" to the wealth. Third generation all marry and have 3 kids each as well, now you have 51 people with a direct claim to the wealth. The family has grown from 2-51 in one lifetime, that's a 25x growth rate. But the trust money is probably in safe, boring investments that grow at modest rates, so the growth rate of the family simply outpaces that of the money over time to the point where it becomes trivial for the family members to piss it away

Didn't happen on mobile.

Waste is part and parcel of luxury

Elon's arc is starting to look eerily similar to that of Howard Hughes

Honestly, in Google's eyes, nothing of value will be lost here. And Firefox gaining some market share will help get regulators off their back, so it's a win-win

I'm betting that ridiculous offer they made last week to cover developer legal fees has already blown up in their face

That's where you give him a pass since he's 16 years old doing this in his spare time

90% of apps could just be websites, so developers also bear a lot of responsibility for jumping onto that bandwagon for little benefit

Google's attachment to "low touch" approach to support is maniacal at this point. There's no use confronting them about it, they'll never change

Owning an operating system is the most powerful position in all of software. That's incentive enough

They're making money hand over fist right now, and they still have startup-esque growth rates, so they don't need to be tough negotiators. When Google's revenue and growth flattens, you'll see the toughness come in

Same. Surely they should not let you lose 3 times in a row, that just takes a person out of it. But there are people, mostly the elderly, who get completely taken in by the sights and sounds of a slot machine

Exactly. If governments were truly concerned with protecting players, they would have provisions preventing casinos from kicking out winning players

The play money casinos are now vastly more profitable than the real money ones. It's all just entertainment. Always has been

The only billionaire I am 100% sure is a genius is Jim Simons. For the rest, the most common trait seems to be that they are good at spotting trends early

Only victimless crimes should involve rehabilitation. If you harm others, punishment is fitting as a deterrent and to restrict your freedom to repeat the crime.

To be fair, there are business models where GAAP doesn't give the full picture. I am currently running an online poker business and GAAP is quite inadequate there

The problem with passion is that most people are passionate about 3 things: food, fashion and entertainment. This makes these areas extremely saturated and further still the distribution curve of success in these fields is brutal

Right observation, wrong conclusion. I would conclude that the pareto principle is just a force of nature and it always yields it's ugly head no matter the effort to beat it down

There was the SoLoMo (Social, Local, Mobile) hype train of the late 2000s which indeed came to take over the world as promised. Also the B2B SaaS hype train that Basecamp started in the mid 2010s has taken over as well

What stage of funding were you at by the end?

And it will fail again. Companies that target indie creators really don't fit into the VC model. Their customers will riot every time they try to maximize profits.

Exactly. The reason Patreon has been able to get away with a basic platform is because they served a basic need: giving your faves money.

They also had good timing since they allowed you to send your faves money before the creator platforms developed in-house solutions.

It's just 3 months. Before cellphones went mainstream, most people used to travel and simply disappear from their families for years. This need to be in constant communication with everyone back home is a phenomenon that just started in the 2000s

The smoking gun is the fact that this story could absolutely kill his golden goose, which is easily replicable. In the next few weeks there will be 10 new competitors for ChatGPT wrappers, all armed with paid marketing budgets to try and get a piece of this high margin business.

The only reason he would risk committing business suicide like this is because building the personal brand is more important to him than keeping this business afloat. If he really wanted to grow the business, there seems to be enough margin in it to support very aggressive paid marketing

To be honest, YouTube should be charging hosting fees to people who don't qualify for the partner program. The fact that they try to make up the shortfall through ads is a huge favor