raiyu

Haha thanks, in the first month Ben wasn't quite happy with that and wanted us to call them virtual servers, but I overruled him ^_^

Once again the promise of decentralized crypto rests on centralized authority. Either it's Coinbase or one of the other exchanges that facilitate purchase or trading of currencies, or OpenSea which facilitates the sale of NFTs, it all eventually becomes centralized because the underlying layer is simply too complicated for every day consumers.

It is critical to expose workers to the problems that their customers experience, but if this is the only way to do it, then you have multiple failures in how your organization is structured.

Really this is the job of the product manager, and if the product manager isn't actively using your product, or talking with your customers and end users, then they are failing at their job.

But the number of product managers that take this part of the job seriously is abysmally low. Which is why companies have to instate other patterns to try and get this work done.

There is a definitely a benefit in terms of trust and security, though not fool proof.

However, when you force companies to only signup and accept payment through your payment gateway instead of giving customers the option, and then unequally applying rules and colluding with other companies you start to get in trouble in regards to monopolistic practices.

Not all of his assets were tied up in his hedge fund, so when it imploded he still remains quite wealthy especially given his frugal life style.

A/B testing!

Perhaps, but on the other hand, if someone like Joe Rogan had a paid for subscription plan where you were paying him directly, instead of being forced into a membership with Spotify, would that in a sense be more open, in that you are able to vote directly with your cash who you are listening to?

Of course, if its an apple product, in a sense you are tied in to their system, but if it's successful, other paid for podcast variants could appear and then Joe Rogan can syndicate it to numerous vendors which have a pay-wall.

I tried club house but got lost in the recommendations and all of the rooms.

Meanwhile when Twitter deployed spaces it made immediate sense and i felt in control based on my followers.

Will be interesting to see what wins out long term but I’m much more interested in Twitter spaces than club house

This is the challenge with taking venture dollars, your interests aren't aligned.

As a founder post Series B you probably have at least 10% of the business, that's a nice $400MM payout coming your way.

But if the VC invested at a $1B price, picks up 10% and 80% of their return goes to their LPs they are personally pocketing much less.

So it is advantageous for them to continue to shoot for the stars rather than sell short. Plus they have multiple bets going on at the same time while the founders only have one.

So a $4B acquisition nets the founder $400MM, but and the VC firm is picking up $300MM of which 80% is going back to LPs, leaving $60MM for the partnership, perhaps split 3-7 ways, with maybe a kicker for the partner that sourced and led the investment.

So let's say that's roughly $10MM going to the VC partner.

Well you got one person staring at $400MM and another staring at $10MM.

The interests aren't quite aligned.

Also survivorship bias has us focused on companies that turned down acquisition offers and made it big, like Facebook, Google, Netflix, Snapchat, and so forth, but we don't really hear about the companies that turn down the offer and then fail to meet that acquisition price later, because that story just doesn't sell as well and the company fades into irrelevance so it isn't a piece that is picked up often.

Certainly at the time it could have been a good decision given how new the market was and the potential upside, but obviously hindsight is 20/20.

Let’s not make this overly complicated, if it was important enough for them to charge you they should give you a way to cancel the only reason any company doesn’t is because they are f*ing customers.

If that’s the case you can get it for nearly for free by just buying the books and reading them rather than paying $25,000 a year for that same privilege.

Looks like Tether is taking the settlement as an agreement of no wrong doing and that no tether coins were issued without backing.

https://tether.to/tether-and-bitfinex-reach-settlement-with-...

The minting of tether accelerated in 2020 and continues in to 2021 including one week alone where $2B was minted.

https://www.coindesk.com/tether-mints-record-2b-usdt-in-one-...

Is this the first official ruling on tether that shows it isn’t backed 1:1 by the US dollar?

That has long been speculated, but if this is the first official verification how does that affect the Market.

Especially the self dealing of Bitfinex.

It’s growing for sure but the link to the stats page is cumulative searches so it’s growing slower than the hockey stick graph would have you believe.

https://duckduckgo.com/traffic

Still impressive though

One important thing to note is that these are secondary transactions and not where the stock may potentially trade.

