stealthmodeclan

In tech, it's not what one particular developer thinks but the consensus among the contributors which decides which one out of X or Y will end up having more benefits.

But in the US, I give my card to many small businesses knowing that I've chargeback as a tool. The businessess also ensure quality and delivery timing because payment processor is closely monitoring their chargeback rates.

One friend told me that in India, banks can freeze your account without a court order, I am not talking about a loan or credit card default.

Sending money is never free, there is always a cost associated with the activity. So which exact transaction is free?

My friend owns one such service, he is using Luxemborg based payment facilitator.

Now he gives talks in local Chinese and Indian conferences shillings consultancy for companies.

He meets a lot of Chinese and Indians and now he has saved a lot of money to retire even by American standards.

One thing we don't recognize is that we might be more valualed in a country where we weren't born.

You are failing in America doesn't mean you'll fail in Thailand, India, China where my friends just because they are white get paid thousands of dollars for smiling for photops

There are many businesses in East who don't know anything about the US but still have software products which can potentially undercut western products on prices, if you show them the way to enter western market - you too can charge a premium for this.

I saw it a high risk/high reward investment.

The money was not available to me in short-term but I could enjoy the compounded returns after sometime.

It's about giving up short term gains for long term gains and more control over your direction.

I never used much money from my compensation. Traveled a bit until i got bored, bought more toys untill i had enough.

Then the paycheck went directly into investment accounts.

So, attachment to money wasn't a problem for me.

Companies only paid me low millions annually. With that money, I can't control a major corporation and its future direction, though i might be able to influence some.

So there is no use of money for me, it helps pay bills and that's all about it. I don't know how more money will change my life.

But he pays no taxes.

Now he is on a student visa there.

And if you do not have a family it might work for you.

2. CI using Drone.io

3. Add trello

4. Everyone gets their own AWS account. It makes it trivial for them to experiment with new ideas from their home or at office without begging anyone for credentials.

You start by empowering your employees.

Now, we consult startups which work differently so you might not have capacity to make these changes.

Dividends come from after tax profits and are sometimes taxed as regular income and there might be tax on distribution too.

In some countries, you must pay yourself a fair salary.

I've also heard Mark Zuckerberg pays himself $1 salary.

GP mentioned the Corporate Tax.

VAT is an indirect tax. It's not a tax on profit but consumption, often paid by individuals.

Supplies used as input by companies are vat exempt.

Capital gains are only taxed when they are realized. E.g. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway hasn't paid a dime in taxes on the 15.4 billion dollar capital gains on its 16.7 billion dollar stake in Coca Cola (a position he initiated in 1987). Since Buffett has indicated he isn't planning on selling Coca Cola ever, those capital gains won't ever be taxed.

I also mentioned taxes on dividends.

Buffet is not the only one operating in market.

Of course they can: by becoming more efficient or by growing GDP.

And how can they grow GDP or become more efficient without investment? Where does that money come from if not from the individuals (buying product/service) and government (spending on infra/healthcare)

Nonsense. If you had looked at the OECD government deficit data [1], you would have known that the US is running one of the biggest deficits in terms of % of GDP (4.94% in 2016 vs 1.546% for the EU as a whole, or a surplus of 1% for Germany). Similarly, personal savings are 2.8% in the US [2] vs 10% in the EU [3] or 50% in Japan [4]

Not sure what you are trying to prove by this random data.

US is the largest Foreign Direct receipent.

Yes, Europe the largest buyer of the US securities.

As US become more attractive to the foreign investors. The trade deficit will increase and will be financed by the foreign investors. Where is the problem?

Europe doesn't reward winners. So Europeans move to the US for their startups.

Do you know Europe is the largest buyer of the US securities? They surely feel compelled enough to benefit from the business scene in the US.

Apple sells globally, should Apple also pay for the welfare of the countries where it sells its product?

The corporate tax rate has been reduced to something like 20%. Most companies in the US pay much less than that. The state is already subsidizing a lot for big corporations.

Some part of which flows to investors who purchase securities. Capital gains and dividends are taxed.

Companies can't earn record profits without government running deficit (by healthcare/infra expenditure) and without people running out of savings (by spending on the goods and services being produced)

Part of the value produced will be taxed in the US while the individuals and governments all over the world run out of saving and run into deficits respectively. All that flows to the US. Stopping this is much worse for the US.

He also lacks apathy. (I think it's some medical condition and not something sinster).

He is very honest and trustworthy but sometimes he ends up insulting us like Linus. But he is also super talented, so we ignore his cons as limitations beyond his control.

Currently, he is GP of our VC fund. He is lot better!

So he had no choice but to bootstrap his own company.

Stealing your employer's trade secret can trigger federal investigation.

It's shocking how few employees know this.

