smohnot

Chiming in for the Ikea fans - you should definitely listen to the Acquired episode about it! It was fantastic and covered this and other fun facts https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/ikea

TikTok has not been sold for $14B but Trump signed an executive order to transfer TikTok to US owners... for less than 1x it's US revenue.

It reminds me of the oligarchs in Russia, license raj in India, privatization in Mexico etc…

being close to political power lets folks buy up crown-jewel assets at a fraction of their true value.

This article isn’t referring to ai generated music

Good post from Lenny Rachitsky on how to acquire your first users

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/consumer-business-find-fi...

Cali is tough- the regulator is really standing in the way of a functioning market and is driving insurers away... Allstate stopped writing new policies in Nov 2022 and said they would pull out of the state entirely unless they could increase rates drastically... so they were allowed this increase.

The 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons wiped out nearly two times the combined underwriting profits for California homeowners’ insurers for the prior 26 years… it’s acceptable to have large losses in this business but you need to have years of gains to offset them. CA is the only state that doesn’t allow for consideration of reinsurance costs in ratemaking.

CA requires insurers to underwrite using historical data from the past 20 years (which doesn’t include housing growth in high-risk regions or increased fuel load following years of drought and poor fire suppression strategies) to determine catastrophe losses vs predictively modeled data incorporating climate change. It is the only state that disallows forward-looking models when pricing wildfire risk.

Until California does something to ensure that the prices of insurance reflect the risk (letting them use modern catastrophe models, letting them price in reinsurance, approving rate filings in a timely manner), insurers will continue non-renewing folks and pulling out of the state altogether. It filed the rate increase in April 2023 and was just approved. In the meantime, Allstate has not added a single new homeowner in the state.

Semi-relatedly, I had my parents sign up for https://www.charlie.com/ There are a bunch of great anti-fraud features including one that lets me be a co-pilot on their account.

Some features: it doesn't allow transactions while they are asleep, can block all transactions online except for merchants that you allow, limit international spend, and they have a feature that you can forward any email that you are curious about and it'll tell you if it's likely to be fraud.

highly recommend.

Leo does a great job explaining why VC's want liquidation preferences.

But founders/employees want them too! With all the crazy founder-friendly deals of 2021, I never heard of one in the US without a liquidation preference.

Why? Liquidation preferences allow the VC bought securities to be treated as "preferred" and reduce the common stock price in the 409a valuation report, allowing early employees to get options at low prices.

If VC's invested in common stock the strike prices would be much higher, making it less lucrative to be an early employee.

In parts of Europe there is different tax treatment for options and employees generally don't own as many shares due to it... and some of those companies don't have liquidation preferences. I believe Klarna (Sweden) doesn't have preferred shares, meaning the huge swing in valuation they had over the past few years is not as bad as it seems.

TBH the whole 409a thing is a charade & we probably need to clean up how we do accounting & taxes but until we do, preferred shares are here to stay.

For those not familiar: Common Paper https://commonpaper.com/standards/ seems to have the best free standard docs.

Here's the post where they describe it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36043944

here's another one: https://www.avodocs.com/

AngelList is great https://www.angellist.com/startups

He had it listed on Craigslist a few years ago... for $550k. Anyone know the current status of it?

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/get-yourself-the-iconic-j...

I've been there a few times & spoken to people who live there. It's beautiful but requires a LOT of maintenance. There are 20,000 bushes and 800 trees. Just maintaining the gardens costs $200,000 per month! There are 113 units, so maintenance itself comes to $1,800 per month per unit.

It's a luxury building in a luxury area.

Besides the point but visa actually gets about 0.14%

Mr. Rogers was my actual neighbor in Pittsburgh in 1999-2000, while I was at CMU. He would really go out of his way to have social interactions. He would always say hello and ask how you were doing in a way that felt like he actually genuinely wanted to know the answer. Case of the person in real life being exactly like what he seems like on TV.

I have a link to http://sheel.wtf (a public motion page) in my twitter bio. I’m surprised at how many people read it and reference stuff from it when we talk. I’m often on podcasts and it gives the hosts something to talk about. I’m a VC and a few founders have mentioned they like knowing about their investors as people and mine helps them understand that.

Http://sheel.wtf

I think the main reason the Bloomberg article got to the top rather than the source (theinformation) is that The Information is beyond a paywall that you can't bypass.

Good question about journalistic ethics.

Someone should build Dymaxion houses and put them on Airbnb- they would do really well

This happened to me too. I opened a new account with a different email address, credit card and phone number (used google voice).

It uses an “on-device machine learning algorithm that processes the music in real-time.” Perhaps it doesn’t work as well on the old Apple TV? Or just an excuse.

This is cool... but what is the business? It's a good domain name & they have a careers@puter.com email address (if you click on the i in the bottom right)

she now admits on her website that some images are composites: "To clarify, all my images are edited and processed in Photoshop and Lightroom. Some images are composites, some are not."

This is super cool. I took a quick look but couldn't see how it was funded... how was it?

see also: http://unit.co

you can programatically create accounts & cards and test with real money - in minutes!

https://www.unit.co/how-to-build

Yale behavioral economist Dean Karlan made a site called Stickk (https://www.stickk.com/) that has a phone app that helps you do the same; you donate money to causes you hate if you don’t do what you say you’ll do

yeah, I mean it isn't shown on a slide... if Lexus & Genesis are shown, Acura & Lincoln probably should be too

Written from a Australian perspective & is missing some US marques, like that Honda owns Acura and Ford owns Lincoln

article is 2+ years old; anyone know how many devs they have now?

He said BTC was the only cryptocurrency he was comfortable saying was a commodity, while many were securities

it didn't address explicitly what all others were

“That’s the only one I’m going to say because I’m not going to talk about any one of these tokens”

https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1541565079992369155?s=20&...