alexeichemenda

I'd take a candidate who fights for a view I disagree with over one who hedges to please everyone (Strong opinions weakly held, but willing to change their mind if/when the data tells a different story)

>Best approach would be to make very few investments

Top VCs—who see the best deals and run deep diligence—still only have a 1–5% hit rate. As an angel, you don’t have that level of access or time. Even if you get strong referrals, you’d need to be 10–15x better than elite VCs to pick winners in a small portfolio. Unless you’re investing in at least 10 companies, it’s statistically a losing game.

My experience: I invested in ~200 companies early stage (with some winners like HuggingFace, Checkr & more).

They do, this URL just links to a custom GPT hosted on OpenAI's chatgpt URL.

>"It was very sad to call it quits because getting the funding to make those units was the only hurdle before making serious progress,” Temple said. “If they connected me with investors like they said, I could have made my invention, gotten efficacy and would be shipping units right now. I really do believe that."

It's unfortunate to see a founder believe that one accelerator would make or break their company. Typically an accelerator amplifies your existing trajectory - if you're a fast-growing company, you'll get more term sheets from investors than you know what to do with. If you're flat, they won't be attracting investors in any way. It's a founder's job to navigate this instead of relying on the accelerator to find $500k.

100x is a great return even for YC standards, but the best returns that business angels, VCs and YC have had is in the order of magnitude of 10000x (yes, ten thousand). So capping at 100x still makes it attractive for investors, yet leaves a lot of potential capital for the non-profit.

As one example, Sequoia invested in Airbnb at $0.01 per share, and Airbnb's current stock price is $102, almost exactly 10000x return. This happens more often that you think if you're not in the early stage & top VC world.

What CC is that?

France’s RSA does not meet UBI standards that we’re considering in the US / California because the amount paid is so small. If you live alone with 2 kids, RSA would be 899€/month in 2022, far below minimum wage.

> You just don't sell all of the company

The other option (more often used) is that you can raise more money at a higher valuation. You dilute yourself by the same amount as the initially planned raise, but you get more money and don't end up selling more/all of the company.

I'll also mention: this is a problem that goes up every ladder. Marketing individual contributor wants to show good performance to their manager, so delivering rides for cheap is good. Marketing manager is in the same boat with the CMO. CMO -> Board -> VC (VC will be happy to see great efficiency on the customer acquisition side). VC -> LPs (LPs will be excited about customer acquisition efficiency). A limited number of people are actually deeply concerned with this, and that's why it's taking so long for the top KPIs to change from "cost per action" to "incremental impact and incremental ROI".

What's important to highlight here is that marketing teams at companies such as Uber are incentivized to pus vendors to drive fraud. Specific example: Uber works with vendors A, B, C. Marketing team is incentivized to reach a cost per sign-up of $X (Let's say $50 for the sake of this example). Vendor A, running fraud, delivers sign-ups @ 45$ each. Vendor B, clean, delivers them at $55 each. Vendor C @ $65 each. The new baseline from an exec standpoint is $45 each, and every vendor that doesn't deliver at that level is cut. Repeat with multiple vendors.

The solution to this problem is incrementality measurement at the channel level. Every time you scale with a recently onboarded vendor, measure baseline of ALL conversions happening on your app. If this baseline doesn't move, cut the vendor. I say scale and not launch because upon launh, there won't be a visible impact on the global conversions. To be able to spot this spike from baseline, pick a small market than "worldwide". For ex, pick "California", let the new vendor scale in California, and measure spike in California.

I’m curious how many users (%) are annoyed by this. My gut feeling tells me only HN/Reddit/tech is annoyed by this, most people aren’t. Which is why we haven’t seen a competitor arise

>Doesn't seem that big in comparison to what SF annual budget is.

There are no singled-out pockets that you can tap into and make up SF annual budget. It's all about cumulating a lot fo long-tail small pockets + 1-2 large pockets.

Not aware of any that do that for laptops but I know 2 personally that do that for phones. They have a collection of devices (phones) trash to go, so it’s not as unscalable as I initially thought because they re-use the devices.

So I’m assuming if some do it for phones, must be some doing it in laptops.

Again. It’s all about probabilities. 1/ What’s the likelihood of the company doing that? Close to none. 2/ what would be the severity of the issue if they were doing that for me? Very high. 3/ what’s the effort level to prevent that? Very little.

This ratio ultimately tells us what to do.

You’re focused on the wrong part of the chain here. As the camera system is only as weak as it’s weakest link, if Apple indeed made a circuit connected to the LED (and I fully trust you on that), then the weakest link is elsewhere: company provided laptops are often altered prior to be given to an employee. I know of colonies who install software to track messages etc. What’s to say the same companies don’t alter the circuit board to modify the LED behavior?

There is a risk/reward/effort to look at, putting a small piece of tape is low risk / low effort / high reward (if your company actually angers laptops).