You can push back in the early stages before >50% board dilution (and this is who pg assumes is his audience), but typically founders are very willing participants in all the spending
I remember the Basecamp guys shouting themselves hoarse about these very same values back when "Social, Local & Mobile" were the new hotness. Seems like they were prophets now
1. Seems like YC is all aboard the B2B SaaS train. This is funny because early last decade B2B SaaS was known as mostly a lifestyle business category, while investors focused on consumer facing tech and big ticket enterprise products
2. It appears that the big tech employee track and the startup track are one and the same now. This flies in the face of the common wisdom that entrepreneurs and employees are very different from one another.
What he didn't add is that YouTube will typically seed your content in the country you upload in. The privilege of birthplace continues to be a huge influence in our lives, even with algorithms on the internet running the show
I've taken a look at the videos. The editing, angles and camera quality tell me that this guy has done quite a bit of research on making good videos and fully intended to make money from them. If you were on YouTube pre-monetization, that's what it looks like when people just put up videos with no financial motivation
The Ivies only recently became places for the smartest students to go. In the beginning they were openly just rich kid schools, like Le Rosey and Eton today.
Unfortunately investors are now all over B2B startups because they're now keenly aware of just how stacked the odds are against you in consumer products. Even YC nowadays calls consumer facing ideas "tar pits". It's also way easier for investors to pump up B2B valuations through cross pollination between portfolio companies
While it is true that entrepreneurship is indeed an upper middle class game, you tell only half the story. I've met guys who went from poor to cushy big tech jobs and even then they are deathly afraid of risk. Probably some form of PTSD from their poor days makes them never want to risk going back
You say this but but VCs are still quite limited in their control until about series C. Literally all the founders I know who have raised over $1m have pretty good lifestyles (house, car, frequent travel). It's worlds apart from the bootstrappers I know who remain frugal despite being profitable
Or maybe your father had an addictive personality that he had dealt with in the past before having you, and he wanted to nip it in the bud in case he had passed it down to you (yes, addictive personality is heritable)
It's quite typical of devs in my experience. I remember during the MegaUpload/Pirate Bay arrests, devs were quite up in arms about big media going after pirates, but when it came to devs going after app pirates with everything they've got, they were real quiet
It actually might be regulation that kills crypto because once you take out the high risk, you take out the high reward as well, and people are only in crypto for the high rewards
I used to think this way, but I tempered my belief to say that all poor countries need a brief period of extreme free markets. 50 to 100 years. After that, some regulation will be needed to manage the undesirable tradeoffs of that period
There is nowhere to take Twitter, it is on the tail end of its business cycle. The only move to play here is to go into damage control mode and relist ASAP. That way Elon can minimize his loss to 'only' $10 billion or less
WeChat solved a problem specific to the Chinese market, given how it's internet market is structured. In the rest of the world, that problem is solved at an OS or browser level. And buying either of those would have been way cheaper than $44 billion
Dominoes indeed are falling, but the coin prices are staying largely the same. Perhaps we're at a point where most people are already down so much from last year that it makes no sense to sell, no matter what the news says
I'm convinced that they just flag transactions from richer countries to poorer countries as fraud. But sending money from the poorer country to the richer country is completely fine.