lionhead

My startup isn't "tech" enough so I hesitated before making this post, but I saw that people talked about their PhD or master thesis and all sorts of cool things, and after all, the prompt is "what are you working on", so here we go!

I am hard at work preparing the 2nd edition of Seoul SPARKS (seoulsparks.com), a 6 weeks pre-college summer program in Korea (currently aimed at US students but open to students all over the world). It is designed to be a high quality, rigorous but also as immersive as possible program, for high school students who want to deepen their understanding of Korean language, culture, and history while earning academic credit at Seoul National University. My aim is to educate the future generation of Korean Studies scholars and I hope my program can be a stepping stone for that! My program director designed a chronological history curriculum, that explores Korea’s past and present through site visits and expert-led discussions. Each week focuses on a specific era of Korean history, beginning with the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1897), where students visit palaces, wear hanbok, and learn about Confucian traditions. The following weeks cover the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945), the Korean War and its aftermath (1950s), Korea’s rapid economic rise through the Miracle on the Han River (1960s–1980s), and finally, modern Korea, including democratization, globalization, and the Hallyu wave. These themes are reinforced through guided tours of historical sites, museums, and cultural landmarks. We try to make it fun too and I think our students last year had a blast!

We try to offer a lot of other really cool things, such as a 100% Customized Cultural Activity (these have included K-pop dance training at a professional studio, Korean Sign Language classes, traditional calligraphy, culinary workshops, and even mini-internships with local businesses ), the opportunity to work on a research project under the supervision of a Korean PhD student if they'd like, and we also link them with university mentors (basically, Korean college students) who hang out with them, answer their questions about life in Korea, help them adjust to life here, and just have fun with them really.

Last year's pilot program was very successful, we were blessed to have a fantastic cohort of very bright and motivated students. The program was also highly rated by parents and students alike (the only serious negative comment we received was: why is Korea so hot and humid during summer?), and I hope we can continue to grow and keep attracting the best students from all over the globe!

Anyway applications are open until April 30th so if any of you have kids or know someone who could be interested, I would be very grateful if you could spread the word :)

Thank you for reading!

Because he is either selling his shares in the company, or the individual assets owned by the company, either way it should be taxed as capital gains.

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer! I do think I have at least product market fit, we know exactly who our customers are, we closed 10 of them and their reaction to your product is ecstatic. I really don't think we have a product problem, but reaching these customers is definitely harder than expected. We did run into high minimums with agencies sadly, so I guess we will have to invest the time and learn what we can!

I applied their advice: "It’s a crucial skill to know how to read the news as it’s presented to us, whether it’s CNN’s rightward swing or the British media’s achingly inescapable royal propaganda during the coronation. One should be able to dissect how a story is told, who is telling it, and what the intended endgame is." and stopped reading right at this paragraph.

Interesting, thanks for sharing. What does this imply for the GPU market in your view?

>The US GDP directly translates into the amount of taxes paid. Suppose a 50% drop in the value of USD happens. If nothing else happens taxes increase by 100%, and people need to acquire more USD which drives the value of the currency up.

? GDP is produced and denominated in USD, domestic taxes are paid in USD. How does a drop in the relative value of USD compared to a foreign currency influence domestically paid taxes in any way?

I agree in a way; there has been a lot of inflation due to printing money, but that inflation went straight to and stayed in the financial sector, supporting assets prices for the last decade. The recent inflationary trend in the real economy is due to "real" factors, including the covid-19 shock.

If what you are saying is true, then there is a huge arbitrage opportunity there, unless there are sufficient transaction costs or legal deterrents involved.

If the value of bitcoin relative to MXN is steadily going up (meaning that MXN is losing value relative to USD), then it automatically mean that the value of MXN is also steadily losing value relative to USD. So at the end, from a "value" point of view, nothing will change for you because both currencies are "pegged" to USD. If parity doesn't hold, there is an arbitrage opportunity there; suppose

1 USD = 2 BTC 1 USD = 4 MXN

The implied exchange rate MXNUSD would be BTC = 2 MXN. But imagine as you say that for some reason, this doesn't hold, and actually 1 BTC = 5 MXN in Mexico. I have then an incentive to buy 1 BTC at 0.5 USD, use that 1 BTC to buy 5 MXN, and sell all that MXN at the original rate of 0.25 USD, earning 1.25 USD.

