arciini

Summary (self-written)

Factor 1: vertical integration and different supply trains

- US automakers are really just car assemblers that build the engine and frame, and assemble everything else

- EVs are uniquely good for vertical integration, and Tesla recognized this when the Roadster had lots of issues. They gradually integrated, but still relied on external partners for earlier models' interiors and key parts

- Now, China's EV makers have taken this to the end

Factor 2: US trusts the private sector too much, and they make short-sighted decisions

- In the US, mines and refineries for raw materials have largely closed due to low margins

- Apple considered going into EVs, but they decided not to due to lower margins and now have a movie studio

- In contract, China ordered state-owned enterprises to do the mining/refining and build the charging infrastructure that's not lucrative

Decision that needs to be made: what level of protectionism the US should have:

- Japan and Germany both protected their local carmakers so they can catch up and (ultimately) exceed the success of foreign ones

- The US carmakers only exist due to the tariff on foreign trucks

- Welcoming German/Japanese carmakers to create plants in the US allowed us to get good products

- China's EVs kinda sucked despite government subsidies, so they invited Tesla around 2020, which set the gold standard and also forced their local suppliers and workforce to match Tesla's standards. Those suppliers then supplied the other new EV carmarkers

- I think what the video is trying to say: we should also encourage the Chinese carmakers to create plants in the US to give our EV industry a shot in the arm

I'd guess that this is to ensure one abusive user doesn't get every other user blocked from a large service (say, Google) for botting over the VPN and constantly rotating IPs.

It's a practical measure, but definitely has a privacy cost though.

Hi! Co-founder of Wanderlog (YC W19) here - what issues did you run into with it? I'd love to get your take to see if there's anything we can do there.

For me, definitely! It helped us raise our first round of funding, without which we may have failed during the pandemic. I also learned a lot and found the online platform useful.

I did YC when I was 27 after trying to do a tiny bit of fundraising, and kinda agree with you, but I think you can replace "22 year old" in your comment with "anyone not super-well-networked in the startup scene".

The truth is, even if you have pedigree (top-tier college, worked at FAANG and startups), the very first time fundraising is going to be pretty hard and annoying unless you've already been going to a lot of founder meetups, want to start something in a hot field, or have VC's in your personal network. This is especially true after the money wave from pre-2022 receded.

I do feel like I probably could've raised on better terms, but I'm not sure it would've improved the trajectory of my life or expected value. YC taught me a lot about fundraising that I didn't know I didn't know. Compared to other VC's we've worked with (who have all been pretty great), YC has provided more specific advice to our stage, better technology, and a slightly better network.

I personally also strictly disagree with their feedback: "try many small things, experiment, tinker, and build a portfolio of multiple income streams".

This is very much the indie-hacker route, but honestly, if you have one thing that's working out, it's usually better financially (though maybe less fun if you like purely doing engineering/product work) to try to grow it than to build a portfolio.

As someone who went through YC, but started out more on the indie-hacker side, I want to mention that going through YC in particular does not close the door to just continuing to build a successful, growing business without raising one round after the other.

I think some indie-hacker influencers encourage this kind of us vs. them thinking about VC's, and the truth is somewhere in between.

I know of many businesses who have decided (either by choice or through a lack of fundraising options) that the ideal way to grow and scale their business after YC is to not fundraise. It's something that YC partners explicitly acknowledge. They understand that an alive business can continue to grow, whereas a dead business is just dead.

Given there are 3 credit bureaus, is there a way to avoid having a credit score at one of the credit bureaus? I think that's a way that we as consumers could try to increase competition in the field.

I did some Googling and it didn't seem like there's an easy option.

While I agree Google is being a bit sly in lobbying against privacy legislation, I think they have a legitimate point, but also think that it'll lead to them concentrating more power in the ad market.

Google clearly believes that they can obfuscate identity by enough so that ads can be targeted while privacy can also be preserved.

