crwalker

As a San Franciscan, I am so happy to see this. SF needs negative feedback on the poor choices it makes, and so far the tech boom has somewhat obscured the consequences.

Start and then sell a financial services company. Then build the space company.

I am hardly a fan of Gerard but this is a well written summary of the guidance.

The only thing I would add to clarify money transmission as "transmitting value that substitutes for currency" is that exchanging funds for goods (normal commerce e.g. buying a coffee with credit card / cash / apple pay / stablecoin) is probably not considered money transmission. But I'm not your lawyer.

I would say ... they folded.

One-star reviews are the best signal I can find for product quality. They will let you know if there is a repeatable issue with trustworthy incentives. If there are more 2 star reviews than 1 star reviews and there is no pattern in the 1 star reviews, that's a great sign.

Yes on negative connotations: the title "Turbotax for Bankruptcy" made me think this would be a hit piece on an unscrupulous vendor.

Jira also has the least consistent UX of any SaaS product I've used (Skype may be a close second).

Fused filament fabrication (FFF) is fighting against physics in the same way that O(n) vs O(n^2) vs O(n!) algorithms have wildly different performance at scale.

It's a point solution, depositing ~1 voxel per unit of time. Running print heads in parallel is still O(1). Speeding up the print head runs out of steam because you run into vibration limits for the machinery (you can hear the rattling in the audio for this article). To really scale you need to deposit ~n voxels per unit of time (HP's MJF technology) or ~n^2 (Carbon's CLIP).

You need lots of voxels for high resolution for most applications. There are certain exceptions like prototyping in PETG or 3D printing concrete houses where the speed limitations of FFF may not be a big issue. But for 3D printing to compete with many forms of traditional manufacturing, simultaneous parallel structuring of matter is key.

This seems really observant. If the true goal is "building beautiful tech" then shipping an actual product usually takes one (far) away from that goal. Those who appear to self-sabotage by pushing back launch dates may simply be revealing their real goals. I think it's critical to honestly evaluate motives before starting a project to avoid burnout.

I keep suggesting that folks name their next child Ashurbanipal, Shalmaneser, or Tiglath-Pileser. So far nobody has taken up the offer ... but think of the excellent nicknames: "time to wrap up The Prince and study some more endgame strategies, Tiggy!"

This sounds like a preeminently practical strategy.

Fair enough: I am most critical of the hype cycle itself, and haven't looked through the longer publications in detail.

Yes, I think it's more about signaling and CYA than fact-finding.