I can understand that it may be easier to physically hold BTC as opposed to fiat USD in that situation, but I don't get the value store proposition. Anyone saying that they see Bitcoin as a store value, are implying they believe that in the future, some people will want to pay for 1 Bitcoin the same amount (or higher than) it's currently worth. It's a perfectly valid claim to make, but what is this belief based on?

It doesn't matter if masks were hard to source at the beginning, every single country found itself in the same situation. Korea is one of the biggest producers of what you call FFP2 masks in the world yet we had a severe domestic shortage here too (the reason for the shortage, after a government investigation, was that suppliers exported most of their production because China was ready to pay x10times the regular price; old dear capitalism at work), forcing the government to nationalize the supply (basically buy all the production) and take over distribution under a strict rationing scheme, until supply stabilized. Nowadays a KF95 (FFP2 equivalent) mask costs less than KRW 500 and supply is plentiful. In early March last year, I had to line up once a week for the chance to buy a maximum of three masks for KRW 2500 each. Sure, the government should have anticipated all of this and establish an export ban early, after all "gouverner c'est prevoir". But what's more important is to be honest with the people who elected you and fix things as soon as possible.

None of what you mention can excuse or justify the blatant lies of the French government. A democratically elected government should not lie to its population, under no circumstances. You don't send a spokesperson on national TV to tell the population that masks are useless, and that the general population wouldn't even know how to use one(!!!).

I suspect the French population will be far more forgiving of a government fuckup followed by an apology and visible and effective efforts to fix the situation, than an outright lie that was only necessary in the first place because of arrogance, complacency and incompetence.

At the early onset of the Covid-19 pandemic started, many countries sent special planes to repatriate their citizens either from the Wuhan region, or from other countries where they got stuck because of a sudden borders close. The US also organized flights, but I was personally very shocked to learn that they charged close to $1,200 for those trips, although it was clearly a case of force majeure. That was the moment I thought that Americans don't actually get their tax money worth in terms of government support, while being subject to taxation on their worldwide income even when not residing in the US.

To be clear, most if not all countries chartered special flights for free. Later on, some more flights were organized with the help of airline companies, but those were paid.

>The virus could be squashed pretty much completely.

In Korea, we tried, succeeded for a couple of weeks, then failed.

Generally, the landing page is not an MVP, it's just that: a landing page. It's a cheap and quick way to get at least some market validation before you start working on your actual product.

But depending on the product, It could be little more than a more elaborate form of customer interview (asking someone: would you pay for this? Does this sound like something you would use?), or it could be actually an effective sales page.

Let me try to give you a couple of examples to clarify: if your product is trying to solve a moderately big and complex problem, let's say personal finance, team project management, home security, etc. With a landing page that only contains a product mockup and asking for an email, you are effectively only gauging initial interest. The thing with this kind of feedback is that an explosive, huge amount of initial interest does tell you something meaningful (You are onto something, keep going!), but moderate or low amounts of feedback don't necessary tell you much about your product-market fit or predict success. It could be that the idea sounds initially interesting but your execution is poor, it could be that your product sounds really cool but fails to solve a definite problem in a definite way, or it could be that there is a real need for your product in the real world but your landing page/marketing copy sucks, resulting in poor email engagement. In this case, the landing page should be used as one tool among many to de-risk your startup early on, along with traditional market research, customer interviews, etc.

But let's say your product is an online programming course on Flutter, or an Indian food cooking guide. You want to know if there is a market for this. If you design your landing page in a way that promises delivery of the product very soon, even if you have not yet started working on it, then your customers are already in "show me where to send the money mode" and the feedback obtained from the landing page is actually meaningful. In this case, the gap between the landing page and making a sale is much smaller.

This is just my take on this, having thought about this specific issue some time ago.