alizaki

I’m very sorry to hear. An old copy of Accidental Empires was one of my introductions technology + capitalism

Indeed. What a deep cut

His PC magazine column was the first thing I read when I was able to get hold of old PC Magazines.

Even in the fast cycle of PCs in the 90s, you could learn something reading yesterdays newspaper from his columns. RIP

There is no “Chinese LLM”. Each “lab” is distinct and their models behavior is as unique as those from OpenAI and Anthropic

I'm not sure if identifying pain is the opposite of creating need. The pain here was fast foods need for cheap fish that has a reliable supply. The need was created when he was able to convince these companies that his fish supply chain was their best solution.

the like/share/repin/rate/review buttons are a form of natural curation built into the fabric of the social web.

A work/travel-program for knowledge professionals to travel the world and work a set number of hours a week on projects to pay their way. Air tickets, budget, airbnbs/apartments all paid for. Then you resell services to clients.

You could probably keep a high enough margin by saving through smart purchasing/renting of travel along and picking lower cost/highly desired destinations (south east asia comes to mind, for example).

a business of lifestyle, if you will.

the irs would hit any partners you use to transfer funds very quickly with deep audits at the very minimum if this gets even a little traction, i'd think

This is a bridge round led by an outside investor. Not uncommon, especially between Series A and B. I don't get much of the hard decision here, seems pretty common. I do appreciate her honesty though.

The problem with such advice is that some of it is always right. But you just don't which part. And you can't do it all.

You're probably right, FB prices went up for Zynga more so than others because they saturated their market (which just took longer cause it was bigger). However, anecdotally, I've seen FB prices rise 25 - 35% over the last 18 months.

I think this misses the point entirely. Zynga is not failing because their products are cheap to recreate. Plenty of companies, in tech and beyond, have easily recreatable products but do just fine. Zynga is "failing" (if you can call it that) because they depended on cheap user traffic from Facebook - both through free virality and later cheap ad buys. Facebook is maturing as a business and ad prices are going up. And Facebook realized that all that game spam was just not worth the 30% vig they charged (probably the hard way - through testing for user engagement). Take away those temporary advantages and Zynga is just like any other gaming company.

This is a right sizing of the company and its revenues to reflect the games they own, once you take away the cheap/free traffic.

A lot more tech companies are started now than maybe, 3 years ago. Also, it takes companies time to reach $100M in revenue.