mikedouglas

He explains earlier in the article that he tries to apply a “consumer” lens to all tech purchases, so he can more honestly evaluate them.

The point being that he’s applying a bunch higher bar than someone with his interests and net worth would otherwise apply.

This is likely impression expansion from Reels. Same thing happened when Stories was introduced.

At this point, I'd flip whatever mental models you have for how 2010-era Microsoft and Google operate.

No, because the FDIC would collect higher fees commensurate with the increase in insured deposits. It would reduce profits for banks like SVB which have a large number of uninsured deposits and were able to take advantage of a "fed put".

It's overwrought takes like this that fail to see the real issues at play. Many of those projects were all good faith efforts and I haven't seen a shred of evidence that a16z was mass dumping tokens (most articles confuse a16z's first crypto fund, which did well, with the funds that were deployed in 2020/2021).

With all that said, a16z (and other top VC firms) are at or near the top in the list responsible for inflating the crypto bubble.

1. They weren't aligned with their LPs. The economics fundamentally changed for them as their funds 10x'd in size and they started bringing in $100M+ in management fees. They should have been asking themselves if they could responsibly invest anywhere near this amount in a crypto market with very few real users, but they decided to cash the checks instead.

2. They used social media to promote these tokens to retail and lobbied to reduce barriers for more retail investment. They were more than happy to sign off on plans for their portfolio companies to sell what were basically securities in seed companies to retail investors at orders of magnitude inflated prices. Then, they used their own Twitter accounts and podcast appearances to play up a potemkin digital revolution and raise their next fund, all while retail investors took a bath.

3. Due diligence was universally awful. They might have avoided most of the worst frauds, but plenty of investments were in unsustainable mechanisms where the collapse could have easily have been predicted.

From another Silicon Valley veteran: this was a horizontal team that lost its exec sponsor and so didn't have a clear way to make impact. This kind of thing happens all the time at companies and panicking is uncalled for.

This theoretically should be possible with MVCC, right? It's not an area I've explored and I could immediately see some issues with resource clean-up, but I could imagine it being possible with most modern DBs.

I've heard Google uses design docs pretty extensively for internal projects. Does anyone have a publicly shared example?