141 karma · joined October 18, 2010
TSMC's moat isn't enough to withstand that much subsidized competition. All of those new competitors will chase market share and destroy the profitability of the market.
Solid move.
Judgement in Managerial Decision Making by Bazerman - Things which bias your thinking and how to avoid them.
My Life and Work by Henry Ford - How Henry Ford thinks. Stories about engineering and building a company.
Homage to Catalonia by Orwell - The famous author's experience in the Spanish civil war which colored much of his work.
Is there anyone other than your company using this API? If not, it might make sense to find a single "customer" and make sure the API solves tons of problems for them. If you cannot get first adopter, iterate on the product/API until you can create something that a customer loves.
It sounds like people don't see strong enough value in being the early adopters of these APIs. You might need to iterate on API/product until they do.
Without changing signals you can still make meaningful long term progress through ranking, delivery, and format improvements.
I would think that in the 5-10 years it'll take to get this safe enough for a commercial product, solar + battery would be scaling and they'd never be able to catch up on price due to the efficiency ceiling.
Maybe there's something possible in aviation for this. There might be electric drones/planes applications which would be way better if they didn't have to carry batteries.
Design docs are great when they can in 1-2 pages describe a how an important/large/complex system will work and the tradeoffs made when designing it.
Some groups in Google confuse design docs conflated with the promotion process, and thus engineers start create long/time consuming docs for every little thing as part of building a case for promotion.
It is quite difficult to beat the S&P 500, and they're saying they don't have any ideas which can.
If a company has money it cannot productively spend, it should return that money to shareholders. Stock buybacks are a tax efficient way to do that.
The company believes the asset wasn't very profitable for them to own, so they sold it and gave the shareholders the money back.
That makes me think this is a long long way from being a self sustaining business.
As real interest rates go lower, the cost of capital goes down. That would make some capital intensive businesses possible/profitable that wouldn't be otherwise.
Productivity growth is normal-ish, but the amount you prices have been all over the place throughout history.
They have not deployed their tech at scale, when competitors (Tesla) has widely deployed worse technology.
Even if they deploy their tech widely, it isn't clear it will generate significant revenue/profit. It might not be that expensive (think less than 1B) to build a good enough self driving car in 10 years. That'd create competition and drive down prices.
Someone else might figure out how to capture the value of self driving cars too. Maybe the profitable parts of self driving cars are the "apps" you can build once self driving cars are cheap.
I wouldn't invest in Waymo at 100B until they have a real business with real revenue and a real moat to protect that business.
Back when I was at Google, X (which many Other Bets came from) had a goal of all their projects having meaningful impact in 10 years. They've been working on Wing and Waymo for close to 10 years now. Those projects are not yet meaningfully impacting many people.
As an armchair CEO, I have doubts about the compensation (more salary / less equity vs startups) and funding (fewer choices funding sources for the companies, weird incentives for the investors vs VC funds) model for "Other Bets". Based off of that and the lack of results, I think they should force the Other Bets to stand on their own vs handing them more cash to burn.
If the Alphabet model made sense, I'd expect to see a company starting to clearly take off after 5 years. The data shows the opposite.
Not only would it be expensive (new overhead for lots of product teams), it would be counter productive.
Today the product leaders are accountable for the impact of their decisions, since they are the only ones who are making them.
If there's a central decision committee, the product leaders would be able abdicate their responsibility since they didn't fully make the decision.
Over time incentives will cause the the product leaders to push for more risky decisions, committee to get less risky, and the whole company to slow down.
Anecdata:
- <50% of the people who joined my team recently were referrals.
- >50% of my friends in "serious" relationships met offline.
'reduced in force, effect, or physical thickness.'
Equity Liquidity -- I can't wait 10 years to get liquidity on options. YC could offer to purchase some employee equity when the company raises additional rounds.
Employee Branding -- FANG on a resume looks better than working at a startup. That really helps when it is time to look for a new job.
Short of turning off ads or ad targeting, do you have any ideas about how to make this better?
1) Advertiser tells tech company "please show this ad to people you think are interested in X"
2) Tech company uses its private data to figure out who to show the ad to.
3) If you don't click the ad, end of story. No data leaves the tech companies servers to tell anyone anything about you.
4) If you click the ad, the place that ad directs to will know the ad you came from. Åt most, they can use referral source to infer some data about you.
To me, data is sold means that large amounts of personal data are shared about me without my consent. What am I misunderstanding?