amb23

This isn't a great list--it's a lot of fluff, and self-help books masquerading as business content.

There are basically two skills you really need to hone in an MBA. The first are the hard skills/knowledge on finance, accounting, (basic) stats, and (basic) economics. The second is being able to assess and analyze business models, from both strategic and operational angles. The former can be learned in MOOCs, while the latter is best approached with case studies, ideally discussed as a group. I'd honestly suggest trying to start a business/entrepreneurs book club with ~12-20 people to try to replicate that experience over reading books on your own.

We're going to see a lot of smaller startups wind down by the end of the year: I know a few that have either wound down operations, or are in the process of an acqi-hire or asset sale to other firms. Anecdotally, I started hearing the numbers of startups in this position pick up significantly about a month ago (but I don't have a bird's eye view, I just pick up on industry news/gossip).

The rest are default alive, but growing slowly. The rapidly scaling startup model is gone for the time being: no one is trying to double headcount or take over a market segment. (Some AI startups are an exception, but that market is nascent/unpredictable.) Default alive startups can be fodder for acquisitions from larger, established firms as well, if VCs are willing to take a cut on prior valuations. It's not clear to me where those VCs are going to find their 10x power law exits without the kind of growth and scale that used to be the norm; default alive is not a good outcome for investors.

I think “software is eating the world” has evolved into “software is eating barriers to entry.” All these fintech startups are entering a market that software already penetrated years ago--but those first gen tools are clunky, or have so much so much bureaucracy that it’s not cost efficient to work with them. What's interesting about these dev-first fintechs (Stripe, now Lithic) is that they can grow the overall market demand by stripping all that away (and not just extract market share from the first gen software companies).

Wonder what this will mean for fintech exits in general. Will VC fintech funding start to cool if exits by legacy finance companies look to be subject to higher regulatory scrutiny than previously expected?

In general you're better off working at a later stage startup if you want reasonable hours. I started working at a startup after it raised a Series A and then left a year after it raised its Series C; in that time I went from working 9:00am-7:30/8:00pm to 9:00am-5:30/6:00pm with the occasional late working day.

The labor of medical residents is something hospital systems exploit during normal times, but that exploitation has severely deepened during the pandemic. At the hospital my partner works at, respiratory therapists and nurses got a $10k bonus for working during COVID; the residents got nothing despite working insane hours in ICU, routinely working more than the legally mandated 90 hours per week. Just because doctors earn more later in their careers does not excuse the level of labor exploitation they are subject to during residency.

Stanford is not the only hospital system to restrict access to the vaccine from frontline residents. I can name 3 other local hospital systems in my city that have vaccinated administrative & C-suite/VP level staff before doctors, nurses, and other frontline employees. If vaccine allocation is getting messed up this early on within these closed systems, I can't help but think the next 2-3 phases will go awry as well--what checks are in place to ensure these vaccines get distributed to grocery store workers before people who are willing to pay more to get it early?

Salesforce is already a monopoly if you go by volume of revenue earned from CRM. No one other than small/niche SaaS businesses competes directly for CRM business, and any new CRM startups can't get venture funding because it's considered an untouchable space by VCs. Every other large player they compete with in the CRM space (Hubspot, Zendesk, Oracle) offers a CRM as a side product to their main line of business.

This transaction shouldn't be the catalyst for regulatory action; regulators should have already taken action.

> I hate to be so blunt, but 50% of the population has IQ below 100.

This is by design. IQ scores are a normal distribution with a mean of 100...

The problem with prestige is that you, yourself, may not care about it, but those around it still do and still use it for social signaling. That affects the rationality of the decisions you make around your career in serious ways.

I think one of the problems around targeting prestige vs. targeting excellence is that we know what it takes to do something prestigious, but excellence is hard to define, and generally comes with much higher risk. Landing a fancy job at Facebook or Google means you tick the box on success without much risk. The criteria that defines success when you start a company, for instance, or work at a non-profit, is much less clear. That compounds the material risk of doing these ventures with a social risk of taking these jobs in the first place. So then what would would it take, in American society, to replace the prestige baiting with an emphasis on achieving actual excellence instead?

One of the lead doctors in the UK is saying life will start to look normal in Spring 2021 (albeit, I assume he was referring to the UK alone). There's good reason for cautious optimism & patience.

Science has done its job; now we need to push for coordination between infrastructure, government, and business to finish it.

A few quick takeaways on this-

1 - the DOJ is targeting a product/feature that Plaid hasn't even released: payment processing. That appears to be the reason other fintechs like Stripe/PayPal opposed the deal. Very odd to see this lawsuit filed on the potential for a future product vs. an existing product Plaid offers already. Not a lawyer but wonder what the precedence for this is.

2 - DOJ is targeting Visa as a monopoly in the online debit transaction space. They don't see them as a Visa-Mastercard duopoly. Interesting to compare the DOJ's decision to call Visa a monopoly & block the acquisition vs. a full on monopoly lawsuit for Google.

3 - Wonder what implications this will have on exits for other fintech firms, and startups generally. Definitely makes going public more attractive if the government is signaling that they're not opposed to putting up significant blocks to prevent acquisitions. Delaying an acquisition like this really will spook employees with stock options & VCs

What are the business risks to a company like Github when their source code has been released in the wild? Startups treat their code like IP, but I imagine it'd still be incredibly difficult for a competitor to try and build the same tool/features even if they have the code as a "cheat sheet" of sorts. Are there other risks (i.e. security vulnerabilities) it causes?