You’re right that GMs are much faster ideating, I point this out later in the essay. But they also spend longer on falsification, even in absolute terms.
Do you have an example of a "drawing" of a theorem, in this context? (I've seen these for fairly trivial theorems but not for more complex ones, so I'm curious.)
>> "That item, in May 2011, was one of the last posts Mr. Szabo made before he went on a lengthy hiatus to work, he said later, on a new concept he called temporal programming."
Anyone know what 'temporal programming' refers to? Sounds intriguing.
This is an incredibly smart observation, and not made often enough:
"Often the smarter people are more prone to trendy, fashionable thinking because they can pick up on things, they can pick up on cues more easily, and so they’re even more trapped by it than people of average ability"
Great post & it's totally true that company culture mirrors that of founders. I think this works through 3 mechanisms:
(1) Employees tend to ape founders, so whatever founders care about & value (in their actions) tends to filter down.
(2) Getting aspects of culture to stick (e.g. transparency) is hard, and requires real commitment from founders. So whatever sticks will tend to be whatever founders care enough to really push through.
(3) Founders tend to hire people who are 'like them', so a critical mass of employees end up being very similar to the founders.
I guess it comes down to how far you're willing to push. If you do move to the Valley (as YC partners frequently advise you to), then you probably could get a meeting with Peter Thiel if you really tried. I mean if someone figuratively held a gun to your head and told you to, you probably could.
I agree with the general point, though - you need a certain amount of baseline opportunity to be able to do this stuff. That is a problem that needs fixing.
Yeah, that part of Paul's talk was amazing. He said most people thought Gmail was a mistake, so he explicitly set a goal to make 100 users really happy, and just went round asking them "What exactly can I make this product do to make you happy?" Then he'd just pick things off the list and do them.
We are looking for a senior backend software engineer to join our team to help us build our next wave of products.
Our product is primarily built in Ruby and JavaScript, using frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Angular. We strongly believe in test-driven development, and deploy code multiple times daily.
You will have the opportunity to contribute to different areas of our code base, and build open source frameworks like Hutch, or Statesman along the way.
On a day-to-day basis, you will be:
- Building out internal services to communicate with international banking systems.
- Helping us to scale our services to serve our fast growing merchant base.
- Working on systems to intelligently identity-check and risk-assess new customers and merchants.
To apply, email Milz ([email protected]). Please include your expected salary and the date you'd be available to start.
This is pull-based. Pingit allows A to pay B, but B does have to chase A for the payment. Whereas Payyr allows B to 'pull' payments from A after a DD is set up.
"It makes infinity times more money than snapchat, but has a thirtieth of the valuation. What is going on?"
A valuation isn't just based on how much money a company makes right now. It's based on how much money the company's expected to make over its lifetime. Snapchat's valuation [1] is based on expectations of high future revenue.
(There was a point where Facebook & Twitter had 0 revenue, too. Now they're both multi-billion dollar public companies.)
These stories always cause scepticism, especially in the HN crowd. It's the most common response ("What?! 4 BILLION!?"), and an easy one (i.e. doesn't require much thought), but it's the wrong one.
Sure, you can argue over the exact number, but let's consider the reverse claim: are you really willing to bet that an app that processes 350m+ messages every day is worth nothing? If not, what would you value it at?
Answering that question requires hard thought; reflexive scepticism doesn't. And if you were really imaginative & thought it through, you'd probably arrive at quite a high number.
For many consumer apps, the path to market dominance involves offering a service for free at first, and then 'monetizing' later on. The whole point of venture capital is to allow that (common) pattern to happen; the result is massive companies - like Dropbox and Airbnb - that weren't always cashflow positive, and that meaningfully benefit the world.
Perhaps it was crazy of Snapchat to turn down $3 billion, and maybe they really are overvalued, but it seems obvious that they are worth a lot of money [2].
[1] Although valuations make great media stories, valuation is really not that meaningful a number for private VC-funded companies.
[2] If you don't agree, consider that both Mark Zuckerberg & the founders of Snapchat disagree with you. So either you're smarter than Mark Zuckerberg & the founders of Snapchat, or you're probably wrong.
You’re right that GMs are much faster ideating, I point this out later in the essay. But they also spend longer on falsification, even in absolute terms.