Box IPOed at $14/share but spiked to $23/share on the first day of trading. Assuming 50K shares (and ignoring the strike price / any upfront cost he might have paid), total additional compensation was ~$700K to $1.150M.
It's not just about accelerating ML, specifically deep learning. There are many other enterprise technologies that can benefit from GPUs. One example: OLAP-focused databases (such as MapD - https://www.mapd.com/). For some benchmarks, check out this blog: http://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html.
The DL "training" use-case is well-known at this point, but there are many others which are emerging.
He's not arguing that a 50K hour salesperson doesn't close more lucrative and more numerous amounts of deals than the 500 hour salesperson. The point is that you can invest a small(ish) amount of time to learn the basics of skills which will help you avoid critical pitfalls when starting a company - an extremely worthy investment when you consider the diminishing returns of mastery and the fact that you can't be a master of everything.
I think the author is writing under the assumption that there are diminishing returns as one gets better at a skill, when really the opposite is true. The number of topics you can absorb per unit term obviously increases with your pre-existing competency with the skill.
There absolutely are diminishing returns in mastering a skill. For example, if you spend a year learning how to play the piano, you might be at a level where you can play some pop songs and impress your friends. To be at the level where you can play some Rachmaninov will probably require an order of magnitude more time (10 years), even though you know all the basics. In the process of mastery from years 1-10, you won't unlock an order of magnitude more songs that you can play as a result. In fact, each year that you march towards mastery, there'll probably be less and less songs that you'll be unlocking as a result. Your returns are diminishing.
This isn't to say that you shouldn't seek to master something (or several things), only that if you are trying to accomplish something which requires mastery of a lot of skills (like starting a company) you should eliminate blind spots by learning a bit about what you don't know. Even reading a book about sales is better than not knowing anything at all about it. Even if you have a sales expert on your team, it helps to empathize and know what they'll be thinking about as you build the product (if you are an engineer). Being an entrepreneur is all about being well-rounded.
Great post! You mention that it is important to "be skeptical" - I concur and would add that it's helpful to approach the analysis from a non-biased standpoint. Even if you are going into your analysis with certain goals in mind, it is not only more ethical, but also more persuasive, to indicate any inconsistencies in your findings.
Doesn't the article specifically point out that software engineering isn't encountering a shortage?...
"It is true that high-skilled professional occupations almost always experience unemployment rates far lower than those for the rest of the U.S. workforce, but unemployment among scientists and engineers is higher than in other professions such as physicians, dentists, lawyers, and registered nurses, and surprisingly high unemployment rates prevail for recent graduates even in fields with alleged serious “shortages” such as engineering (7.0 percent), computer science (7.8 percent) and information systems (11.7 percent)."
Because existing businesses are afraid of change and politicians are afraid of possibly eliminating jobs. People are afraid of change because it means that they will have to adapt.
The email they sent to current Prime customers was very classy and effective as well...
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Even as fuel and transportation costs have increased, the price of Prime has remained the same for nine years. Since 2005, the number of items eligible for unlimited free Two-Day Shipping has grown from one million to over 20 million. We also added unlimited access to over 40,000 movies and TV episodes with Prime Instant Video and a selection of over 500,000 books to borrow from the Kindle Owners' Lending Library.
For more information about your Prime membership, visit our Prime membership page.
Thanks for actually doing the research on this. My "um, wow" was a response to people assuming Company XYZ's performance is amazing at face value.
When serving static pages, it is unlikely that any sort of engine will outperform something more like a CDN. I hate it when people just throw out the Google name as proof of performance/excellence/etc. Can we be a bit more scientific here?
I think all of us battle with those feelings. In this circumstance, what you did was the right thing.
On one occasion, I was driving through on Market St towards Castro when I saw a disheveled younger man in his twenties with a sign "Don't want money. Just food." As I pulled up to a stoplight, I turned to my girlfriend and asked, "do we have anything?" And we did - two bagels and a croissant. We didn't mind going hungry because once we gave him the food, he did a giddy little dance... as if there were nothing else in the world that could've made him happier.
That said, on a totally different circumstance, while eating outside at Union Sq I was approached by a bum who "just wanted food." After I got up from the table and asked him to lead the way to the "pizza place" he wanted to grab something from, he realized his bluff had been called and he walked away (he was hoping that I would be lazy and just give him some money).
I guess this boils down to a bigger philosophical question, which is "am I doing the right thing, or am I getting taken advantage of?" My solution is to go the extra mile and assume the best of people. Just put the right checks in place so that you can also avoid getting taken advantage of.
A little wave was upset at being so tiny and turned to a bigger wave to complain about his plight. "It just isn't fair that other waves are so much bigger than me, I want to be a tsunami!"
The bigger wave, feeling sorry for his smaller companion replied: "Why does your size matter? Don't you realize that we are all a part of the same ocean?"