jeremymims

This was how the BMW i3 worked. It was a rather novel design that included an optional small electric scooter motor in the rear that had a 2.5 gallon gas tank. When the battery was low, it would be charged by running the small generator.

This was clearly a wonderful idea but it was hamstrung by a silly California rule requiring the gas range to be less than the electric range to qualify for rebates. With a 6 gallon tank, the car would have been able to do ~300 miles instead of 170 and would have been parked in everyone’s driveway.

An added benefit was that the car could use existing gas station infrastructure when you needed to travel long distances.

Congratulations, Garry! YC couldn't have picked a better leader.

Steve Jobs famously said that he saw the computer as a "bicycle of the mind." He saw technology as a tool to amplify humanity's abilities.

Mark Zuckerberg has chosen to build a "casino of the mind." Facebook and Instagram have been purpose-built to amplify and prey on humanity's weaknesses.

The fact that "Meta" is now trying to make their casino _even more_ addictive to compete with TikTok does not bode well for the world.

Congratulations, Zach! It's been very cool watching Codecademy go from electrifying prototype to media darling to quiet giant.

My e-mail is in my profile and I'd be happy to help you get in touch with them if you meet their parameters.

Most of them are looking to do just a few deals a year.

There are actually a number of VCs showing up right now to address this pain point.

They're tending to fund profitable B2B companies with $5-40m in annual revenue and explicitly state that they're content with the option of 3-5X returns (while still hoping for more).

When I was in high school (quite a long time ago now), I'd try to buy 2-4 albums a month. That was an average cost of $25-$50 to listen to 20-50 new songs... some of which I enjoyed, some of which I didn't.

$10 per month to listen to almost anything is such an astounding underpricing of the value I personally derive from the service. I can hardly believe my good fortune to be alive at a time when I can pay so little to listen to so much with so little effort.

Newspapers were largely ad driven since their "modern day" inception in the early 1700's.

I'm going to need to write a blog post about this since I'm seeing so much confusion about how we got where we are and why we've ended up with ad models we have. It may take me a month or two to get to, but I think this community would benefit greatly from it.

There absolutely is a reason why it's expensive. In fact, I could easily make a case that as a society we'd be better off if more money was invested in creating quality content.

Believe it or not, the subscription costs usually only cover the delivery and printing fees. Historically, subscription revenue has never been a real profit center because it's always been the best interest of a publication to build a larger circulation to increase ad rates.

Now, the internet has brought certain efficiencies to what it costs to distribute content. But it hasn't necessarily impacted what it costs to create quality content. With ad rates being lower online than they are in really any other medium, ad revenue isn't supporting the creation of quality content like it used to.

While Game of Thrones exists on a no commercial network, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and many more of your favorite cable television shows rely on both ad revenue and subscription revenue to exist. HBO has a cost north of $15 per month depending on your cable network, whereas AMC (which runs commercials) costs about 27 cents in your bundled cable package which is about 2% of the cost of HBO. That's a colossal difference and yes, advertisers, are subsidizing that dramatic cost differential.

Ok, education time.

You may not like ads but they heavily subsidize great content. In fact, the price of a New York Times subscription would be close to $1,500 per year if it weren't for advertisers keeping it closer to $300 (and that's if all their existing subscribers could even afford it).

Alexander Hamilton (newspaper owner, secretary of the treasury, founder of the Bank of New York) said:

"It is the advertiser who provides the paper for the subscriber. It is not to be disputed, that the publisher of a newspaper in this country, without a very exhaustive advertising support, would receive less reward for his labor than the humblest mechanic."

The fact is people dramatically underestimate what it costs to produce high quality content and that as a rule you'd need to spend much more than you'd expect to have access to it.

Advertising has essentially made information free or cheap for the user for a long time. Just because you think ads are ugly and annoying doesn't change this fundamental reality.

Today, Groupon's market cap is $6.88 billion. So, maybe it would have been smart to sell, but as of today, they're ahead.

I have a feeling that company wasn't quite the disaster you think it was.

YC already has the ability to accept more startups from the thousands of applications it gets. Most high-quality startups are applying to YC even if they apply to other incubator/accelerator programs and the number of high-quality startups that apply to incubator/accelerator programs but don't also apply to YC is going to be fairly small.