I didn't realize YC was investing in bio companies now. Is that a recent development?
233 karma · joined October 10, 2008
It is true that ultimately your manager has to make a case for what bonus/raise/promotion you deserve, and rankings will figure into that. If your manager sucks and/or hates you, he isn't going to fight for you. But if you have a sucky manager, you are in trouble no matter which company you're at.
The famous MIT black jack team was able to 'take down the casino' by counting cards and waiting for expected value to swing positive, and then placing large bets at that time. If the game is truly random and negative (like all well-constructed casino games should be) then there should never been an opportunity for positive expected value.
If you factor in the times the player went bankrupt, your win percent probably won't look so hot.
Blizzard has plenty of games in the pipeline for the next five years. SC2:HOTS, SC2:LOTV, Diablo III, and the presumed Diablo III expansion pack. Plus 'Titan', whatever that ends up being.
It might not be as robust and predictable as WoW subscriptions, but running a profitable business isn't supposed to be easy.
Unaccredited investors, friends, and family could invest into a pre-angel rounds in the sub-$500k region, with 'more sophisticated' angels investing around $500k to $1m range, and the 'most sophisticated' VCs investing in $1m+ rounds.
If Facebook's percentage revenue increase is 'only' double-digits, and shrinking, it will take years and years of earnings growth before it becomes a 'good value'. It will take 5 years at a sustained 60% yearly earnings growth rate to reach the same PE ratio Apple has today.
It's not like Facebook is a mission-critical application that requires all data to be 100% consistent. If an update to a user's photo album isn't immediately viewable by all other users, it isn't that big of a deal -- most users won't even notice, and the speed increases over MySql were dramatic.
My favorite part comes at the end. The last step involves predicting where a specific BIOS handler lies in memory. It is a static address in all pre-Vista OS.
Starting in Vista, Windows introduced address space layout randomization to make hacks like this more difficult.
However: "Unfortunately, this potentially useful exploit mitigation is trivial to defeat locally as unprivileged users can simply query the loaded module list via NtQuerySystemInformation()."
Whoops.
To use your example of the iPhone: As innovative as the iPhone was when it was released, Apple really hasn't messed with it in almost three years. Doing so would risk alienating the 50+ million people using iPhone OS devices every day.
When the time comes in the next few years, will Apple make the hard decision to redesign their iPhone OS, possibly driving away some of their current users in the process? I would say they are more likely to than Microsoft. However, until they have passed that test, we shouldn't be so quick to judge.
Yes, Microsoft sold 30 million Xboxs to "hard core gamers" and effectively conquered that market niche.
But, in the same time, Nintendo sold 50+ million Wiis to people who like "toys", making billions of dollars in the process.
As a hypothetical investor, I don't really care if Microsoft "wins" the hard-core market, I care about the bottom line. Nintendo effectively created a new market and capitalized on it, and they would get my hypothetical dollar.
-Leaders without vision: Gates wasn't perfect, but he at least put forward the vision of a PC in every house. Ballmer is more of a cheerleader than a visionary, and "three screens and a cloud" isn't a vision of the future so much as commentary on the present.
-Hubris: Making billions of dollars is an easy way to justify that you are "doing the right thing", even 15 years later.
-Customers focused: This is a little more subtle, but I think a culture making products (Windows, Office) for "Customers" is different than a culture making products (Gmail, Search) for "Users". For the former, you could pessimistically say that your main objective is to make a product you can convince someone to buy. Whether or not the customer uses the product is somewhat incidental. Each subsequent version must have enough features crammed into it to justify the customer paying again, even if they aren't useful. In contrast, focusing on the user provides more motivation to keep the product relevant, make the product useful, and so on. If it isn't, the users can simply stop using it.
-Middle-child syndrome: If your team isn't making $1+billion, no one cares. It is hard to have the proper resources to innovate and be creative if most of your management chain doesn't know your project exists.
That said, he probably did the correct thing by simply answering their questions. That shows that "someone is home" better than flipping his bit randomly.
For example, the patient didn't answer the last question because.. he fell asleep? I would imagine if I was trapped inside my body and suddenly given a mechanism to communicate, I would be too excited to fall asleep.
Did they observe any signs of excitement that I would expect a person to feel in this situation? Increased heart rate or other brain activity? Did the man try to convey his own message using the new-found communication mechanism?
It almost sounds like they are communicating with some small ghost of the man's subconscious, something that can respond to basic queries and recall memories, but lacks what we would really consider a consciousness.
Xbox is successful in that it has a large mind-share in the hard-core gamer community, but financially the project is still a failure. Had Microsoft decided not to begin the Xbox project 10+ years ago, it would easily have a few more $billion in the bank today.
Contrast that with the Wii, which, along with the DS, has added billions of dollars in profit to Nintendo's coffers over the past few years alone.
Now that Xbox has established itself, the next decade will show whether or not the system is net-profitable, or whether the project never should have started to begin with.