notabanker

Thanks for sharing a critical insight.

Good to know there's a whole set of actions you have to be prepared for if you list a company's logo -- discounts, set up reference call, etc. Thank you.

Thanks for sharing your insight.

I agree. I see single-digit million ARR startups list Google, Facebook, Visa, etc. as customers. Do you think they actually went through the process of getting permission to 1. list as customer and 2. use their logo on the website ?

If they did go through that process, I wonder if there's a written guide somewhere, on how to go about it.

You own the pointer to the image but the pointer can never be dereferenced.

In the less distant future, our grandchildren will read the wikipedia on the NFT mania of 2021 and exclaim "I can't believe you guys were that dumb" At that moment I'll point to the framed screenshot of my reply to your comment and say "There's evidence I stayed out of it kiddo"

Amazing synthesis of facts... so much I didn't know.

I have a copy of The history of the future and was planning to read it. If all it's going to be is PR for Luckey, I will donate it to a used books shop.

Would you have an opinion on VR being the next computing platform? Despite the troubled past, do you suppose Oculus Quest 2 could become THE standard?

Watched the video from start to finish. It's basically too good to be true -- modular, undetectable, lethal, rain proof, etc. Picturing the meeting room where the Anduril salesman plays the video to investors. A distortion vortex is in play due to the founder's previous success and no one in the audience dares object to the claims in the video. Bereft of challenge, the startup quadruples in valuation after the meeting.

It's for insights like these that I come to HN. Thanks for disabusing me of the notion that Oculus was a classic garage to greatness story.

Only if you are in all hands on deck mode. It's helpful when a team to be in sync on an urgent and critical issue. Otherwise, always-on communication tends to be a distraction.

Do you mind beaming me up on what's happening/happened with Clubhouse? I know what the app is about not much clued into the fortunes of the company.

Are his essays not copyrighted? If they are copyrighted, probably a good call to take the repo down.

Thanks a lot for sharing your wisdom. A counterintuitive yet better way to understand how modern business works.

The video you shared is unbelievable (in every sense of the word).

I could be wrong on the timeline, but wasn't Ben Evans at that time a partner at Andreesen Horowitz. Partners are expected to be cheerleaders of their investments. After all difficult technologies become manifest by cheerleading them until one of them catches on.

Do you mean Anduril?

I have only a passing knowledge of Anduril, thanks for sharing your impression of them. But knowing his track record, I tend to believe Palmer Luckey has the ability to achieve daring innovations. That said, with quantum leap innovation, failure is the more likely outcome.

Unprofitability is rampant among public software companies: https://survivingtomorrow.org/why-do-so-many-famous-companie...

Wonder if you have an opinion -- has unprofitability always been this pervasive or is this how businesses are generally run?

I knew a startup founder who was spending 10-15K Euros on marketing each month. He knew the startup was a dead-end but had raised money and wanted a "managed X million $ budget" bullet point on his resume so he could apply for high-level job positions later on. It came down to fundraising for resume building.

"AI" also gets used for cosmetic reasons. I knew a startup that got acquired. They had a .ai domain with no AI product whatsoever.

Now I'm glad I started this Ask HN as your response is eye opening. You should write a blogpost about it.

We're all strangers on this forum. Half take the numbers at face value, the other half doesn't.

The allure of this thread is the author's claims on revenue. I'm asking on behalf of the latter half of hn, that would like to believe but would like to see verification first.

Appreciate your being candid about your revenues.

Since you are quite transparent and forthcoming about your revenues, I urge you to take it a step further. It would be very helpful if you could share a screenshot from your payment processor to substantiate your revenue claim. Could you do that please?

Good point, that's really what it is .. a complex entity.

I really would like to believe your prophecy but want to offer a few rebuttals...

> the government really doesn't like a challenge to its power.

But the government as a whole hasn't really made up its mind. There are a few junior congresspeople who are vocal about monopoly problems with Big Tech. But senior Democrat congresspeople from Big Tech states have not uttered a word against Big Tech. Even senior Republicans, and republicans have been at the receiving end of Big Tech censorship, are loath to antitrust as they have started conflating checks on Big Tech monopoly with checks on free enterprise. In short, government will has not coalesced around antitrust action against Big Tech.

I don't know if Big Tech can be stopped by the government. A possibility I see is that the stock market bubble pops, Fed money printing loses its ability to inflate tech stocks, leading to a decline in Big Tech power.

There's this phrase "elite lawlessness" that comes to mind. Perhaps billionaires stepping on each others toes and getting into legal tussles is our best hope to contain the lawlessness.

I would like to read a point-by-point critique of Shadowstats but have yet to come across one. The wikis you've listed are more muckraking in nature than a technical rebuttal.

A poorly done critique increases rather than diminishes the credibility of the target.

It would be ideal if the app creator is able to provide some verification to show they are indeed generating the stated revenue of $4K per month?

At the very least it will help me improve my understanding of the kind of things for which people are willing to part their hard earned money.

I think it was intended as a satirical comment.

Does that mean Ray Dalio is pessimistic about US prospects and thinks China will dominate the future?

But how does one invest in China without worrying about their capricious, personality-centered policies?

What's different in China's case compared to other protectionist countries is they can get away with being protectionist.

How can they get away with it? They have powerful people lobbying with foreign governments on China's behalf. Take Apple for example: they contract out iPhone manufacturing to Foxconn in China. Due to the low cost of manufacturing they are able to generate astronomical profits.

Every measure against China will directly or indirectly impact some US multinational corporation and it's natural for the corporation to lobby Western governments to put the brakes on such measures.

On the contrary, if you look at Iran or Russia, multinational corporations don't have a similar deep-seated interest or supply chain infrastructure as they do in China. How did this come to be? A lot of it can be attributed to Deng Xiaoping's setting the tone for China's relationship with the West: “stabilize the position, observe calmly, take all in stride, never take the lead, and hide our capacity to bide our time.”

More on that in this essay: https://www.hoover.org/research/china-us-relations-eyes-chin...