eldavido

38 ms·

301.
by eldavido 8y ago
I see your point. You are correct in that there is no net new creation of equity capital in a secondary market trade. I look at it this way: there is a fixed amount of equity capital floating in the world at any given moment. At any point i
302.
by eldavido 8y ago
Not necessarily. A more general, yet more precise definition of investing might be, "Trading cashflows in a way that both parties find beneficial". Those cashflows may be subject to (negotiated) differences in timing, risk of nonp
303.
by eldavido 8y ago
Kind of a hodgepodge: Rack up experience. It's much better to be working than not working. It is much better to have 2 years of experience and learning vs. 6-9 months looking for something perfect -- this is especially the case for jun
304.
by eldavido 8y ago
Or maybe we're starting to act like a real profession, adopting the idea of "continuing education" they have in every other field from law to dietetics? Just a thought
305.
by eldavido 8y ago
I've been thinking about this recently. The split started to happen about 5 years ago and it's really picked up velocity in the last year or two, to where it's getting hard to "jump" if you want to change. It's
306.
by eldavido 8y ago
I lived with Andrew in a shared apartment for several years. He is one of the kindest people I've ever known, as well as a little quirky in an old-school Silicon Valley sort of way. He grew up in Minnesota, is really into gymnastics, a
307.
by eldavido 8y ago
Yeah, anyone trying to disrupt waste pickup, construction, concrete, pretty much any local services had better be ready to fight well-entrenched incumbents. Not that it can't be done but it's important to acknowledge local governm
308.
by eldavido 8y ago
This is a false aggregate: https://blog.shortbar.com/false-aggregates-571745b2d483 If I'm writing a game I care about what's most popular with games. If I'm writing an enterprise reservation system, I care ab
309.
by eldavido 8y ago
All I'm saying is that there's a choice. You have to ask, why will companies pay $180K or more in salary when equivalently good people (and I really do mean this) are available at half the cost elsewhere? How is this sustainable l
310.
by eldavido 8y ago
I live in SF. There is a very clear trend of companies starting to look elsewhere for talent, such that in the long term, I really doubt the tradeoffs of SF will be worth it. The cost of living here is just terrible and I think companies ar
311.
by eldavido 8y ago
Yeah it was funny, I wrote this after reading about half of the update and saw that quote after the fact, which almost perfectly articulates what I said here (albeit better than me, as is most of his writing)
312.
by eldavido 8y ago
I agree 100%. Another point: we're actually talking about strategy (Stratechery/MBA worldview) vs. operations (build the best product, do things well -- HN view). This is a well-worn argument in business circles and it's funn
313.
by eldavido 8y ago
I'm not that rich. That said, two thoughts. First, money at at level isn't earned to spend -- you're right about this. It's more a way of signaling status. Someone getting paid $30 million is less important than someone
314.
by eldavido 8y ago
I am a daily reader of Stratechery. It's a very "MBA" publication: the emphasis is always on strategy, distribution channels, markets, sales and marketing, etc. It's a soberingly different worldview than product-obsessed
315.
by eldavido 8y ago
This is actually a lot simpler than it looks. There are two concepts. Calendars almost never have crazy holes in the middle of them. When you say "I'm in Chicago", you pretty much can schedule an appointment at 1 or 2pm on &q
316.
by eldavido 8y ago
Thank you, this is exactly my point. I don't buy the concept of "living wage" but that's not even what's at issue. I just think it's folly to blame Wal-Mart employees for availing themselves of a legally availa
317.
by eldavido 8y ago
I'm not sure why people blame Wal-Mart if their employees take food stamps. This is really the fault of poorly-written policy. It blows my mind why people blame Wal-Mart and not the folks who developed the legislation of those policies
318.
by eldavido 8y ago
> but there are also costs, like wage depression. Do you have a source for this? The conventional wisdom is that larger firms are more productive, and tend to pay more as a result.
319.
by eldavido 8y ago
I took french in high school and can read about 90% of this. It's not that hard. lol. Half of advanced math was done in France anyway...Laplace, logarithmes, Cauchy, Riemann... "analyser les résultats des algorithmes de manière
320.
by eldavido 8y ago
Investors provide at least three separate things: (1) Cash (2) Credibility (3) Operational help/advice This feels like a bundle that might get redone. Already venture capital unbundles cash from credibilty/endorsement. Angel inves
321.
by eldavido 8y ago
Of course there is. If you want more of a discussion on this topic, I would highly encourage reading some of Larry Lessig's work on internet identity and "cyberspace". Code 2.0 is a good start. He viewed pseudonyms like you,
322.
by eldavido 8y ago
There's a lot of negativity here. I give Buffer a lot of credit. They seem to deeply internalize the idea of "realistic expectations" and it sounds like the buy-out was a win-win solution where everyone got (mostly) what they
323.
by eldavido 8y ago
The entire ecosystem emphasizes this. People put it on Twitter, AngelList, LinkedIn, etc. ex-FAANG is the VC equivalent of "nobody got fired for buying IBM". It's what happens when nobody has any idea how to assess anything:
324.
by eldavido 8y ago
Sort of. Banks don't actually have that high of return on equity compared to industrials. I tend to think of it more like a source/sink model. Some companies are net sources of capital: agencies, most manufacturers, etc. Then ther
325.
by eldavido 8y ago
Yes and no. I read in Brealey-Myers [1] that you can get 80-90% of the way to pure beta (market risk) by picking 15-20 stocks. You just have to pick ones that aren't super correlated, e.g. 10 pharmaceutical companies. Whether it'
326.
by eldavido 8y ago
I'm not sure specifically for restaurants. A lot of my ideas on health come from "Catastrophic Care", where they talk about "the surrogates" who stand in, for the role customers would pay in an ordinary cash transac
327.
by eldavido 8y ago
Inflation is only one symptom. The bigger problem is that the providers (health or restaurants) start catering to what the PAYERS -- insurance, or the company handing out restaurant tickets -- want, not what's good or helpful for the c
328.
by eldavido 8y ago
This is why healthcare is so expensive btw. (I can't help but notice the similarities) Insurance hands out "tickets" that get redeemed by doctors. And as you rightly point out, everything gets warped and twisted based on what
329.
by eldavido 8y ago
I read this differently. Disciplined companies return capital. Bad ones squander it on bad projects. All things equal, I would prefer a company invest my capital in new, good projects. But barring that, I would much prefer it's returne
330.
by eldavido 8y ago
I know this. But Visa sets the rules of the game. They make the rules, everyone else participates. Visa isn't really a technology company. That's how they started, but these days, I think of them as more of a "facilitation pl

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