Secondly, Coinbase doesn’t allow any secondary transactions, this was a company sponsored (approved) secondary. As a result this created immense scarcity so you can see how much the price changes just in these limited sales.

Third, as we saw with the last bull run of Bitcoin everything with blockchain in the name had a halo effect so there is definitely upward momentum.

Fourth, there is no Bitcoin tracking security on public markets. Obviously if Bitcoin succeeds so does Coinbase, this is an Avenue to get exposure to that without having to invest in Bitcoin directly and since Coinbase makes money on volatility which Bitcoin has a tremendous amount you get to ride the swings up and down by investing in Coinbase and not having exposure to Bitcoin directly. Investing in the shovels not the gold.

Eventually companies grow in to their valuations and that is determined by supply and demand and ultimately revenue and profits. Coinbase is still growing rapidly and profitable so in today’s market there will be a huge premium for that.

Technically it most closely resembles zoom from a financial perspective and from a capturing the trends perspective so while the valuation may seem high if Coinbase isn’t worth this then neither is zoom.

When will there be a market correction it’s impossible to know. We could have said the same thing for the post two years and it still hasn’t happened.

Don’t forget that getting yield outside of stocks is increasingly difficult and while we are on HN trapped in the echo chamber of tech and tech stocks when you look at the old staples like Coca-Cola they haven’t appreciated during this time.

Large mutual funds could be rebalancing their portfolios to move more into tech which they should have done from 2010 onwards but largely resisted outside of FAANG stocks.

The only thing that is certain is that this is a wild ride.

Why large companies fail - they put revenue ahead of customers.

How long a company can get away with that depends on their moats, competitive landscape, and what alternatives exist. In the case of FB, obviously there's a huge moat and a semi monopoly.

There is some competition from Twitter and Snapchat, but really FB acquiring Instagram doubled their market cap, because that is the only other social platform that has truly reached their scale, and also has an effective, if not more effective, ad platform.

This is also pretty typical even at smaller companies. Different people have different "masters". The product manager is rightfully trying to build the best product for their customers - the advertisers. But the upper management has bonuses tied to revenue usually through stock compensation, so their interest is in their own pockets. The product manager who correctly points out a real issue, is then seen as a negative, rather than someone doing a fantastic job.

Well the original post was someone who had access to reliable safe drinking water, so I'm not sure where that is coming from.

Also if you look historically over the past 100 years overall rates of poverty have declined everywhere.

If you look even further back in time the amount of rights that global citizens enjoy today is fundamentally a million times better than it was 100, 200, 300, 400 years ago.

Humans were ruled by kings and queens, where land was inherited, there was no upward social mobility, slavery of peoples was much more rampant than it is today.

Humanity was never equal, in it's history, but today if you ignore the top 1% we as a people actually enjoy fundamentally more equality than our predecessors who weren't part of the 1%.

Also, while the inequality exists between the 1% and the 99% today, today actually have upward social mobility to become part of the 1%, where 400 years ago that wasn't really all that possible.

I'm not saying the world is perfect, but if you look at it has actually gotten better overall.

I'm also pretty sure that the implied worth of Rockefeller and some of those old guard monopolists on a inflation adjusted and power adjusted basis was probably many times higher than even Elon Musk's net worth today.

Bitcoin is used as a speculative instrument because by definition it is deflationary. Which means it is more expensive to buy something with it today, then tomorrow. Just look at Chamath's tweet about how he bought a property for Bitcoin in 2014 for $1.4MM but today that same amount of bitcoin would be $100MM+

https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/chamath-...

This creates an environment there is never a reason to use the currency for a purchase, strictly because it's supply is completely limited and never increasing over time.

Since the world economy continues to grow as GDP, output, and the population grows, it stands to reason that if Bitcoin in any way parallels our real world economic scenario, it would continue to rise in price per unit, because the overall GDP continues to increase.

As a result, it in fact never stabilizes, unless overall GDP stops growing.

Since it never stops growing, it never makes sense to use it for a purchase, and so you have a flywheel effect of ever increasing upward price pressure.

The public bathroom air blades drive me crazy. It keeps splashing the water back and forth, the air speed is too high and my hands inadvertently touch the sides and probably there are a bunch of germs circulating inside, as not everyone washes their hands thoroughly.

