waxman

A practical application of this perspective, and one that has a lot of virtues is:

When evaluating a crazy new idea (particularly something like a product or business), don't bother asking "will this work?" because no one truly knows, but rather ask: "if this does work, then what are the implications?"

Pg has quite a track record here by being an early investor in textbook crazy new ideas like Airbnb, Coinbase, etc. "Will this replace a chunk of the hotel market? Unclear, but if it does, it will be a huge and valuable business."

For folks talking about Mighty, its through this lens that pg is thinking about it. "Will it work? Is it better than alternatives? Who knows... But if the vision does pan out, I think it's more obvious to see how this could be a big and important business."

I'm a big fan of both Ben Thompson and Tim Wu. One of Wu's specific critiques is my biggest disagreement I have with Thompson, and is a train of thought that seems to be dogma in Silicon Valley Twitter.

Wal-Mart putting their own brand of toilet paper on more prominent end cap shelves is fundamentally different than Amazon promoting their own Amazon Basics toilet paper on a search results page on Amazon.com. Amazon has a much greater ability to drive conversion to its own products than a brick-and-mortar retailer (e.g. limited screen space, UI, information hierarchy, better data, etc.)

Thompson's argument that "it's all the same," "private labeling has been going on forever," is flimsy and intellectually lazy.

Once we agree on this basic set of facts the more interesting question becomes: is this dynamic bad for consumers long-term?

The crux of this round of tech anti-trust scrutiny is time horizon. Many of these practices are neutral or beneficial to consumers in the short-term, but that's always how monopolies operate. Undercutting prices to put a competitor out of business benefit consumers immediately, but hurt consumers after the competitor goes out of business and the monopolist can raise prices. Amazon selling Amazon Basics products at a loss or near-loss is good for customers now, but if it puts too many other online retailers out of business, eventually they'll raise prices and hurt consumers.

I worked on a video chat startup in 2006 and a concept that still stands out is "floor exchange," which is when one person stops talking and another person starts talking during a conversation.

Floor Exchange usually happens seamlessly in most in-person conversations, but it can be a challenge over video chat, even in 2020.

In any video chat it's helpful to keep your points short and pause for longer than you normally would at the end of each one; if you're doing it right, the pauses will feel uncomfortably long, especially at first. This allows extra time for floor exchange.

I'm excited to see how this remote batch goes!

Garry and the Initialized crew are simply the best!

You can really judge investors by how helpful they are during adversity. Through ups and downs, but especially the downs, Garry and Initialized have been the absolute best!

If you're a founder and you have an opportunity to team up with them, do it without hesitation!

There are interesting challenges with data collection (and I don't think the survey paper discussed in the OP really solves this problem), but to be clear, somewhere between 10-30% of Americans average fewer than 6 hours of sleep per night, which increases your risk of catching colds by 450%.

So getting less sleep than you need is definitely harmful, the questions become: a) how much do we really need, b) how much are people actually getting, and the jury still seems to be out on both of these.

The idea that a startup's end game should be to "build a monopoly" is one of the most profound insights in Thiel's excellent book, Zero to One.

This move just deepens YC's monopoly in its domain, as sama would say, "in the Peter Thiel sense."