If you don't think that all ads are bad (and Google argues that ads help make many of the sites we rely on economically feasible), then I think you may agree that sometimes, ad targeting produces more useful ads. Many of my friends have actually found Instagram ads interesting enough to talk about them at dinners. It's better to have those ads rather than random banners for things that you don't care about. Google would definitely also argue that ad targeting improves the worth of the Internet and allows more sites to offer their services for free because they can make more from AdSense.

The following only makes sense if you buy this argument:

The data for ad targeting has been abused so often that for many (most?) consumers, it's not worth it.

Google's perspective is: "we can be a responsible steward of this data for this new age of privacy-conscious ad targeting". The Chrome topics API and mathematical/statistical obfuscation are things that a blunt tool like the law may forbid. As far as arguments go, I think this is actually a plausible one. I do think Google has somewhat OK privacy controls compared to other large tech companies, and way better ones compared to bad acting small sites and ad companies/data brokers.

That being said, I don't love the concentration of power (that's why the DOJ is going after them) - I'd much rather there be some decentralized way to ensure privacy but still allow useful ads, but we get what we get.

While I'd love to attribute this to data harvesting and don't love Meta as a company, as someone who has tried to scrape Instagram in the past (to get recent images users have posted for specific restaurants), I believe this is a reasonable measure to increase the cost of new spam accounts.

The cost of an email is virtually 0. The cost of a unique phone number that can receive text-messages is non-zero. This was a pain in the butt for me, as you often have to get a real phone number (they reject VoIP ones) and that takes more work to get working.

Bots and scraping is a huge issue for Instagram. Instagram really dislikes the fact that you can buy a lot of likes for very cheap, so I kinda understand why they do this.

It seems like this is mostly summarizing what seems to be pretty settled law. Here are my main takeaways:

1. The courts have concluded that just because a price is higher does not mean it is necessarily in the fiduciary interests of shareholders (especially long-term ones). This is reasonable too, as in many ways, shareholders are more shortsighted

2. Even in the short term, shareholders are usually incentivized to accept offers, whereas auctions and negotiation may yield better offers (this reminds me of the latest season of Succession)

3. Somewhat interestingly, a study (Kidder) showed that companies that defended takeovers successfully were worth less, but companies that tried to defend a takeover but ended up being acquired by the original buyer or another buyer ended up being worth more

4. Different structures of offers (a 2-stage offer, where 51% of shares are acquired at one price and the remaining is acquired at another or not acquired) can make the offer pretty bad to a lot of shareholders, even though it coerces shareholders to pass it

The article concludes that because of all these factors, the board having more power is generally a reasonable thing. I think this generally matches up with the overall role of boards, and I generally agree.

While I don't love this API's idea, I understand why they're doing it, and the API it describes really just sounds like any Captcha API today.

> Google's plan is that, during a webpage transaction, the web server could require you to pass an "environment attestation" test before you get any data. At this point your browser would contact a "third-party" attestation server, and you would need to pass some kind of test. If you passed, you would get a signed "IntegrityToken" that verifies your environment is unmodified and points to the content you wanted unlocked. You bring this back to the web server, and if the server trusts the attestation company, you get the content unlocked and finally get a response with the data you wanted.

The problem with Captchas today is that there are a lot of services you can use to bypass them. You send the token to a human, human gives you the solution-token, and you pass that to Google.

I can see why they want to make this more protected. As a user, if this lets me solve captchas less for certain sites, I'm OK with that. Of course, I don't think this API should be used for the entire web, but I definitely understand its use-case.

I think this is actually a pretty balanced and rational take on crypto. There's a lot to be jaded by in the industry, and I'm glad he got a lot out of the experience (attending the conference, meeting people, including other skeptics) despite not continuing on the startup. I think at the start of our careers, it's generally a good instinct to just try things and see if they're for you.

> By the way, we didn't plan doing that at the end, after thinking about it a lot, but it meant we would need to gain many users by having a killer product and work for free for very long, like a regular startup I'd say.

Real web3 startups are just like normal startups if you take out the token economics. There do exist use-cases and users, but I'm glad the author had a strong enough sense to do what he felt was right. It's definitely easier now that the bandwagon has mostly stopped, but I think his reaction is a good one to maintain throughout our careers.