So let me get this straight... technical founders are providing limitless access to their IP, and this is supposed to be a positive indicator that they would be a good founder? Thats wild
There are many ways to create "sticky" products, even commodity products (e.g. coca cola, starbucks, etc). Network effects are just one.
Regarding Price to Earnings... I'm not sure everyone fully fleshed out the end game for the frontier companies. It appears the pitch is that this current phase is a stepping stone to Artificial General Intelligence or Super Intelligence. I can understand the perspective of investors though... If you can get half of the world on these products at some point you will find something you can sell them even if its not the core product (i.e. loss leader).
Audiobooks are just a different medium. I don't think people should pretend that an audiobook is a book. You process the two in completely different ways. This doesn't imply one is better than the other either.
For me I don't like audiobooks because its very slow and spoken stories should have a different cadence, velocity, set of dynamics, and diction than a book should (check out "the moth" to see what I'm talking about). I hold nothing against people who don't like to read or people who like audiobooks, or people who like slow things - Suum cuique.
Lots of people assume that the valuable thing is the direct business, but a business can be a lot more than that. A competitor may buy you for your engineers or sales team or patents, or assets, or whatever (e.g. Siri, Motorola, etc)... and just toss the rest of the business or sell that stuff off after they have what they want. In other industries they may just buy companies for their assets. Also you never know what will happen with a pivot (e.g. twitter, slack, etc).
The bleak reality is if you can keep growing (making more money than you spend) that alone is usually desirable enough for people to keep giving you money and eventually provide an exit. Why? because it's really hard to do. Its a skill.
No, this is 100% battle tested. I can't drop numbers but we just did a study at work comparing referrals to non-referrals... its night and day. Referrals are out performing across the board. the only problem is that eventually you run out of referrals
Yes. Figure out who your top performers are ask them for referrals. Some people will recommend "meh" people, but more often than not your top performers hang out with other top performers because they appreciate the same things.
Eric, really interested in how you pick the things you work on. I'm a really big fan of the concept of the Long Term Stock Exchange, but projects like that seem to me at times like paddling a canoe upstream using a spoon.
Whats your criteria? Is there an analytical component? Are you willing to work on something even if "success" is unlikely? And with all of this going on how do you have time to work on books!
thank you for your work by the way. It continues to be useful year after year to me and people around me!
Correct. We actually don't play "football" properly as a street sport either though... its typically a flag style football (two hand touch, etc) but the main sports are (generally separated by season during school) football, hockey/basketball, baseball.
The comments here are wild. Uh the answer is football/basketball/baseball. We send our best athletes into football, basketball, and baseball. They don't play soccer. I would argue its more shocking that we are as good we are considering the talent pool.
Yes, Code Monkey jobs are gone... I can assure you though that there are plenty of hard problems that reduce human suffering which still need humans to solve them.
Stuff like that is risk tolerance... its not strictly codified and its more akin to probability. Different companies at different stages, in different industries will all interpret their risk differently... how will a smarter model improve that?
I'm Jon Paul "Pope"(uritis). I'm a sales guy turned software engineer that likes to write a bunch. Check out JonPaulUritis.com