The old school super blowers that just do hot air down, or whichever direction you turn, probably consume more power, but certainly dry my hands faster and I don't have to worry about touching anything that isn't clean in the process.

By the same token, Elon Musk is someone who succeeded, while thousands upon thousands of entrepreneurs fail, end up with debt, and don't have much to show for their work.

So using survivorship bias to compare yourself to Elon Musk which is an atypical result when it comes to business formation doesn't make sense.

You should probably compare yourself to the average business creator and see how you fare compared to them.

It's like saying I'm not that great at Basketball, but let me compare myself to Michael Jordan.

Bitcoin is a modern day example of what happens when you have a currency that has deflation instead of inflation at it's core.

It becomes actually more expensive to buy anything in the present, as a result, consumers stop purchasing, and as a result economic activity decreases.

DigitalGold is also non-sensical, because that is simply designed to track against inflation, to prevent the loss of today's buying power tomorrow because of inflation. But when something appreciates 10,000x it's not really a hedge against inflation anymore, but a different speculative instrument entirely.

There is a ton of backend stuff you need to do to make alcohol delivery work as well as sign up the independent mom and pop shops that do the majority of the business.

So backend built, customer base, largest player in the space, and integrating directly into uber eats will definitely lift sales.

I use Uber eats daily but struggle to open Drizly for alcohol delivery, if it’s in one experience for the late majority and the installed user base of Uber eats it will definitely increase volume of sales.

I’m sure they are still heavily investing in CapEx given their growth.

You have to remember that AWS had a more linear path so capex investment was spread out over a longer time line. Meanwhile Google had to rebuild all of AWS infra and capacity basically over night.

That coupled with high revenue growth leads to a large loss in the build out years. As revenue increase YoY slows down that loss will begin to narrow.

The author makes the assertion that if we are all celebrating Apple's latest hardware, it is because the focus on their user interface has faded into the background and they have lost their way.

But reading through the piece the only tangible evidence he provides is more spacing between elements that he is pulling up on 5 year old hardware?

Screen density and pixels have improved dramatically in that time frame, we have larger screens, more resolution, and retina display, it's like switching from Analog to HD. Not every new interface will work equally well on old hardware, but that doesn't mean that the interface has deteriorated.

Making something infinitely backwards compatible will ultimately destroy the user experience, as you can't take advantage of the present and the improvements it offers.

The OS is getting a bit iOS-ified - that I agree with, but it isn't forced upon you to the level Windows does, so it is easily avoided.

I would prefer to have a seen a more detailed breakout of the real degradation in user experience, otherwise it's just a complete opinion piece with no real facts or proof points to offer.

When we first moved office space to the city from Brooklyn, in 2012 we were seeing rents in the mid $50's, now at a record low (past three years) of $73 per sq ft, still quite a bit way off of where rent was less than 10 years ago. And that's after a tremendous amount of real estate has been developed for office space.

2012 was pre WeWork, it was also pre Hudson Yards - though that is extremely pricey office real estate.

The benefit of reduced rents is that when the market recovers companies that hadn't previously considered the city affordable can take advantage of lower rates and as a blended avg I'm sure there are some great deals to be found.

The 1950s and 60s were great in America because Europe was decimated in WWII, heavy industry was alive and well, the population was growing, the government was helping GIs with housing loans and college, and imports and global trade had not yet taken hold.

Fast forward and globalization has moved production else where, population growth compared to Nordic countries is massive, there are a multitude of factors at play.

Ahh - touche - one time out of 6 - not looking like good odds for Republicans to be in favor of going the popular vote route.

Given that republicans have lost the popular vote in every election since 2000 I don't see them getting on board with going to a straight popular vote anytime in the near future to determine the Presidential election.

There's definitely been a less reported but positive side to the proliferation of technology and everyone now having a video camera in their pocket.

I would love to see what social media looked like if the news went back to reporting just the news.

Like in school, the who, what, when, and that's it. Now when you turn on the news it feels like turning on Inside Edition when I was a kid. Here are the ten things that can kill you in your house hold... tune in after the commercial break to find out.

If our news organizations actually followed these practices it would be interesting to see if social media in and of itself may not be as detrimental as it appears to be today.