Once I met employees who would copy over the propriety packages from their old employers to their new employers just to save some time.

The other time i met employees who would develop a system the exact same way as they had done at the previous employer.

This is probably the biggest risk which specialized employees do not recognize while job hopping.

I started sharing my penthouse with economically challenged students.

We all go on hiking, fishing etc.. together. This is helped me come out of depression and now i am starting my new company with the same guys.

Where does the money come for dividends, taxes, and overhead?

If there is enough supply of engineers at the same quality, no one will pay more.

VC constraints:

1. VC has to get out within a specific timeframe, let's say 10 years and return all money to the LPs.

So VC can't afford to wait indenfinately collecting narrow streams of money.

That leaves you with very limited opportunities.

2. The number of companies they can deal with is small. There is a cost per transaction (funding), fewer transactions you make, better you do. But some transactions are must for VC math to work.

Banks also used to make only big loans in past. Micro lending is a recent thing. Algorithmic underwriting which doesn't even require manually looking at the balance sheet is based on heavy data collection, KPIs made feasable by technology advancement like big data processing etc..

3. VC can't fund anything which doesn't match their investment thesis. The LPs often start fund with a specific mission, for example, "advancement of AI for humanity". The VC partners often are veterans in specific industry and their resources are often useless in other industries.

This further reduces the number of companies they can fund.

4. You seem to assume all VC are chasing returns, well no! If our mission is "AI advancement". It's much better, if we've 2-3 focused winner companies in this niche. Fewer companies achieve better leverage, industry penetration, economies of scale and ofcourse, too big to fail.

5. Most of those small profitable companies are not able to keep stable revenue for 3years+.

One of the most misunderstood thing about VC, is that VC money wants maximum returns.

No! VC is a quest for control over new monopolies with enough holding, VC can influence and install their own management.

Money is cheap for them.

Imagine if you are an engineer and you own the largest semiconductor company. It's established fact that the old monopolies die and new disrupters emerge as new monopolies. You can't change this!

What you can do is control new disrupters by purchasing equity in them.

You do this by starting a VC fund and putting money derived from your semiconductor business in the fund. You can liquidate some of your holding it's not too hard.

Your VC funds thesis then becomes, "semiconductor advancement".

Then GPs will not chase the startups which have nothing to do with the semiconductor as their main focus.

If you don't do this, you watch your semiconductor empire dying. If don't even have stakes in new semiconductor disrupter monopoly, how do you maintain your dominance in this industry? That has a price, so absolute returns do not matter.

When a VC funded company dies, LPs do not cry. They cheer because another potential disrupter died trying, this can explain why some VCs are downright bad as they want you to fail.

Secondly, some VC funds have LPs who get their money from industry underdogs and really are after a disrupter who can unseat the current #1. So, they might be more helpful.

VCs are after potential disrupters.

Now if they want to kill the potential disrupter or help it grow that depends on the people who's money is at stake. No one is really going to share their motives upfront.

Surprisingly, there aren't any options for that.

Labor produces guaranteed income atleast in the west.

But investing capital doesn't.

How else do you incentivize risk taking?

1. Amount of things I've to learn to completely utilized 100% features of the language.

2. Availability of well supported packages for stuff like elastic search, stripe, postgres etc...

3. Ease of making a function asynchronous. I love how go routines make it trivial and hated pythons way.

4. IDE and debugger: I am using goland now, and it is magical.

GO has provided me everything, finally i can focus on building my product.

I sold my company (had a legal battle with my partners which destroyed me emotionally and now I find it hard to trust others, naturally i am risk reverse now), and deployed excess capital in these vacant kept properties. I simply have no desire to earn extra income on them. I hope I'll make some amount on appraisal.

Secondly, not everyone is in the market for maximizing their gains. It would cost more of my time if I ran into a bad tenant who sued me (if partners i known for years couldn't resist, what makes a random one any different? No amount of rational explanation is going to change my belief. Once you are burned, you even start hating candles). I optimize for less risk and if it comes at zero return or slight loss, all good.

You are talking as if capital gains don't increase efficiency the company, help produce more goods and services for the people or create/eliminate useless jobs via automation. He only gets to keep money for the value he creates for the society. Society gets to keep the value.

Now he might be corrupt or using loopholes, but that's smth we need to fix.

Today, you can directly take a look at their craft on github, this has given much confidence to those from lower rungs of the society like, hey! I can create better than this person even tho i am not from such an ellite university. This along with the meritocracy in tech levels the playing field where the ones from better universities should found startups by using their connections instead of working for companies

Why look at it in isolation?

Here we comparing taking a job and collecting a paycheck vs investing capital.

Investing capital is more likely to create or eliminate jobs which makes economy efficient than taking a simple job.