shubik22

thanks for hosting the model! i created an account to try it out, you started emailing me with “important notice: low account balance - action required” and now it seems like there’s no way for me to unsubscribe or delete my account. is that the case? thanks!

Yep, very odd, my guess would be this was sent to the reporter by their comms contact at Softbank and they literally copy/pasted it.

For context, here’s the full paragraph. The positive framing (“a GAIN”, and “significantly less…”) makes me think this came from someone spinning on Softbank’s behalf.

> For your piece, the Vision Funds actually posted a GAIN for the quarter of $0.8 billion, including shared assets such as its ARM holdings. Stripping out shared assets, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 1 and 2 and its Latin American fund together posted a quarterly investment loss of 13 billion yen ($91 million) — significantly less than the 2,919 billion yen loss a year ago ($20 billion).

It’s fine to view the hiring process from recruiters’ perspective, but man, some parts of this article.

> The job she posted listed its selling points — the business had 400 percent growth a year, the backing of a legendary venture capitalist, no limit to personal vacation days, full coverage of employee health-care premiums and the option to work remote or locally.

> Dyba estimates that she sent the listing to about 75 prospective hires and received back maybe five responses, three of which were either a brief “no thanks” or the simple declination of her InMail message. A declination — that’s LinkedIn language for “Please, stop throwing all these jobs at me with employer-paid health-insurance premiums and unlimited vacation time.”

Sorry, what? As an in-demand tech work, I feel incredibly fortunate to be compensated far above many others who work harder at in my view more significant work (e.g. teachers, or nurses). I would certainly not defend tech compensation relative to many other sectors of our economy.

At the same time, there has been an explosion in value creation and wealth in technology over the past few years (from an already high baseline). I think part of what we’re seeing is a larger percentage of that value flow to software engineers and other technology workers. And still that percentage of the overall value created pales in comparison to the value that’s accruing to tech executives and venture capitalists.

When I read passages like the one quoted above (which by the way is written by the reporter! not even quoting someone), it’s as if the article is written by a tech exec or VC who’s outraged that they have to spend an additional 1% of their market cap paying engineers.

Thanks for leaving the post up and for responding here. I’m curious if and how your approach to writing has changed since you wrote the piece. What strikes me about the piece is the certainty and lack of caveats in it, especially given it’s about an area in which I assume you don’t have any particular expertise (blood testing — please correct me if I’m mistaken).

One takeaway from the Theranos saga for me was that the type of fraud perpetrated by Elizabeth Holmes can have very real consequences on people’s lives beyond some rich investors losing their money. The stories about people receiving incorrect test results, the irresponsibility with which Theranos ran their lab, not to mention Holmes using David Boies to attack the brave whistleblowers in my mind go far beyond the “fake it till you make it” / “mistakes were made” framing of the case.

If I had played a role in supporting that type of behavior, however small, I would probably have a different takeaway than “got this specific example wrong! but my core point was correct”.

This has been my experience as well. At a prior job, we experimented with deferring reporting/tracking functions until the browser was idle, and then firing the remaining tracking events on unload and found that a non-trivial number of events were just dropped (I believe due to this issue).

If I were you, I’d go with Vanguard index funds, which have the lowest fees in the industry.

I would pick a fund/funds that matches my risk target/preferences (e.g. equity funds riskier than bonds, small cap riskier than large cap/overall market, foreign riskier than domestic). If I had a very large risk tolerance, I might also allocate a small percentage of your portfolio to single name stocks.

Lastly, I’d just keep in mind the risk you’re taking with your investments. A five year time horizon doesn’t strike me as particularly long or compatible with having a high risk tolerance. Investing in equities can give you high returns over a long time horizon, but their volatility means that you can have large negative returns over a short time period (e.g. the S&P had a max decline from its peak of almost 60% during the 2008-9 financial crisis).

(Standard disclaimer about investing being risky, please do your own research as well.) Good luck!

Congrats on your product. I'm curious what lead to you all creating this product, after you spent "years working at data brokers."

Perhaps this is too harsh an analogy, but how is this different than someone who spends years working at a tobacco company and then launches a company which sells a smoking cessation product? As other comments here point out, even the process of opting out of these brokers via Optery requires disclosure of personal information and some level of trust. I can imagine the fact that you all previously worked at data brokers make people less likely to trust you with their personal information, rather than more.